Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

On Democrats fighting the last war

Trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks sometimes seems pointless. With few exceptions, Democrats always seem to be fighting the last war because that’s the one they learned on. Brian Beutler sees it too.

Beutler perceives that social media has fundamentally shifted our political ground:

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola.

[…]

All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics.

What allowed Democrats to win in 2018 and 2020 were not material conditions but “contagious ideas.” We could use some about now.

“A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power,” Beutler writes, and the slow recovery precipitated the 2010 backlash. All fitting predictive models. Then social media took off.

The media once measured the economy by a standard set of metrics, whatever “gloom and doom” Republicans spread. But the right had fewer tools for spreading them. Today the Net is a toxic smorgasbord while collective media literacy has remained weak. (Undermining liberal arts and civics education has helped that, I’d add.)

“Within that glut, the lines between professional journalism and all other media have blurred, and liberal political elites were unprepared for it,” Beutler continues. All of the radical shifts in how people receive and process information off screens has occured in the last 15 years, he argues (emphasis mine):

While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the assumption itself has become less and less true.

Ask those beaten and injured in the “Be There. Will Be Wild!” insurrection if the internet isn’t real life.

This paragraph evokes memories:

Even before Republicans became terminally online, Democrats were no great visionaries about the power of the internet. When I began my career in online journalism almost 19 years ago, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quicker than Republicans to make small adjustments for it. But they were very small and very reluctant. It was common practice for Democrats to leave their standard communications operations intact, but create tiny, isolated digital-media outreach teams to contend with their online critics and allies. Real news and information was for the capital-J Journalists; “bloggers” (emphasis always on the “blah”) had to contend with the 22-year old staffer who had an RSS feed and no useful information to share. Over many years and under a lot of pressure, these teams typically became integrated. But the disdain lingered—many of the same people run the Democratic Party today. And under their watch, Republicans became savvier about the online world and overtook the left.

Before then, back when conservatives scheduled their Right Online conferences for the same dates and cities as Netroots Nation (2008-2011?), they held digital trainings that seemed to amount to teaching senior citizens how to “log on.” Ah, the good old days. We bloggers were DFHs then. Still are.

And this is ultimately why I’m not so sanguine about Republicans voting to formalize their baseless Biden impeachment inquiry. It’s why I suspect media is largely responsible for breaking the relationship between economic fundamentals and public sentiment, and why I don’t take it for granted that happier tidings will wash over the public in the coming months (though, of course, I hope they do). 

Most liberals see factual realities—of Biden’s unimpeachable conduct, or the economy’s resiliency—and assume they must break through to the masses at some point. I see artifacts of yet-more information wars that could cost Democrats a fateful election once again.

I have to interject yet again that this information war is an asymmetrical one. When people ask why the Democrats don’t have a messaging infrastructure as vast and as disciplined as the GOP’s, I remind them that the GOP doesn’t have one either. It just appears that way because Republicans are so well-supplied with information armaments by a network of billionaire-funded think tanks and billionaire-owned media outlets. Democrats are Ukrainians fending off Russia without support from NATO and the U.S.

Another problem is that Democrats are not as plucky and improvisational as the “outmatched” Ukrainian Army. Decades after the advent of near-universal early voting, their election organizing still echoes the days when precinct captains were tasked with turning out neighborhood voters in a single-day, fourteen-hour marathon. Like 1999, if not 1969. They’ve been slow to up their game at the county level.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

Animals opening their presents!

Aaaaand kids opening their presents:

Happy Hollandaise, folks. I know some of you like the Friday Night Soother more than anything else I do. If so … 🙂

What happened to all the missing secrets?

You may remember Cassidy Hutchinson saying that Mark Meadows took a binder full of information about the Russia investigation home with him during her January 6 Committee testimony:

According to transcripts released by the Jan. 6 committee last year, in closed-door testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee she was “almost positive” the binder went home with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. 

“I don’t think that would have been something that he would have destroyed. It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe in the office safe most of the time,” Hutchinson said, adding that she realized the binder was no longer in the safe on her last day at the White House. 

CNN has new reporting on what went on and the enduring mystery of the missing binder continues.

A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office. The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.

The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.

The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.

Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.

Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to hand-deliver a redacted copy for a last review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents, despite Trump’s declassification order. Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives.

But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.

We knew that Trump was determined to declassify all this stuff believing that it somehow exonerated him. Of course it didn’t and I would guess that most of the “redactions” done by his staff had little to do with classified secrets and more to do with information that pointed to Russian interference on Trump’s behalf.

They didn’t find it at Mar-a-Lago. Mark Meadows insists that he didn’t take it. So where is it?

The New York Times adds this:

Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.

But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.

“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”

Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”

“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”

Suuuuuure. He’d love to show it to the media but he doesn’t have it. Talk to Mark, maybe he’ll show it to you.

And where did it come from in the first place? Well, the usual suspects, of course:

The binder’s origins trace back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, compiled a classified report alleging the Obama administration skewed intelligence in its assessment that Putin had worked to help Trump in the 2016 election.

The GOP report, which criticized the intelligence community’s “tradecraft,” scrutinized the highly classified intelligence from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia sought to assist Trump’s campaign. House Republicans cut a deal with the CIA in which the committee brought in a safe for its documents that was then placed inside a CIA vault – a setup that prompted some officials to characterize it as a “turducken” or a “safe within a safe.”

It truly is the sign of a nation in decline that it would elect such imbeciles to govern it.

The Republicans on the Committee said the intelligence was rigged by former Obama officials to exclude intelligence that would have shown that the Russians really wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Seriously. The Democrats said that was nonsense, of course, and their view was validated by the bipartisan Senate report which found that they actually preferred Donald Trump.

It seems there will never be an end to revelations of just how corrupt Trump’s administration actually was. Sure, some of the people on the inside did what they could to stop them from doing their worst but so many didn’t. And we know that next time no one will even try.

And by the way, here’s another enduring mystery: why in the hell has Mark Meadows not been charged by the Special Counsel nor does he seem to be a cooperating witness? What’s up with that? The guy is in the middle everything. On the other hand, a federal appeals court heard his appeal to move his Georgia case to federal court and they didn’t sound convinced. So, at least there’s that. Trump can’t pardon him for that crime.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

And his cult will probably believe it.

I don’t know how many of you are watching the Trump videos on his web site but almost all of them are terrifying. But among the atrocities are a few comic gems. This is one of them:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.”

Commuters, meanwhile, could get around in flying cars, Trump said – an echo of “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon about a family in a high-tech future society. Work to develop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles is already underway by major airlines, auto manufacturers and other companies, though widely seen as years away from reaching the market.

“I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,” Trump, who announced his third bid for the presidency in November, said in a four-minute video detailing his plan.

He said he would launch a contest to charter up to 10 “freedom cities” roughly the size of Washington, DC, on undeveloped federal land.

“We’ll actually build new cities in our country again,” Trump said in the video. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American dream.”

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

He manipulated the court’s norms to overturn Roe. And he’ll do it again whenever he chooses.

This piece in the NY Times about the deliberations in the Dobbs decision is a barn burner. I’ve included a gift link so that you can read the whole thing, but here is how it opens.

Alito is a beast, as are those in his thuggish crew:

On Feb. 10 last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. showed his eight colleagues how he intended to uproot the constitutional right to abortion.

At 11:16 a.m., his clerk circulated a 98-page draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After a justice shares an opinion inside the court, other members scrutinize it. Those in the majority can request revisions, sometimes as the price of their votes, sweating sentences or even words.

But this time, despite the document’s length, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote back just 10 minutes later to say that he would sign on to the opinion and had no changes, according to two people who reviewed the messages. The next morning, Justice Clarence Thomas added his name, then Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and days later, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. None requested a single alteration. The responses looked like a display of conservative force and discipline.

In the months since, that draft turned into a leak, then law, then the rare Supreme Court decision that affects the entire country, reshaping elections, the practice of medicine and a fundamental aspect of being female. The story of how this happened has seemed obvious: The constitutional right to abortion effectively died with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom President Donald J. Trump replaced with a favorite of the anti-abortion movement, Justice Barrett.

But that version is far from complete. Justice Barrett, selected to clinch the court’s conservative supermajority and deliver the nearly 50-year goal of the religious right, opposed even taking up the case. When the jurists were debating Mississippi’s request to hear it, she first voted in favor — but later switched to a no, according to several court insiders and a written tally. Four male justices, a minority of the court, chose to move ahead anyway, with Justice Kavanaugh providing the final vote.

Those dynamics help explain why the responses stacked up so speedily to the draft opinion in February 2022: Justice Alito appeared to have pregamed it among some of the conservative justices, out of view from other colleagues, to safeguard a coalition more fragile than it looked.

The Supreme Court deliberates in secret, and those who speak can be cast out of the fold. To piece together the hidden narrative of how the court, guided by Justice Alito, engineered a titanic shift in the law, The New York Times drew on internal documents, contemporaneous notes and interviews with more than a dozen people from the court — both conservative and liberal — who had real-time knowledge of the proceedings. Because of the institution’s insistence on confidentiality, they spoke on the condition of anonymity.

We are continuing to report on the Supreme Court. If you are able to share further information, please use our secure tip line to reach Jodi Kantor, Adam Liptak and the rest of our team. nytimes.com/tips

At every stage of the Dobbs litigation, Justice Alito faced impediments: a case that initially looked inauspicious, reservations by two conservative justices and efforts by colleagues to pull off a compromise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, along with the liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer, worked to prevent or at least limit the outcome. Justice Breyer even considered trying to save Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion — by significantly eroding it.

To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.

Justice Ginsburg’s death hung over the process. For months, the court delayed announcing its decision to hear the case, creating the appearance of distance from her passing. The justices later allowed Mississippi to perform a bait-and-switch, widening what had been a narrower attempt to restrict abortion while she was alive into a full assault on Roe — the kind of move that has prompted dismissals of other cases.

The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.

In the Dobbs case, the court “barreled over each of its normal procedural guardrails,” wrote Richard M. Re, a University of Virginia law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk on a federal appellate court, adding that “the court compromised its own deliberative process.”

In his opinion, Justice Alito wrote that the court was stepping away from the abortion debate and intended to “return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Since the court’s ruling, access to abortion has dropped overall, with 21 states banning or restricting it and some others reinforcing abortion protections.

I don’t know if this dynamic and the reporting on it helps or hurts the chances that they go easy on the Mifepristone case. I don’t think we can know. But if I had to guess it may have a better outcome but only because there is enough partisan hackery in that majority that they may see it as useful for the Republican Party not to start another firestorm so soon. But they will do it eventually. The Alito majority is going to be around for a long time.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks… 🙂 If you’d like to toss something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, you can do so here:

Or is it just more hopium?

I’m hoping to spread a little bit of hopium during this holiday season, not because I’m trying to blow smoke but because I’m honestly not as pessimistic about this coming election as a lot of people are. It’s not that I’m not extremely nervous. I know as well as you do that anything can happen and this political situation is extremely volatile. After all, just two years ago we had an attempted coup!

But after having lived through some earlier panics that inform my feelings about this election, I’m just not ready to call for the hemlock. Yet. I know it will take hard work and close attention to what’s going on over the next year, but I do believe it’s possible. I’ll try to bring you analysis that I find as I scour the internet everyday that may at least give you some pause.

JV Last of the Bulwark is a bit of a curmudgeon. Sometimes he is down right dark but I often find his analysis interesting. Today he discusses a conversation with economist Noah Smith about Biden’s chances in the election and why Smith believes he will win.

I don’t know if he’s right but it’s certainly worth taking into consideration. He starts off by pointing out something that I’ve said for years, based on my own experience, which is that consumer sentiment and economic polling are very lagging indicators. I’ve observed in the past that it always takes about a year for people to catch up to reality.

Last recounts Smith’s thesis:

Inflation is now—we think—finished. This week’s suggestion that the Fed is looking at multiple rate cuts in the coming months caused the markets to jump. Projections now suggest that the economy will continue to be strong through 2024.

Having achieved a soft landing, the next phase of the business cycle may be expansion. As such, Goldman Sachs believes 2024 will be even better than initially thought.

As these economic realities continue to stack on top of one another and prices remain stable, consumer sentiment will eventually come around—as it always does. By the middle of 2024 we should see a measurable uptick in people’s perception of the economy; by late 2024 voters should be fully caught up.

\

Hopium? Maybe. But it doesn’t sound off base to me. I’m already seeing a change in the media which is an important first step.

Smith argues that Biden’s approval numbers will improve as will his polling. (God, let’s hope so.) “By staying the course, not panicking, and letting the growing economy do the work, Biden will be in a strong position for reelection simply because of the fundamentals.”

Last likes this argument because it doesn’t just rely on the polling being skewed or abortion being the magic bullet everywhere. It assumes instead that despite the bizarre nature of this election, what with a psychopathic would-be dictator currently under 91 felony indictments running against the incumbent, things haven’t changed so very much.

As he says:

And I like same-as-it-ever-was heuristics, because (1) they tend to be true¹ and (2) they assume persistent levels of low information among voters.

And I might add, if those normal heuristics, like a successful incumbent, a good economy and a monstrously dangerous opponent aren’t relevant at all, we are in much, much bigger trouble. So yeah, maybe it’s hopium but what else have we got?

Being Last, he’s still not happy with that argument, even if it’s true, because despite all that the odds still give Trump a pretty good fighting chance to pull it off which is as chilling as always. And why? Because we’ve got evidence that a massive number of Americans have been exposed to illiberalism — and they like it. This will be lasting legacy of Trump. They now know that the rules were made to be broken.

The whole Republican party has been activated and they now believe they have a right to attain power by any means necessary. Trump may lose but he’s just the beginning. This anti-democratic, authoritarian worldview is now the organizing principle of the Republican Party.

I do believe it’s possible that public opinion is on the verge of catching up to a good economy and a lot of the people who now say they disapprove of Biden will come around. I don’t know how many of them will, however, and no matter what, I believe the electoral college vote is going to be close. We just have to hope that reality and sanity will assert themselves in enough of the population that we can at least finally put Trump out to pasture. It may not cure the disease but we can cut out the tumor that caused it.

We’ll be keeping a super close eye on this seven days a week all year long here at Hullabaloo, as we always do. If you are of a mind to help me keep this thing going over what promises to be an unprecedentedly tumultuous year, I’d be most appreciative. Your support means the world to me and I am very, very grateful.

cheers,
digby

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

It’s a mess and it’s getting messier

It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that he allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats.

Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision” because he wouldn’t choose between two competing bills. And apparently it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off. We used to be able to get answers from people.” Who could have seen that coming?

It’s clear from his record that Johnson would love nothing more than to stand by their side and throw tantrums but his job as Speaker is coming into conflict with his ideology as a MAGA warrior and it’s probably not going to end well for him.

He has certainly gone out of his way to show the hardliners that he’s one of them. He immediately made the required pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and then enthusiastically delivered his endorsement making it clear that he is still MAGA all the way. And despite just a few weeks ago suggesting that impeachment was no longer necessary since President Biden’s polls numbers are weak (therefore admitting that the whole thing is a partisan sham) he delivered for Trump and the MAGA faithful on their biggest priority this week. He brought the vote to formalize the inquiry to the floor and persuaded the so-called moderates in the party to go along. You’d think that would have appeased the Freedom caucus but let that be a lesson to him: that is simply not possible.

All the usual suspects have been making the rounds since the vote suggesting that the party line vote (which Johnson once insisted could destroy the Republic) shows that they have the goods. But once again, they are lying. They have still produced not one sliver of evidence that Joe Biden did any of the things they are implying he did with their histrionic innuendo about “the Biden Crime Family.”

Interestingly, there is one member of the House who may have actually done the things he’s accusing Biden of doing. A few weeks ago Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast broke a story about some shady dealings by House Oversight Chair James Comer that resembles some of the crimes he’s accusing Biden of committing. In a new report the AP unearthed new details and now it’s now pretty clear that his crusade is a clear example of projection.

Comer has been yammering about “the Biden family” shell companies, which Joe Biden had nothing to do with and were actually completely legitimate companies with real purposes, for months. He even once told Fox Business, “nobody creates shell companies.”

Actually, some people do. In fact, Comer himself has a shell company which grew from $50,000 and $100,000 at the time of purchase to between $500,001 and $1 million today. Evidently, he’s conveniently forgotten to report the assets within it which goes against House rules which require members to disclose assets held by companies worth more than $1,000. Oh, and this shell company was formed from a transfer of a piece of land co-owned with one of his major campaign donors and nobody can figure out what the purpose of it was or why he has gone to such lengths to obscure it.

When asked about this, he keeps saying that the questioner is “financially illiterate” which is hilarious considering the total illiteracy of his charges against Joe Biden. If you don’t believe that, I highly recommend this thorough fact check by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump or this one by Factcheck.org. It would be sad if it wasn’t so outrageous.

But the point of all this is to dirty up Joe Biden as corrupt to give some red meat to the Trump followers and make the rest of the country assume “where there’s smoke there’s fire” which is something they’ve been successful at doing against their enemies for decades. I’m sure I don’t have to remind people about Whitewater which bears some similarities with this current bogus scandal in both its lack of evidence or its relevance to the current presidency. The memory of Benghazi and “But Her Emails” against Hillary Clinton are still fresh. The Birther scandal enraptured the right wingers throughout the Obama presidency and launched Donald Trump’s political career.

This is what they do. And more often than not, when you examine these scandals closely you’ll find that it’s the Republicans doing the accusing who are actually guilty of the crimes. James Comer’s flagrant hypocrisy is just par for the course.

Donald Trump wants revenge for his two impeachments and if there was time he would demand that they impeach Biden three times just so he’d have one more than him on his record. And because they’ve pounded this story on right wing media for years now, the MAGA base is slavering over the prospect of taking down the president. It has nothing to do with any real crimes or evidence or anything else that would justify an impeachment.

Those Representatives from swing districts who voted to open the inquiry this week may believe this was essentially a free vote and hope that they won’t be asked to vote for an actual impeachment but I think they are deluding themselves. The constitutional standard for impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” but in practice, as the late president Gerald Ford put it, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

At this moment in history, Donald Trump, James Comer and Jim Jordan will be deciding what it is and it’s clear that their standard is literally nothing. They’ll do it because they can. That’s the only reason they need.

If you’d like to support Hullabaloo for another year, you can do so below or use the snail mail address on the left. Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

 

Wouldn’t you rather try Hopium?

Many of us have them in our lives or in our families, people who over the Trump years slid from left to right. For some it was the terror and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. For others it began sooner than 2020. Most are unknowns, but they often follow better-knowns down the rabbit hole.

Michelle Goldberg considers the phenomenon in light of an In These Times essay by Kathryn Joyce (“The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption“) and Jeff Sharlet (“The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War“) and with a little help from Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger.”

Goldberg writes:

There have been plenty of high-profile defectors from the left in recent years, among them the comedian Russell Brand, the environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the journalist Matt Taibbi, a onetime scourge of Wall Street, who was recently one of the winners of a $100,000 prize from the ultraconservative Young America’s Foundation.

What gives this migration political significance, however, are the ordinary people following them, casting off what they view as a censorious liberalism for a movement that doesn’t ask anyone to “do the work” or “check your privilege.” Joyce and Sharlet write, “We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.”

What spurs some to lurch right is rejection by the left. Trust me, I’ve heard that one. Some new volunteers are quickly discouraged at not being elevated to positions of prominence and authority in political campaigns that are mostly grunt work directed by the more experienced. Grunt work is beneath their dignity. They are “big ideas” people.

We see something similar among better-knowns of the post-left. Klein’s book examines the shift with her shadow, the former feminist celebrity Naomi Wolf:

A key question for the left is why this is happening. For some celebrity defectors, the impetus seems clear enough: They lurched right after a cancellation or public humiliation. Klein writes that a turning point for Wolf was widespread mockery after she was confronted, live on the radio, with evidence that the thesis of the book she was promoting was based on her misreading of archival documents. Brand’s right-wing turn, as Matt Flegenheimer wrote in The New York Times Magazine, coincided with the start of investigations into sexual-assault accusations against him. But that doesn’t explain why there’s such an eager audience for born-again reactionaries and why, in much of the Western world, the right has been so much better than the left at harnessing hatred of the status quo.

Part of the answer is probably that the culture of the left is simply less welcoming, especially to the politically unsure, than the right. The conservative movement may revel in cruelty toward out-groups — see, for example, the ravening digital mobs that descended on the podcaster Julia Mazur for a TikTok she made about the pleasures of life without children — but the movement is often good at love-bombing potential recruits. “People go where people accept them, or are nice to them, and away from people who are mean to them,” the Marxist Edwin Aponte, one of the founders of the heterodox but socially conservative magazine Compact, told Joyce and Sharlet.

But I think there’s a deeper problem, which stems from a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress. Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future. I sometimes hear leftists talk about “our collective liberation,” but outside a few specific contexts — the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians comes to mind — I mostly have no idea what they’re talking about.

This is important. The left can be censorious, purist, and unwelcoming, especially glass-half-empty progressives for whom every victory is a sellout. They find a dark cloud in every silver lining, As smart and well-informed as they are, they never seem to grasp why more aren’t eager to join the pity party. What they get out of relentless negativity is beyond me. Patience, flexibility is not selling out. As Anand Giridharadas found, it’s movement-building:

A repeated theme in Anand Giridharadas’s “The Persuaders” is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” Do those on the left edge of the left — at the cutting edge of consciousness, if you prefer — possess enough critical mass to achieve the progressive goals they seek:

Veteran activists Giridharadas profiles have decided they do not. Success means expanding their movements without compromising them. They’ve learned to “call in” progressives with whom they mostly agree rather than just calling them out for their failings, to focus more on conversion than on hunting heretics. They walk a fine line seeking to coalition with more moderate allies without watering down their own goals.

“Was any movement ever made stronger by subtraction?” ask Joyce and Sharlet:

Meanwhile, the Right knows the power of addition. For Steve Bannon, his new War Room regular Naomi Wolf is just one more wedge he can use to peel pandemic-aggrieved suburban ​“wellness moms” away from the Democratic Party, just as he’s pulled the ​“white working class” toward Trump.

For every Wolf, for every Taibbi, there are so many everyday people following them rightward. Not selling out but breaking up, sometimes cracking up, giving into knowingness and the elation of ​“seeing through” the con— of Covid, or pronouns, or ​“the Russia hoax” or ​“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.

Hope, after all, is earnest, and earnest can be embarrassing, especially now as the odds seem to lengthen. But as media critic Jay Rosen puts it, what matters more than odds are stakes. We, the authors of this article — such an earnest phrase — have spent much of the past 20 years documenting the mutations of the Right in the United States and around the world. We’ve taken courage from the fault lines such close examination reveals: that there is no singular Right, but many, so often squalling, like the GOP House conference that just spent a month searching for a speaker. 

But in this age of Trump, his presence and his shadow, we’ve witnessed more right-wing factions converging than splitting, putting aside differences and adopting new and ugly dreams. They, of course, do not see the dreams as ugly, but beautiful. Utopian, even, with MAGA as merely prelude to what the intellectuals among them sometimes refer to as ​“sovereignty,” ​“greatness” or ​“the common good”: sweet-sounding phrases that find their purest expression in the image of the gallows erected outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The greater the spectacle, the stronger its gravity. That’s what makes fascism so scary when it genuinely flares. It consumes. It grows.

Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic Thursday cites a study that amplifies an economic message that research finds has appeal where Democrats remain weak:

To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by the right to legal abortion.

The study was conducted by Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing voters of color, in conjunction with Anat Shenker-Osorio, of ASO Communications, a message consulting firm for progressive candidates and causes. Last year, Way to Win was among the top advocates pushing the party to stress a message of protecting personal freedoms and democracy—an approach that helped Democrats overperform expectations despite widespread discontent about the economy.

Reversing the advantage Donald Trump and the GOP have on the economy will require Democrats to highlight “the tangible improvements their policies have made in people’s lives, in lieu of speaking of abstract economic gains, as well as touting their future agenda of expanding on these gains, taking on corporate greed and the MAGA Republicans who aim to rule only for the wealthy few,” concludes a memo summarizing the research that was provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

I hate to break it to Brownstein, but these are people dedicated to sharing their findings widely. ASO Communications posts on its web site most of what it’s paid to produce. Keeping it proprietary defeats the mission.

What Brownstein reports about Democrats’ economics message and what Goldberg sees is that a “plausible vision of the future” is what’s missing on the left, what Shenker-Osorio calls painting the beautiful tomorrow.

Brownstein:

“If the argument is who [handles] the economy best, even though it’s not true in any sense, that’s their brand advantage,” Shenker-Osorio told me. “If the question is who is going to create the best future for your family, that is a Democratic-brand advantage. That is a story we can tell. It’s a credible story, and it’s a story that people care more about.”

There’s plenty of negativity to report. But what we try to do here is mix in a dose of Hopium as well. How else to get out of bed every day?

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

Clay Higgins is on the case

Brandi Buchman’s offering was the first thing that popped up on the hellsite this a.m. Clearly, former Louisiana lawman Rep. Clay Higgins, perpetually in high dudgeon (I love that phrase), is enjoying his moment in Lara Logan’s Truth in Media spotlight.

“The Cajun John Wayne,” the man who accused the FBI of sending “ghost busses” filled with agents to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 to impersonate Trump supporters and spark the riot, has “done his research.” Again. Higgins insists that the Biden administration has weaponized the government (MAGAs love that phrase) to track Trump supporters.

Higgins is gonna gear up, lock and load, expose ’em, flush ’em out, nip it in the bud:

“I’m telling you, we’re in uncharted waters as it relates to the weaponization of our government against the American people. I am not frightened of these people. I’ve spent my life serving others, and I love my country. This thing is not going to just slip away. They’re not going to take us without a fight. I’m going to fight legally and peacefully and within the parameters of the constitution that I’ve sworn to serve. But they’re going down. These men and their high perch and their position of power and authority that are walking upon our entire history, our deepest core principles. They’re not going to get away with it.”

Ok Clay https://t.co/8AzqZFI4Wj

— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) December 15, 2023

Higgins gets too little attention for his skill at generating word salad like: “You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”

And gems like this that it took Jeff Sharlet to translate:

“President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”

How about the sanction Higgins drew over a Facebook post:

The beauty of Facebook posts is that screenshots allow preservation of the impulsive madness of posters. Higgins, R-Lafayette, posted a picture of Black men carrying assault-style rifles and other tactical gear. Higgins said that anyone arriving in the state “aggressively natured and armed” would have a “one way ticket.”

“I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand,” said the post, which was removed not long after appearing on Higgins’ official campaign account. “Nothing personal. We just eliminate the threat. We don’t care what color you are. We don’t care if you’re left or right. if you show up like this, if We recognize threat … you won’t walk away.”

Facebook removed the post for breaking the company’s “Violence and Incitement” policies, a company spokesperson confirmed late Tuesday.

Higgins will be the first to let you know when the revolution is here:

“America is being manipulated into a new era of government control. Your liberty is threatened from within. Welcome to the front lines, Ladies and Gentlemen. I suggest you get your mind right. I’ll advise when it’s time gear up, mount up, and roll out.”

Mount up, Pilgrims.

Update: Adding this from about 10:30 ET on the hellsite.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

They sneaked it into the defense bill

The Hill reports:

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. 

The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden. 

The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“NATO has held strong in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said in a statement. He added the legislation “reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”

Rubio said the measure served as a critical tool for congressional oversight.

“We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies,” he said in a statement. 

Biden has invested deeply in the NATO alliance during his term, committing more troops and military resources to Europe as a show of force against Putin’s war. He has also overseen the expansion of the alliance with the inclusion of Finland and ongoing efforts to secure Sweden’s full accession.

Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has sent mixed messages on the alliance ahead of 2024. The former president’s advocates say his tough talk and criticisms of the alliance served to inspire member-states to fulfill their obligations to reach 2 percent of defense spending, lightening the burden on the U.S.

But Trump’s critics say the former president’s rhetoric weakens the unity and force of purpose of the alliance. And they expressed concerns that Trump would abandon the U.S. commitment to the mutual defense pact of the alliance or withdraw the U.S. completely. 

You have to love Trump supporter Marco Rubio proving once again that he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He publicly gives him kudos and slams Biden but clearly knows that Trump is a massive threat.

Also, Trumps critics are right. Even if he can’t unilaterally withdraw from NATO, he can easily destroy it just by letting his buddy Vladimir Putin have his way:

In an interview with columnist Thomas B. Edsall of The New York Times, Council on Foreign Relations senior vice president James Lindsay believes that a second Trump term would be a massive windfall for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, currently mired in a disastrous invasion of Ukraine that has evolved into a costly stalemate.

“Trump could effectively gut NATO simply by saying he will not come to the aid of NATO allies in the event they are attacked,” said Lindsay. “The power of Article V rests on the belief that alliance members, and specifically, the most powerful alliance member, will act when called upon. Destroy that belief and the organization withers. Walking away from Ukraine would damage the alliance as well even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Member countries would read it as a signal that Trump is abandoning Europe.”

Even in his first term, Trump was often hostile toward the NATO alliance, complaining that other member states needed to pay more in military spending to secure American support, and he frequently praised Putin on the world stage — to this day saying he trusts the Russian autocrat more than the U.S. intelligence agencies, whom he believes were out to get him.

“Trump’s hostility toward alliances, skepticism about the benefits of cooperation writ large, and his belief in the power of unilateral action will lead him to make foreign policy moves that will unintentionally provide strategic windfalls to China, Russia, Iran or North Korea,” Lindsay continued. “The scenario in which he withdraws the United States from NATO or says he will not abide by Article V is the most obvious example.”

The actual motivation of Trump in doing this, “will be to save money and/or free the United States from foreign entanglements,” Lindsay added. “But Vladimir Putin would love to see NATO on the ash heap of history.”

Putin is clearly going to hold out until next November in the hopes that Trump will win. And I’m sure he’ll do what he can to help. It wouldn’t be the first time. And now, Trump has the entire Republican Party on board the Putin train as well.

https://t.co/13acPoJVM9 pic.twitter.com/zjG7FsQBSE

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) December 14, 2023

Here’s Julia Davis’ report from last week:

Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill to aid Ukraine and Israel Wednesday night, sparking celebrations in Moscow where they believe the U.S. will withdraw support for Kyiv allowing them to win the war.

A classified briefing with administration officials reportedly devolved into a meltdown on Tuesday afternoon, making it clear that the measure would fail. “We are about to abandon Ukraine,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy told the press as he left the briefing. “When Vladimir Putin marches into a NATO country, they will rue the day they decided to play politics with the future of Ukraine’s security.”

These developments prompted jubilation in Moscow. During Wednesday’s broadcast of a state TV program 60 Minutes, Evgeny Popov said Ukraine was now in “agony” and it was “difficult to imagine a bigger humiliation.”

During his morning show Full Contact on Wednesday, top pro-Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov joyfully noted: “[Janet] Yellen screamed, “Don’t you dare!” [Joe] Biden screamed, “Don’t you dare!” but Republicans said, “Go to hell! We won’t give your khokhols [slur for “Ukrainians”] any money.” The segment was entitled, “No one needs Ukraine anymore—especially the United States.”

Appearing on his program, America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky noted, “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!”

During his appearance on 60 Minutes, Dmitry Abzalov, president of the Center for Strategic Communications, predicted that the fiasco with the funding for Ukraine will spell the political demise of Biden. Host Olga Skabeeva added, “We’ll have no pity for him! To the contrary, we’re ready to hammer those final nails right in!” With a happy grin, Skabeeva said, “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”

Roman Golovanov, the host of Golovanov’s Time on Vladimir Solovyov’s channel Solovyov Live, pointed out, “This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory.”

The turmoil comes at a critical point in time, with Russia facing internal issues, while its invasion failed to proceed at the rate anticipated by the experts. The population is tired of the war but is predictably hesitant to express that for fear of being arrested or otherwise persecuted. Instead, many show their displeasure by tuning out the relentless war coverage. On Wednesday, Solovyov noted, “We lived in peace for too long and now we have to get used to living through war… With great interest, I’m observing the negative growth on my Telegram channel, meaning that the number of followers is sharply declining. Oh well, that’s life.” Solovyov previously complained that every day Russians are losing interest in Putin’s war.

The GOP’s willingness to jeopardize Ukraine’s ability to defend itself provided a sudden boost to the faltering Russian propagandists—a crucial element of Putin’s war effort that is used to motivate the masses. In recent months, their rhetoric devolved from “When we win” to “If we win,” reflecting realities on the ground. Winter’s arrival added another layer of concern. The Republicans brought back the joy for Putin’s gloomy propagandists, reviving their musings as to how they will “punish” Ukrainians once Russia wins.

The only news that dampened the celebration in Moscow was the revelation that Taylor Swift–and not Vladimir Putin–was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. The host of The Meeting Place Andrey Norkin angrily complained, “Taylor Swift! No one knows who that broad is, but Americans worship her.”

As she says, they are very happy with the GOP but they are ecstatic about the potential return of Trump.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the entire panoply of alliances that have been the bulwark of the post WWII world will be blown up. And maybe you think it’s time for a reevaluation of our national security and foreign policy in that regard which is certainly arguable. But I don’t think anyone with any sense would think that in a time of existential global threat of climate change and various new emerging threats it makes sense to just blow everything up with nothing but Donald Trump’s dazzling personality to put in its place.

For instance, this should work out well:

Trump may be prepared to give up on even attempting to convince Kim to dismantle his country’s nuclear weapons if he wins another term in 2024. At least part of his motivation, the people said, would be to avoid wasting time on what he sees as futile arms talks — and focus instead on the larger task of competing with China.

Trump, one of the people said, is highly motivated to get an agreement with North Korea. “He knows he wants a deal,” this person said of Trump. “What type of deal? I don’t think he has thought that through.”

“Thinking it through” would be a first.

That’s the kind of thing we’re looking at if Trump wins. His approach to foreign policy is just as lethal as his fascist domestic policy. It’s terrifying.

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