Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No foolin’ this time

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 13, 2023

American voters were crazy enough once before

Cartoon via Mike Luckovich X feed.

Brian Beutler offers thoughts on Donald Trump dissing the Israeli prime minister on Wednesday when Benjamin Netanyahu is down. And Netanyahu is down after the Hamas attack last Saturday per Noga Tarnopolsky at Intelligencer: Netanyahu Is Losing the War at Home.

It wasn’t Israel’s failure to aid in Trump’s drone strike on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani that soured Trump on the Israeli PM, as Trump’s Florida rally comments suggest. Nor even Netanyahu upstaging Trump at a past White House event.

NBC News:

Trump has long sought to emphasize his appeal to Jewish Americans and has complained when he feels he has not been recognized sufficiently. Even after having left office, Trump has maintained he has done more for Israel and the Middle East than any other U.S. president, holding up the historic peace agreements he forged with Arab nations.

He wants Jewish votes. They owe him. Yet 7 in 10 overall support Democrats.

Beutler writes:

But then I recalled the news I’d tracked in recent days, including Netanyahu’s fulsome praise of Biden, and the mayor of Tel Aviv’s similar expression gratitude, and it hit me: THAT’S what Trump’s mad about. The mere acknowledgement of Biden’s steadfast—I’d call it questionably unquestioning—support for Israel has all but stamped out the MAGA propaganda, limiting its potential to reach and deceive voters who aren’t already part of the cult.

I logged that suspicion here, and Politico’s Jonathan Lemire quickly confirmed it—but the revelation went largely unnoticed. When isn’t Trump lashing out at someone he perceives to be disloyal?

We should ignore the temptation to write this off as another ego-driven Trump outburst and grapple seriously with the implications—what does it mean that Trump thought Netanyahu owed him political favors, even now, and is pissed that they weren’t delivered?

The answer is more sinister than selfishness. 

Consider what Trump thought he might get from Netanyahu (what, for all we know, he or an intermediary may have asked for explicitly): He wanted Bibi, beset by events in his own country, to antagonize the U.S. government. To harm Israel’s vital interests, for the solitary purpose of helping Trump in the presidential election. At the very least, Trump wanted Netanyahu to let horrible slanders go uncontested.

We don’t need to imagine hidden entreaties or favors to think Trump seriously expected Netanyahu to play along. It’s a big part of why he was so solicitous of Netanyahu during his administration. And over four years he compiled a record of one-sidedness that (quite unfortunately) made him a popular and influential figure in Israel. Trump may very well be annoyed by this or that (in his remarks he specifically complained of Netanyahu’s supposed ambivalence over a U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top security official, Qassim Soleimani, in 2020). But all of that stuff falls low on Trump’s unwritten ledger of political debts. Loyalty to him comes first. Netanyahu, weakened abruptly by the justified wrath of the Israeli population, didn’t deliver. So Trump, in his pathological vindictiveness, fed him to them.

Whatever Trump imagined Netanyahu might do for him in the midst of a mass national trauma, he revealed something more general. It is not just his hope, it is his expectation, that the whole network of autocrats he placated and toadied to during his presidency and afterward will abuse their offices however they can to help him return to power in 2024.

Trump is all about what’s in it for Trump. But you knew that.

Anyone leaning toward Trump who does not needs reminding over and over and over. Fool me once, as George W. Bush mangled the expression:

The first time around, before colluding became a lifestyle for him, Trump had never been president, and thus had weak relationships with foreign leaders, to the extent he had them at all. He knew through back channels that Russia wanted to help his campaign, and he accepted the offer in clumsy ways—“Russia, if you’re listening…” and Don Jr.’s infamous “if it’s what you say, I love it” email, which only surfaced after it was too late.  

Trump’s brazenness, along with his seeming unelectability, suckered Democrats and the rest of the government into under-reacting. The Obama administration approached the congressional leadership during the campaign seeking a public, bipartisan warning about Russian election interference, but bent to Mitch McConnell who sabotaged the united front and threatened to cry foul if Democrats released the statement on their own. He didn’t mind Trump working in concert with Russia and he definitely didn’t want to sign his name to any public admonition that a GOP campaign was up to something so unpatriotic. 

There’s no use second-guessing that decision seven years later, but it’s worth revisiting before Trump secures the GOP presidential nomination for the third time. Now we know he can win; now we know better.

His back against multiple legal walls, Trump is more treacherous (and crazier) than ever.

Burning it down one match at a time

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 13, 2023

It’s Friday the 13th

Playing with Matches photo 2012 by Dennis Wilkinson via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)

Donald Trump’s attorneys this week argued in a Colorado case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) that the Constitution does not prohibit him from running for office. Based on Trump’s Jan. 6 actions, CREW hopes to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot under the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause prohibiting any officer who has “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding a civil, military, or elected office unless approved by a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate.

But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. And Trump attorneys. They argue the Constitution does not apply to him becuase he never took an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” per the amendment’s language (Law & Crime):

“Section Three does not apply to President Trump,” the filing reads. “Section Three disqualifies a person from holding office only if he “previously [took] an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State…’ Because President Trump was never a congressman, state legislator, or state officer, Section Three applies only if he was an ‘officer of the United States.’ But as that term was used in Section Three, it did not cover the President.”

[…]

“[T]he Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution—not ‘to support’ the Constitution,” the motion reads. “Both oaths put a weighty burden on an oath-taker. However, because the framers chose to define the group of people subject to Section Three by an oath to ‘support’ the Constitution of the United States, and not by an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President.”

You read that right.

“If they wanted to include the President in the reach of Section Three, they could have done so by expanding the language of which type of oath would bring an ‘officer’ under the strictures of Section Three,” the Monday motion argues. “They did not do so, and no number of semantical arguments will change this simple fact. As such, Section Three does not apply to President Trump.”

Cleanup on Aisle R

Meantime, with military aid urgently needed by allies Ukraine and Israel, and with threats of a widening war in the Middle East, and with funds for running our own country set to run out in days, the Party of Trump is in ccontrol of the U.S. House without a Speaker authorized to bring such measures for a vote in the House. The party’s lunatic fringe ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California from that position ten days ago.

Last night, the apparent frontrunner for the speaker post, House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), withdrew his nomination for lack of support. Scalise narrowly defeated Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio in a caucus vote on Wednesday. He needs 217 votes and saw no path to winning after an hours-long meeting.

NBC News:

Exiting the meeting before it ended, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., openly fretted that his party’s narrow majority may never find the 217 votes necessary to elect a speaker.

He blasted eight Republican “traitors” — a word he used four times in a hallway interview — who voted with Democrats to remove former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and “put us in this situation.” And if those eight decide to back Scalise, Rogers warned, “then there’s just another eight like them” who could create further trouble.

“The bottom line is we have a very fractured conference, and to limit ourselves to just getting 217 out of our conference, I think, is not a wise path,” Rogers told NBC News, adding that Republicans may “absolutely” need some Democratic votes to elect a speaker.

Once again, the GOP needs Democrats to clean up the mess they created.

Heather Cox Richardson offers additional details:

The Republican chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike McCaul of Texas, today told reporters, “Every day that goes by, it gets more dangerous.” He continued:  “I see a lot of threats out there, but one of the biggest threats I see is in that room [pointing to where the Republicans were meeting], because we can’t unify as a conference and put a speaker in the chair together.” 

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today said it is “urgently necessary” for the Republicans to “get their act together and elect a Speaker from within their own ranks, as it is the responsibility of the majority party to do, or have traditional Republicans break with the extremists within the House Republican Conference and partner with Democrats on a bipartisan path forward. We are ready, willing, and able to do so. I know there are traditional Republicans who are good women and men who want to see government function, but they are unable to do it within the ranks of their own conference, which is dominated by the extremist wing, and that’s why we continue to extend the hand of bipartisanship to them.”

Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen, who hosts the podcast No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, summed up the day when he wrote: “The fact that ALL Republicans would rather fight over Scalise (who attended a neo-Nazi event) or Jordan (who allegedly covered up rampant sexual abuse) rather than simply work with Democrats to elect a Speaker says it all.”

Federal prosecutors slapped Trump wannabe, Rep. George Santos of New York, with a 23-count superseding indictment on Tuesday charging him with “‘repeatedly, without their authorization,’ distributing [donors’] money to his and other candidates’ campaigns and to his own bank account.” Santos refuses to resign. His vote is essential for Republicans seeking the speakership.

The most likely Republican to win the party’s 2024 nomination for president (in case you need reminding) is this guy:

In DC Comics, The Joker is the Clown Prince of Crime. In D.C., the title of Clown Prince of Politics is up for grabs. Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner. But he’s hotly pursued by multiple others in Republican ranks.

And should Trump falter, conservatives behind No Labels have a backup plan for thwarting the will of the people.

Opponents of democracy seem to believe that if they throw enough matches at the Constitution it will catch fire eventually.

It’s not as if Senate Democrats don’t have a member under indictment. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey stands accused not only of bribery but of being a foreign agent for Egypt. But Senate Democrats in numbers have called for his immediate resignation. The Hill reports “Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Thursday called on the full Senate to vote on a resolution to expel” Menendez.  

GOP SCOTUS back in business

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

Gerrymandering is still on their menu. And it’s not going to go down well.

Ian Millhiser on the latest voting rights case before the Court:

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority spent Wednesday morning seemingly hunting for a reason to uphold a South Carolina congressional map that everyone agrees was gerrymandered to benefit the Republican Party.

The case is Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, federal courts are not allowed to hear lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders — that is, maps drawn to benefit one political party or the other. But federal courts may hear challenges to racial gerrymanders — maps drawn to minimize the political power of voters of a particular race. A lower court struck down the South Carolina map because it determined that while the state’s GOP-controlled legislature’s goal was to shore up Republican control over the state’s First Congressional District, the legislature did so by excluding Black voters from this district.

In South Carolina, about 90 percent of Black voters prefer Democrats to Republicans. So mapmakers could be quite sure that they were making the First District more Republican every time they removed a Black voter from it.

So, given the Court’s previous rulings, what happens when a legislative map is both a racial gerrymander and a partisan gerrymander, as the lower court found is the case in Alexander? The answer is supposed to be that the map is illegal. As the Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017), “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.”

The plaintiffs in Alexander should also benefit from another well-established legal rule. When a trial court determines that a legislative map is an impermissible racial gerrymander, the Court said in Cooper, the lower court’s “findings of fact — most notably, as to whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines — are subject to review only for clear error.”

The 2023-2024 SCOTUS term will feature a growing list of cases that could transform the US, its government, and our right to free speech and public safety. We’re tracking them here.

Ian has covered the Supreme Court extensively as a senior correspondent for Vox. Read more of his reporting here.

Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, may correct a lower court that applies the wrong legal rule in a racial gerrymandering case. But the Supreme Court is supposed to defer to the trial court’s factual determinations regarding how and why a legislative map was drawn the way it was drawn.

Most of the justices, including several of the Court’s Republican appointees, acknowledged during Wednesday’s oral argument that the Supreme Court’s obligation to defer to a trial court’s factual findings places South Carolina in a bind. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, asked the very first question of John Gore, the former Trump administration lawyer defending South Carolina’s maps, and that question focused on the fact that the Court is supposed to “review this for clear error.”

But after Gore stepped away from the podium, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared determined to find some way to uphold South Carolina’s gerrymander.

The Court appears to be falling back into its normal, partisan pattern in voting rights cases

For years, the Court’s GOP-appointed majority was uniquely hostile toward voting rights plaintiffs — often fabricating new legal rules from nothing in order to weaken laws protecting the right to vote.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), for example, the Court’s Republican appointees declared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional based on something called the “‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among the States” that cannot be found anywhere in the text of the Constitution. The GOP-appointed justices’ decision in Brnovich v. DNC (2021) simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act, such as a presumption that voting restrictions that were commonplace in 1982 are valid, which also have no basis in any legal text.

Last June, however, the Supreme Court surprised pretty much everyone who follows voting rights litigation when it voted 5-4 to strike down a racially gerrymandered map in Alabama. The Court’s opinion in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama case, was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, and joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, along with the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

But while Milligan suggested that the Court may be turning away from its hostility to voting rights claims, Wednesday’s argument in Alexander suggests that Milligan could be a one-off.

Many of the GOP-appointed justices spent that argument probing for flaws in the evidence the Alexander plaintiffs raised in the lower court — evidence which shows that race, and not just partisanship, shaped South Carolina’s gerrymandered maps.

While Leah Aden, the lawyer representing those plaintiffs, was at the podium, Justice Samuel Alito behaved like a lawyer for the Republican Party who was cross-examining a hostile witness. He peppered her with questions about whether her side’s expert witnesses used an airtight methodology, and whether the Court should impose new legal requirements on lawyers challenging racial gerrymanders.

Though no justice was as aggressive an advocate for the Republican gerrymander as Alito, he was joined in his questions by Kavanaugh, who repeatedly brought up a white Democratic area that was excluded from the First District, seemingly to suggest that race was not the driving force behind this gerrymander.

There are strong rebuttals to these attacks on the lower court’s factual findings. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the evidence shows that Black Democrats were excluded from the First District at a higher rate than white Democrats. There was also evidence that South Carolina’s mapmakers had to rely on racial data to draw a Republican gerrymander, because it did not have sufficiently reliable data on voters’ partisan preferences to gerrymander the First District without using race as a proxy to identify Democrats.

And, under the clear error rule, it shouldn’t matter whether Alito or Kavanaugh can find flaws in the plaintiffs’ evidence. All that matters is whether the trial court, after looking at all of the evidence in the case, could “plausibly” conclude that the evidence on the plaintiffs’ side was stronger than the state’s evidence.

Meanwhile, some other GOP-appointed justices suggested ways to change the law so that South Carolina will win. Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, both suggested that the voting rights plaintiffs should have to produce “alternative maps” that achieve the state legislature’s partisan goal without engaging in racial gerrymandering — effectively requiring the plaintiffs to draw a partisan gerrymander. That would mean that, even if these plaintiffs prevail, Alito and Gorsuch’s Republican Party will retain control of the First District’s US House seat.

Roberts, meanwhile, complained that the lower court relied on “circumstantial evidence,” such as the fact that so many Black voters were moved out of the First District, and the fact that the state did not have reliable partisan voter data, rather than “direct evidence” such as a lawmaker’s admission that the maps were drawn with racist intent. Roberts even suggested that allowing someone to challenge a gerrymander without direct evidence “would be breaking new ground in our voting rights jurisprudence.”

So it sure looks bad for the Alexander plaintiffs, and for voting rights advocates more broadly. It is still possible that the Court will surprise observers in the same way it surprised us in the Milligan case. But, for the GOP-appointed justices, the biggest question in Alexander appears to be whether they should toss out the lower court’s factual findings, or whether they should announce a new legal rule that will permanently hobble all future plaintiffs’ ability to challenge racial gerrymanders.

It also appears that the brief ray of hope the Court gave voting rights advocates in Milligan could soon be extinguished.

Did anyone think they had had a change of heart? I didn’t.

The once and future leader of the free world blabs again

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

Thank goodness Biden refused him the privilege of getting classified information in the post-presidency

Once again, he shows his casual disregard about classified information. He doesn’t seem to know if he’s sharing it or, more importantly, care. And he thinks that a good time to air his personal grievances with Netanyahu is when Israel is at war and the entire Middle East is on tender hooks.

Bill Sher has the back story:

On Wednesday  Donald Trump held a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. Considering Palm Beach County has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish people in America, the typical person at a Trump rally is quite conservative, and Israel is now responding to one of deadliest attacks on its soil in history, I think it’s safe to assume many people in the crowd were supportive of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet Trump picked this rally, at this moment, to publicly upbraid Netanyahu.

After saying, “We will stand with Israel 100 percent,” he digressed: “I did have a bad experience with Israel, though, when we took out [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem] Soleimani” on January 3, 2020.

As he told the story, he said, “I don’t think this has ever been told. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s classified information.’ Well, maybe it is, but I don’t think so.”

He said Israel and the U.S. government were “working together” on plans to kill Soleimani before he could launch attacks on American military installations. (In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that Trump “gave shifting explanations” for the assassination, and that claims of imminent “attacks of four American embassies” were not “backed up in briefings with congressional leaders” by military and intelligence officials.)

But “the night before it happened,” according to Trump, “I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack … I said, I don’t like that, that’s not good.”

Trump said he ordered the American military to proceed without Israel. “We did it, but I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down, that was a very terrible thing … We did the job ourself [sic] and it was absolute precision—magnificent, beautiful job. And then Bibi tried to take credit for it … That didn’t make me feel too good.”

This is not the first time Trump has aired his beef with Netanyahu. In an interview conducted by Axios’s Barak Ravid for his book Trump’s Peace, Trump complained that Netanyahu quickly accepted the results of the 2020 election and publicly congratulated Joe Biden: “The first person who congratulated Joe Biden, because this was an election in dispute, it’s still in dispute. The first person who congratulated me was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with…Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake … I haven’t spoken to him since. Fuck him.”

The relationship was strained before the election. In January 2020, after the Soleimani operation, the two announced a “peace” offer to the Palestinians at the White House, involving $50 billion in commercial investment in a new Palestinian state. Netanyahu was eager to burnish his political standing as Israeli elections loomed, so, according to The Divider, he turned the White House ceremony “into a campaign event, speaking from the podium for a full twenty minutes.”

That wasn’t in the script. “Trump did not like anyone stealing his thunder, especially in his own house,” wrote Baker and Glasser.

“’What the hell was that?’ he demanded of his aides afterward. Trump was doing him a favor, the latest of a whole slew of favors, the president told others, and Netanyahu had upstaged him.”

I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on his rally last night so far today but he went over the line I would have even expected him to to observe. It’s one of the few things I’d have thought might shake some of his cult loose but it doesn’t look as though they’ll ever hear about it.

The NY Times had a few more details of where Trump has been on this. I hadn’t heard him say this before:

He then criticized Israeli intelligence, pointing in part to failures to anticipate and stop Hamas, the Islamic militant group, from executing such a large-scale and devastating attack. “They’ve got to straighten it out,” Mr. Trump said. […]

“If the election wasn’t rigged,” he said, “there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel.”

[…]

Mr. Trump also criticized Mr. Netanyahu in a Fox News Radio interview that is expected to air on Thursday. In a clip from that interview that aired on television on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Netanyahu “was not prepared and Israel was not prepared.”

He again suggested Israeli intelligence had been deficient, saying, “Thousands of people knew about it and they let this slip by. ”

He’s not wrong. But to go into Florida and say it at this moment, even as he’s complimenting Hezbollah for being very smart (just like Putin, Xi, Kim and all the other despots he admires so greatly) is bizarre, even for him.

The New Republican Establishment

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

…is the Trump Cult

I think this has been true for years actually but it fully formed once the smoke cleared after January 6th and Trump remained standing as the Dear Leader. It’s been solidifying its power ever since. Nate Cohn in the NY Times:

In the final account, the rise and fall of Kevin McCarthy might read like the familiar tale of a Republican congressional leader toppled by a small but uncompromising right-wing faction.

But even if the story ultimately ends like any other Republican congressional drama in Washington over the last decade, something different and important has already happened: The right wing didn’t just bring down a House speaker — its members also made a credible bid at claiming the gavel for themselves.

A founder of the House Freedom Caucus, Jim Jordan, won 99 votes in the House Republican conference vote Wednesday, good for about 45 percent of congressional Republicans. It wasn’t enough to defeat Steve Scalise, the conservative congressman from Louisiana who still faces a daunting path to the post, but it’s a serious showing — especially for someone whom John Boehner once called a “legislative terrorist.”

For all of the quotes about “inmates running the asylum” in the press over the last decade, the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party has never won anything like actual power. In January, Andy Biggs won a mere 14 percent of Republicans against Mr. McCarthy in the House Republican conference vote. That’s enough to make life miserable for a speaker with a five-vote majority, but it’s nowhere near leading the caucus. Getting up to 45 percent, on the other hand, starts to make the gavel appear tantalizingly close.

The swelling congressional support for Mr. Jordan didn’t make him speaker, but it might nonetheless herald the emergence of a new, alternative Trumpist governing elite — one authentically loyal to Donald J. Trump’s pugilistic brand of politics, and one that would pose a fundamental challenge to what remains of the beleaguered Republican “establishment.”

As recently as the beginning of the year, this establishment — the party’s traditional Washington governing elite of political leaders, business interests, donors, journalists and so on — looked as if it had almost managed to survive the Trump era. Yes, it was in tatters. Yes, it had to kowtow to Mr. Trump. But by bending the knee, the establishment still held nearly all of the significant — if hardly dominant — positions of power in Washington. Mitch McConnell and Mr. McCarthy still reigned in Congress. The likes of William P. Barr and Elaine Chao still staffed the Trump administration. Donor money continued to flow to mainstream candidates, even if it wasn’t worth as much as a Trump endorsement.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was even a moment earlier this year when Republican politics almost seemed reminiscent of the Obama era. Mr. McCarthy’s fight with the Freedom Caucus over budgetary tactics certainly read like an Obama-era tale. And the likes of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis seemed to earn the kind of broad praise from activists and donors that made it seem as if post-Trump Republicans had cracked the code to unifying the base and the establishment.

Apparently not. Mr. Trump’s continued dominance of Republican politics has dashed any establishment hopes of a return to the way things were. Instead, his strength has started to pose a more lasting threat to what remains of the old elite, by promoting a group of loyalist outsiders who might soon have the numbers to defeat the insiders at their own game.

Mr. Jordan’s bid for speaker is perhaps the most visible indication of this growing counter-establishment, especially since Mr. Trump’s endorsement may have been a major reason for his strength — but it’s not the only one. There’s the reporting that a second Trump administration would be staffed by conservatives with personal loyalty to Mr. Trump — something that was essentially impossible eight years ago. There’s the transformation of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation into MAGA hotbeds. And there’s also the endorsement race in the presidential primary. With so many Trump loyalists now in the Republican ranks, Mr. Trump almost looks like an establishment candidate. He has an overwhelming lead in endorsements; his rivals have virtually no endorsements at all.

It’s hard to imagine calling someone like Mr. Trump or Mr. Jordan the “establishment,” and they certainly aren’t the actual establishment quite yet. To the extent they threaten to win power, it mainly appears attributable to Mr. Trump. That’s not a sustainable basis for rule in Washington. The usual connection to big donors and business interests isn’t yet so evident, either.

But if Mr. Jordan and Mr. Trump still aren’t the establishment, they’re not mere outsiders anymore. As they build and cement power in Washington, Trumpism’s grip on the Republican Party will only tighten.

I think they’re already there. They just have to and off the rough edges a tiny bit for the low tax, low regulation Big Money Boys to make peace with them. (Their “populism” is all about culture not economics and rich people don’t care about that because they live in their own bubble.) Trumpism now defines the party and the remaining rump of semi-normal Republicans are swiftly becoming the Republicans of the Democratic Neo-conservative movement of the 60s and 70s.

You know you’re in trouble when….

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 12, 2023

A lunatic is the leading GOP candidate for president

I’ve said it before: Donald J. Trump is one grain alcohol and rain water away from pulling a Browning machine gun out of his golf bag.

And his fans want more:

I’m trying to heed Obama’s advice. “This country’s seen darker moments before”:

Not saying it’s easy.

Do your best to cope.

Are you angry enough or too much?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 12, 2023

Emotional policing is again in vogue

Have you condemned Hamas vigorously enough for [insert viral unconfirmed atrocity here]?

The murderous rampage by Hamas last weekend against Israeli civilians of all ages and how Israel responds will reverberate for years to come. Israel’s 9/11. In the wake of terrorist attacks here two decades ago, some pundit asked: Would America keep its head? I wrote later:

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

It is happening again. Pro-Israel protesters in New York City think Gaza should be flattened to a parking lot. Wipe out all the Palestinians. There are calls for revenge, for collective punishment. War fever is on the rise again.

Someone on Bluesky last night posted that “every single Israeli child will one day be an active member of the IDF.” Thus, none are innocent. Thus, targets for Hamas. Col. John Chivington, a Methodist minister, used that reasoning in 1864 to direct the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho children at Sand Creek in the Colorado territory. (The post has since been deleted.)

Responses to the Hamas attack recall not just 9/11 but the earlier Challenger disaster in 1986. Celebrated schoolteacher and payload specialist Christa McAuliffe died in the shuttle explosion along with six other crewmates. Network TV brought on therapists to tell children how they should process their feelings. Today, we see Americans policing others’ feelings about the Hamas attacks. They make moral judgments based on the strength of others’ outrage or, more likely, direct condemnation at those who cannot find the words. Join them in calling for blood or you are with the terrorists.

No doubt people who rail against language policing they’ve only ever heard about on Fox News are among those now insisting how others should feel.

Worse, some on the left in grotesque fits of performative anti-colonialism celebrate the slaughter. Or else “gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon,” as Eric Levitz observed. “All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt,” he continued. Not to mention, he explains, an abandonment of progressive principles.

On Tuesday, Michelle Goldberg spoke with Israel-born Misha Shulman, rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue. Congregants who had lost loved ones and young Jews he’d spoken with were “‘completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,’ who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.” Some of those supposed progressives lean Chivington.

Goldberg writes:

Victimization and dispossession are not alibis for barbarism. The distinction between civilians and combatants must be respected. No cause, righteous or otherwise, excuses the killing of children.

[…]

“At the strategic level, it would be much more helpful if there was a large group of American leftists who had the moral credibility to say, ‘We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza,’” said Leifer.

There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a statement by Bernie Sanders. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” That message is undermined when a loud part of the left insists that when it comes to Israelis, there is no such thing as civilians.

On the right, of course, not issuing loud public condemnations of Hamas that bolster support for indiscriminate killing in Gaza means you “are with the terrorists” whether one is, as Goldberg writes, the type to “relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty” or else too shell-shocked and depressed to make a public show of one’s revulsion.

Has Miss Manners issued guidelines, or did I miss them? Don’t worry, Fox News will.

Update (also added image): Paul Waldman offers a column on the same condemnation competition and blowback I’ve observed. Anyone wrestling with the complexity of what comes next is condemned for not possessing moral clarity:

You know who does have moral clarity? Hamas has moral clarity. The protesters in Sydney celebrating the Hamas attack with chants of “Gas the Jews” have moral clarity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government have always had moral clarity, and it didn’t protect his nation’s people, so now they prepare to lay waste to Gaza. “We are fighting human animals,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as he announced that Israel would cut off electricity, water and food to the area as the bombing begins.

Hamas’s barbarism … is already producing a boiling desire for revenge. No one has a good answer to the question of what happens next, but even asking it will be seen as a violation of moral clarity.

Wrapping your mind around the complexity

Published by digby on October 11, 2023

The left must hang on to its moral authority

This piece by Eric Levitz brilliantly examines all the complexities I imagine many of you are feeling about the war in Israel. I know I am. It’s very difficult and social media has made it almost impossible to express any nuance about any of it. (I’m reeling from being buffeting in all directions.)

Anyway, this is the most honest, most mature analysis of how we should be thinking about this if we have a conscience:

This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage.

Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday, saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the “military strategy” or “violent resistance” of oppressed Palestinians.

In my view, these responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.

The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority. For decades, the Israeli government’s knee-jerk defenders have sought to equate opposition to the occupation with contempt for the security of Jewish Israelis. Now, a loud minority of Palestine’s self-styled champions are blithely affirming this smear, insisting that solidarity with Palestine requires callous indifference toward (or, at the very least, silence about) the mass murder of Jews. In so doing, they are making it easier for their adversaries to discredit and marginalize the broader cause of Palestinian liberation.

And that cause has never been more vital. It is therefore imperative for progressives to disavow all apologia for Hamas’s atrocities and for the broader public to understand that the left’s analysis of the conflict’s origins, and its prescriptions for its resolution, are wholly extricable from the blood lust of a loud minority of pseudo-radicals.

It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. The national leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend’s events a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” touting Hamas’s success in “catching the enemy completely by surprise.” The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance’s “unprecedented anti-colonial struggle,” pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed, “No peace on stolen land!” At a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in New York City, one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, saying, “There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

Some left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, chose to gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon. Speaking plainly would have required such thinkers to acknowledge that they were endorsing the mass murder of children, and thus to assume the extraordinary burden of justifying this stance; which is to say, the burden of explaining why we should believe that Palestinian liberation can be achieved through the killing of Jewish children and only through the killing of Jewish children. It’s understandable, then, that instead of forthrightly making this case, many chose to convey the sentiment “Oppressed people have a right to commit mass murder” with as much opacity and pseudo-profundity as their hard-won vocabularies would allow. These remarks from an editor of The Drift, a socialist magazine, are exemplary:

to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical(!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off

a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude — these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum

In this intellectual’s telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradict the left’s fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life; they are “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land.” Other academics, and a wide variety of campus student organizations, issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize “Palestinian resistance.”

Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas’s atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli civilians were fair targets for violence as they are settlers occupying stolen lands.

All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt. From my vantage, it looks as though a few leftists were eager to demonstrate their superlative moral clarity by fighting with liberals about the legitimacy of a Palestinian uprising aimed squarely at the IDF and conducted in the name of democratic equality; so eager that they would not be deterred by the fact that the weekend’s events bore scant resemblance to that scenario.

What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.

Meanwhile, although many aspects of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians can be justifiably described as neocolonial, analogies between the conflict and paradigmatic anti-colonial struggles can be misleading. This is not Algeria, and the Israelis aren’t the pied-noirs. Much of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries; which is to say, people who suffered the same sort of dispossession endured by the Palestinians. These people did not have anywhere else to seek refuge. And their grandchildren do not have any metropole to return to. The idea that they deserve to be shot to death while dancing because they were born in Israel, or for the crimes of a government many actively opposed, is hateful.

More broadly, the notion that an ethnic group can boast the exclusive right to occupy any stretch of land is not a left-wing one. Virtually all land is “stolen land” if one rolls the tape back far enough. Individuals who were dispossessed of property as a result of their ethnicity have a right of return and reparation. But ethnic groups do not have a right to cleanse any geographic area of outgroup members, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.

For these reasons, it is a moral imperative for progressives to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, affirm the human rights of Jewish Israelis, and reject the ethno-nationalist claim that Palestinians have a unique right to reside in the region. And it is also a political imperative for them to do so.

Those who approve or condone Hamas’s atrocities constitute a small minority of the left. Yet since algorithmic social media favors incendiary speech, from the vantage of many X and Instagram users, the left’s response to last weekend’s events is characterized by bloodlust. In the face of that response, multiple progressive-leaning people in my life have expressed a sense of estrangement from leftists and newfound doubts about their worldview. Seeing an ideological group embrace a position that one knows to be intellectually bankrupt and morally odious will naturally lead one to view that group’s other claims — especially those concerning matters one knows little about, such as the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict — with greater skepticism. It’s important, therefore, to ensure that the majority of progressives who abhor all war crimes makes itself as visible as possible. In the present context, pointedly refusing to condemn Hamas’s atrocities might help a leftist to perform a more radical solidarity than squishy liberals can muster and thus win some points in a subcultural status game. But doing so will make it harder for them to actually advance their ostensible aims.

The political necessity of criticizing Israel on universalist grounds, rather than ethno-nationalist ones, is similarly urgent. In defending their apologias for war crimes, leftists tend to cite the gross power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis as somehow exculpatory. But precisely because Palestinians cannot hope to prevail in a contest of brute force, it is incumbent on their champions to make the case for their liberation in terms that honor the basic rights of Israelis. If we posit that some ethnic groups have a unique claim to specific stretches of land, and that they also have the right to commit war crimes so as to secure this heritage, then we will do the Israeli far-right’s ideological work for it. When supposed leftists embrace calls for the expulsion of all Jewish “settlers” from “the river to the sea,” they pit one group’s account of why its historical victimization gives it carte blanche to commit ethnic cleansing against another group’s account of the same. In a contest between competing visions of ethno-nationalist domination, the Palestinians cannot win. Their primary strength is the moral force of egalitarian universalism; in other words, of the idea that all people are entitled to security, self-government, and equality under the law. The moment that Palestine’s western supporters treat this idea as negotiable, they kick the legs out from under their own movement.

And that movement is needed now more than ever. The current Israeli government is the most far-right in its history and has been working to de-facto annex the West Bank and entrench Jewish supremacy in that occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers in that region have been carrying out attacks that even Israeli officials recognize as “pogroms.” Meanwhile, last year, Israeli troops in the West Bank killed a record number of Palestinians. And even before the present war, they were on pace to set a new one in 2023.

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is an open anti-Arab racist who has called for the mass expulsion of disloyal Arab Israelis and whose sympathies for Jewish terrorists prevented him from serving in the Israeli army. The nation’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for wiping out Palestinian villages. This is a government that needed no provocation to demonstrate its contempt for Palestinian life. Now, Hamas has given it the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

Israel has responded by promising that its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza will be unconstrained by concern for the lives of the 2 million civilians who are tightly packed into a strip of land twice the size of Washington, D.C. On Tuesday morning, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on Gaza and noted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

A member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel’s parliament tweeted in response to the attacks, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” This is a reference to the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.

At present, Israel’s allies in the West are giving it little incentive to temper its thirst for vengeance with concern for, say, the majority of Gazans who are under 18 years old. In his remarks on the attacks, Joe Biden offered the unqualified support of the U.S. for Israel’s response while lamenting Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as “human shields.” This is a real practice, but it also serves as an alibi for Israel to pursue aerial campaigns that emphasize “damage” over “accuracy.”

A precondition for a durable peace in Israel-Palestine is an Israeli government that honors its commitments under international law, ends its occupation of the West Bank, and forswears collective punishment as a tool of war against Hamas. To assert this is not to pretend that Hamas is an eager partner for peace. But that organization owes much of its popular legitimacy (and power) to Israel’s crimes.

The Israeli government will not honor the legal and moral rights of Palestinians absent concerted international pressure. And mounting such pressure requires a progressive movement with the moral authority to challenge popular narratives about the conflict that elide the crimes of the Israeli state.

Admittedly, the prospects for success on that front in the near term look bleak, irrespective of whether progressives denounce Hamas’s atrocities or justify them. But a left that refuses to condemn mass murder will ensure (and deserve) its own political irrelevance. To celebrate the slaughter of Jewish children as “decolonial” struggle, or to refuse to condemn the “military strategy” of far-right war criminals, is to place the performance of radicalism above the demands of moral integrity and political efficacy.

His points are clear. If those of us on the left have any hope that the we can continue to have a positive influence on this situation it’s vitally important that we hold fast to our principles and cling to our morals. His analysis of where this has gone astray in some quarters is valuable.

I’m reminded of the endless fatuous accusations from some that support for Ukraine is hypocritical when one was against the war in Iraq. My principles hold that I was against the invasion by the US and against the invasion by Russia. It’s not really complicated. Likewise, I find terrorism directed at civilians abhorrant and I don’t support it no matter who is doing it. That’s not really complicated either even though we have witnessed an inimaginable horror already from one side and can expect to see more of it from the other in reaction.

What’s happening in Israel makes it’s hard to stop yourself from throwing up your hands in despair. It’s all so awful. Cheering any of it from either side is grotesque. Levitz does a good job of breaking it down and helping to illuminate the problem.