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There Has To Be A Better Way To Frame This

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

Maybe they could take a stand as to what reality really is in that headline? And maybe they could be just a little bit more assertive about it in the piece as well?

Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.

Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.

Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.

The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.

The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.

“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

On Friday evening, at his own rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump fired back, calling Mr. Biden’s remarks “pathetic fear-mongering” and again accusing him, without any evidence, of wielding federal law enforcement to attack his political opponents.

“They’ve weaponized government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Mr. Trump said incredulously.

The early maneuvering by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump points to an election that will be fought on extraordinary ground. While the economy, abortion rights and the ages of the candidates are all expected to be central campaign issues, both men argue that what is fundamentally at stake is whether the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of government endures.

How nice of them to help Trump frame his bogus “I know you are but what am I” claims as just another interpretation of the threat to democracy. Just saying “brazenly” and issuing a passing disclaimer like “without any evidence” does not properly convey reality. And yet, they present this story as a battle for reality!

This is going to be a problem. The reflexive impulse to “be fair” leads to whitewashing what Trump is doing which is lying while Biden is accurately reflecting exactly what Trump is doing.

Yes, Trump is going to say that Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s been saying the elections are all rigged for Democrats sits he first started running for president. But that doesn’t make it true and the media is going to have to stop the “both sides” their coverage of this or many voters are going to believe that their arguments cancel each other out and get more cynical and more polarized and our country will slip further and further away from political sanity.

“The entire nation watched in horror.

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

The whole world watched in disbelief. And Trump did nothing.”

Here are the first words of Biden’s speech yesterday:

Today, the topic of my speech today is deadly serious and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.

In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks, to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire in existence in the world at the time. His mission was clear: liberty, not conquest. Freedom. Not domination. National independence. Not individual glory.

America made a vow: Never again would we bow down to a king.

Months ahead would be incredibly difficult. But General Washington knew something in his bones. Something about the spirit of the troops he was leading. Something, something about the soul of the nation he was struggling to be born. In his general order, he predicted, and I quote, with one heart and one mind, with fortitude and with patience, they would overcome every difficulty, the troops he was leading. And they did. They did.

This army that lacked blankets and food, clothes and shoes. This army, whose march left bloody bare footprints in the snow. This ragtag army made up of ordinary people.

Their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause. That was the phrase he used. A sacred cause. Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.

I just visited the grounds of Valley Forge. I’ve been there a number of times since the time I was a Boy Scout years ago.

You know, it’s the very site that I think every American should visit, because it tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.

Today, we gather in a new year, some 246 years later, just one day before January 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all.

Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it.

This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.

And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.

The choice is clear.

Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.

Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.

Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background that occupy this country.

It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together. And our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy.

Three years ago tomorrow, we saw with our own eyes the violent mob stormed the United States Capitol. It was almost in disbelief as you first turned on the television.

For the first time in our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer, transfer of power in America. First time.

Smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police.

Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Inside, they hunted for Speaker Pelosi. The House was chanting as they marched through and smashed windows, “Where’s Nancy?”

Over 140 police officers were injured.

Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.

Because of Donald Trump’s lies, they died because these lies brought a mob to Washington.

He promised it would be wild. And it was.

He told the crowd to “fight like hell” and all hell was unleashed.

He promised he would be side by side with them.

Then, as usual, he left the dirty work to others.

He retreated to the White House.

As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV in a private, small dining room off my oval, off the Oval Office.

The entire nation watched in horror.

The whole world watched in disbelief.

And Trump did nothing.

Members of his staff, members of his family. Republican leaders who were under attack at that very moment pled with him.

Act. Call off the mob. Imagine had he gone out and said, “Stop.”

Still, Trump did nothing.

It was among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.

An attempt to overturn a free and fair election by force and violence.

There was much more to the speech than that but this was the essence. I know we have to talk about other things in the election, kitchen table issues, gas prices, school loans, Israel, etc. etc. But this is the central issue facing Americans in 2024. None of the rest of it will matter if we don’t get this right. And many, many, many more innocent people will suffer.

Here’s the whole speech if you didn’t get a chance to see it and you’d like to.

ICYMI

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2024

Biden almost got medieval on his presumptive rival

3 Years Ago Today

Published by digby on January 6, 2024

“Coming for you Pelosi, you socialist c**t!” “We know where you live!” “Antifa’s a bunch of p*ssies!” “If we’re got to hang a bunch of crooked congressmen, we’ll do that, okay?”

That’s just a small sample of the patriotic rhetoric heard from these patriots that day. Watch the whole Youtube if you have the stomach for it. It’s about 8 minutes. It’s so easy to forget just how violent these feral criminals were that day.

And by the way, Roy Nehls, the congressman attempting to talk to the protesters, wrote this before he voted against certifying the election:

Here he is today:

Nehls announced Tuesday that he will be serving as a witness for Trump’s defense in the 14th Amendment case that argues the former president should be barred from running for office under the Constitution’s disqualification clause. Calling the civil trial a “sham” and “clear election interference,” Nehls said, “I was at the doors on January 6, face to face with protestors, and I know firsthand there was NO INSURRECTION.”

“I look forward to providing my eyewitness account of that,” Nehls wrote in a post on X.

Also, get a look at this, from yesterday:

It’s unthinkable that this monster ever comes close to power again. And even then I don’t know what we’re going to do about his cult.

Donald Trump Is A Criminal

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2024

Stop pretending he’s wearing clothes!

Friday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case from Colorado that declared Donald J. Trump, Insurrectionist, ineligible to appear on that state’s 2024 primary ballot. And oh, the humanity!

The 14th Amendment, the Civil War, Maine, Colorado, a divided nation, MAGA death threats against lawmakers and judges, etc. Plus the kettles of limp-spaghetti arguments desperate Trump’s attorneys have thrown at courtroom walls hoping something, anything, will stick and save their client’s ass.

And then there’s the tarnished Roberts court itself (Washington Post):

The public already views the Supreme Court through a partisan lens, with Democrats expressing little confidence in the court and Republicans saying the opposite — and the question of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot has the potential to further polarize those views.

“It throws them right into the political thicket,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell said of the court. “There is no way they can decide the case without having about half the country think they are being partisan hacks.”

Oh, but Team Trump thinks they have this in the bag:

“I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court; I have faith in them,” [Trump attorney Alina] Habba said on Fox News.“You know, people like Kavanaugh who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up.”

Aaron Blake:

[D]espite Habba’s cleanup effort, she was clearly pointing in the direction of Kavanaugh (and potentially others) being beholden to Trump; there is no other reason to invoke the supposed favors Trump did for Kavanaugh. This adds to a volume of evidence that indicates that Trump does indeed expect loyalty from judges and justices — along with plenty of others in positions where that shouldn’t be a consideration.

That was before SCOTUS decided to accept the case it must take no matter how much it does not want to.

Trump sent the judges a message himself at a Friday rally in Iowa:

“All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”

Also sprach MAGAthustra.

Translation: You owe me.

Implied threat: You’d better come through. Or else.

Oh, the democracy!

Constitutional scholars are divided on whether it would be good for democracy to bar Trump from the ballot, or whether such a move, even if legally sound, is politically too dangerous. Many of them say theyexpect the justices to try to find a way to decide the case without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection.

Listen. Listen closely. Trump did this. That is the context no one in the press has the guts to talk about. All this hand-ringing over the Court’s dilemma, over a democracy in peril, and no mention that our democratic republic stands at this crossroads because Donald Trump is a career criminal! We’re here because of him.

Oh, but he’s not been adjudicated! they cry. Like the dozens of indicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists still awaiting trial while their accomplices sit rotting in jail? Poor babies, all!

“There’s no confusion about who Trump is,” Biden said on Friday. We know who Trump is. You don’t have to be Maya Angelou or Robert Zimmerman to know which way the wind blows.

Look, I don’t agree with everything Dan Froomkin writes here, but I share his frustration that the mainstream press refuses, refuses, to address any elephant in any room:

Our top newsrooms are too timid to go there, however. Racism, especially when it comes to calling specific people or practices racist, has long been the third rail of journalism. Newsroom leaders don’t want to be accused of stoking racial resentment, don’t want to alienate racist readers, and don’t want to have to defend their own insufficient attempts to diversify their newsrooms and sources. They just don’t want to go there.

Sadly, the fact that racism may be the key to understanding the current political climate hasn’t changed that aversion.

By the same token, Trump is a criminal. By temperament and by habit if not by judicial decree.

But God forbid anyone should speak bluntly about the personality cult that accuses Democrats of being baby-blood-drinking pedophiles.

Trump is not the the genetic progenitor of this movement. As a natural-born predator, he just exploits it more efficiently than his wannabes.

But the flood of 14th Amendment odds-making just sickens me. Because Trumpism, with its not-so-subliminal threats of violence has turned press watchdogs into lapdogs. The expert analysis we’ll be expected to swallow as SCOTUS deliberates Trump’s questionable standing as a candidate for dictator will focus on every legal and political consideration except the behaviors of the man who misled us here.

I’m reminded of the kids’ nonseense song about the hole at the botton of the sea. It all comes back to Trump. He’s the hole.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

This week I’ll just share some cute little videos that came across twitter this week. (These are necessary to cleanse your brain from all the Nazis.)

“…. Bastard”

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

I finished it for him.

This was the opening speech of Biden’s campaign and he is making it clear how he sees the stakes and he is 100% right.

Unfortunately, we are clearly going to have to fight much of the media at the same time we will have to fight Trump and the MAGA cult. CNN’s commentary after the speech was dismal. Gloria Borger complained that it was “very personal” ignoring the fact that it’s a presidential campaign and Biden is running against Trump! Of course it’s personal. And all he did was use Trump’s own words. (He didn’t even call him old or fat or make fun of him, which I think is the actual definition of “getting personal.”)

Then former Republican Charlie Dent said that people are sick of all the “extremistm” and are looking for something different than Trump who they think is crazy and Biden who is too old. Then he brought up No Labels at which point I changed the channel.

*sigh*

Some more highlights:

Some other highlights:

There’s a lot of work to do to get people to pay attention to what Trump has in store if he gets elected again. This was a good start.

Update –— I thought this piece in Politico Playbook framed the issue well:

BIDEN SETS THE STAKES — One way to think about the last three years of American politics is as an ongoing effort to hold DONALD TRUMP accountable for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

It started as a bipartisan effort that treated Trump as a pariah, but then it quickly polarized into just another red-blue issue, one that rehabilitated Trump among Republicans while generally benefitting Democrats electorally. Ever since, the accountability effort has pingponged through different branches of government, the states, and other legal and political institutions.

First up was Congress with Trump’s post-riot impeachment, which was ultimately rejected by Republican senators, including Leader MITCH McCONNELL, who argued that there were better ways in other parts of the government to seek accountability.

Next was the House Jan. 6 committee, which had no power over Trump but served as a catalyst for the next two forums of accountability: the 2022 midterms, where Republican candidates who supported election subversion were generally defeated, and the Justice Department, which indicted Trump.

Then came the GOP presidential primaries, the Republican Party’s internal system of candidate accountability. By then Jan. 6 had so fully matured into a partisan issue that trying to use it against Trump strengthened him and damaged the attacker. Trump will spend the anniversary on Saturday at two rallies in Iowa.

As the AP reminds, Trump “has called it ‘a beautiful day’ and described those imprisoned for the insurrection as ‘great, great patriots’ and ‘hostages.’ At some campaign rallies, he has played a recording of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ sung by jailed rioters — the anthem interspersed with his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

The Jan. 6 accountability project will dominate 2024, as the issue is taken up by the states deciding whether Trump is an insurrectionist and should be allowed on the ballot, juries in Georgia and Washington, D.C., deciding two criminal cases, and the Supreme Court which seems poised to decide three major issues related to these efforts.

But all of these efforts — the GOP primaries, the 14th Amendment movement, the JACK SMITH and FANI WILLIS indictments — might sputter out, just as impeachment did three years ago.

That would leave President JOE BIDEN and his reelection campaign as the last tool of accountability.

So it is no surprise that Biden is kicking off the 2024 election today with a speech reminding voters of Jan. 6 and alerting them to the threat he believes Trump poses — one he prepped for by meeting with a group of historians at the White House.

“Using the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection to frame the stakes of the 2024 campaign, the president will draw upon the history of the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, setting Friday to argue that his likely rematch with Donald Trump will be a seismic test of the republic’s foundation,” Jonathan Lemire writes this morning, citing senior Biden advisers who offered a preview of the speech.

“‘Democracy is not a sideline issue: It is a sacred cause,’ said one of the advisers, granted anonymity as part of the ground rules during a call with reporters. ‘When major events occur, people render the judgments in national elections. Voters won’t forget Jan. 6.’”

The content of the speech will be studied carefully by Democratic strategists who are in the middle of the same electoral debate they had in 2022: Should the party emphasize Jan. 6 and the threat to democratic norms, or should it focus on traditional policy issues?

There was a cottage industry of pundits ahead of the midterms who argued Biden was making a mistake by emphasizing the former, which was allegedly not as important to voters, at the expense of the latter.

But post-election analysis suggested that Democrats prevailed in places where they convinced voters to take “the MAGA threat” seriously, and suffered in places where that message didn’t break through. It’s not a strict binary choice, of course, but a question of emphasis. Biden will use the MAGA and Jan. 6 as an umbrella threat that affects numerous policies.

As Lemire writes, “Biden will extend the concept of freedom to other issue areas during his remarks on Friday, aides said. That includes access to vote, abortion rights and economic fairness.”

Blood on his hands

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

That alone should have disqualified him from ever running for office again. Now, he should be held liable for millions of dollars from families whose loved ones followed his advice:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

In fact, they say the figure may be far higher given the study only concerns six countries from March to July 2020, when the drug was prescribed much more widely.

Hydroxychloroquine gained prominence partly due to French virologist Didier Raoult who had headed the Méditerranée Infection Foundation hospital, but was later removed amid growing controversy.

It was also considered something of a “miracle cure” by the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said: “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

They had a lot to lose, obviously. How any politician, much less the president of the United States, could be so arrogant as to push untried snake oil on people during a deadly pandemic is beyond me. He was desperate to get the whole thing over with so he could go campaign for re-election but he was in so far over his head he literally didn’t know what to do. He only knows how to brag and attack his enemies. Something like this, which required serious leadership was way beyond his capabilities.

I guess nobody wants to remember what happened during those dark days. But I wish they would at least remember what Donald Trump did when he was confronted with his first serious national crisis. No president has ever done worse. Just imagine if it was a serious national security threat. It makes you shudder just to think about it.

Trump personally exhorted people to take an unproven cure that made people mistrust the medical advice they were getting — and it killed some of them. Is there any other president who has done something so despicably irresponsible for purely selfish reasons?

Trump’s Top Legal Adviser Puts “His” Supreme Court Justices On Notice

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

Yesterday I wrote about Trump’s right hand gal, Alina Habba saying she’d rather be pretty than smart because she can fake being smart.

She’s not faking it very well:

Aaron Blake writes:

There is saying the quiet part out loud, and then there’s what Trump lawyer Alina Habba just did.

Addressing the Supreme Court’s looming 14th Amendment decisions on whether Donald Trump can be disqualified from state ballots for engaging in insurrection, Habba decided it would be a good time to remind people of just how much Trump has done for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court; I have faith in them,” Habba saidon Fox News.“You know, people like Kavanaugh who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up.”

She tried to clean it up but please. Let there be no doubt about what she was saying:

[D]espite Habba’s cleanup effort, she was clearly pointing in the direction of Kavanaugh (and potentially others) being beholden to Trump; there is no other reason to invoke the supposed favors Trump did for Kavanaugh. This adds to a volume of evidence that indicates that Trump does indeed expect loyalty from judges and justices — along with plenty of others in positions where that shouldn’t be a consideration.

The second point is that this is potentially counterproductive.

Trump’s record on such issues is unambiguous. He has made clear he expects judges to toe his line, and he looks for loyalty in all the wrong places — from officials who are supposed to be insulated from politics. That starts with but is hardly limited to an FBI director whose investigation threatened Trump, James B. Comey. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Comey testified that Trump told him in 2017 before Trump fired him.

The Washington Post has reported that, also in 2017, Trump considered pulling the nomination of now-Justice Neil M. Gorsuch because of a perceived lack of loyalty. Gorsuch had in a confirmation interview with a Democratic senator expressed displeasure with Trump’s attacks on judges, calling them “disheartening” and “demoralizing.”

As The Post’s Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Barnes reported:

The president worried that Gorsuch would not be “loyal,” one of the people said, and told aides that he was tempted to pull Gorsuch’s nomination — and that he knew plenty of other judges who would want the job.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested that judges he nominated would rule in predictable ways, including on issues such as Roe v. Wade. “If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” he assured evangelicals at one point.

Trump in 2022 also bristled after the Supreme Court declined to help him shield his tax returns from the House Ways and Means Committee.

“Many Republican Judges go out of their way to show they are beyond reproach, & will come down hard on people before them in order to prove they cannot be ‘bought’ or in any way show favor to those who appointed them,” Trump said on Truth Social, adding: “As soon as they get appointed, they go ‘ROGUE!’”

Trump suggested that this was a contrast to judges appointed by Democrats, who were more apt to toe the party’s line.

But that last point also shows how Habba’s comment could be ill-advised, even beyond the ethics of it.

Whatever you think of Trump’s expressed sentiment about relative party loyalty, it’s true that judges are fiercely protective of the perception that they are independent. Yes, judges and even Supreme Court justices often rule in predictable ways that align with the party that appointed them. But crucial to the legitimacy of the court is the idea that they aren’t just political operatives doing the bidding of their allies.

Habba’s comments — and Trump’s past comments — basically set the narrative that Trump is working the justices. And any favorable decision for Trump could be viewed as bowing to that pressure. Whether it affects Kavanaugh’s thought process or not, it puts him in a box.

Normally, I would say that it’s very stupid to say something like this openly. But the Trump cult is all about intimidation and frankly it works very well on right wingers. They cower like beaten dogs whenever he looks at them sideways. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Kav and Barrett and Gorsuch all broke out into a cold sweat at the idea Trump might sic his red hats on them. They are Republicans, after all, first and foremost.

Just Don’t Call It A Cult

Published by digby on January 5, 2024

Donald Trump uploaded the following to his Truth Social feed. Sure, he’s mentally stable. Nothing megalomaniacal about this at all:

This is so delusional it sends chills down my spine. How can this country survive when almost half the country believes something this batshit crazy?