#Sidney Blumenthal

[chicinsilk]

US Vogue August 1, 1962

Deborah Dixon wears a short, fitted, silky gray coat with a clean, belted back silhouette. Coat by Modelia, in Dynel fabric and Sidney Blumenthal mohair.

Deborah Dixon porte un manteau gris court, ajusté et soyeux, avec une silhouette épurée, ceinturée dans le dos. Manteau de Modelia, en tissu Dynel et mohair Sidney Blumenthal.

Photo Louis Faurer vogue archive

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sidney Blumenthal: DeSantis was paraphrasing a social philosopher on the psychological basis of authoritarian movements. Eric Hoffer was an itinerant longshoreman whose book The True Believer, on the mentality of Naziism and Communism, published in 1951, drew praise from President Dwight Eisenhower in one of his first press conferences. Hoffer described how individuals erased their volition and critical thinking by submerging themselves into movements led by demagogues. “The fanatic,” Hoffer wrote, “is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.” The demagogue appeals to restoring the good old days. “A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present.” Through propaganda, “people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know’”. Enemies must be identified as the source of decay. “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.” But, Hoffer wrote, it would be a mistake to give too much credence to the ideas of demagogues. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

Eisenhower, who had led the armies that defeated Hitler, wrote a letter in 1958 warning against authoritarianism. Citing Hoffer, he stated that “dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions”. DeSantis, who has attempted and failed to supplant Trump by whipping up hysteria against the menace of “wokeness”, more or less got one of Hoffer’s memorable quotes right. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” In Georgia, on 14 August 2023, Trump was indicted on 41 felony counts with 18 co-defendants for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results under the state’s Rico statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The problem in applying Hoffer’s aphorism to Trump is that with him it was always a racket.

[tomorrowusa]

«[T]he Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else.

The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction.»

– Sidney Blumenthal, author and onetime senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, writing at The Guardian.

Trump frames himself as a quasi-religious figure – which is ironic given his personal lack of spirituality.

It's not at all gratuitous to refer to Trumpism as an extremist cult. Members of this cult will even flirt with death at his suggestion. We remember how large numbers of the Trump cult followed his quack medical advice during the pandemic emergency rather than observe scientific medical practices. Many became human sacrifices to the Dear Leader.

The only way this cult will end is to utterly defeat its leader. Reasoned arguments and logic won't cut it with the profoundly self-deluded. And the only way to defeat Republicans is to vote Democratic in large numbers.

[davidpotash]

Young Lincoln, Political Operative

“Leadership is situational” It makes sense, for it is mighty difficult to think of leadership outside of a context, a challenge, a before and an after. But if leadership is contingent, dependent upon the who, where, when and what, how do we understand leaders? What makes them, shapes them, and makes them tick? What is successful leadership all about? Without a doubt one of America’s greatest…

[ptseti]

On this day in 2011, revolutionary Libyan leader and pan-Africanist Muammar Gaddafi was captured and executed by NATO-backed rebels. Not long after, The Atlantic published an article with the headline: 'As Qaddafi Died, So Did His Craziest Dream and Mistake: Pan-Africanism.' Yes, they actually said the quiet part out loud.

The article boldly states, "Qaddafi's death -- and the outpouring of support for the late Libyan leader in sub-Saharan Africa following his demise -- is a reminder that pan-Africanism was an historic mistake of enormous proportions -- a simple-minded political ideology that for the past 50 years or so has done more harm than good for Africa's standing in the world."

People across the political spectrum still debate whether Gaddafi really was the brutal dictator the West made him out to be. Was he killed because he was hated by his own people? Or did his anti-imperialist politics and refusal to bow down to the West play a decisive role? Today, in 2024, there is a significant body of evidence that the West had a vested interest in removing Gaddafi, who was working to liberate and unify Africa. This article by The Atlantic was an early clue.

The most persuasive evidence that there was a Western plot to destroy pan-Africanism through Gaddafi's assassination comes directly from email correspondences between former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former aide to President Bill Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal. Here’s an extract from one email:

"This [Libyan] gold [reserve] was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA)… French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya."

They did not want Africa to unite under the golden dinar currency that Gaddafi proposed, so he had to go.

[mariacallous]

For the apotheosis of his entire “poisoning of the blood” campaign, Donald Trump has planned a spectacular extravaganza in Madison Square Garden on 27 October, a week before the election. When JD Vance sings Trump’s fulsome praises to introduce him, his ominous tribute will not inspire comparison to the night in the Garden of 19 May 1962, when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr President to John F Kennedy.

Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20 February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.

In the last week, Trump has pledged to deploy the military against “the enemy within”, domestic opponents he claims are worse than foreign adversaries – those Hitler called “Feind des Volkes”, or “enemy of the people”. Trump has threatened to destroy CBS, ABC and the New York Times. About ABC, after it conducted the debate in which he performed disastrously, he called to “take away their license”. After Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, having refused his own, he tweeted on 10 October: “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” About the Times, he said on 9 October: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with them.” He has singled out by name journalists for the Times and the New Yorker as “FAKE OBAMA LOVING ‘JOURNALISTS”. At every rally he denounces the “fake news”, a drumbeat for years, echoing Hitler’s pejorative slur, “die Lügenpresse” – “the lying press”.

Trump traveled on 11 October to Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed a Venezuelan gang had seized control, “scum” and “animals” who have “invaded and conquered” and “infected” the town, a description dismissed as false by its Republican mayor. “We have to clean out our country,” said Trump. His language represented the Nazi idea of “Rassenhygiene” – “race cleansing” that required purification, not an academic interest in genetics but a program of eugenics for designating inferior races to be isolated or eliminated.

As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations. A disintegrated national character is the inevitable consequence of a process of disintegration in the blood.”

The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, retired general Mark Milley, according to Bob Woodward in his new book War, told the veteran journalist: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” Trump had stated that for Milley’s communication with his counterparts in China on January 6 to reassure them that the US military was stable, he deserved “DEATH” – to be executed.

On 14 October, retired general Mike Flynn – Trump’s former national security adviser, whom he pardoned for failing to register as a foreign agent and obstructing justice – was asked at a Christian nationalist rally for Trump whether he would preside over military tribunals in a second Trump term to “not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp”. “Believe me,” Flynn replied, “the gates of hell – my hell – will be unleashed.”

Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure, rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly, but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself. When he does not receive the adoration he feels he deserves, he hates New York. Then, he tries to win its love again by performing a disgusting act, which, when he is predictably rejected, triggers his anger once again. And, then, he engages in gestures of infantile defiance, like holding a Nazi-esque rally. Trying to show himself triumphant over the city, he invites its scorn once again, and again, and again. He never comprehends that he is the cause of his continuing narcissistic injuries.

Trump’s rally, through the rhyme of history, will be a rebuke to the greatest campaign speech delivered by Franklin D Roosevelt, which, though given 88 years ago in the Garden on 31 October 1936, rings remarkably contemporary, a speech for “the restoration of American democracy” and its “preservation”.

“We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle,” FDR said. “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage. From the balcony hung a banner: “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” “Wake up!” shouted the Führer of the Bund, Fritz Kuhn, “you, Aryan, Nordic and Christians, to demand that our government be returned to the people who founded it!”

Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the Bund’s public relations director, declared that white supremacy was the essential basis of the nation. “The spirit which opened the west and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man,” he said, citing racial segregation and immigration quotas as its bulwarks. “It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation.”

In 2019, a seven-minute documentary about the Nazi rally of 1939, A Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. To promote it, a 30-second TV ad was produced with the tagline: “It Can Happen Here.” The line was a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about a populist demagogue defeating FDR and imposing a fascist regime. Lewis’s wife, the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had reported on the rise of Hitler, pointedly attended the Nazi rally. “I saw an exact duplicate of it in the Berlin Sports Palast in 1931,” she wrote.

When the film distributor of A Night at the Garden sought to buy time for a spot on Fox News, its CEO, Suzanne Scott, rejected it as “not appropriate for our air”. After the 2020 election, during Trump’s ramping up to the January 6 insurrection, she ordered that Fox News suppress factchecking his lies because it was “bad for business”.

Now, in his announcement of his night at the Garden, Trump advertised a clipped version of the replacement theory, declaring that New York was “reeling” from “Kamala’s reckless open-border policies”, “flooding” the city with criminal “illegal migrants”. For nearly a $1m contribution to attend the event, the top tier, donors are promised an “Ultra MAGA Experience”, details to follow.

Trump’s Maga rally will be the first time since the 1939 Nazi rally that the same themes of the replacement theory will echo in the Garden. But his closing argument is more than Nazi cosplay. He cannot help but reveal his deepest desire to be loved and then to fling the middle finger to the city whose unconditional admiration he has sought since he first crossed the Queensboro Bridge.

Trump’s permanent physical move to Palm Beach after his failed coup in 2020 has not transformed him into a contented Florida Man. To the inveterate New Yorker, the Sunshine state is strictly for snowbirds, God’s waiting room for shuffleboarders. Mar-a-Lago, his winter escape, has become his unnatural embittering palace-in-exile. Florida represents disgrace to Trump.

Trump’s emotional journey back to the White House must travel through New York. He has nothing but contempt and indifference for Washington. He despises policy, flaunts his ignorance and detests anyone who has ever tried to temper him, from four-star generals to Republican congressional leaders. He wants the pomp without the circumstance. January 6 played out Trump’s true view of the capital.

Trump plots his night at the Garden as the climax of his comeback tour. He may have been president, but never top of the heap. Roy Cohn could tell him how to skirt the law and ingratiate himself with the mob, but Cohn was not a Virgil to guide his protege to respectability. Trump’s lowlife publicity antics, tutored by Cohn, made him into one of the revolving cast of characters populating tabloid trash. The larger the headline of the sordid story about himself, the bigger Trump’s delusion that kitsch burnished his class. He was always crestfallen when his frolics did not win his admission into the club.

Trump has only been truly comfortable strutting in his old New York, conning and threatening, greasing the palms of the mafia, stiffing his contractors and workers, while trying to buy his way into society affairs. Time and again, the city spat him out. He was ridiculed and reviled. He went bust six times. He defaulted on the Trump Shuttle. The banks denied him loans. He had to sell his yacht named for his daughter, The Princess. His brutish father, who financed his wild ventures, throwing good money after bad, had to buy chips illegally to momentarily float his sinking Atlantic City casino. He dumped two wives. He allegedly sexually assaulted dozens of women. When he tried to lowball Frank Sinatra, an idol, Ol’ Blue Eyes told him, “Go fuck yourself.”

After Trump had plunged in what seemed to be his final bankruptcy, he was rescued by a TV producer, Mark Burnett, who created the reality TV show The Apprentice, which depicted Trump as a business genius reigning over the Manhattan skyline. The sheer fiction was the veneer that enabled his grubby lucrative product placement side deals. His motive for running for president was a branding scam gone haywire.

Now, he has returned to the city on his road to redemption. Yet, so far, he has been held accountable for his vast crimes only in New York. He has been found liable for defamation and sexual assault and termed an adjudicated rapist by the judge in the E Jean Carroll case, and ordered to pay $83.3m in damages plus continuing interest; found liable of widespread financial fraud and ordered to pay $364m for ill-gotten gains plus continuing interest; and convicted of 34 felony counts of financial fraud for hush-money payments, to a porn star and Playboy model with whom he had affairs, in order to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

Once again, he intends to prove himself in the city that never sleeps, the city that will give him another shot at murdering someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. A star is reborn.

These little town blues are melting away I’m gonna make a brand-new start of it in old New York And if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere It’s up to you, New York, New York

Trump now says that if he loses he will blame the unappreciative Jews – he hasn’t been “treated right” by the Jews and their support for Democrats is a “curse”. But Trump, who has picked up a few Yiddish words, uses them unconsciously like a native New Yorker. On 2 January 2021, he displayed his proficiency in his notorious telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he sought to intimidate him into committing election fraud to switch the state’s voting results.

“So look,” said Trump. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

Raffensperger resisted Trump’s strong-arming, the Georgia outcome stood, and four days later Trump incited the assault on the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to thwart the certification of the election: “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump has since been indicted in Georgia for election fraud, a case in legal purgatory until after the 2024 election.

Twice, during his call with Raffensperger, Trump derided the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who refused to be complicit in Trump’s scheme, by calling him a “schmuck”. Perhaps the word was lost on Trump’s listeners. According to Leo Rosten’s The Joy of Yiddish, it carries several meanings, including “penis” and “a dope, a jerk, a boob, a clumsy bumbling fellow”. Rosten wrote that “few impolite words express comparable contempt”.

Now, New Yorkers can only wonder, what kind of schmuck holds a Nazi-esque rally in Madison Square Garden?

[darkeagleruins]

On July 4th Sidney Blumenthal wrote a “make believe” speech from Joe Biden announcing President Trump had been “eliminated”

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

1984 George Orwell

Trump was dangerous as president the first time, now he would be extremely dangerous. There are Tory MPs who say they would vote for Trump, they are fools or liars, probably both.

[deadpresidents]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN •Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Trilogy by Sidney Blumenthal: -A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 1809-1849 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856 (BOOK | KINDLE) -All the Powers of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, 1856-1860 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

ANDREW JOHNSON •Andrew Johnson: A Biography by Hans L. Trefousse (BOOK) •Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •High Crimes & Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Gene Smith (BOOK)

ULYSSES S. GRANT •Grant by Ron Chernow (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year by Charles Bracelen Flood (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition by Ulysses S. Grant, Edited by John F. Marszalek (BOOK | KINDLE)

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES •Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President by Ari Hoogenboom (BOOK) •Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr. (BOOK | KINDLE)

JAMES GARFIELD •President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman (BOOK | KINDLE) •Garfield by Allan Peskin (BOOK | KINDLE)

CHESTER A. ARTHUR •The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves (BOOK | KINDLE) •Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President by John M. Pafford (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[allthegeopolitics]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/07/donald-trumps-hitlerian-logic-is-no-mistake

[progressivepower]

Republicans have a ghoulish tactic for distracting from Trump’s criminality | Sidney Blumenthal http://dlvr.it/T8kwCN

[pulp-art-from-an-english-writer]

If you didn’t believe it before, read this!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sidney Blumenthal on the iconography of the Trump-era GOP. It's weird, but it really seems to work on the white Evangelicals who are the wellspring for MAGAdom. "All told, so far, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions. Three other elaborate trials will follow his January 6 case, if it is scheduled any time in January or February. His trial date in New York is tentatively on the calendar for 25 March 2024. In that case, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg “for falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election. During the election, Trump and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.” But Bragg has suggested he would postpone this trial to allow the January 6 federal case to be first.

Trump’s trial in the Mar-a-Lago presidential records case is on the calendar in Florida for 20 May 2024, where he is charged with the illegal and willful theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice. Even more than during the gripping performance of his various indictments, the theatre of his trials will subsume politics. There will not be another campaign, some semblance of a normal campaign of the past, a fantasy campaign, separate from Trump’s trials. The scenes from courtroom to courtroom will overlap with the primaries – the final ones taking place on 4 June 2024 – only intensifying the zeal of his base. And then Trump’s battle with the law will engulf the general election. The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).

But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else. The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction."

[the-desolated-quill]

A fascinating analysis of Trump’s behaviour over the last couple of months. Definitely worth a read.

[nodynasty4us]

The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged.... Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%. -- Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian