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I’ve been watching all these GOP politicians wring their hands over impeachment, saying that people are hurting because of the election and we need healing and reconciliation. Then why were mad when they won too?

I wrote this after the 2016 election when the Trump voters were running around assaulting people. Yes, they did it then too.

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest on the left has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts, while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by people on the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there also have been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In a “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

 Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by his saying “don’t be afraid” — followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat.

And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and those with minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

An incident in Brooklyn this past weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women in a restaurant were bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the two women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave a meal without charge to calm the two down. But after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: Who gets that mad after winning? It’s not as if the two women were rubbing the man’s nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a stranger (a woman) in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction has come to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable: Right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is why the right-wingers are so angry. It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him. We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them,” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”That is not going to happen. Trump’s forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn’t vote for him. And they won’t. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers’ guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It’s all on them.Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

What else can we do?

They are perpetually angry, whether they win or they lose, because they simply cannot accept that people disagree with them. I don’t know what kind of psychology this is, but it’s pervasive. And it’s a very difficult problem for a democracy.

I gotcher socialist hellhole for you, right here

Bring it Trumpie.

.

“Let us have faith that right makes might”

by digby

President Obama is on the campaign trail wondering why the people who won the election are so mad all the time. And a lot of people are saying “good question” on social media.

I will offer, once again (I know some of you are sick of it) my post attempting to answer that from the early days after the election.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

We must be avowedly with them

by digby

As I have many times before, I wrote about the right’s strange “winner” psychology for Salon today:

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts on the left while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there have also been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by him saying “don’t be afraid” followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat. And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

This incident in Brooklyn over the weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women were in a restaurant bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave them their meal without charge to calm them down, but after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: who gets that mad when they’ve won? It’s not as if those women were rubbing his nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a a stranger, a woman, in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction came to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or this ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable — right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when the their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is why they are so angry. It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him.We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”

That is not going to happen. Trump’s forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn’t vote for him. And they won’t. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers’ guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be an ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It’s all on them.

Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

What else can we do? 

Citizens all over the country rose to the occasion and went out and organized and ran for office and gave their money.

Hopefully, Tuesday will show that their faith was not misplaced.

.

Authoritarian wingnuts rising — Trump’s potential new boyfriend

by digby

The first round of voting occurred in Brazil’s presidential election yesterday. This man received nearly 50% of the vote and almost won outright. He is the favorite to win the runoff:

Many people in Brazil cannot bring themselves to utter the name of the rightwing extremist expected to win the first round of voting in the country’s presidential election on Sunday. On social networks, the former army officer Jair Bolsonaro is often referred to simply as “the thing”.

To understand why Bolsonaro evokes such dread, consider some of the things he has said in the last few years:

• “I had four sons, but then I had a moment of weakness, and the fifth was a girl.”

• “I’m not going to rape you, because you’re very ugly” – to a female representative in Congress.

• “I’d rather have my son die in a car accident than have him show up dating some guy.”

• “I’m pro-torture, and the people are too.”

• “They don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation any more” – referring to quilombolas, the black descendants of rebel African slaves.

• “You can be sure that if I get there [the presidency], there’ll be no money for NGOs. If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home. Not one centimetre will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas.”

• “You won’t change anything in this country through voting – nothing, absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, you’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do. Killing 30,000, starting with FHC [former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso]. Killing. If a few innocent people die, that’s alright.”

Bolsonaro has also said he will not accept the election result unless he is the winner – only to backtrack after a negative reaction.

When president Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ party (PT) was forced from office in 2016 through an impeachment process of dubious legal merit, Bolsonaro viciously dedicated his vote “to the memory of colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra”. Ustra was one of the most sadistic torturers and murderers in the military dictatorship that choked Brazil between 1964 and 1985. He died without answering for his crimes.

For this election, Bolsonaro’s children and supporters have printed the torturer’s face on their T-shirts, with the phrase “Ustra lives!”.

By celebrating Ustra, Bolsonaro has rekindled the horror of that period. And he can do it only because Brazil has never punished those who tortured, kidnapped and killed in the name of the state. Bolsonaro is the monstrous product of Brazilian democracy’s silence about the crimes committed by its former dictatorship.

Bolsonaro embodies the grimmest forces of old and new Brazil

In August, Ludimilla Teixeira, a black anarchist born in one of the poorest communities of Salvador, Bahia, created a Facebook page: Women United Against Bolsonaro. The page, which accepts only female followers, now has almost 4 million of them. A movement grew out of this group, last week spurring hundreds of thousands of women – and men – on to the streets of Brazil and around the world. Many carried banners with the slogan and hashtag: #EleNão – #NotHim. It was the biggest demonstration organised by women in Brazil’s history.

Famous Brazilian women recorded videos explaining why #NotHim. Considering everything the far-right candidate has said in public, such explaining might seem unnecessary, but this is a feature of today’s Brazil – and today’s world.

Explaining hasn’t had any effect. Bolsonaro is less a post-truth phenomenon than a phenomenon of what I call self-truth. The content of what he says doesn’t matter: what matters is the act of saying it. Aesthetics have replaced ethics. By saying everything and anything, no matter how violent, he is labelled truthful or sincere by his voters at a time when politicians are being shunned as frauds and liars. At the same time, “truth” has become an absolute and a personal choice. The individual has been taken to a radical extreme.

Bolsonaro, “the thing”, is a retired army captain. He’s being sold as new to voters, but he’s anything but. In his 26 years as a federal lawmaker, he managed to pass only two of his proposed laws.

Meanwhile, his running mate, retired general Hamilton Mourão, has said publicly that, if elected, the president could launch a self-coup backed by the military.

Bolsonaro embodies the grimmest forces of old and new Brazil. Most grileiros(public land grabbers) and big farmers support him in the Amazon – one of the regions that will be hit hardest if he is elected. Brazil ranks as the deadliest country for environmental activists, and there is the grave potential for violence to explode, along with greater deforestation, if Bolsonaro wins.

In the cities, he has the support of the leaders of evangelical religious empires, who defend the concept that marriage is possible only between a man and a woman. The far-right candidate also leads among wealthier, more educated men, reflecting the calibre of the Brazilian elites.

In addition to his staunch supporters, he attracts a slice of the population that is simply anti-PT. These people hate the PT for many reasons. Some because under former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Rousseff, the party reduced poverty, widened university access to black students, and strengthened rights for housemaids – for a long time, a form of modern slavery in Brazil. Others because they cannot forgive a party that rose to power promising change, only to become corrupted and aloof. Poor, mostly black, women are most vociferously against Bolsonaro.

During the first decade of this century, Brazil appeared to be a country that was finally reaching for the future. Now it seems mired in the past. The violence of this election has plunged Brazilians into a kind of collective convulsion. There is no other subject; people are starting to feel sick with fear. On the left, the reality of a dictator’s defender being the choice of 39% of voters, according to recent polls, is more frightening than any dystopian fiction.

He got 46%.

This is happening.

Despite misgivings, Brazil's business community begins coalescing around far-right candidate. https://t.co/KZECf2UdPn— The Associated Press (@AP) October 6, 2018

.

What’s with the right wing sore winner syndrome?

by digby

Here is one thing I don’t understand: why is the MAGA crowd always in a perpetual state of anger even after they win. Trump gets elected, they stayed angry. They hold all levers of power in dc, still angry. They win tax vote, still angry. They win kavanaugh, still angry.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 6, 2018

In response to that, I’m re-upping this piece I wrote shortly after the election that I think helps to explain it. Or, at least, analyze it. I can’t say that I truly understand what makes thee people tick, other than a propensity for cruelty, paranoia and a deep need for dominance.

Anyway …

Thursday, November 17, 2016

We must be avowedly with them

by digby

As I have many times before, I wrote about the right’s strange “winner” psychology for Salon today:

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts on the left while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there have also been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by him saying “don’t be afraid” followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat. And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

This incident in Brooklyn over the weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women were in a restaurant bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave them their meal without charge to calm them down, but after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: who gets that mad when they’ve won? It’s not as if those women were rubbing his nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a a stranger, a woman, in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction came to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or this ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable — right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when the their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is why they are so angry. It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him.We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”

That is not going to happen. Trump’s forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn’t vote for him. And they won’t. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers’ guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be an ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It’s all on them.

Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

What else can we do? 

Ingraham’s crusade

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

The big earthquake of the 2018 primary season so far has been the unseating of powerful member of the Democratic House leader Joe Crowley by Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez in NY. This isn’t a common occurrence, needless to say, but it does happen from time to time, most recently four years ago when an obscure economics professor named David Brat unseated GOP House leader and “young gun” Eric Cantor of Virginia. At the time, much of the chattering class chalked the defeat up to “all politics is local” saying that Cantor had neglected the district. That analysis was wrong. Brat won because of one very hot issue that was boiling over in the right wing media: immigration.

The right wing star most responsible for pushing that issue into the GOP mainstream was talk radio host Laura Ingraham. She even went to the district to campaign for Brat, solely on the basis of his hardcore stance against the central American kids who were in the news at the time for gathering at the border seeking asylum.

Ingraham was on a tear during that crisis, ranting daily about the ungrateful little wretches coming to our sacred borders asking for an undeserved handout. When she heard that some of these refugees weren’t taking to the food in their detention centers she described them as spoiled brats and mocked them by playing an old TV commercial with the slogan “yo qiero Taco Bell?”.  She made this declaration to the kids themselves:

“Oh no you won’t. This is our country… Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No you won’t.”

During this period Donald Trump was seriously considering jumping into the presidential election and he had his friend Roger Stone’s hired hand, Sam Nunberg, listen to thousands of hours of talk radio and report back to him about what they were talking about. He didn’t have any strong feelings about immigration at the time but when he got a strong response at the conservative CPAC gathering that year for saying “we either have borders or we don’t,” he was all in. He rode that anti-immigration wave all the way to the White House.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment had been trying to tamp down this growing xenophobia because it had been obvious for a while that the problem these talk radio zealots were accusing the Democrats of trying to solve by encouraging immigration was far more applicable to their own party. The 2012 “autopsy” made it very clear that the GOP was in grave danger of becoming an all white party in a country that was becoming less and less white. The lesson that the activists like Ingraham took from that was to try to reverse the trend and rid the country of as many people of color as possible. And they were joined by a faction in the US congress led by the man who would become one of Trump’s earliest supporters, Senator Jeff Sessions.

In 2015, he and his aide, now Senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, drafted a document that laid out a plan to end not only illegal immigration but put a stop to all legal immigration as well, arguing that the country could not “absorb” any more people from other cultures. It pointed to the 1924 Immigration Act, which curbed immigration of most non-whites, Catholics, Jews, Arabs, southern Italians for several decades, as its model.

From the moment Sessions signed on with Trump (and subsequently submitted to Trump’s ongoing ritual humiliation of him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation) it has been clear that he did so because he saw the best opportunity he’s ever had to advance this nativist and racist agenda.

The Attorney General has no greater supporter in that effort than Laura Ingraham who caused some big ripples again this week with a xenophobic rant on her Fox News show in which she attacked both legal and illegal immigration. It was called “The left’s effort to remake America”:

Laura Ingraham: “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration” pic.twitter.com/s5G2qIY4W0

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 9, 2018

She went on to describe lurid details of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in much the same language President Trump commonly uses to paint them as deviant and subhuman. And then she asked the president to give an address to the nation from the Oval Office:

The president can be so persuasive, so give us the whole truth, Mr. President, the good, the bad, and yes, the uncomfortable. This is a national emergency and he must demand that Congress act now. There is something slipping away in this country and it’s not about race or ethnicity. It’s what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.

First, it is not a national emergency. Border crossings are far below what they were a decade ago. And this president is the last person on earth to make a case for the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution since he demonstrates on a daily basis that he has no respect for the first or even a rudimentary understanding of the second.

Nonetheless, this policy is being implemented. The Muslim ban, ICE deportations and the horrifying separation of families at the border are just the beginning.  NBC news reported this week that Trump’s unctuous factotum Stephen Miller has written a proposal to “make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare.” The purpose is to reduce the number of immigrants who obtain citizenship and, therefore, the right to vote. That’s what’s known as a “win-win” in the Trump administration.

Yesterday it was announced that Melania Trump’s parents got in just under the wire. Sponsored by their daughter and her husband under the much maligned “family migration” system they became US citizens. It’s unknown just what “merit” the president believes they have that qualifies them under his new proposals but one can’t help but notice that they are Caucasian so Laura Ingraham no doubt has little concern that they will be polluting American culture like those little children at the border.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it

by digby

It’s not just Trump. I have used that quote from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech many, many times. It pertains to a faction of Americans.

I wrote this after the election:

NOVEMBER 17, 2016

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest on the left has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts, while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by people on the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there also have been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In a “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by his saying “don’t be afraid” — followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat.

And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and those with minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

An incident in Brooklyn this past weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women in a restaurant were bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the two women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave a meal without charge to calm the two down. But after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: Who gets that mad after winning? It’s not as if the two women were rubbing the man’s nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a stranger (a woman) in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction has come to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable: Right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

It’s white supremacy, people. It’s always been white supremacy.by digby

Ezra Klein has published an interesting overview of the new book “How Democracies Die” over at Vox. He talks about the book’s central thesis that nations in the modern era lose their democratic character by exploiting democratic processes rather than overthrow. (I wrote a little bit about it on Salon a couple of weeks ago.) The whole article is worth reading but this is the nub of it:

Where How Democracies Die makes its contribution is with an unusually clear analysis of why these norms are so embattled in America.

Levitsky and Ziblatt trace a troubling thread of American history: Our democracy was built atop racism and has been repeatedly shaken in eras of racial progress. The founding compromises that birthed the country included entrenching slavery and counting African Americans as three-fifths of a person. The bloodshed required to end slavery almost ended our democracy with it — habeas corpus was suspended, a third of American states sat out the 1864 election, and the South was under military occupation.

Then in the the Civil War’s aftermath, the pursuit of equality fell before the pursuit of stability — in Reconstruction and continuing up through the mid-20th century, the Democratic and Republican parties permitted the South to construct an apartheid state atop a foundation of legal discrimination and racial terrorism, and it was in this environment that American politics saw its so-called golden era, in which the two parties worked together smoothly and routinely. Levitsky and Ziblatt tell this story well:

The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The “solid South” emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship.

The tale doesn’t end in the mid-20th century. The racial progress of the civil rights era led to a series of political assassinations and, shortly thereafter, to the election of Richard Nixon — who quickly caused a democratic and constitutional crisis of his own. In the aftermath of that period, little was done — and much was undone — on civil rights, and American democracy stabilized.

That is, it stabilized until the election of President Barack Obama, which led to a hard turn toward confrontation in the Republican Party, and — perhaps predictably, given this history — to the election of Donald Trump, who pairs racial resentment with a deep skepticism of both democratic process and the legitimacy of his opponents.

Making our present moment yet more combustible is a deep transformation of our political coalitions:

The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.

And it doesn’t stop there:

As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority — nearly 80 percent — of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party.

“In other words,” write Levitsky and Ziblatt, “the two parties are now divided over race and religion — two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.”

It’s these underlying trends, they argue, that are making it harder for Americans to tolerate each other, harder for partisans on both sides to accept each other. The parties have become more distant ideologically, racially, religiously. They look over the divide and see a coalition that doesn’t look like them or think like them, that doesn’t like them, that actively fears them — indeed, a recent Pew survey found that 49 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of Democrats, say they are “afraid” of the other party. Keep that in mind as you read this paragraph:

If the definition of “real Americans” is restricted to those who are native-born, English-speaking, white, and Christian, then it is easy to see how “real Americans” may view themselves as declining. As Ann Coulter chillingly put it, “The American electorate isn’t moving to the left — it’s shrinking.” The perception among many Tea Party Republicans that their America is disappearing helps us understand the appeal of such slogans as “Take Our Country Back” or “Make America Great Again.” The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

If that is your mindset, how can you compromise? How can you abide by the niceties of politics-as-usual?

Again, for the thousandth time, I quote Lincoln:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events…

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is the fundamental contour of American politics. When the two parties take opposite positions on slavery, now racial equality, we are divided. It’s hard to believe that we are back to this place, but we are. And we can try to ascribe that to other motives all we want, it won’t change anything.

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Semper falafel

by digby

Hey, remember when Bill O’Reilly claimed he’d been in combat in the Falklands? Good times.

This one is from 2015:

A hero in his own mind


Gee, I wonder why people thought Bill O’Reilly said he was in combat in the Falklands war?

KEVIN (CALLER): Hey, yeah, I have to say real quick, I’ve been — I’ve listened to interviews from the guy that was saved and from some of the other Swift Boat, the guys in these new groups that have come on talking about it.

And if you listen to interviews with the guy, he’s not smearing the guy who got the, you know, who fell in the water, but he gave a rational, cognizant explanation what happened that day, and these boats are always in pairs and packs —

O’REILLY: Right.

KEVIN: — so they’re always trying to say well, no — well, you weren’t on Kerry’s you — you — his Swift boat. You didn’t have to be. You were 20 feet away on another one.

O’REILLY: All right, let me challenge that, Kevin, from —

KEVIN: Uh-huh.

O’REILLY: — from personal experience.

KEVIN: Sure.

O’REILLY: I — I was in a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, OK?

KEVIN: Mm-hmm.

O’REILLY: And I can tell you when the Kool-Aid hits the fan, OK, nobody is locking in on anybody else. Nobody.

KEVIN: And you’re right.

O’REILLY: OK, ad —

KEVIN: I know (inaudible; overlapping dialogue)

O’REILLY: — adrenaline — adrenaline surges and you veterans out there listening right now, you know exactly what I’m talking about here. Adrenaline surges, your senses become very attune, much sharper than they are ordinarily, and you are locked in, focused in, on your survival and achieving the means of staying alive.

You’re not watching what happens in the boat next to year. You’re not watching any of that. OK? You are — you are zeroed in on your situation.

And that’s why I am believing the guys that are sitting next to this Kerry, because the guys away from him, yeah, maybe somebody looked over, and yeah, but what probably happened was after the fact people talked. And that’s what always happens. And then perceptions are shaped. But they’re always ab — they’re never primary source perceptions.

Now, again, I don’t have anything against these Swift Boats guys. They — I’m sure they believe what they’re saying. But I’m going to go with the guy in the water. I got to go with him. [Westwood One, The Radio Factor, 8/9/04, transcript via Escriptionist.com/Media Matters internal archives]

There’s more where that came from. Here’s another one:

O’REILLY: But again, look, I mean all of us who are reporters — and I was a reporter for 24 years, even, you know — and I was in El Salvador, and in the Falkland War in Argentina, and in Northern Ireland, and in the Middle East. And I did some pretty risky things. I was single and nobody cared, but you know — a couple of girlfriends would have been – ‘oh, no more free dinners from Bill.’

But I did. I put myself, you know, in positions that perhaps I should not have, but I got good stories. And that’s what people do. That’s what journalists do. But I volunteered. Nobody sent me. Nobody forced me. I went it. And that’s what these guys did. And these guys were in much more danger than I was ever in, although it got a little hairy in the Falklands, that’s for sure. [Westwood One, The Radio Factor, 1/30/06]

He pretty clearly wants people to believe that he’s been in combat even going so far as to compare himself as superior to actual combat veterans, something Brian Williams never did. He’s a liar.


The biggest lie is that he continually portrays Buenos Aires as a war zone during the Falklands war. It was not. He covered some street demonstrations after the war was over. If that is the definition of being in the shit, then anyone who was on the streets in Ferguson, Missouri last summer is a combat veteran. 


I can’t believe he’s going to get away with this in the wake of Brian Williams being vilified for much less. O’Reilly has continuously portrayed himself as a fucking hero, someone who stared down the barrel of a gun and saved his cameraman from the the enemy. And he was in a street protest. 


And this from 2007:

Semper Falafel


O’Reilly understands that war is hell:

Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash. If that wounded insurgent had a grenade or other explosive device, the entire marine squad and the photographer could be dead right now. In a killing zone, one cannot afford the luxury of knowing what is certain.

As with all literary greats like Mailer, Jones and Heller, O’Reilly has memorialized his scorching combat experiences in his novel, “Those Who Trespass” a murder mystery set in Argentina during the hell on earth that was the Falklands:

The policemen were clearly frightened. Their fascist powers were being brazenly challenged. Standing directly in front of the police were nearly ten thousand very angry Argentine citizens screaming curses and revolutionary slogans:

ALa gente unida venceramos!

AMuera la Junta!

AMuera Galtieri!

GNN News Correspondent Shannon Michaels translated the chant and wrote it into his notebook: “The people, united, will never be defeated! Death to the Junta! Death to the dictator Galtieri!” Shannon and his video crew stood behind the police, five hundred strong crowded together in a massive show of force. Their assignment was to guard the presidential palace, called the Casa Rosada–the Pink House–and to protect President General Leopoldo Galtieri. But the crowd was getting more and more aggressive, pushing toward the large metal gate that provided access to the palatial grounds. Shannon saw that The Plaza de Mayo, the huge square in front of the Casa Rosada, was now filled to capacity. Something very ugly was going to happen, Shannon thought, and happen soon.

The sky was clear, but clouds were assembling in the west. Shannon ran his fingers through his thick mane of wavy brown hair. His teal blue eyes were locked on the agitated crowd. It was his eyes that most people noticed first–a very unusual color that some thought materialized from a contact lens case. But Shannon, the product of two Celtic parents, didn’t go in for cosmetic enhancements. His 6′ 4 frame was well toned by constant athletics, and his pale white skin was flawless–another genetic gift. Shannon’s looks, which he thoroughly capitalized on, made him a natural for television.

As the mob continued its boisterous serenade, Shannon slowly shook his head. Most wars were foolish, he thought, but this one was unusually idiotic. The Argentine Junta, a group of military thugs led by General Galtieri, had ordered an invasion of the British-administered Falkland Islands on April Fool’s Day, 1982. The government claim was that the islands, which the Argentines called the Malvinas, became a part of Argentina through a Papal declaration in 1493. The British disagreed. So, nearly five hundred years after the grant of land, the Argentine Army swarmed ashore, startling eighteen hundred British subjects and tens of thousands of bewildered sheep.

[…]

During his seven-year career as a TV news correspondent, Michaels had seen rank stupidity, but this moronic government strategy boggled the mind. Anyone who read a newspaper knew that the British Parliament, and especially Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, would never allow British honor to be besmirched. It took the Brits just three months to thoroughly humiliate the Junta, further angering the Argentine citizenry. No wonder they were now filling the streets in passionate demonstration against the Galtieri government.

Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it? Has anyone matched this searing prose chronicling the nightmare of the Falklands war? 


I don’t want to ruin the story by revealing the fiery hell that our blue eyed Celtic hero had to endure. Let’s just say that that marine in Falluja won’t know what hell is until he’s had to film a news story with his flawless white skin covered in dust and dirt. It just makes you sick to even think about it. 


The horror…

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There’s nothing to see here, citizens. Nothing at all.

by digby

This was just a little note that passed through my twitter feed:

A Washington Post reporter met with the FBI and an outside security consultant after receiving a death threat in October.

David Fahrenthold broke the story of President-elect Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he brags about sexually assaulting women.

Shortly after the story was published, he writes in the Washington Post Magazine this week, another Post reporter got a death threat for Fahrenthold, prompting the newspaper to hire a former counterterrorism official to consult with him on security.

Fahrenthold also met with the FBI and Washington, D.C., police.

“When she arrived at our house she terrified us far more than the actual death threat had,” Fahrenthold recounts.

“‘Your cars are parked too far away for a car bomb,’ she said, looking out the front windows at the street. ‘They’ll probably cut your brake lines.’ She recommended having a car patrol the neighborhood. She recommended a safe room.”

Politico reporters have also said they’ve received death threats for reporting on Trump. And the Arizona Republic said it got death threats for endorsing Hillary Clinton over Trump.

MSNBC reporter katy Tur also had to have security to cover the rallies after Trump called her out by name.

The only thing Trump has ever said about this was the one comment on 60 Minutes: “stop it.” Otherwise, he’s encouraged this behavior by growling “get ’em out” to his personal goon squad and talking about how he’d like to hit protesters in the face and growling that in the old days, they’d have “been taken out on a stretcher.” And there were his little asides about “2nd Amendment people” having to take things into their own hands. He continues to insult journalists in the most degrading ways possible.

So far, we’ve had a lot of defacing of mosques and synagogues and jubilant Trump voters feeling their oats by screaming epithets at Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and Jews. We’ve had men saying “Hillary bitches” had better get in line. Journalists are still being threatened. But nobody’s been shot and nobody’s died.

But that’s doesn’t mean this is normal. IT IS NOT NORMAL. These violent threats by Trump supporters have been ubiquitous throughout the campaign toward journalists and others. It’s not ok.

I wrote about this phenomenon for Salon after the election:

Happy New Year everyone.

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