Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

James Comer continues to try to deceive the Capitol Hill press corps and country

(LEFT)
Comer insists “I haven’t said he should be impeached,” after McCarthy declared an inquiry open

(RIGHT)
Comer on Newsmax: “You know where I stand on that, I would vote to impeach right now.” pic.twitter.com/JSbL52x4Jt

— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) September 19, 2023

By the way:

New testimony from a number of FBI and Internal Revenue Service officials casts doubt on key claims from an IRS whistleblower who alleges there was political interference in the federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden’s taxes.

According to transcripts provided to CNN, several FBI and IRS officials brought in for closed-door testimony by House Republicans in recent days said they don’t remember US Attorney David Weiss saying that he lacked the authority to decide whether to bring charges against the president’s son, or that Weiss said he had been denied a request for special counsel status.

Those twin claims, made by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, form the basis of Republican accusations that the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s taxes was tainted by political influence and that Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland tried to protect Hunter Biden in the investigation.

The new testimony comes as House Republicans begin an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his family, potentially undercutting one element of that effort.

At issue is an October 2022 meeting between prosecutors and case agents working on the Hunter Biden investigation. Shapley alleges that during that meeting, Weiss, the then-US attorney for Delaware, told participants that he was “not the deciding person” on whether Hunter Biden was charged, according to Shapley’s notes from the meeting. House Republicans have taken that to mean Weiss was not in charge of his own investigation, and was deferring to a higher authority.

In addition to Shapley and Weiss, there were five others in that meeting, three of whom have recently testified to the Republican-led congressional committees now spearheading the impeachment inquiry.

Marcy Wheeler has looked closely at Shapley’s notes (they are public) and they are not as clear as they are being portrayed. He may have misinterpreted or misremembered what was actually said in that meeting but his own notes do not back up what is being said.

This is the sort of arcana featured in all these right wing pseudo-scandals from Whitewater to Benghazi and they almost always feature a whistleblower of some sort who is either full of shit or totally manipulated. I think that’s what we have here. Wheeler doesn’t suggest that Shapley is lying only that he heard something incorrectly and that his notes actually bear that out.

Michelle Cottle is right about this:

The dysfunctional dance taking place in the House between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his right flank has driven me to consider something I never imagined possible: that Matt Gaetz is right.

A House speaker can be successful only with the confidence of the members who put him or her in charge, when he or she can follow through on promises made and concessions extracted. Indeed, there may be no job in American government that calls for crackerjack deal-making skills more than that of speaker: so many egos, alliances and grievances to manage to keep things moving.

Mr. McCarthy, in his desperate pursuit of the speakership last winter, ran around making promises willy-nilly to the House’s small band of right-wingers, and he will now rise and fall on how he handles those commitments and expectations. So far, things are not looking good for Kev — and, by extension, for a functional Congress.

Miffed at the speaker’s handling of the spending fight, the right’s hard-liners have been threatening to oust him, shut down the government or both. His attempt to placate them by announcing an impeachment investigation into President Biden went over poorly, prompting multiple Freedom Caucusers to scold him for trying to buy them off. Mr. Gaetz, the Florida congressman and frontman for the rebels who temporarily blocked Mr. McCarthy’s speakership in January, dismissed the move as a disingenuous “baby step,” accused him of being “out of compliance” with his commitments to hard-liners and threatened to force daily votes to vacate the chair — that is, depose him. All of which apparently sent Mr. McCarthy into a profanity laced tirade at a closed-door conference meeting on Thursday that, according to multiple attendees, boiled down to (and here I’ve tidied it up to be family friendly): If you want to file a motion to vacate, file the flipping motion!

The speaker is clearly fed up with being bullied by his radicals. But here’s the thing. Gaetz & Company have a point: Mr. McCarthy is out of compliance with several of his promises — or at least several they claim he made. (That’s the problem with secret back-room deals.) So if the rabble-rousers want to be taken seriously going forward, they need to stop all the chest-thumping. It’s time to step up and file the flipping motion.

[…]

The extremists are easy to denounce, especially with their tendency to act out like unruly teens — or Lauren Boebert at “Beetlejuice.” But they are not to blame for the chaos consuming the House. It is Mr. McCarthy who led them to believe he would champion their policies and priorities. And it is Mr. McCarthy who elevated their influence in the conference, empowering them to wreak even greater havoc. Of course they are going to make more and more outrageous demands. That’s what they do.

Some of what Mr. McCarthy committed to was beyond his power to deliver. Take the ongoing showdown over government funding. He pledged to try to cap discretionary spending at 2022 levels or lower. But with the Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, that is a non-starter. Worse, Mr. McCarthy effectively gave the hard-liners license to play chicken with the debt ceiling. Small wonder they were brassed off when he cut a debt deal with the Democrats in May.

Maybe the key word for Mr. McCarthy in these promises was “try.” Maybe he figured that, as long as he let the rebels take their best shot, they would cut him slack even if they failed to carry the day. If so, their outraged, burn-it-all-down reaction to the debt agreement should have disabused everyone of that notion. At that point, Mr. McCarthy really should have started adjusting his strategy — and the hard-liners’ expectations — accordingly. Instead, he doubled down on coddling them, encouraging them to plow ahead with fantasy spending cuts. The latest proposal for a stopgap bill to keep the government running through October, which the chamber’s G.O.P. leadership put forward on Sunday, was being savaged by around a dozen House Republicans on Monday, dimming its prospects for passage.

Other McCarthy promises involved bits of partisan theater. Mr. Gaetz says the rebels were guaranteed a vote on term limits, something Mr. McCarthy presumably could have arranged time for in the past eight months. But he didn’t. Because he doesn’t give a fig about the radicals’ priorities. He just aims to keep them calm enough for him to keep his gavel.

Am I rooting for the hard-liners to get their way on policy matters such as … well, anything? Good Lord, no. Their revanchist vision for America is not one that I — or a majority of voters for that matter — share. But I get their frustration and anger. Mr. McCarthy created and unleashed this right-wing monster to serve his own ambitions. And yet somehow he seems flummoxed that it is now smashing up things and demanding its due.

Of course, there are practical reasons Gaetz et al. might opt not to boot the speaker. For all their bluster, he may be the best they can hope for. He won’t get them everything they want, but he is willing to be their dancing monkey in plenty of situations. At the same time, he gives the conference enough of a sheen of establishment respectability to retain the support of its non-wingers and to not terrify more moderate voters. Arguably few other House Republicans could or would toe this degrading line.

This speaker is often said to have made a deal with the devil. But the conference’s hard-liners have made one with a cynical, inconstant opportunist. They clearly suspect their slippery chief never intended to deliver on a whole host of stuff they care about, just as they know deep down that an individual so hollow is fundamentally untrustworthy. But until someone is willing to break this stalemate, we are all stuck with their twisted, codependent relationship.

They want to vacate the chair so badly they can taste it. But the bit question remains: who wants that thankless job?

Biden gets a big round of applause as he wraps up his speech at the UN pic.twitter.com/hjDXBleeSk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2023

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1704140636738244767?s=20

WOW! The UN audience laughs at Trump after he claims, “my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” pic.twitter.com/tXg50ejQqy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2018

Update: Let’s not forget this winner…

PA institutes automatic voter registration

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) announced this morning that “eligible voters getting a new driver’s license or ID card in Pennsylvania will now be automatically registered to vote,” reports NBC News.

Shapiro’s office issued a statement:

“Pennsylvania is the birthplace of our democracy, and as Governor, I’m committed to ensuring free and fair elections that allow every eligible voter to make their voice heard,” said Governor Josh Shapiro. “Automatic voter registration is a commonsense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars. Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age, and citizenship at the DMV – all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration. My Administration will keep taking innovative actions like this one to make government work better and more efficiently for all Pennsylvanians.”

The howls you hear outside belong to opponents of universal suffrage who believe the goal is to “bloat” voter rolls to boost Democratic turnout. Shapiro campaigned on implementing automatic voter registration (AVR).

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent adds:

An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

[…]

By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.

Despite the right’s insistence that voter roll accuracy is critical to “election integrity,” GOP-led states are exiting the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the voter roll maintenance consortium, under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers. Election integrity is a right-wing marketing slogan for disguising efforts to undermine popular sovereignty.

Sargent continues:

Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.

That is encouraging at a time when democracy is under constant attack.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but a caveat about AVR. As part of an ongoing outreach effort to my local Hispanic/Latino community (designated HL in the state voter file), I surveyed multiple county precincts with concentrations of HL registrants.

Of the HL voters 45 and under, some unscientific observations. Note bolded section:

• About 60% of HL registrants 45 and under are registered unaffiliated.
• Only 9% report being born outside the U.S.; for another 18% birth_state is left blank.
• 35% of voters vote irregularly; women more than men by 3 to 2. (Many are presidential-year-only voters.)
• Of the nearly one-quarter (22%) of registrants who vote consistently, women outperform men by 2 to 1.
• Women and men who register but never vote (30%) do so about equally.

A local elections official suspects many of the non-voters register as an afterthought when prompted during a visit to the DMV or a social services agency, then forget about it. Registering them automatically could be even more invisible (depending on the style of AVR), even if citizens receive registration cards in the mail.

As the AVR study notes, while AVR “ultimately has a net positive effect on turnout,” new registrants “have a somewhat lower propensity to vote.”

Automatic registration is no panacea for boosting election participation. Outreach and voter engagement is key, especially since campaigns typically prioritize outreach to registrants with solid voting track records (the low-hanging fruit). What my limited survey in one population suggests is that many lower propensity registrants may not even remember they are registered by election time. They’ll need encouraging no matter their track record.

Is Kavanaugh standing back and standing by?

The GOP loves a twofer, or even a threefer. Political maneuvering some might call strategic might less flatteringly be called sneaky or outright dishonest. Diabolical is not out of the running.

Donald Trump withholds final payments to subcontractors, for example, just enough that court costs make it a losing proposition for a subcontractor to take him to court to recover what he owes. Or Trump plays delay, delay, delay when he finds himself in court holding a losing hand.

Gerrymandering cases are another example. GOP legislatures draw district maps patently illegal under the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Democrats and aligned groups take them to court, win, and judges orders new maps. Then GOP legislators draw a second set of unacceptably gerrymandered maps, and the exasperated court appoints a special master to draw them instead. It happened in North Carolina. Or the GOP-led legislature might simply defy the courts until there is no time left before the next election to implement new maps. Something like what happened in Ohio.

Or in the case of Alabama, that maneuver is where dark money meets hidden agenda.

The Alabama Political Reporter (APR) offers a “twofer” explanation for Alabama Republicans’ defying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama draw a second majority Black congressional district. Leonard Leo, the “hidden architect of the Supreme Court,” is allegedly involved:

APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

[…]

As APR reported on July 27, Alabama lawmakers working in conjunction with state Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office and Washington D.C. lawyers had “intelligence” that Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who voted with the majority in Milligan just weeks ago to order the new maps under the statutory language — is open to rehearing the case as a constitutional challenge to the validity of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

The Alabama government’s briefs before the three-judge panel in September referenced a concurring opinion by Kavanaugh that questioned whether “race-based redistricting” can “extend indefinitely into the future.” Alabama further relied on arguments — also rejected by the U.S. District Court — that a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision this same term ending affirmative action in college admissions (called Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ) compels the Court to find that a state’s use of a map in which “race predominates” now violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. As in Milligan, Kavanaugh filed a concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions, emphasizing the potential for time limits on race-related policies. 

Having gutted Section 5 (pre-clearance) in Shelby (2013), the right is now gunning for Section 2 (ban on discrimination on the basis of race, color or minority status).

APR’s Bill Britt writes, “The tangled web of previously unreported ties centers around Marshall, Alabama Solicitor General Edmond LaCour — dubbed “the architect behind Alabama’s voting rights defiance” — and the D.C.-area law firm Consovoy McCarthy, the firm founded by William Consovoy, a now-deceased former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas who represented Shelby County in Shelby County v. Holder.” He maps out a web of connections between LaCour and his wife, the D.C. law firm, Leo, “the Catholic far-right,” and Kavanaugh.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos cautions:

None of this proves that Kavanaugh is involved in the effort to allow Alabama’s racist gerrymander and effectively gut the Voting Rights Act; that’s resting on that supposed “intelligence” that Alabama Political Reporter sources assert. What is clear is that strands of Leo’s web of dark money are at work here, with the goal of eradicating the scraps of the VRA that still exist. There’s no denying that Kavanaugh owes his lifetime appointment on the court to that network.

Alabama joined forces with Leo’s team to file this as an emergency petition, one that’s decided on the shadow docket. They want the Supreme Court to blow up the VRA behind closed doors—again.

MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” interviewed Britt Monday night.

“I cannot say with any certainty that Justice Kavanaugh will join in the scheme but when you look at the bedfellows it is an awfully crowded queen-size bed.” –@BillBritt on the Alabama GOP reportedly trying to force the Supreme Court to strike down Voting Rights Act. #TheReidOut pic.twitter.com/5ZnMUfONT5

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) September 19, 2023

What has long been clear is that “an authoritarian minority,” its political and cultural preeminence threatened by an expanding multicultural, secularizing society, is bent on preventing further slippage in its role as apex dominator. However many thumbs it must apply to the scales of fairness, so be it.

I think Philip Bump’s analysis of the Trump interview problem is on point. The rest of the media should know this by now:

Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican nominating contest was, at its essence, uncomplicated.

Running against a cadre of sitting and former elected officials, Trump said things they wouldn’t — mostly the things that were being said in the right-wing media and by pundits on Fox News. The reputation for “truth-telling” his supporters embrace was born of his willingness to elevate false, popular claims, particularly about the left. He wasn’t elected for his policies; in fact, he broadly rejected the idea that people cared much about policy.

The only thing that’s changed over the past eight years, really, is that everyone should know the playbook by now. We should know that he will 1) flood the zone with things that are burbling on the right-wing fringe, 2) make sweeping promises without much follow-through and 3) reject any criticism out of hand, spinning it into a reason to praise himself.

And so it was with his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday.

One of only a few interviews with a traditional news outlet since he announced his 2024 candidacy last November, the discussion began precisely as his 2015 announcement at Trump Tower had begun: He would make America great again in part by repelling the hordes of criminal immigrants flooding into the country.

“They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions, insane asylums,” he said as he was answering the first question from host Kristen Welker. “They say, ‘Sir, please don’t use that term,’ but it’s true.”

As was the case eight years ago, this is not generally true. Some of those seeking to enter the country may have criminal records or even mental illness, of course, but there’s no indication that this constitutes a significant component of those seeking asylum or work in the United States. It’s almost certainly true that the universe of people who have served in senior positions on Trump’s political campaigns is more densely populated with accused criminals than the pool of recent immigrants.

Welker didn’t push back on this claim, in large part because Trump quickly moved on to another bit of patter. Flooding the zone.

She did offer some resistance to his attempt to present the film “2000 Mules” as a legitimate indictment of the 2020 election. Created by Dinesh D’Souza, recipient of one of Trump’s first presidential pardons, the film’s allegations of drop-box-stuffing have been completely eviscerated. When Trump told Welker, for example, that “we have thousands of essentially motion pictures of people stuffing the ballot boxes,” he’s referring to a common belief about the movie that is entirely false. The movie shows only a few examples of someone casting more than one vote at a drop box; none has been shown to have been illegal. One clip, described in the film as committing a crime, was determined to have depicted a man legally adding the ballots of family members. That man is now suing D’Souza.

Welker rejected Trump’s assertion, eager to move on to a different subject. There was probably a way for someone well-versed in the arcana of the allegations to push back harder on Trump’s claims; it’s very safe to assume that his ability to defend the movie is untested and flimsy. But this would almost certainly have simply led to Trump shifting the goal posts somewhere else, until he made a claim that his interviewer didn’t rebut. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories will always find a sturdy enough foundation on which they can rest.

Once you hand Trump a megaphone, he’s going to do with it what he wants. He knows how to use it. This is why it’s better to pretape his interviews, allowing for obvious dishonesties such as the one about “2000 Mules” to be elided or presented with context. For whatever reason, despite taping the interview in advance, NBC chose not to make such edits.

The interview was very difficult for me to watch. My rage at the fact that almost half the country supports this obviously corrupt, lying, imbecile has become almost too much to bear. If an interviewer ever actually did what Bump suggests I think I would feel a lot better but they don’t seem capable of it. They just let him go on and on and on with chaotic word salad perhaps in the hope that his ignorance and narcissism will be obvious to the audience. But after years of this his absurd meanderings have been normalized and I’m not sure that many people see him that way anymore. Certainly, you have to assume that young people who’ve grown up listening to him over the last 8 years think it’s normal. It’s all they know.

I guess the conventional wisdom is that the mainstream media does this for ratings (and that Chris Licht episode at CNN certainly corroborates that.) But I have to wonder if they’ve thought this through. Wouldn’t they get good ratings if they did something creative like fact checking a recorded interview like that on MTP, within the broadcast? It would be arduous but I’ll bet people would watch it. It might result in Trump refusing to ever appear with them again, but so what? He’s not on there very often anyway and there will be plenty of public appearances to cover.

As I wrote in my Salon piece this morning, Trump is not a novelty as he was in 2015 nor is he a sitting president. He’s just another and he doesn’t deserve any special deference. In fact, he deserves less deference than any of the others. After all, he’s also a criminal defendant in four separate cases. Treating him like a respectable government official is ridiculous.

Remember those so-called sensible Republicans who didn’t think they should launch an impeachment inquiry? Well, they’ve seen the light:

Before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally launched an impeachment inquiry, center-right Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., urged his party not to go down that road, saying it was “too early” given the lack of evidence against President Joe Biden.

But two days after McCarthy made that decision last week, Bacon, who represents an Omaha-based district that voted for Biden in 2020, shifted his tone and said he wasn’t taking issue with it.

“If there’s a high crime or misdemeanor, well, let’s get the facts,” Bacon told NBC News, adding that he had been “hesitant” about it earlier — but now it’s done, and he stands by McCarthy, R-Calif.

“I don’t think it’s healthy or good for our country. So I wanted to set a high bar. I want to do it carefully. I want to do it conscientiously, do it meticulously,” Bacon said. “But it’s been done. So, at this point, we’ll see what the facts are.”

His remarks represent a trend: McCarthy’s decision to proceed with the impeachment inquiry has faced scant public pushback from House Republicans, even though many of them objected to taking that momentous step. The softening of stances is the latest example of swing-district and center-right Republicans standing by their leadership team, even as it bends to pressure from far-right lawmakers to take actions that could backfire politically on these more centrist members and endanger their competitive seats.

If those same far-right lawmakers try to overthrow McCarthy for failing to meet their demands on other issues, like spending, Bacon made it clear he and others would protect McCarthy. “There’s 200 of us or so, maybe more, that will stick by the speaker,” Bacon said.

In the 2024 election cycle, Democrats will be targeting the seats of the 18 Republicans who represent districts Biden won, with the hope of recapturing control of the House. The man in charge of protecting the GOP majority, Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., said he supports the inquiry but hasn’t seen enough evidence to actually impeach the president.

“I’ve seen enough that we need to continue to ask questions,” Hudson, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an interview. “But I think we just need to continue to talk about what we’ve found and keep looking. And let’s follow the facts. And if the facts show the president is innocent, then let’s tell the American people that’s the case.”

Another skeptic of an impeachment inquiry was Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, who chairs the center-right Republican Governance Group, and said last month he hadn’t seen any “facts” to justify such a step.

But after McCarthy greenlighted the inquiry, Joyce had no complaints.

“I support Speaker McCarthy’s decision to direct the House Committees on Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” he said in a statement, adding that he’s “confident” the committee leaders in charge “will conduct thoughtful and thorough investigations into allegations against the President, which I will carefully review.”

Other impeachment-inquiry critics in the group of the “Biden 18” Republicans, who represent the crossover districts, include Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. Their offices didn’t return emails seeking comment on whether they support McCarthy’s decision to launch the inquiry.

Notably, other Republicans in Biden-won districts supported pursuing an impeachment inquiry. That includes Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., who said the international business dealings and transgressions of Biden’s son Hunter Biden create “a requirement to seek truth and to seek accountability” for the House in terms of exploring so far unproven links to the president.

“There’s smoke there, right? So we have a requirement to go investigate that to see if there’s actually fire there,” he said.

McCarthy opened the inquiry by himself, bypassing a vote of the House as it was unclear he had enough votes to succeed in his paper-thin Republican majority with Democrats opposed. But Garcia said he would have voted “yes” to launch such an inquiry.

“I would have voted for it,” Garcia said. “That’s the great fallacy. There seems to be this national narrative that people in swing districts don’t want accountability and truth. That’s not the case.”

But he also said that in the end, “if it’s not substantiated, we should oppose” proceeding to articles of impeachment.

Some Republicans in districts that Biden carried have steered clear of the issue. Asked about her position, Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., who represents an Orange County area, directed NBC News to contact her office, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Marc Molinaro, R-N.Y., who represents a Hudson Valley district, said he supports the inquiry, but his focus is elsewhere.

“When there’s questions or impropriety, it’s the appropriate responsibility of Congress to be the check and balance on the administration,” Molinaro said after McCarthy launched the inquiry. “I didn’t come here to impeach anybody, but the responsibility of Congress is to provide the appropriate oversight.”

But now that the House has begun the impeachment inquiry, failing to move forward with articles of impeachment would be sure to spark a rebellion from far-right Republicans. Many of them are already prepared to impeach Biden even though the House has yet to produce evidence implicating him in bribery or abuse of power. They believe that a failure to impeach would give their GOP base the impression that they’re exonerating Biden.

“The American people support impeachment of Joe Biden and an investigation of the entire family and every person who covered it up,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a McCarthy ally who introduced articles of impeachment against Biden over a different issue the day after he was sworn in as president, said Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s time to hold Democrats accountable.”

I really hope that Democrats target these people and use this against them in their re-election campaigns. Biden’s impeachment (and there is going to be one) is going to be a shitshow and these people should not be let off the hook for it.

If you are a member of the GOP today you are MAGA and you are no better than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

To those who thought that Trump calling the 6-week abortion bans “terrible” in his interview this weekend would cause the “pro-life” movement to abandon him, think again. Aaron Blake of the WaPo asked Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America about it and this is what they said:

If you ever thought the anti-abortion movement was about anything other than rank politics, you know better now. They are just another political interest group trying to maintain its power in the party. It’s what they’ve always been.

These are people who’ve spent the last five decades screaming that abortion is murder. Now they’re talking about “ambition and common sense” and trying to sell a 15 week abortion ban in order to get votes for their side. Apparently, fetuses may be endowed with all the rights of fully formed human beings but maybe a little genocide under 15 weeks is a small price to pay to maintain political power? Looks like it.

I would guess that most of you haven’t ever heard of Sneako, a right wing Youtube “influencer.” Here’s a short bio:

Nicolas “Nico” Kenn De Balinthazy (born: September 8, 1998 [age 25]), better known online as Sneako, is a right-wing Muslim-American internet personality. Sneako is closely associated with figures such as Andrew and Tristan Tate, rapper Kanye “Ye” West, white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, LeafyIsHere and the hosts of the Fresh&Fit Podcast.

Through his main channel “SNEAKO” and second channel “SHNEAKO” on YouTube, Sneako amassed over 2,000,000 subscribers, up until his termination from the platform after repeated community guideline violations. He now posts content on the “alt-tech” platform Rumble.com

You can get more details here but let’s just say this guy is a real piece of work.

Here he is with some of his ardent fans:

sneako finally realizes he got himself in a bubble with his red pill content 🤣 pic.twitter.com/enVlvMBAlz

— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) September 17, 2023

I guess that’s supposed to be funny but it sends a chill down my spine. Those little boys are watching this misogynist, homophobic pig online. What did he think was going to happen? God help this country.

Over the last few days as most of the media was blathering on about Joe Biden’s “bad week” , Donald Trump was stepping up his campaign and appearing at various venues saying things and behaving in ways that should have made journalists’ ears perk up, wondering if he’s lost more than a step. He was wildly dishonest and incredibly self-destructive even for him.

It started with an interview with Megyn Kelly for her Sirius XM show last Thursday, the first since Trump crudely insulted her back in 2015 in the first presidential primary debate. Trump seemed to expect a friendly, Fox-like, interview and she gave him plenty of softballs and expressed her agreement with much of his nonsense. But she did ask some probing questions about his legal troubles and once again he more or less confessed to his crimes. He must have said the words “Presidential Records Act” a dozen times, reiterating over and over that he had every right to take any document he chooses. And he slipped up continuously, providing the prosecution plenty of fodder:

Trump on taking classified documents: “I’m allowed to have these documents. I’m allowed to take these documents…When I have them, they become unclassified. People think you have to go through a ritual. You don’t, at least in my opinion.” pic.twitter.com/IAkdGsGnWo

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) September 14, 2023

When the Special Prosecutor presents this case to the jury they will be told exactly what is supposed to happen with classified documents and they will understand how utterly ridiculous it would be for a president to secretly declassify documents and not tell anyone that they’ve been declassified.

Over the Weekend he spoke at the Christian Right “Pray, Vote, Stand” Summit in Washington and mocked President Biden mercilessly over his alleged mental unfitness and then said this:

Trump says Joe Biden is “cognitively impaired” and then accuses him of getting us into World War TWO.

No, he really did. 🤭 pic.twitter.com/03KKUm24XT

— Jim Stewartson, Anti-disinfo activist 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙 (@jimstewartson) September 16, 2023

Any normal person would have just corrected himself for misspeaking but he can never admit he did anything wrong so instead he twisted himself into a verbal pretzel that had it been delivered by Joe Biden would have resulted in national call to check him into a nursing home immediately.

He later appeared at the Concerned Women for America conference and was a little bit sharper but repeated nonsense such as his silly claim that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread, another sign that he simply cannot retain information. He has certainly heard by now that this is silly and could easily substitute something like “you have to have ID to travel on an airplane” to make his point but he can’t do that. Once he gets something like “low flow showers” or “windmills cause cancer” in his head there’s no getting it out. That’s not normal.

The final segment of his week-end odyssey was the highly anticipated interview on Meet the Press which was filmed earlier in the week. To say it was infuriating would be an understatement. As he always does, he ran circles around the host, Kristen Welker, and basically made a mockery of American democracy by demonstrating that an incoherent con artist is going to be the Republican nominee for president. Again.

He once again showed he is completely oblivious to the legal damage he is doing to himself every time he agrees to answer questions about his cases. Here he confesses that he only listened to lawyers who told him what his own “instincts” told him was true. When pressed he says that the decision about whether the election was rigged was his alone, although he dances away from Welker’s question about whether he was “calling the shots.”

WATCH: Kristen Welker asks former President Trump to clarify if he was listening to his lawyers’ advice or his own instincts after he lost the 2020 election.

Trump: “It was my decision.” pic.twitter.com/a3Hl4HPbEX

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 17, 2023

Watching these events is intensely frustrating and I think it’s even more difficult to watch now than before. He is no longer a first time candidate taking the political press by surprise. Neither is he the president whose office confers such immense power that even a dolt like Trump is automatically given more deference than he deserves. Today he is just another candidate for president and he doesn’t deserve to be treated with any more respect than any of the others. In fact, he deserves less since he is a criminal defendant in four different cases and was recently found liable for sexual assault to the tune of $5 million.

The man sat in all the interviews and appearances and made it crystal clear that he believes he is above the law. In fact, with his endless blathering about how he can do whatever he wants with classified documents he makes it clear that he believes he is the law. And yet, the befuddled yet eager media is treating Donald Trump with the same consideration they always did, before they knew how disordered and his mind was and what a danger he is to American democracy and the rule of law.

I had thought after the widely criticized CNN Trump town hall everyone understood that you simply cannot allow Trump to ramble incoherently to cover for his unwillingness to answer the questions. They have to find another way to cover him. And yet there he was this weekend on Meet The Press doing exactly that and inspite of the interview being on tape they aired it as if it was live only putting a lame fact check on their website after the fact.

For every viewer who saw that he’s completely unfit to be president there is another who got lost in the overwhelming rush of words, or what’s known to rhetoricians as “the Gish Gallop” which is a tactic designed to “defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments.” That’s what he does, however unconsciously, and the media aides and abets him by treating him as if he’s just another politician.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan wrote about this problem last week pointing out

Trump is covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes.

She says the solution for journalists is simpler than we think:

Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.Headlines will include context, not just deliver political messaging. Overall politics coverage will reflect “not the odds, but the stakes”, as NYU’s Jay Rosen elegantly put it. Lies and liars won’t get a platform and a megaphone.

I wish I had more confidence that this would happen. At this point I think we just have to fervently hope that there are enough people in this country who can see through that cacophony of bs and vote as if their future depends upon him never holding office again — because it does.

Salon