No, of course not. But the Bush administration, with the collusion of the msm, is doing its level best to create the impression that maybe We Don’t Really Know. The strategy worked when Bush got us into this mess. Hey, y’never can tell!
Many more Iraqis have joined the Iraqi Security Forces in the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province. Despite mutual distrust, stemming from the power shift after Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government fell, Sunnis and Shiites are working together in the ISF to fight al Qaeda in Iraq.
While Hussein was in power, Sunnis were in positions of authority over the Shiites, and now are fearful that the majority of Shiites will seek revenge. Iraqi Shiites fear a return of Sunni power in Iraq.
However, Sunnis in Anbar continue to join the ISF.
“The spike in police has really been significant,” Couric said. “The incidents in Iraq have gone down dramatically.”
Security and stability have improved in Iraq, but basic services remain in disrepair.
Sounds good, dunnit? Hands across the Great Islamic Divide – banding together to fight a common enemy. And it’s working, Katie Couric says so.
Iraq’s Interior Ministry is regarded as “dysfunctional” and sectarian” and the National Police should be “disbanded and reorganized,” according to an independent report obtained by CNN.
The report, authored by the Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq, fires stinging criticism at Iraqi security forces but also includes promising words for the country’s military…
The Interior Ministry and the National Police force it operates have long been regarded by observers as being infiltrated by sectarian Shiite militias.
“Such fundamental flaws present a serious obstacle to achieving the levels of readiness, capability, and effectiveness in police and border security forces that are essential for internal security and stability in Iraq.”
“Sectarianism in its units undermines its ability to provide security; the force is not viable in its current form. The National Police should be disbanded and reorganized…”
The report says the Iraqi Police Service “is incapable today of providing security at a level sufficient to protect Iraqi neighborhoods from insurgents and sectarian violence.”
But what accounts for such profoundly discrepant conclusions? It’s obvious, or should be:
The Pentagon said Wednesday it does not agree with the report’s recommendation that the Iraqi National Police be disbanded.
Get it? Couric, of course, wouldn’t be able to move anywhere in Iraq without the active participation of US armed forces. A newcomer to Iraq, Couric and crew simply were shown what they wanted her to see.
Need some convincing? Then see, for example, Lara Logan’s report from Basra. Logan, of course, has spent a good deal of time in Iraq, and needn’t depend upon US Army escorts to do her job:
British troops were handing over their base at Basra Palace the very next morning to the Iraqi Army’s 10th Division and withdrawing to a British air base on the outskirts of the city.
While on the way to see the local governor, Logan reports that their lives were in the hands of his uncle and personal security force – the only men Gov. Mohammed al-Waili trusts in a city that’s become a battleground for rival militias that have infiltrated the police force and tried repeatedly to kill him.
“Those policemen outside the front of your building, do you trust them” asked Logan.
“Not all of them,” al-Waili replied. [Emphasis added]
Even in this short excerpt, the complexity of the situation is apparent. No simplistic conflation of “the enemy” into Al Qaeda. The vertigo-inducing situation includes withdrawing British troops, an Iraqi governor – aka, warlord – with a private army and a police force infiltrated by “rival militias.” Note the plural.
Let’s face it. The only incontrovertibly genuine outcome of Bush’s escalation is that additional people have died or been mutilated at rates near the highest since Bush’s invasion. Iraqis and Americans alike. (And by the way, not even Bill “The Gambler” Bennett would bet much on the Iraqi army’s increasing effectivenesss.)
Short version: It’s more chaotic in Iraq than you can possibly imagine. It’s a civil war, not between two sides, but dozens. It is far beyond the control of the American forces there, let alone the Maliki I-use-the-term-loosely government. And that things look marginally – and temporarily- better where Couric was permitted to venture merely highlights the deterioration elsewhere.
Well, recently, I was at dinner with a friend who is a major journalist at a major media outlet in New York City. (I will not identify the person further, including whether my friend is male or female, or what kind of media s/he works for – video, print, or online). In the course of the conversation, I brought up the Lara Logan video and s/he said, with certain authority, “I know about that. Y’know, there’s a lot of controversy because she used footage from al Qaeda in the reporting.”
“Wha?” sez I, “I never heard that.”
“Yes,” said, my friend. “I was searching around for it and saw there was a huge controversy about her sources. That could very well have been the reason they didn’t broadcast it. After all, it’s not like there’s much reluctance anymore to hold back on damaging reports on the Bush administration.”
I promised to look into it. And I did. It turns out that Michelle Malkin and friends have been up to their old tricks again. You can read all about it at this link to Media Channel, but the short version: it’s a bullshit insinuation meant to smear CBS and Logan, who has done some of the finest network reporting on the Bush/Iraq war.
And it worked, My friend, a highly-respected journalist (and rightly so), was gulled into questioning Logan’s integrity.
Now before you jump down her/his throat and say, “Your friend should have known better,” I should mention that my friend’s beat is not Iraq or the Bush administration, or the rightwing. Even so, I’ll concede that perhaps s/he should have known better in this particular instance. But the larger point is that there is so much garbage like this being put out every day – Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Clinton the gossip-monger to name a recent set of whoppers – that it is impossible for anyone who is (rightly) skeptical of all public figures and celebrities to separate the truth from ALL the nonsense the rightwing puts out without serious digging.
And that’s the objective of slime like Malkin and Co., to pollute the discourse so it cannot be trusted, even when it’s telling the truth.
Now, why didn’t CBS broadcast Logan’s report? I suspect that among the reasons were the one they actually gave out, that it is was too graphic for primetime. Click on the link above and make up your own mind. And I think my friend truly underestimates how much all media, especially CBS, self-censors information that is damaging to Bush, even at this late date. But one thing is certain: Logan’s reporting has been excellent and honest. To insinuate that she is serving as a conduit for al Qaeda propaganda is outrageous, even if it’s not surprising behavior from Malin.
Just in case you haven’t had your daily dose of shocked, stunned, disbelief at something that is going on in Iraq, check out this story from CBS on conditions in Baghdad:
An assembly line of rotting corpses lined up for burial at Sandy Desert Cemetery is what civil war in Iraq looks like close up.
The bodies are only a fraction of the unidentified bodies sent from Baghdad every few days for mass burial in the southern Shiite city of Kerbala, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.
They come from the main morgue that’s overflowing, relatives too terrified to claim their dead because most are from Iraq’s Sunni minority, murdered by Shiite death squads.
And the morgue itself is believed to be controlled by the same Shiite militia blamed for many of the killings: the Mahdi Army, founded and led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The takeover began after the last election in December when Sadr’s political faction was given control of the Ministry of Health. The U.S. military has documented how Sadr’s Mahdi Army has turned morgues and hospitals into places where death squads operate freely.
The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:
Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.
Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.
The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.
They’re using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.
Iraq’s Health Minister, Ali al-Shameri, is a devoted follower of Moqtada al-Sadr. He disputes the report’s claims.
I don’t know what to say. To listen to Condi Rice make happy talk today almost makes sick to my stomach.
Blitzer: At this point, she comes in for a few hours, a day or whatever. Into Iraq, she immediately goes to the very secure green zone. Does she really see what’s happening inside Iraq? Does she leave there with a better appreciation of either the sectarian violence or the insurgency?
Ware: Of course not, Wolf. I mean you could just imagine the umbrella of security that encases someone like the security of state. But i mean going to from the airport which is its own self-contained little bubble. To the green zone which is the ultimate bubble here in Iraq, i mean, U.S. Officials and contractors and all manner of people will come into six to 12 months in Iraq. But never leave the green zone. They don’t know even what it’s like to walk an Iraqi street. Certainly not without the shroud of heavily-armed American soldiers about them. They don’t know what it’s like to go to someone’s home and sit and talk with them. To shop in the markets. To have blackouts. To not have water. To have the cure for benzene. Secretary Rice is so far from that reality that she couldn’t possibly hope to understand it. Certainly not from fleeting visits to an artificial bubble like the green zone, Wolf?
I just want to second tristero’s endorsement below of Lara Logan’s rapier-like take down of Howie Kurtz’s lame reiteration of GOP talking points. Crooks and Liars has the video, here.
As I wrote earlier in the week:
Memo to the news media: The mere fact that reporters must risk their lives every time they attempt to report the “good news” means that the news, by definition, cannot be all that good. It means that all those new schools and soccer games and litters of adorable puppies exist in the shadow of horrible violence.
And speaking of lameass reiteration of GOP talking points, could someone wise up our sleepy, naive New York Times Babydoll, Elizabeth Bumiller, about how the Republicans work please? Perhaps someone from the “conservative beat” could take her out for coffee. Or maybe she could open her little eyes and look around her:
MR. HARWOOD: … When, when you have, as Charlie said, journalists over there who cannot move around the country to report because they know that, that they’re in danger of being killed at any moment, that tells you about the state of security in the country. It’s not good.
MR. RUSSERT: The White House?
MS. BUMILLER: The other thing that’s interesting, what you didn’t show was the president’s response to her. I was there that day, and he was very, very careful not to jump on her bandwagon. In fact – I mean, obviously, he didn’t have to, she did it for him. But the point is he said, “Look, wait a minute. You know, I understand your frustration, but we have a free press in this country, we can’t tell them what to do.” He pulled back somewhat from her comment.
And I think you’re right, Charlie, that they aren’t – they know they can’t sell this, and when they’ve tried in the past, it has backfired on them.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president also said don’t be afraid to go to blogs and find out some more information.
MS. BUMILLER: Yes. I mean, I mean, I’m, I’m—these are gradations here, I mean, in White House response.
MR. RUSSERT: But is the White House convinced that in order to secure the base of the Republican Party for the president, it doesn’t hurt to go after the media a little bit?
MS. BUMILLER: Not – of course not. They do it all the time. And, and they complain all the time about, about, about what we do. But, but I, I have noticed this past week Scott McClellan saying, the White House press secretary, you know, “We’re not blaming the media for the war in Iraq.” He said that a couple times this week, and so, so it, it’s – they’re – again, they’re being a little more careful here than usual.
That military wife, who just happens to be married to a public affairs officer, made her comments all on her own. Why, the president didn’t publicly endorse them or anything! And Scott McClellan never says one thing while Rove’s RNC minions say another. They are much too straighforward and honest to do something like that.
The bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.
You don’t think that I haven’t been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let’s see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can’t take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they’re going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.
Trump rally speaker: “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” pic.twitter.com/iZoheUraCW
After the 2016 election once everyone recovered from the shock, the analyses of what happened started to gel into a conventional wisdom that said Donald Trump won because a bunch of non-college educated white people were feeling “economic anxiety.” Thousands of stories and features followed with reporters being sent out to rural Pennsylvania diners and Iowa church socials to figure out what those voters really want.
But the fact was that it was an extremely close electoral college victory that could have gone either way with just a handful of votes in a couple of swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis which showed that whenever there was an event such as Hillary Clinton collapsing briefly at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post reporting of Donald Trump’s gross commentary on the Access Hollywood tape, there would be a slight drop in the polls for the affected candidate but they would rebound to the usual stasis within a couple of weeks.
Trump was still struggling to recover from the Access Hollywood scandal at the end of October of that year and Clinton was ahead in the aggregated polling by about 6 points. And then FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to congress announcing that the agency was following up on the Clinton email investigation and the media once again went wild with the story that had captivated them for months. Clinton’s polls immediately dropped and never had a chance to recover because election day was just too soon. The rest is history.
Silver gathered plenty of evidence to back up his theory that the Comey letter and the subsequent media frenzy so close to the election was decisive in Clinton’s loss. Why do I bring that up now? Well, that event happened exactly 8 years ago today. You may remember the famous NY Times front page the next morning:
The polls are a lot tighter today than they were in 2016. But as that year proved, any small misstep can matter greatly because there is no time to recover. And it’s just possible that Donald Trump made one yesterday with his horrifying rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The event was packed and it went on for many hours as his rallies are wont to do. The speakers were pretty much uniformly crude, extreme and insulting in one way or another. It got off to a roaring start with radio host Sid Rosenberg calling Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a “crappy jew” and keeping it classy by saying, “she is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. A bunch of degenerates. Lowlives, Jew-haters, and lowlives. Every one of ’em. Every one of ’em.” So that was nice.
Another speaker, David Rem, supposedly a childhood friend of Trump’s (apparently not true) said, “Kamala Harris is the devil! She is the Antichrist!” A real estate expert (?) named Grant Cardone took to the podium to declare that former California AG, US Senator and current Vice President Harris is “the least qualified person to ever run for any office in America” and claims that she has “pimp handlers,” which I think has a pretty clear implication.
The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan.. in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you.
Trump’s transition chief, Howard Lutnick, yelled “we must crush Jihad!” and waxed on about the 1890s when America was great while Trump’s top adviser Steven Miller really brought home the 1939 vibes with his declaration that “America is for Americans!” (It sounded better in the original German: Nur für Deutsche a genuine Nazi slogan.)
RFK Jr was there too, ranting about the “corruption at the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and the CIA.” Trump later promised him, “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the foods. I’m gonna let him go wild on the medicines.” And Tucker Carlson took the stage to huge applause, laughing maniacally and delivering a crude racist insult toward Kamala Harris:
Tucker: it's going to be pretty tough for them.. say.. Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she's so impressive. As the first is a Samoan Malaysian low I.Q. former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.. pic.twitter.com/s0Vtbzhbgp
Those are just the highlights of some of the introductory speeches before Trump came on and did his usual schtick which had people leaving the venue in droves.
But there was one very special speech given by a “comedian” at the start of the event. His name is Tony Hinchcliffe and he apparently has a very popular podcast. He got the whole event rolling with this line:
Trump rally speaker: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico” pic.twitter.com/pbw88p5PhI
He also had a gag about hanging out with a Black friend and instead of carving pumpkins, they carved a watermelon. But this Puerto Rico “joke” caused a sensation and not for nothing. In this very tight race, Trump is depending on making inroads among Latino voters to make up for his losses among white college educated suburbanites. The line immediately went viral.
Is it just another tempest in a teapot? Could be. Trump is a master at eluding all accountability. He didn’t say anything about it in his own speech but perhaps he’ll address it today and that will be the end of it. But if there’s a lesson from 2016 it’s that a scandal that would normally blow over given enough time can be lethal in the final days of a campaign. In a tied race it’s the last thing any campaign would want.
Of course, everything that was said in that rally should, by all rights, disqualify Trump in the minds of decent people everywhere. I’ll never understand how any of that is considered normal political discourse now. But specifically insulting a group that’s necessary for victory is just plain dumb even for them. All it takes is just a point or two in the right place and it could be the death blow.
Not that you necessarily asked me for it, but since we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the 2000s, I thought I might offer up my picks for (tympani roll, please) the Top 25 films of the 21st Century (so far). So here for your consideration, edification, or (most likely reaction) eternal damnation, is my list, subjective as hell (you might want to bookmark this one for movie night ideas). As per usual, they are presented in alphabetical order, not by preference.
Amelie -I know this one has its haters (?!), but Jean-Pierre Juenet’s beautifully realized film stole this reviewer’s heart. Audrey Tautou lights up the screen as a gregarious loner who decides to become a guardian angel (and benign devil) and commit random, anonymous acts of kindness. The plight of Amelie’s “people in need” is suspiciously similar to her own-those who need that little push to come out of self-imposed exiles and revel in life’s simple pleasures. Of course, our heroine is really in search of her own happiness and fulfillment. Does she find it? You’ll have to see for yourself. Whimsical, original, humanistic and life-affirming, Amelie will melt the most cynical of hearts.
American Splendor– From the streets of Cleveland! Paul Giamatti was born to play underground comic writer Harvey Pekar, the misanthropic file clerk/armchair philosopher who became a cult figure through his collaborations with legendary illustrator R. Crumb. Co-directors Shari Berman and Robert Pulcini keep their biopic fresh and engaging via some unusual choices, like breaking down the fourth wall by having the real Pekar interacting with Giamatti in several scenes; it’s quite effective. Hope Davis is excellent as Pekar’s deadpan wife. Thoroughly engaging and unexpectedly moving.
Another Earth – Writer-director Mike Cahill’s auspicious 2011 narrative feature debut concerns an M.I.T.-bound young woman (co-scripter Brit Marling) who makes a fateful decision to get behind the wheel after a few belts. The resultant tragedy kills two people, and leaves the life of the survivor, a music composer (William Mapother) in shambles. After serving prison time, the guilt-wracked young woman, determined to do penance, ingratiates herself into the widower’s life (he doesn’t realize who she is). Complications ensue.
Another Earth is a “sci-fi” film mostly in the academic sense; don’t expect to see CGI aliens in 3-D. Orbiting somewhere in proximity of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, its concerns are more metaphysical than astrophysical. And not unlike a Tarkovsky film, it demands your full and undivided attention.
Black KkKlansman – So what do you get if you cross Cyrano de Bergerac with Blazing Saddles? You might get Spike Lee’s Black KkKlansman. That is not to say that Lee’s film is a knee-slapping comedy; far from it. Lee takes the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American undercover cop who managed to infiltrate the KKK in Colorado in the early 70s and runs with it, in his inimitable fashion.
I think this is Lee’s most affecting and hard-hitting film since Do the Right Thing (1989). The screenplay (adapted by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Lee from Stallworth’s eponymous memoir) is equal parts biopic, docudrama, police procedural and social commentary, finding a nice balance of drama, humor and suspense. (Full review)
Blade Runner: 2049– So many films passing themselves off as “sci-fi” these days are needlessly loud and jarringly flash-cut. Not this one. Which is to say that Blade Runner 2049 is leisurely paced. The story is not as deep or complex as the film makers want you to think. The narrative is essentially a 90-minute script (by original Blade Runner co-screenwriter Hampton Fancher and Michael Green), stretched to a 164-minute run time.
So why is it on my top 25 list? Well, for one thing, the “language” of film being two-fold (aural and visual), the visual language of Blade Runner 2049 is mesmerizing and immersive. I imagine the most burning question you have about Denis Villeneuve’s film is: “Are the ‘big’ questions that were left dangling at the end of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original answered?” Don’t ask me. I just do eyes. You may not find the answers you seek, but you may find yourself still thinking about this film long after the credits roll. (Full review)
The Brotherhood of the Wolf – If I told you one of the best martial arts films of the 2000s features an 18th-century French libertine/naturalist/philosopher and his enigmatic “blood-brother” (an Iroquois mystic played by future Iron Chef Mark Dacasos) who are on the prowl for a supernaturally huge, man-eating lupine creature terrorizing the countryside-would you avoid eye contact and scurry to the other side of the street?
Christophe Gans’ film defies category; Dangerous Liaisons meets Captain Kronos-Vampire Hunter by way of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the best I can do. Artfully photographed, handsomely mounted and surprising at every turn.
Certified Copy – Just when you’re being lulled into thinking this is going to be one of those brainy, talky, yet pleasantly diverting romantic romps where you and your date can amuse yourselves by placing bets on “will they or won’t they-that is, if they can both shut up long enough to get down to business before the credits roll” propositions, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami throws you a curve-ball.
Then again, maybe this film isn’t so much about “thinking”, as it is about “perceiving”. Because if it’s true that a “film” is merely (if I may quote Orson Welles) “a ribbon of dreams”-then Certified Copy, like any true work of art, is simply what you perceive it to be-nothing more, nothing less. Even if it leaves you scratching your head, you get to revel in the luminosity of Juliette Binoche’s amazing performance; there’s pure poetry in every glance, every gesture. (Full review)
Computer Chess – The most original sci-fi film of 2013 proved you don’t need a $300 million budget and 3-D technology to blow people’s minds. For his retro 80s-style mockumentary, Andrew Bujalski finds verisimilitude via a vintage B&W video camera (which makes it seem as if you’re watching events unfold on a slightly fuzzy closed-circuit TV), and “documents” a tournament where nerdy computer chess programmers from all over North America assemble once a year to match algorithmic prowess. Not unlike a Christopher Guest satire, Bujalski throws idiosyncratic characters into a jar, and then steps back to watch. Just when you think you’ve got the film sussed as a gentle satirical jab at computer geek culture, things get weird…then weirder. Dig that final shot! (Full review)
Driveways – There is beauty in simplicity. Korean American director Andrew Ahn and writers Hannah Bo and Paul Thureen fashion a beautiful, elegantly constructed drama from a simple setup.
A single Korean American mom (Hong Chau) and her 8-year old son (Lucas Jaye) move into her deceased sister’s house. She discovers her estranged sis was a classic hoarder and it appears they will be there longer than she anticipated. In the interim, her shy son strikes up a friendship with a neighbor (Brian Dennehy), a kindly widower and Korean War vet.
I know…it sounds like “a show about nothing”, but it’s about everything-from racism to ageism and beyond. Humanistic and insightful. Wonderful performances by all, but the perennially underrated Dennehy is a standout.
The Fellowship of the Ring – Taken as a whole, Peter Jackson’s sprawling 3-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s revered Lord of the Rings trilogy is not without its flaws (and fanboy-lamented abridgements and revisions), but he damn near gets it all pitch-perfect in the first installment. Even though it is only the beginning of the epic tale, the first book has always been always my favorite. I think it’s because it sparks that joy of first discovering Tolkien’s wondrous fantasy world, and Jackson’s film does it proud. The two sequels (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) tend to go more over the top, but this film maintains a perfect blend of character, heart, and rousing heroics; not to mention an immersive sense of a mythic time and place.
The Grand Budapest Hotel – In the interest of upholding my credo to be forthright with my readers (all three of you), I will confess that, with the exception of his engaging 1996 directing debut, Bottle Rocket, and the fitfully amusing Rushmore, I have been somewhat immune to the charms of Wes Anderson.
I now have a second confession to make. I loved The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film is not dissimilar to his previous work; in that it is akin to a live action cartoon, drenched in whimsy, expressed in bold primary colors, populated by quirky characters (who would never exist outside of the strange Andersonian universe they live in) caught up in a quirky narrative with quirky twists and turns (I believe the operative word here, is “quirky”). So why did I like it? I cannot really say. My conundrum (if I may paraphrase one of my favorite lines from The Producers) would be this: “Where did he go so right?” (Full review)
The Irishman – If I didn’t know better, I’d wager Martin Scorsese’s epic crime drama was partially intended to be a black comedy. That’s because I thought a lot of it was so funny. “Funny” how? It’s funny, y’know, the …the story. OK, the story isn’t “ha-ha” funny; there’s all these mob guys, and there’s a lot of stealing and extorting and shooting and garroting. It’s just, y’know, it’s … the way Scorsese tells the story and everything.
I know this sounds weird, but there’s something oddly reassuring about tucking into a Scorsese film that features some of the most seasoned veterans of his “mob movie repertory” like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel; akin to putting on your most well-worn pair of comfy slippers. And with the addition of Al Pacino …fuhgeddaboudit! (Full review)
Love and Mercy – Paul Dano’s Oscar-worthy performance as the 1960s era Brian Wilson is a revelation, capturing the duality of a troubled genius/sweet man-child to a tee. If this were a conventional biopic, this would be “good enough” as is. But director Bill Pohlad (and screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner) make this one go to “11”, by interpolating Brian’s peak period with his bleak period…the Dr. Eugene Landy years (early 80s through the early 90s). This “version” of Brian is played by John Cusack, who has rarely been better; this is a real comeback performance for him. There are no bad performances in this film, down to the smallest parts. I usually try to avoid hyperbole, but I’ll say it: This is one of the best rock ’n’ roll biopics I’ve seen in years. (Full review)
The Man on the Train – There are a handful of films I have become emotionally attached to, usually for reasons I can’t completely fathom. This 2002 drama is one of them.
Best described as an “existential noir”, Patrice LeConte’s relatively simple tale of two men in their twilight years with disparate life paths (a retired poetry teacher and a career felon) forming an unexpected deep bond turns into a transcendent film experience. French pop star Johnny Hallyday and screen veteran Jean Rochefort deliver mesmerizing performances. There was a 2011 remake…but frankly, I don’t see the point, because this is a perfect film.
Man on Wire– Late in the summer of 1974, a diminutive Frenchman named Philippe Petit took a casual morning stroll across a ¾” steel cable, stretched between the two towers of the then-unfinished World Trade Center. On the surface, this may appear to be a straightforward documentary about this eccentric high wire artist who was either incredibly brave, or incredibly stupid. In actuality, it is one of the best suspense/heist movies of the decade, although no guns are drawn and nothing gets stolen. It is also very romantic, although it is not a traditional love story. Like Petit’s sky-high walk itself, James Marsh’s film is ultimately an act of pure aesthetic grace, and deeply profound. (Full review)
The Mayor of the Sunset Strip– This amazing rockumentary, an alternately exhilarating and melancholy portrait of L.A. music scene fixture Rodney Bingenheimer was directed by George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl). The diminutive, skittish and soft-spoken Rodney comes off like Andy Warhol’s west coast doppelganger. Although the film is ostensibly “about” Rodney, it is ultimately a whirlwind time trip through rock music’s evolution, filtered through a coked-out L.A. haze and informed by its subject’s Zelig-like propensity to have been photographed with seemingly everybody who was ever anybody in the business. So is he a true “rock impresario”, or just a glorified Rupert Pupkin? You decide.
Memories of Murder – Buoyed by its artful production and knockout performances, this visceral and ultimately haunting 2003 police procedural from director Joon-ho Bong (Parasite) really gets under your skin. Based on the true story of South Korea’s first known serial killer, it follows a pair of rural homicide investigators as they search for a prime suspect.
Initially, they seem bent on instilling more fear into the local citizenry than the lurking killer, as they proceed to violate every civil liberty known to man. Soon, however, the team’s dynamic is tempered by the addition of a more cool-headed detective from Seoul, who takes the profiler approach. The film doubles as a fascinating glimpse into modern South Korean society and culture.
Midnight in Paris – For this 2011 romantic fantasy, writer-director Woody Allen continued his European travelogue that began in England (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream), trekked to Spain (VickyCristina Barcelona) then after a respite in his home turf of N.Y.C. (Whatever Works) headed back to the U.K. (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) before settling in the City of Light.
Allen re-examines many of his signature themes-particularly regarding the mysteries of attraction and the flightiness of the Muse. He also offers keen insights about those who romanticize the past. Do we really believe in our hearts that everything was better “then”? Isn’t getting lost in nostalgia just another way to shirk responsibility for dealing with the present? Bolstered by a wonderful cast, Midnight in Paris is romantic, intelligent, perceptive, magical, and yes…very funny. (Full review)
Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always – Writer-director Eliza Hittman’s timely drama centers on 17-year old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) , a young woman in a quandary over an unwanted pregnancy who has only one real confidant; her cousin, BFF and schoolmate Skylar (Talia Ryder). They both work part-time as grocery clerks in rural Pennsylvania (a state where the parent of a minor must consent before an abortion is provided). After a decidedly unhelpful visit to her local “crisis pregnancy center” and a harrowing failed attempt to self-induce an abortion, Autumn and Skylar scrape together funds and hop a bus to New York City.
Hittman really gets inside the heads of her two main characters; helped immensely by wonderful, naturalistic performances from Flanigan and Ryder. Hittman has made a film that is quietly observant, compassionate, and non-judgmental. She does not proselytize one way or the other about the ever-thorny right-to-life debate. This is not an allegory in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, because it doesn’t have to be; it is a straightforward and realistic story of one young woman’s personal journey. The reason it works so well on a personal level is because of its universality; it could easily be any young woman’s story in the here and now.(Full review)
No Country For Old Men – The bodies pile up faster than you can say Blood Simple in Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterfully constructed 2007 neo-noir (which earned them a shared Best Director trophy). The brothers’ Oscar-winning screenplay (adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel) is rich in characterization and thankfully devoid of the self-conscious quirkiness that has left some of their latter-day films teetering on self-parody.
The story is set among the sagebrush and desert heat of the Tex-Mex border, where the deer and the antelope play. One day, good ol’ boy Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) is shootin’ at some food (the playful antelope) when he encounters a grievously wounded pit bull. The blood trail leads to discovery of the aftermath of a shootout. As this is Coen country…that twisty trail does lead to a twisty tale.
Tommy Lee Jones gives a wonderful low-key performance as an old-school, Gary Cooper-ish lawman who (you guessed it) comes from a long line of lawmen. Jones’ face is a craggy, world-weary road map of someone who has reluctantly borne witness to every inhumanity man is capable of, and is counting down the days to imminent retirement (‘cos it’s becoming no country for old men…).
The cast is outstanding. Javier Bardem picked up a Best Supporting Actor statue for his turn as a psychotic hit man. His performance is understated, yet menacing, made all the more unsettling by his Peter Tork haircut. Kelly McDonald and Woody Harrelson are standouts as well. Curiously, Roger Deakins wasn’t nominated for his cinematography, but his work on this film ranks among his best. (Full review)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – “Surely (you’re thinking), a film involving the Manson Family and directed by Quentin Tarantino must feature a cathartic orgy of blood and viscera…amirite?” Sir or madam, all I can tell you is that I am unaware of any such activity or operation… nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir or madam.
What I am prepared to share is this: Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt have rarely been better, Margot Robbie is radiant and angelic as Sharon Tate, and 9-year-old moppet Julia Butters nearly steals the film. Los Angeles gives a fabulous and convincing performance as 1969 Los Angeles. Oh, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is now my favorite “grown-up” Quentin Tarantino film (after Jackie Brown). (Full review)
Skyfall – Assembled with great intelligence and verve by American Beauty director Sam Mendes, this tough, spare and relatively gadget-free 2012 Bond caper harkens back to the gritty, straightforward approach of FromRussia with Love (the best of the early films).
That being said, Mendes hasn’t forgotten his obligation to fulfill the franchise’s tradition of delivering a slam-bang, pull out all the stops opening sequence, which I daresay outdoes all previous. Interestingly, the film’s narrative owes more to Howard Hawks than it does to Ian Fleming; I gleaned a healthy infusion of Rio Bravo in Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s screenplay.
Star Daniel Craig finally settled comfortably into the character with this entry; his Bond feels a little more “lived in” than in the previous installments, where he was a little stiff and unsure about where he should be at times.
This is one of the most beautifully photographed Bond films in recent memory, thanks to DP Roger Deakins (one particularly memorable fight scene, staged in a darkened high rise suite and silhouetted against the backdrop of Shanghai’s myriad neon lights, approaches high art). Bond geeks will be pleased; and anyone up for pure popcorn escapism will not be disappointed. Any way you look at it, this is a terrific entertainment. (Full review)
Samsara – Whether you see Ron Fricke’s film as a deep treatise on the cyclic nature of the Omniverse, or merely as an assemblage of pretty pictures, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. The man who gave us the similar cinematic tone poems Chronos and Baraka drops a clue early on in his latest film, as we observe a group of Buddhist monks painstakingly creating a sand mandala (it must take days).
At the very end of the film, we revisit the artists, who now sit in silent contemplation of their lovely creation. This (literal) Moment of Zen turns out to be the preface to the monks’ next project-the ritualistic de-construction of the painting (which I assume must take an equal amount of time). Yes, it is a very simple metaphor for the transitory nature of beauty, life, the universe and everything. But, as they say, there’s beauty in simplicity. (Full review)
Spirited Away-Innovative Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki has made a lot of great films, but this 2001 stunner may well be his crowning achievement. A young girl and her parents inadvertently stumble into a resort spa reserved exclusively for traditional Japanese deities and other assorted denizens of the spirit world. Needless to say, this “security breach” throws the phantasmagorical residents into quite a tizzy; Mom and Dad are turned into barnyard animals and their daughter has to rely on her wits and previously untapped inner strength to save them. Visually stunning and imaginative beyond description, it also tells a beautiful story-funny, touching, exciting and empowering.
There Will Be Blood– What you see in the dialog-free prologue of Paul Thomas Andersons’ gripping epic may not be as seminal as Kubrick’s “dawn of man” sequence in 2001, but it does put the focus on something just as primordial. It is something that is buried deep within the capitalist DNA-the relentless drive to amass wealth and power through willful exploitation and opportunism. And this very American “ideal” (love it or loathe it) has never been so perfectly embodied as it is in Daniel Day Lewis’ magnificent performance as self-made oil man Daniel Plainview. In his worldview, you are either with him, or you are his “competitor”. And trust me-he WILL “…drink your milkshake”. (Full review)
The G.O.P. response to President Biden’s truthful statement that some Republicans want to sunset Medicare and Social Security has been highly gratifying. In other words, the party has reacted with sheer panic — plus a startling lack of message discipline, with both Mike Pence and Nikki Haley saying that actually, yes, they do want to privatize or “reform” Social Security, which is code for gutting it.
Now Republicans are talking about slashing “woke” programs like Medicaid and food stamps. It’s going to be fun when the party realizes who depends on these programs and how popular Medicaid, in particular, is even among its own voters.
The press’s response to Biden’s remarks has, however, been less gratifying. I’ve seen numerous declarations from mainstream media that of course Medicare and Social Security can’t be sustained in their present form. And not just in the opinion pages: There’s been at least some reversion to the early 2010s practice of including anti-social-insurance editorializing in what are supposed to be straight news reports, with highly disputable claims about these programs’ futures presented as simple facts.
So let me try to set the record straight. Yes, our major social programs are on a trajectory that will cause them to cost more in the future than they do today. But how we deal with that trajectory is a choice, and the solution need not involve benefit cuts.
A good starting point on all these issues is the Congressional Budget Office report on the long-term budget outlook — a report issued every year, with the most recent report released in July. (The numbers were updated this month, but the basic picture hasn’t changed.) The C.B.O. does excellent work, without a policy agenda, and is an extremely useful resource.
The current report offers a very clear depiction of both the budget challenges facing our major social insurance programs and the sources of those challenges. Here’s my favorite figure, showing projected changes in spending over the next 30 years:
But the budget office is not necessarily always right — in fact, the ways in which it has proved wrong in the past are highly illuminating. To put this chart in context, there’s a widespread narrative to the effect that Medicare and Social Security are unsustainable because they won’t be able to handle the mass retirement of baby boomers. But as you can see right away, only about half the projected rise in spending is the result of population aging. The rest comes from the assumption — and that’s all it is, an assumption — that medical costs will rise faster than gross domestic product.
Before I get there, a word about demography. You might think that the projected aging is all about the baby boomers. But the baby boom is generally considered to have ended in 1964. So the last of us — yes, I’m one of them — will hit 65 in 2029, just six years from now. Most baby boomers are already there.
So why does the C.B.O. project continuing budget pressure from aging? Because it assumes that life expectancy, specifically life expectancy at age 65, will keep rising. That has certainly been true in the past, but given America’s mortality problems, I’m not sure that it’s safe to assume this trend will continue at past rates.
Still, let’s grant the aging bit. What about “additional cost growth” in health care?
Well, historically health spending has risen faster than G.D.P. — largely, we think, because doctors can now treat many more things than in the past, and this effect has outpaced cost savings from improved technology. But excess cost growth has slowed considerably since around 2010 — perhaps in part because of cost-reduction aspects of the Affordable Care Act. In any case, the leveling off is unmistakable. Here’s national health spending as a percent of G.D.P.:
This health-cost slowdown has, as it should, affected budget projections. Back during the early 2010s, the heyday of the Very Serious People who insisted that Medicare and Social Security were unsustainable, C.B.O. projections assumed that health spending would grow at historical rates. This meant that under current policies long-run projected spending was indeed enormous, and obviously unsustainable.
But that has changed, a lot. I don’t know if people still repeating the old slogans about the need for entitlement reform realize just how much projections of future spending have come down. But here’s a comparison between projected Medicare spending as a percent of G.D.P. from the 2009 long-term budget outlook and the most recent projection:
A side note: The C.B.O. used to do 75-year projections, but apparently realized at some point that these are of little value, because nobody has any idea what the world may look like in 75 years. I used to joke that long before we got there, Skynet would have killed us all, but now we know better: Bing’s chatbot will do us in. In any case, the projections now go only 30 years ahead.
Anyway, C.B.O. projections now show social insurance spending as a percentage of G.D.P. eventually rising by about 5 points, which is still a lot but not unimaginably large. And here’s the thing: Half of that is still the assumed rise in health care costs. And there are things we can do to control costs that don’t involve cutting off Americans’ benefits. Bear in mind both that U.S. health care is far more expensive than that of any other nation — without delivering better results — and that since 2010 we’ve already done quite a lot to “bend the curve.” It’s not at all hard to imagine that improving the incentives to focus on medically effective care could limit cost growth to well below what the C.B.O. is projecting, even now.
And if we can do that, the rise in entitlement spending over the next three decades might be more like 3 percent of G.D.P. That’s not an inconceivable burden. America has the lowest taxes of any advanced nation; given the political will, of course we could come up with 3 percent more of G.D.P. in revenue.
So no, Social Security and Medicare aren’t inherently unsustainable, doomed by demography. We can keep these programs, which are so deeply embedded in American society, if we want to. Killing them would be a choice.
It’s exhausting having to set the record straight on this stuff over and over again. But they won’t stop trying to kill them so we have to defend them with the facts.
The term “fog of unknowability” escaped me until Eric Boehlert mentioned it this morning. But while the term is unfamiliar, the tactic is not. Beohlert references a March 2017 essay at Vanity Fair that asks whether Donald Trump learned the tactic from the Russians:
Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who has studied Russian propaganda for years, sees major similarities between Putin’s and Trump’s approaches. “Create chaos in the system, such that you don’t know what is the truth or not the truth,” he says. The Kremlin does this by flooding television and digital media with biased coverage and wanton spin. The Trump administration has discovered something equally effective: lying to reporters and publicly attacking critics are like tossing grenades into the media eco-system. The press is constantly scrambling to respond to a never-ending river of slime, and the system is gradually overwhelmed.
Over time, this chaos creates what Pomerantsev describes as a “fog of unknowability.” Kellyanne Conway espouses “alternative facts” on NBC’s Meet the Press. President Trump continues to insist that millions voted illegally in the general election. The president’s relationships with government agencies like the C.I.A. are bitterly disputed. Objective reality splinters under the weight of falsehoods, conspiracies, and doubt, and the rules begin to change. “In that fog, norms and rational debate disappear, and all that matters is whoever’s faster, harder, more daring,” Pomerantsev says. “A different kind of calculus appears.”
As Boehlert notes, “the fog of unknowability” approach is “embraced by the Republican Party, Trump and Fox News.” The ability to define reality one way one day and another the next might have originated with the Ministry of Truth. By which Orwell alluded to Soviet control of information under Joseph Stalin. A Soviet joke well-known by the 1970s made fun of state-controlled newspapers Pravda (“truth”) and Izvestia (“news”): “There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia“.
Fox News is worse. When pressed, Fox may admit to being infotainment. Disinfotainment is more accurate.
It’s a stunning collective that’s become more pronounced during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The evidence of that alliance was on display when Kremlin forces teamed up with Fox News and GOP players to push the obvious distraction about Ukraine being the home of secret, U.S.-funded bioweapons that target certain ethnicities, thereby producing some sort of justification for Russia’s land war.
It’s shocking to watch an American media outlet such as Fox routinely suggest the U.S. provoked the Ukraine invasion, side with Russia over America, and smear Ukrainians as being unworthy of U.S. support. Still, the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.
Look at how the Washington Post recently described Putin-era propaganda: “Russian disinformation often begins with a speck of fact, which is then twisted into a full-blown conspiracy theory. The technique makes it easier to spread and take root among the country’s supporters.” Sound familiar? They’re describing the foundation of Fox News’ daily programming.
For some reason though, the D.C. media which so easily identifies Russian propaganda, refuse to apply the same term when the GOP engages in the exact same behavior.
Note that the Post piece suggested Fox News’ Tucker Carlson had “fallen” for Russian disinformation about a bioweapons program in Ukraine. Trust me, nobody at Fox News, in the right-wing media, or inside the GOP has “fallen” for the bioweapons story — no one got duped. They have knowingly embraced the campaign of lies. That’s why state-run Russia TV is encouraged to air clips of Carlson. The two validate each other.
“The real opposition is the media,” Trump adviser Steve Bannon told author Michael Lewis. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Author Jonathan Rauch said of Bannon’s approach, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
Which raises the question of why an “American” former president, his advisers, right-wing pundits, and his favorite media outlet have adopted tactics not just from Putin but formalized by Stalin.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
In case you haven’t seen this Australian TV interview of the nutball Sidney Powell, here it is:
Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine has done an invaluable service by putting together the timeline of Trump’s Big Lie. I’m posting it here for the record. It’s my hope that we’re going to need it when the January 6th Committee gets rolling:
The House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.
A full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome.
Laying the Groundwork: Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016
Epitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal votes.
This wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:
Kobach’s plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.
The commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters’ personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies.
Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting in the 2018 midterms
In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting but lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving) anything in particular, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and mailed before Election Day but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin, which McCarthy was still pushing a year later, but warned that “all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost sounds like a dress rehearsal for how they’ll behave if they do poorly again next year.”
The president himself made similar allegations after the 2018 midterms, though he focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans Day, Trump declared that Florida’s Senate and governor’s race should be called in favor of the Republicans who were ahead on Election Night, though legally cast overseas military and civilian mail ballots had yet to be counted. He tweeted, falsely, that these “massively infected” ballots had shown up “out of nowhere” and thus must be ignored:
The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!
This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about late-arriving (or just late-counted) mail ballots on Election Night 2020.
Trump suggests that voting by mail is inherently fraudulent
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, states holding primaries and special elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of State had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters.
Twitter, in what was then an unprecedented action, took down two Trump tweets in which he mendaciously attacked California for “sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how they got there.” Actually, of course, the ballots went only to registered voters.
Trump’s goal seemed clear: By asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a bogus justification for contesting election results in any state he lost.
Trump prepares to exploit the “Red Mirage”
Team Trump’s parallel strategy was to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as possible (which is why one analyst dubbed the scheme the “Red Mirage”). As Election Day approached, there were many signs that, simply by attacking voting by mail as illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in discouraging his supporters from voting that way, thus producing the desired Election Night “skew” in his favor.
In September, Trump’s hostility to mail ballots and threats to just claim victory became more intense and regular. In his first debate with Biden, on September 30, the plan to contest any election loss was made plain. Following an incoherent diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to “stay calm” and “not engage in any civil unrest” during the ballot-counting process, which would likely be drawn out due to unprecedented levels of voting by mail. “Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.
“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” Trump replied. “If it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent onboard. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”
November 4, 2020 – January 5, 2021
The Post election scramble: Trump declares victory on Election Night
With Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately lose, he made his long-awaited play. At around 3 a.m. on November 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.
It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.
Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in court
A steadily changing cast of Trump campaign lawyers, eventually featuring histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61 were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in Pennsylvania, involved a small number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.
There were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but Trump lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania’s expansion of voting by mail was invalid because it was not enacted by a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
By then, the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”
Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators
Arguably the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politico observed, it was a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.” The opposition of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such maneuvers absent an unlikely court finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to Trump’s requests for assistance.
Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes
Trump continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.
On December 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23, Trump called Bonnie Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since “I won [Georgia] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
On January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering by appealing directly to Raffensperger to find him some more votes. “So look. All I want to do is this,” the president said in a recorded conversation. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt”
Trump was also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.
Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was “investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” Clark reportedly prepared similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
None of these letters was ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue told Clark in an email obtained by ABC News.
The @JudiciaryDems investigation into former President Trump’s attempt to enlist the DOJ in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has already revealed some frightening truths. Just yesterday, we heard seven hours of testimony from Jeffrey Rosen alone. Much more is to come.
In recent closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent” efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on the call.
“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”
Only a wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results,” according to the New York Times.
Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s electoral votes
“It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” pic.twitter.com/cIZvfCMfnt
Trump calls on congressional allies to block confirmation of Biden’s win
The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks announced in early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.
Trump promptly thanked Brooks publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since every challenge requires the support of at least one member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.
This set the stage for the Capitol Riot.
January 6, 2021 – Present
The Insurrection Goes Live
For weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 to protest Biden’s election (and back whatever play he could manage in Congress). On December 20, he tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election…. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
By December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism, were planning to converge on D.C. in response to Trump’s summons. “Stop the Steal,” a rubric invented by Roger Stone in 2016 in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the protesters’ organizing slogan.
As a joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who subsequently broke into the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Was this the smoking gun from his address?
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.
Or maybe this?
We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
Equally significant from a broader perspective was Trump’s language echoing the lies he told about Democrats “finding” votes during the wee hours on Election Night, which he would continue to use as a rallying cry long afterward:
Our election was over at ten o’clock in the evening. We’re leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.
And then late in the evening, or early in the morning — boom — these explosions of bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.
Arizona conducts an endless election “audit”
Even after the failure of the January 6 insurrection, and then Biden’s inauguration, cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from holding office again after his second impeachment. Then he and his supporters devised another way to keep pointlessly challenging the 2020 results. In Arizona (with sporadic efforts to repeat the tactic in other states, so far unsuccessfully), hard-core Trump activists in the state senate ordered an election “audit” (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County, which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried it in 2016.
This strange exercise, conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, was supposed to last 60 days but has now gone on for more than five months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might call Biden’s Arizona win into question. The idea seems to be to muddy the waters just enough that those who already believe in a Biden “steal” can nourish their grievances right up until the next presidential cycle.
Trump keeps the Big Lie alive
There’s been a lot of media derision about Trump’s postpresidential efforts to wave the bloody shirt of the stolen election. It’s easy to assume the 45th president is just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.
It’s entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor will build on the lies he deployed so regularly during the 2020 election cycle and plan a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November 5, 2024, as I argued in April 2021:
If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense …
And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth.
Put together shrewd vote suppressors, audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a better slate of lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite possibly a Republican-controlled Congress, and the insurrection plot could finally succeed.
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