Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

While the House clown show fulminates over Joe Biden’s brother, get a load of what Trump was raking in from just one guy while he was president

The media has been so overwhelmed with news of the war in Israel and the trainwreck happening in slow motion in the House of Representatives that a lot of stories that would have normally received front page treatment have been relegated to the back burner. When the news is emanating from the right wing media, that’s actually a good thing since it’s almost never truly newsworthy and almost always a form of MAGA propaganda. A case in point is a breathless report released last Friday from the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee announcing that they’ve found evidence that President Joe Biden’s brother paid him $200,000 in 2017, which is supposed to prove that Joe Biden was part of some kind of criminal scheme.

Upon examination, one can see that the check was marked as a repayment of a loan Joe Biden made to his brother a couple of months before, not a payoff of some sort. And furthermore, it was during the time that Joe Biden was completely out of office and hadn’t even decided if he was going to run three years later. But they found this check and immediately started running around in circles shrieking “smoking gun! smoking gun!”

Their reasoning is this: the repayment was sent on the day James Biden received a check for the same amount from a healthcare company (which later went bankrupt) that he had allegedly promised to get some investment from the Middle East due to his political connections. If that’s true, then Biden’s brother was influence peddling, just as Hunter Biden did in his various schemes. But there’s nothing illegal in these people trading on their names no matter how slimy the practice. And it’s certainly not confined to Biden’s relatives or Democrats. Recall the activities of former President George H.W. Bush and his son Neil who parlayed their political contacts into big bucks from all over the world. Or Jared Kushner. 

Going back to the beginning of the republic, relatives of powerful politicians in America have made a bundle promising that they have special access and special interests giving them money based upon that promise. It’s a shady business but unless there is some reason to believe that there is some reciprocation by a politician or some other benefit is exchanged it’s usually just a lucrative game of perceptions, not unlike lobbying which, I would argue, is actually much more corrupt since the money is most often given right out in the open to the campaigns of the people they are trying to influence. Half of Washington, in both parties,is involved in that unseemly business. (And, once again, there is no evidence Joe Biden was personally involved in any of his son or brothers’ businesses.)

On Friday, Chairman Comer excitedly tweeted, “A document that we’re releasing today raises new questions about how President Biden personally benefited from his family’s shady influence peddling of his name and their access to him.” The whole right wing mediaverse went crazy with the usual suspects like Lauren Bobert tweeting, “Yesterday, the Oversight Committee unveiled a $200,000 check James Biden wrote to his brother on the same day he received a loan from a failing company. And it was even more than 10% for the Big Guy this time.”

After Democrats pushed back, Comer tweeted a video hedging his accusations just a little bit, saying “even if this was a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.” Think about that. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden knew anything about his brother’s deal. All we know is that he loaned him some money and was paid back. There’s nothing “troubling” about any of that. Not to mention the fact that Joe Biden was a private citizen who didn’t hold any office at the time.

If you want “troubling,” how about the latest revelations about the man James Comer and virtually the entire US Congress is supporting for president, Donald Trump? You’ll recall a couple of weeks ago that it was reported  Trump had shot his mouth off to a foreign businessman about the United States’ nuclear submarine capabilities. Considering his sloppiness with all the classified documents he stole from the White House, this was hardly surprising. As president he’d been known to share classified information with people who had no business getting it, putting allies and sources in danger in the process. He never cared. He never stopped.

This man, an Australian billionaire by the name of Anthony Pratt, had Trump’s number from the moment he became president and while he was unable to donate money to his campaign because he was a foreign national he saw a much more direct way to influence Trump. He put money directly into Trump’s pocket by joining Mar-a-Lago and spending time with Trump whenever he could. Trump liked him very much, especially when he did things like spend a million dollars for New Year’s Eve party tickets that were sold to everyone else for $50,000.

And Trump just loved to dish about national security with this fellow, telling him that he bombed an Iraqi city before it had been reported and sharing that when the president of Iraq called to complain he said, “What are you going to do about it?” He claimed that his dealings with the Ukrainian president in the “perfect phone call” were nothing compared to what he usually did with foreign leaders. One shudders to think what he meant by that.

All of this was reported in a big story in the NY Times on Sunday which was followed up by an Australian 60 Minutes report that has Pratt on tape discussing all of this. He considered Trump a sharp operator who “ran his business like the Mafia.” 

 As the Times reported:

Mr. Pratt was hardly the only favor seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the fulcrum of the president’s two overlapping worlds, and a marketplace of sorts where favors, secrets and opportunities to lobby the president over clubhouse burgers were treated as currency. But Mr. Pratt, who rode in Mr. Trump’s motorcade and attended a White House state dinner, played the game better than most.

According to the Times, Pratt also made out like a bandit saving over $2 billion in taxes due to the 2017 tax cuts and dined out on America’s national security secrets for years. This is just one of dozens of examples of Donald Trump getting paid directlyby people seeking access and influence by spending vast sums of money at his properties and getting exactly what they paid for — while Trump was the president of the United States. He is the most corrupt president in American history, blatantly selling access to rich people, foreign and domestic and these “drain the swamp” Republicans, howling about Joe Biden’s brother paying back a loan, can’t wait to put him back in the White House. 

Salon

America under siege

The last few weeks have been more stressful than the some during the Trump administration, even during the height of the pandemic. It is easy to grow weary and lose faith that after nearly a quarter of a millennium, this country will self-correct once again. That sense is spreading (Associated Press):

For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions.

The lack of faith extends beyond Congress, with recent polling conducted both before and after the leadership meltdown finding a mistrust in everything from the courts to organized religion. The GOP internal bickering that for nearly three weeks has left open the speaker’s position — second in line to the presidency — is widely seen as the latest indication of deep problems with the nation’s bedrock institutions.

[…]

About half of adults (53%) say they have “hardly any confidence at all” in the people running Congress, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that was conducted in October. That’s in line with 49% who said that in March. Just 3% have a great deal of confidence in Congress, virtually unchanged from March.

About 4 in 10 adults (39%) have hardly any confidence in the executive branch of the federal government, compared with 44% in March. Most Republicans (56%) have low levels of confidence in the executive branch — which is overseen by a member of the opposing party, Democrat Joe Biden — compared with just 20% of Democrats.

About a third of adults (36%) say they have hardly any confidence in the conservative-majority Supreme Court, a figure that has remained steady in recent months. The polling reinforces that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say their confidence in the Supreme Court is low. Black Americans are more likely than Americans overall, as well as more likely than white or Hispanic adults, to have hardly any confidence in the nation’s highest court.

One-third of U.S. adults (33%) continue to have low levels of confidence in the Justice Department, with Republicans having less confidence than Democrats. This comes as former President Donald Trump rails against the department after being charged with mishandling classified documents and attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Efforts to undermine our system and to build public support for autocracy are decades old.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson charts them in her recent book. As her publisher sells it:

In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Since I’m only partway through, I’ll have to take Penguin’s word that. Richardson’s description of the modern downward trend begins, familiarly, in the 1970s with the beginning of the conservative backlash to the Civil Rights movement. But its roots lie in the white backlash to Reconstruction.

The Associated Press reflection on where we are concedes the same post-1970s history. The decline in trust accelerated with the T-party movement that arose in reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency and deeppened with Donald Trump’s rejection of the 2020 election results.

“That validated the idea that the whole institutional system is rigged, which it isn’t,” said David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University.

Democracy once was rigged only when Republicans lost. By further stoking public distrust even when they win, they hope to build support for replacing it with autocratic rule. People are fickle. Republicans have a better shot at retaining power when the consent of the governed is not a factor.

Yes, that’s discouraging. More than that, argues Bishop William J. Barber II, it is “mean, unjust and evil.” America is under siege.

Anyone who has heard a sermon from Bishop William J. Barber II knows he knows the history as well as Richardson.

LIVE: Wake the Sleeping Giant | Bishop Barber Speaks in Gulfport, Mississippi https://t.co/E5J4CYs6fj

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) October 22, 2023

Barber insists. “Society can’t die here. Democracy can’t die here. Justice cannot die here.” But that requires a plan. It requires we be as steadfast as our relentless, long-scheming opponents. We have power we are not using, the power of the vote. Especially poor and low-wealth Americans. There are 15 states, he insists, in which if only 20 percent of non-voters turned out, they could change the results.

Do not let the stress get to you. Keep on keeping on.

And no rules

A law professor sent Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick a chilling note suggesting, she said, “if Jim Jordan won the speakership, he would simply never certify a Biden election win.”

Erica Newland, formerly with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, did research on the matter for Protect Democracy. She concurs. If the current iteration of the GOP controls the House in January of 2025, there is no way they will certify a Democratic victory.

Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy’s co-founder and executive director, tells Lithwick that on the bright side a handful of Republicans thwarted Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) bid for House speaker:

And I think if that holds, and that’s a big if, this is one of the most important developments in this country over the last seven-plus years. And here’s why. I’m going to invoke another recent story in the news that I think is really important to pay attention to, which is the elections this past week in Poland. So, in Poland this past week, a coalition that ran from the center right to the left, united and pulled off a stunning upset of the illiberal nationalist and ever more authoritarian leaning Law and Justice party, which has governed Poland for the better part of the last decade or so.

Why is that important? Because history teaches that the way to defeat authoritarian movements is to form a very broad pro-democracy coalition of people who typically disagree about policy and politics. This is why I talked about how our strategy at Protect Democracy is build a broad coalition of pro-democracy progressives, moderates, and conservatives.

Bassin says that while for “most of the last six years, the American Republican Party, by and large, has chosen the German and Italian path” toward authoritarianism, he is “cautiously optimistic” that we may survive its attempt to undo the republic.

Meanwhile out here in the provinces, the news is mixed.

Jennifer Rubin celebrates Wisconsin Democrats’ state chair Ben Wikler for year-round organizing that has held the line against an authoritarian Republican majority in the Madison state house. Prepared and positioned, Democrats have fended off multiple GOP efforts to undermine the will of Wisconsin voters. Thus, a lesson for us all:

The Wisconsin lesson: Even in less than ideal conditions, defenders of the rule of law and democracy can organize, instill hope, drive public opinion and defeat authoritarian efforts to protect incumbents.

North Carolina Democrats will need some of that organzing given the latest set of aggressively gerrymandered district maps unveiled last week by Republicans in Raleigh. They have a supermajority and mean to keep it (Carolina Forward):

This is so plain and demonstrable a fact that even Republican leaders have not really bothered denying it since the maps dropped last week. Republicans are gerrymandering North Carolina’s election maps for partisan advantage simply because we can, says the Art Pope-John Locke Foundation. “Political considerations are now allowed to be used as one of the criteria,” said Republican State Senator Warren Daniel, a lead map-drawer. They are, of course, technically correct about this. Yet admitting so openly to rigging North Carolina’s democratic process is quite a departure from the elaborate pantomime staged last year, when Republican leaders pretended to take into account factors like compactness and communities of interest. It speaks volumes that virtually no Republican spokespeople have even bothered defending the fundamental fairness of these maps in public. Everyone concerned, it seems, knows the score.

A reworking of the court-drawn, one-election, 7-7 congressional map used in 2022 was expected.

But not so for the state legislative maps. North Carolina’s State Senate and State House maps were wholly and duly drawn and passed by Republican legislative leaders alone in February of last year. As such, the plainest reading of Article II, Sections 3 and 5 of the North Carolina State Constitution explicitly prohibits altering them now – most especially the House map, which was not even challenged in court. Yet that is precisely what Republican leaders of the legislature have done, with the full acquiescence of the new Republican majority of the state supreme court. This marks a major breach of constitutional order in our state.

If not hard rules, Dr. Peter Venkman at least had guidelines. As we’ve seen inside the Beltway, violating constitutional boundaries is no longer out of bounds for Antide. The law is what they say it is, to be followed when it works in their favor (and provides political cover), and to be ignored when it does not.

Democratic House Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) contrasted Democrats’ positions with Jordan’s in nominating Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York during Jordan’s third failed attempt at winning the speakership:

In her speech, Clark chided Jordan for voting against health care for children, veterans, and 9/11 survivors, opposing lowering the cost of insulin, wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, and never supporting a farm bill.

Also, Clark said, “The Republican nominee wants a national abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother. We want to make our own health care decisions in consultation with our families, our doctors, our faith, not with Jim Jordan!”

Antide is bereft of ideas. It has settled on one principle, one rule to follow: power. For its own sake. Not to improve voters’ lives. Not to perfect the union. And certainly not to embrace multiracial democracy (or any other kind). The only thing American about them is their birth certificates.

Update: Corrected the name of Carolina Forward.

We’ll give you crazy

Rudy says Biden is an Iranian spy: “He’s on Iran’s side and he’s on Hamas’s side. He is not on our side. He’s got a bunch of spies in his Admin. This guy is working for Iran. Why? Maybe because they’ve infiltrated his Admin the way the communists infiltrated FDR’s Admin.” pic.twitter.com/pBudDVycaM

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 22, 2023

This is the man the putative GOP nominee for president hired to represent him.

Meanwhile, in MAGA:

THIS WEEK IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Oct 14 – Oct 21, 2023 pic.twitter.com/9kR7YkCZmL

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 22, 2023

And they aren’t positive

I never much cared for Mitt Romney over the years but I did admire his willingness to vote to impeach Trump and sign on to bipartisan legislation from time to time. That’s a pretty low bar but in GOP politics these days it makes him a unicorn. But in his new book he doesn’t hold back about his impressions of his fellow Republicans and I am here for it:

Christie, Chris

Mr. Romney’s advisers in 2012 suggested that he consider Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, as a running mate, according to the book.

But Mr. Romney had reservations about Mr. Christie’s “prima donna tendencies,” and worried that the governor was not “up to the physical demands” of being on the ticket and was plagued by “barely buried” scandals, Mr. Coppins writes.

The two also came into conflict in 2016 after Mr. Christie became one of the first establishment Republicans to back Mr. Trump.

“I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally,” Mr. Romney wrote in an email. He added: “You must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character.”

Evaluating Mr. Christie’s 2024 campaign, Mr. Romney labels him “another bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth” like Mr. Trump, saying it would be “a hoot” to watch the two of them spar on the debate stage.

Cruz, Ted

Mr. Romney called Senator Ted Cruz of Texas “scary” and “a demagogue” in his journal, and in an email assessing political candidates in 2016, he said Mr. Cruz was “frightening.”

He was also bluntly critical of Mr. Cruz’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including his perpetuating Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.

Mr. Romney said that he believed Mr. Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another objector, were too smart to believe what they were saying.

“They were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution,” Mr. Romney said.

DeSantis, Ron

Of all of the would-be challengers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Romney seemed to have the most to say about Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was viewed early on as having the best shot at challenging Mr. Trump for the nomination.

Mr. Romney’s views on the governor were decidedly mixed, according to the book.

“Mr. Romney wanted to like the governor,” Mr. Coppins writes. The senator said that it was a “no-brainer” to support Mr. DeSantis if it meant keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House.

Yet Mr. Romney appeared to have reservations. He worried that Mr. DeSantis shared “odious qualities” with Mr. Trump, pointing to his penchant for stoking the culture wars and his fight with the Walt Disney Company.

And Mr. Romney appeared to have objections to the Florida governor on a more personal level.

“There’s just no warmth at all,” Mr. Romney said. He added that when Mr. DeSantis posed for photos with Iowa voters, “he looks like he’s got a toothache.”

Even his appraisal of Mr. DeSantis’s positive qualities came with a backhanded sting.

“He’s much smarter than Trump,” Mr. Romney said. But, he added, “there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.”

Gingrich, Newt

While Mr. Romney was running unsuccessfully for Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, Mr. Gingrich, a hard-line conservative who would become House speaker, was rising to prominence.

Mr. Romney recalls thinking, according to the book, that Mr. Gingrich “came across as a smug know-it-all; smarmy and too pleased with himself and not a great face for our party.”

Two decades later, when the two were competing against each other in the Republican presidential primary, Mr. Romney was no more impressed.

Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney saw Mr. Gingrich as “a ridiculous blowhard who babbled about America building colonies on the moon.” He also had moral objections to Mr. Gingrich’s admitted adultery.

In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote that his wife, Ann, thought that Mr. Gingrich was “a megalomaniac, seriously needing psychiatric attention.”

McConnell, Mitch

As he does with many other Republicans in the book, Mr. Romney hammers Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, over what he sees as a gap between his public and private statements relating to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney questioned “which version of McConnell was more authentic: the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.”

Still, Mr. Romney seems to have respect for Mr. McConnell. In January 2021, he said, he believed Mr. McConnell had been “indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the last four years, but he’s not crazy.”

Pence, Mike

Mr. Romney makes his disdain for the former vice president abundantly clear, calling him “a lap dog to Trump for four years.”

He seems particularly appalled by what he viewed as Mr. Pence’s willingness to compromise his own moral views, or contort them, to be a loyal foot soldier to Mr. Trump.

“No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly, than Mike Pence,” Mr. Romney told Mr. Coppins.

Perry, Rick

Mr. Romney described Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor who was a rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, as a “dimwit,” Mr. Coppins writes.

In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote of Mr. Perry that “Republicans must realize that we must have someone who can complete a sentence.”

In 2016, when Mr. Perry ran a short-lived campaign for president, Mr. Romney said that the Texan’s “prima donna, low-IQ personality” was a non-starter.

Santorum, Rick

The former senator from Pennsylvania, who also ran against Mr. Romney in 2012, was “sanctimonious, severe and strange,” in Mr. Romney’s assessment.

At one point during the 2012 campaign, Mr. Romney finds himself irked by his rival’s “apparently bottomless self-interest,” Mr. Coppin writes.

In his journal, Mr. Romney said Mr. Santorum was “driven by ego, not principle.”

Trump, Donald J.

Perhaps the freshest revelation in Mr. Romney’s book is his acknowledgment that many of his colleagues in the Senate, including Mr. McConnell, privately shared his poor view of Mr. Trump.

But that harsh assessment — which would set up Mr. Romney’s conflict with Mr. Trump throughout his presidency — was made most clear in the email Mr. Romney sent to Mr. Christie in 2016.

“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence,” Mr. Romney wrote. “There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.”

You have to admit, this takes some balls considering that he is still in the US Senate for another year. Good on him.

Utah Senator and one-time GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney says he is no longer at home within a party dominated by Trump. He also talks about examining his legacy, as the subject of a new biography, "Romney: A Reckoning." https://t.co/3dRov5edUu pic.twitter.com/np30GCcnyW

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) October 22, 2023

A very thought-provoking piece from Zack Beauchamp at Vox about the next steps for the Israel war. It’s complicated and well worth reading in its entirety, going into all the global, military and political implications, but this is a taste of the kind of thinking that’s gone into it and I think it’s impressive:

The moral case for counterterrorism

Bradley Strawser, a former US Air Force captain, has an unusual job: he is a moral philosopher working for the US Navy. His title is professor of philosophy in the defense analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School; his actual job description is teaching America’s special operators how to fight wars as ethically as possible.

When I asked Strawser how he would approach the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he said that it was essential to hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time.

First, that Israel had not only a right but a moral obligation to respond to Hamas’ vicious attack on its civilian population.

This may not seem obvious, as a ceasefire would certainly lead to some immediate reduction in civilian suffering. Indeed, a temporary ceasefire to provide humanitarian relief before further Israeli escalation might well be a good idea.

But an indefinite ceasefire is politically impossible in Israel — no major faction could countenance it — for reasons that speak to the very purpose of having a state. Governments owe their citizens a duty of protection, to keep them safe from external threats. If Hamas is not militarily degraded and deterred by the end of this operation, the Israeli state will have failed in this basic task.

“Even with all the history, and even with their culpability and failures and how they’ve [wronged Palestinians] for decades, this is self-defense against horrific aggression. You have to respond,” Strawser says.

Second, that no matter how barbarous Hamas’ conduct, Israel cannot itself ignore the laws and moral codes governing warfare in response. While civilian casualties are a terrible inevitability in warfare, there are clear moral rules that any state must follow — even when facing a brutal enemy who disregards all of them like Hamas. Unfettered, a modern military like the IDF could cause carnage on an even more horrific scale than it already does.

“If you’re going to become the monster you fight, what’s the point of fighting the monster?” Strawser asks.

The dilemma he poses — Israel must act, but it must do so within moral limits — is the heart of the moral case for replacing a regime change strategy with counterterrorism. It is a way, perhaps the only way, to satisfy Israel’s legitimate security needs without crossing the line into brutality.

A regime change operation, one that sends IDF tanks into the urban core of places like Gaza City in the north, would inherently threaten civilians in the densest parts of the Strip, far more than the current bombing offensive. Though Israel has warned residents of the northern Gaza Strip to leave, this is exceptionally difficult to accomplish in practice.

They cannot get out entirely: neither Israel nor Egypt will accept mass numbers of Gazans into their borders. Within Gaza, they have trouble getting south: armed Hamas fighters have warned them not to leave, and the roads themselves are difficult and dangerous thanks to Israeli airstrikes. Nor is it obvious they’re willing to flee: given the history of Palestinian dispossession at Israeli hands, they have legitimate reason to worry that they will never be able to return if they leave.

So long as there are large numbers of Palestinians where Israel wants to invade, there is virtually no way for it to fight without massive civilian casualties.

Moreover, it matters morally that Israel has no clear endgame. If the post-invasion situation is almost certainly going to be a bloody insurgency, one that could strengthen Hamas in the long term, Israel would need — morally speaking — to make the case that it has a credible plan for achieving civilian security in the postwar environment. It would be profoundly unjust, and cruel, to either leave Palestinian civilians in anarchy or subject them to an painful occupation and years of bloody counterinsurgency.

Some of the tactics Israel has resorted to in preparation for such an expansive war — most notably the cutoff of electricity, water, and humanitarian supplies — are themselves obviously indefensible.

It is widely accepted that it’s immoral to intentionally starve civilians as part of a tactic to weaken your opponents: this kind of siege has, in recent history, been used only by the world’s most vile regimes (like Bashar al-Assad in Syria). If you think about the war against Hamas as a total existential war, it opens the moral door to a much more expansive set of potential tactics designed to facilitate this much more expansive objective — some of which amount to atrocities.

In moral terms, then, the case for limiting Israel’s ambitions is fairly straightforward: nothing it can hope to accomplish with a regime change operation can outweigh the harm it will do to civilians in the process.

In fact, there’s a very good case that there’s less tension between morality and military necessity in Gaza than it seems. A counterterrorism campaign would likely produce better strategic outcomes than a larger invasion in part because it kills fewer civilians, denying Hamas horrific imagery it could use to recruit more fighters or galvanize external forces like Hezbollah to come to its aid.

“The most important thing [strategically] is to separate Hamas, as a military organization, from the Palestinian population,” says Kurth Cronin, the Carnegie Mellon professor.

What force Israel may use, permissibly, needs to be tightly limited and designed to accomplish feasible ends. Regime change is not one of them — however understandable it may be for Israelis to want Hamas annihilated.

There’s a lot more at the link and I think it’s important. This is not a “black and white, good ‘n evil” issue even though a whole lot of people want to think it is. Whether or not anyone in power on either side is thinking it through this comprehensively is unknown. We’ll just have to see how it unfolds.

According to his lawyer, Trump has nothing to worry about:

Prosecutors claimed the former lawyer wrote legal memos on behalf of the Trump campaign creating a false legal backing for the fake elector scheme.

As part of the plea, the former lawyer agreed to testify in future cases if called upon. That would include the trial of former President Trump, scheduled for early next year.

Grubman said Chesebro’s guilty plea doesn’t implicate any other defendants, and that Trump should “not be worried.”

“He did not implicate anyone else. He implicated himself in that particular charge,” he said. “He is required to testify truthfully if he is called by the state, and Mr. Chesebro is a man of his word.”

“At the same time I will say, if he is called by a defendant he will testify and testify truthfully,” Grubman added.

This isn’t going to go over well, however:

“First of all, Mr. Chesebro never believed in ‘the Big Lie,’” attorney Scott Grubman said Saturday in an interview on MSNBC. “If you ask Mr. Chesebro today who won the 2020 presidential election, he would say Joe Biden.”

I’m sure Trump will claim he doesn’t know this person. But he’s never happy to hear that someone doesn’t believe the Big Lie. He hasn’t said anything yet about Chesebro as far as I know but here’s his post about Sidney Powell:

“Stollen” election. He spells it that way every time. It’s not a typo.

BTW:

 

McCarthy: This is embarrassing for the Republican Party. It’s embarrassing for the nation pic.twitter.com/Mv8fc4PvoR

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 22, 2023

EJ Dionne:

The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown.

But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will.

The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power.

The current crisis, after all, was initiated by a small far-right contingent, empowered by the broad popularity of Donald Trump in the party. They brought down former House speaker Kevin McCarthy despite his willingness to make one concession after another to the crazies, the impeachers and the Trumpists.

Republicans blame Democrats for assisting in McCarthy’s defenestration. The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them at his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists.

The last straw came after Democrats gave more votes than Republicans did to pass McCarthy’s September bill to avoid a government shutdown. The next day, McCarthy turned around and bizarrely claimed that Democrats “did not want the bill” and “were willing to let government shut down.” That dishonest nonsense sealed his fate.

Republicans have yet to learn the lesson of McCarthy’s fall: Because of the GOP’s splits, only an agreement with Democrats can create a majority in the House capable of governing. On the compromise measure to avert a debt ceiling crisis, House Republicans divided 149-71. On the bill to avoid a shutdown, the vote was even closer, 126-90. In their divided party, Republicans who want to avoid defaults or shutdowns or selling out Ukraine cannot do so on their own. They should formally recognize this.

Democrats are going out of their way to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”

The Democratic rank-and-file has quietly been working in this direction. Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told me that moderate Democrats “were talking to any reasonable Republican we had a relationship with” in an effort to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) to bring up bills that have broad support in both parties.

She noted that the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Some middle-of-the-road Republicans were genuinely interested, Kuster said, but the plan blew up in the Republican conference on Thursday “because word got out that we [Democrats] might support the McHenry solution, and that made it unacceptable to the right.” More moderate Republicans also worried that Jordan would use a McHenry interlude to keep his own candidacy alive.

Democrats have reacted with understandable horror at the willingness of 200 Republicans to make the election-denying, insurrection-sympathizing, Trump-backed Jordan second in the line of succession for the presidency. But it’s important to recognize an additional blessing: For some two dozen Republicans — whose ranks grew through the three ballots — a Jordan speakership was too much to accept.

The iron rule of Republican politics has been that the right wing of the party plays hardball, and more moderate Republicans inevitably fold. Not this time. Because of the brave souls who went public, the party caucus voted 112-86 by secret ballot on Friday afternoon to force Jordan to step aside. All friends of democratic rule should be grateful. With a regiment of perhaps a dozen lesser-known Republicans pondering a now wide-open speaker’s race, a new version of the McHenry option might gain appeal.

One more lesson emerged from scare tactics and threats to anti-Jordan Republicans. They matched those “unleashed against anybody who stands in the way of Donald Trump,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, adding: “If you fail to renounce and denounce political violence in very clear and specific terms, it’s going to come back to haunt you.”

Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.

It’s a nice idea but Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer. They actually whined when Democrats didn’t vote for Jim Jordan, the insurrectionist.

I don’t know what it will take for any House Republicans to get to the point at which they understand that saving the country is more important than saving themselves from the wrath of Trump’s brainwashed cult but they aren’t there yet. Not by a long shot.

Maybe they mean to repeat history

When was America great the first time? Someone go ask Donald Trump. Maybe Jordan Klepper should query Trump rally attendees what “great again” means again.

I’m guessing they really mean 1859.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.

Historian Seth Cotlar (Rightlandia) will be in Seattle on Tuesday interviewing Rachel Maddow about her new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Those who listened to her latest podcast, Ultra, know the basics. She traces the America fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s in more detail. What Cotlar finds interesting is how this history disappeared down the collective memory hole for most Americans in subsequent generations:

One thing we learn from Maddow’s book is that almost all of the seditious American fascists from the 1930s and 40s—people who literally wanted to work together with the Nazis to eliminate or deport the nation’s Jews and turn the country into an authoritarian homeland for white Christians—got off scot free after WWII and went on to live fairly normal lives as people who their neighbors generally thought of as “Commie-hating Christian Patriots,” if perhaps slightly eccentric or kooky ones.

Likely, history will once again consign people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, convicted insurrectionists from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, et al. to the slightly eccentric or kooky category. Those who don’t go to jail will return to their normal lives, their yards, and their pet goldfish.

Cotlar continues:

Let’s take Charles Lindbergh as our first case study. I vividly remember, as a teenager visiting DC for the first time in 1983, staring up in awe at The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum. As far as I can remember, Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi sensibilities were not part of what I learned about him on that day. Had that come up, I suspect I would have dismissed it as a fairly unimportant aspect of who that brave aviator was.

It appears that Lindbergh had kind of a cultural moment in the mid-1980s, because in 1985, Minneapolis made the decision to name one of its airport terminals after Mr. “Let’s Put America First Because the Jews are Trying to Drag us into a War” and Mr. “aviation technology was a gift to the white people of the world so we can maintain our dominance over the world’s savage hordes of non-whites.” I blithely flew in and out of Minneapolis’s Lindbergh terminal many times in the 1990s and 2000s, DURING and AFTER my PhD work in US History, and I swear it was not until the mid-2010s that I first thought to myself “hey, wait a minute, why the hell is that Hitler-lover Lindbergh’s name on this terminal?”

I was just as ignorant of the fascist proclivities of Henry Ford, who had a framed picture of Hitler on his desk in the 1930s which was reciprocated by Hitler who had a framed picture of Henry Ford on his desk. I vaguely remember hearing some relatives talk about how Ford was an antisemite, but I imagined that meant he was personally rude to individual Jewish people. I did not know that aside from innovating the Model T and the assembly line (factoids I dutifully learned in history class), he also was responsible for producing and disseminating an enormous barrage of lying, antisemitic propaganda that fueled a violently fascist movement in the pre-WWII era. Many Ford dealerships in the 1920s and 30s placed copies of Ford’s publication (a representative sample below) on the seat of every new Ford they sold. So it’s not that Ford’s antisemitism simply made him guilty of private “wrongthink.” He’s not just “a man of his time” who’s been subjected to unfair cancellation these days by the woke mob and “revisionist historians.” He poured a large chunk of his wealth into building a robust fascist movement that talked openly about eliminating Jewish people from America and the earth. The pro-democracy Americans who fought against fascism in Ford’s time understood that quite well.

The problem is that by not teaching that inconvenient history, the “buffoonishly illiberal bigotry” of the past has a way of slip-sliding its way largely unnoticed into the present. Cotlar presents a list of forgotten minor figures from the fascist movement now resurrecting nearly a hundred years later.

Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.

One of my takeaways (IIRC) from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” is how Americans with no knowledge of the history of ideas naively believe the ones in their heads are original, theirs. Those who don’t know the difference are doomed to repeat the same historical mistakes of their forebears. Unless our resurrected fascist movement footsoldiers see them not as mistakes but missed opportunities.

America has a rich history of racism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that pushed against that racism. America has a rich history of fascism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that sought to blunt the power and influence of those fascists. In passing down such histories to the rising generations, there’s no need for us to bothsides them as if we should honor them as equally valued and respected parts of our national tapestry. To a great extent, nations are the stories they tell themselves about themselves. One way we can hopefully move toward a more democratic future is by more fully and truthfully telling the history of fascism and those who resisted it in the American past.

Threatening the nation that protects them

Sometimes in grazing the net, a theme appears in otherwise disconnected bits of internet flotsam. The current of electrons this morning delivered several random entries pointing toward the cultural degradation of the very people in this country who decry cultural degradation the loudest. This is the real American carnage, to borrow a phrase.

The meme at the top is one example.

The man who entered American carnage into the lexicon spoke of “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” His most ardent followers are working at this very moment to decimate public education, to proscribe what children can learn, and to ensure children remain in poverty. Violent crime is rampant, he suggested, and does to this day. People believe him.

In fact, violent crime is down. Yes, property crimes are up, but along with hate crimes targeting Blacks, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Antisemitic crimes are up as well.

Another bit of flotsam this TikTok video by comedian John Fugelsang, riffing on a theme familar to fans of this son of a former nun and former Fransiscan brother. His targets are the very “people of faith” most devoted to the former president.

Post by @johnfugelsang

View on Threads

The Liberty Way

Perhaps the most damning bit this morning comes from conservative columnist David French. The “most consequential education scandal in the United States,” he writes is not what’s taught at Ivy league schools or your neighborhood schools, but “the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia.” You know the one, the religious school founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell.

“Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head,” French writes, unintentionally echoing Fugelsang (New York Times):

Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education. The education department has been investigating violations of the Clery Act, a federal statute that requires federally funded colleges and universities to publicly report data about campus crime. To put that number into perspective, consider that Michigan State University paid $4.5 million for its own “systemic failure” to respond to the infamous Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, in which Nassar was convicted of sexually abusing dozens of women in his care. While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.

The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

If this was the only scandal at Liberty, it would and should be a national story. But it’s not the only scandal. Far from it. I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.

Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions

But that’s not all. In 2021, ProPublica published a comprehensive, gut-wrenching report describing how Liberty mishandled claims of sex abuse and sex harassment on campus and used its strict code of conduct, the Liberty Way, against victims of sex abuse. If, for example, a victim had been drinking or engaged in any other conduct prohibited by Liberty policies, those details in their sex abuse complaint could be used against them in school disciplinary proceedings.

Too many Christians, too many Christian institutions, French believes, have gotten Christianity “exactly backwards.” The biggest threat to Christianity is not secular America. Christianity is, as Fugelsang suggests, under attack by fake Christians.

“For a lot of right-wing America, the Bible consists of the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Revelation duct-taped to the entire Left Behind series.” Sad, but true.

French concludes, “Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.”

The overlap between French’s targets and MAGA Republicans is substantial. The sadder irony is that the people I now think of as Antide are not only a threat to their own ostensible faith, but to the democratic republic that protects their right to practice it so badly.