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misfitwashere · 1 year ago

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The apocalypse we choose

Mike Johnson's record as Speaker of the House

Timothy Snyder

Mar 3, 2024

In four months as Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson has given Russia a chance to win its war in Ukraine, and thereby turn the world towards tyranny.

Johnson's term of office consists of stratagems to avoid funding Ukraine. He and a minority of Trumpist Republicans have left Ukrainians without the means to defend themselves, and enabled Russian aggressors to retake Ukrainian territory. As a result, troops are killed and disabled every day.

Around the world, Johnson's behavior is seen as betrayal and weakness. We tend to focus on the details of Johnson's various excuses, rather than seeing the larger pattern. Johnson's success in making the war a story about him exemplifies the American propensity to miss the big picture.

Alive? Thank a Ukrainian. The great American capacity is to take others for granted, and our specific form of hubris blinds us to the great services others perform for us. The resistance of the Ukrainian armed forces and Ukrainian civil society is holding back every form of modern catastrophe. Ukrainians are preserving an order established after the Second World War, but also pointing the way towards a brighter future. Their tremendous daily efforts have pushed the world toward a set of better alternatives we would all lack without them. But they need us at their back.

An elementary form of apocalypse is genocide. Russia is making war on Ukraine with the genocidal goal of eliminating Ukrainian society as such. It consciously fights its war with its own national minorities, and takes every opportunity to spread racist propaganda (including about African-Americans). Russian occupiers deport Ukrainian children, rape Ukrainian women, castrate Ukrainian men, and murder Ukrainian cultural leaders with this purpose in mind. They keep children out of school and force families into emigration, all with the goal of putting an end to a nation. Ukrainian resistance, though, has put the backbone into "never again." Where Ukraine holds territory, and that is most of the country, people are saved. Ukrainians have shown that a genocide can be halted -- with the right kind of help. When we cut off that help, as we have done, we enable genocide to proceed. This is not only a horror in itself, but a precedent.

A great fear of our age is nuclear war, and Russia has used nuclear blackmail against Ukraine. Russians want Ukraine (and the rest of us) to give up because Russia has nuclear weapons. Russian propaganda instructs that a nuclear power cannot lose a war. This is of course untrue. The U.S. lost in Vietnam, the USSR lost in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons did not hold the British and French empires together, or bring Israel victory in Lebanon. Had Ukraine submitted to Putin's nuclear blackmail, this would have incentivized every country to build nuclear weapons: some to intimidate, some to prevent intimidation. Ukrainian resistance has saved us from this scenario -- thus far. Should America abandon Ukraine, we can expect nuclear proliferation and nuclear jeopardy.

Another traditional worry has been a Russian attack upon a European country that triggers the collective defense provision of the NATO alliance. For now, Ukraine is making this all but impossible. Ukraine has absorbed an attack by Russia. At horrible cost, Ukraine is fulfilling the entire mission of NATO, thereby sparing all other NATO members any risk of loss of territory or of life. The NATO economies are about two-hundred and fifty times as big as the Ukrainian economy. If they exploit a tiny fraction of their economic power, they could easily sustain the Ukrainian armed forces. Unfortunately the largest by far of these NATO members, the United States, is doing nothing. Should this continue, and should Russia win its war in Ukraine, then further war in Europe becomes not only possible, but likely.

For the past two decades, the main concern in Washington, D.C. has been a war with China in the Pacific over Taiwan. Never was this concern more pressing than in February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin had just received China's blessing for his adventure. Had Ukraine fallen, as so many expected, it would have been a signal that other such adventures were possible. Ukraine's endurance has made clear that offensive operations are unpredictable and costly. Ukrainians are achieving what we could not, as Americans, achieve ourselves: sending a counsel of caution to China without in any way antagonizing the Chinese. Of course, should Ukraine be abandoned by its allies, and should Russia win, our earlier fears would return, and rightly so.

Russia is testing an international order. The basic assumption, since the Second World War, is that states exist have borders that war cannot alter. When Russia attacked Ukraine, it was attacking this principle. Russia's rulers expected that a new age of chaos would begin, in which only lies and force would count. The consensus in Washington, we should remember, was the same. In the beginning, the American leadership expected the Ukrainian president to flee and for the country to fall in three days. Every day since the fourth day is one in which Ukrainian blood has bought for us a future that we ourselves did not think we had. After two years, too many of us take this for granted. But if we decide not to help the Ukrainians, disorder will ensue, and prosperity will collapse.Albrecht Dürer, “Apocalypse,” (third panel), 1498

For the past half century, people have been rightly concerned about global warming. Whether we get through the next half century will depend upon a balance of power between those who make money from fossil fuels and lie about their consequences and those who tell the truth about science and seek alternative sources of energy. Vladimir Putin is the most important fossil fuel oligarch. Both his wealth and his power arise from natural gas and oil reserves. His war in Ukraine is a foretaste of the struggle for resources we will all face should Putin and other fossil fuel oligarchs get the upper hand. Precisely because Ukraine resisted, important economies have accelerated their green transition. Should Ukraine be abandoned and lose, it seems unlikely that there will be another chance to hold back fossil fuel oligarchy and save the climate. More broadly, Putin's idiotic nation that there is no Ukraine is an example of the kind of oligarchical fantasy wastes time and destroys life as we try to confront the world's actual problems.

Global hunger is an important scenario for catastrophic global suffering in an age of drastic inequality and resource strife. Here no country is more important than Ukraine. For more than two thousand years, since the ancient Greeks, the fertile soil of Ukraine has fed neighboring lands and civilizations. Ukraine today is capable of feeding something like half a billion people. Russia's war against Ukraine has also been a hunger war. Russia has mined farms, flooded others by destroying a critical dam, targeted grain-storage facilities, and blockaded the Black Sea to prevent exports. In 2023, Ukraine was able to win an astonishing victory, clearing the western Black Sea of the Russian navy, and opening lanes for export of grain. Because the Ukrainians did this on their own, it has hardly been covered in our press. But it is a huge achievement. People in the Near East and Africa are being fed who might otherwise starve. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, all of this can be reversed, and suffering and war will spread to those vulnerable and critical areas.

From a different perspective, people fear that our world can end as a result of artificial intelligence, digital propaganda, and the collapse of the human contact needed for political decency. For a decade now, Russia has been in the forefront of digital manipulation. Its first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, was successful chiefly as a hybrid war, in which it found vulnerable minds in the West and inserted useful memes -- ones which are still in use today. And Russia does find backers today among the digital oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, who has bent his personal account and indeed his entire platform to become an instrument of Russian propaganda. That said, the Ukrainians have, this time, shown how this can be resisted. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi and other Ukrainian leaders, by taking personal risks in time of danger, have reminded us that there is a real world. And Ukrainian civil society has this time taken a playful approach to new media, deconstructing Russian propaganda and reminding us of the human side -- and the human stakes.

Perhaps the most insidious calamity we face is one of doubt: we cease to believe in ourselves, as human beings with values, who deserve to rule themselves in the system we call democracy. For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve. Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history. Which way we will all turn remains to be seen. By resisting on the battlefield, Ukraine has, for the time being anyway, preserved its own democracy, and given new hope to democracies in general. There is nothing automatic about democracy. People have to believe that they should rule. And this will always involve some risk. By taking great risks for the right values, Ukrainians can and do encourage others around the world. If Ukrainians are killed, maimed, and forced to retreat as a result of U.S. policy, everyone is demoralized -- including us.

If Americans let Ukrainians down, it will be a blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the "spirit of freedom," as a Ukrainian veteran put it in a speech I heard at the Munich Security Council. We need that spirit, in part to oppose those who lack it. The people who block aid for Ukraine today wish our own democracy ill. In the last few days and weeks we have witnessed, again and again, the overlap between Russian influence in American politics, opposition to aid to Ukraine, and hostility toward the American constitutional system. Putin knows that his only route to Kyiv passes through Washington, D.C., and he has acted accordingly.

The people working to assure the destruction of democracy in Ukraine also oppose democracy in America. We have just experienced a bogus impeachment proceeding against President Biden, where the chief accusation (long ago discredited by Ukrainian and other journalists, incidentally) arose from a Russian agent. Mike Johnson is in a submission chain that passes through Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Trump presents himself as an admirer of Putin and had been his client, in one form or another, for a decade. He has succeeded in conditioning the media by teaching his followers to shout "Russia hoax" whenever the subject comes up: but, all the same, Russia has backed him in every campaign and is backing him in this one. Johnson's 2018 congressional campaign, for that matter, took laundered funds from a Russian oligarch, and Johnson was one of the congressmen most deeply implicated in Trump's attempted coup in 2021.

Ukraine should and can win this war. To do so, it needs arms and funds. The amount needed of both is tiny on an American scale, not anything we would even notice. It is the choices of certain Americans that have brought the Ukrainians to this cruel pass, and brought the world to the edge of multiple catastrophe. Should we fail to assist Ukraine, we will be inviting the worst of catastrophes. We will put the security of the world at risk, and betray what is best about ourselves. Americans can enable Ukrainian victory. If we fail to do so, we will face an apocalypse Americans have chosen. And, in particular, an apocalypse Mike Johnson has chosen.

#ukraine #timothy snyder #republican inaction #makes me want to fucking scream

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saint-hildegard-of-bingen · 5 years ago

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If you love our country, please read this article, and continue to work to save our democracy. And stay hopeful!

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The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depressionafter grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.

The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”

I reached out to a number of therapists, who said they’re seeing this politically induced misery in their patients. Three years ago, said Karen Starr, a psychologist who practices in Manhattan and on Long Island, some of her patients were “in a state of alarm,” but that’s changed into “more of a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair.” Among those most affected, she said, are the Holocaust survivors she sees. “It’s about this general feeling that the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail,” she said.

Kimberly Grocher, a psychotherapist who works in both New York and South Florida, and whose clients are primarily women of color, told me that during her sessions, the political situation “is always in the room. It’s always in the room.” Trump, she said, has made bigotry more open and acceptable, something her patients feel in their daily lives. “When you’re dealing with people of color’s mental health, systemic racism is a big part of that,” she said.

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now represented by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

“It’s like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease,” she said, speaking of our country. “Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, you’re always going to have that little hope that everything’s going to turn out O.K., but every day it seems like we get hit by something else.” Some mornings, she said, it’s hard to get out of bed. “It doesn’t feel like depression,” she said. “It really does feel more like grief.”

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of the Trumpist Republican Party, just as it’s an ally and benefactor of the far right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack Obama, we’ve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies, subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

To those who recognize the Trump administration’s official lies as such, the scale of dishonesty can be destabilizing. It’s a psychic tax on the population, who must parse an avalanche of untruths to understand current events. “What’s going on in the government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by this,” said Stephanie Engel, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who said Trump comes up “very frequently” in her sessions.

Like several therapists I spoke to, Engel said she’s had to rethink how she practices, because she has no clinical distance from the things that are terrifying her patients. “If we continue to present a facade — that we know how to manage this ourselves, and we’re not worried about our grandchildren, or we’re not worried about how we’re going to live our lives if he wins the next election — we’re not doing our patients a service,” she said.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth, there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world. The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing The Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

#rumors and misinformation #dump trump #keep america great

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ghostpalmtechnique · 6 years ago

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I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that US defense spending is too high, mostly because I think we should wash our hands of the Middle East, which doesn’t want us there (except for incompatible reasons, as with Saudi Arabia) and re-frame our strategy around defending liberal democracy in Europe and Asia.

I do wonder, though, if the people who say things like “The US spends more on defense than Russia and China combined” as an argument for defense cuts are aware of this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-apparently-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-war-games-2019-3

Granted, if the hypothetical wars were the US defending Canada or Mexico from Russian/Chinese invasion rather than the Baltics or Taiwan, things would probably look a little different. And something is seriously wrong when the response to the (really obvious) enemy strategy of taking out satellite command-and-control systems is “let’s restart the exercise” rather than “how do we deal with this.”

But, assumping you aren’t a Trumpist “America first (and only) and fuck liberal democracy” person, just claiming that our main military problem is that we spend too much money rather than that our strategy is incoherent doesn’t seem very reasonable.

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surly01 · 4 years ago

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The Avatar of American Apartheid

The Trump years have revealed new truths about our relatives, neighbors, and friends. Or former friends. They have embraced the Avatar of American Apartheid.

We’ve had to open our eyes to the fact that some with whom we’ve happily shared parts of our lives stand revealed as racist to the core. Just fine with kidnapping and incarceration of immigrant children, forced family separations, and compulsory hysterectomies for some refugee women. OK with cancellation of decades of environmental regulation and climate change denial. OK with the negligent homicide that comprises the administration’s Covid-19 response. Enthused about deploying anonymized companies of military-style shock troops into the streets to “black bag” protesters and gas peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights. Fully embracing the author of 20,000-plus lies, the serial sexual assaults, the mind-bending attacks on institutions great and small.

Enough. I am not fine with any of the above, nor am I fine with those who are.

Some reading this might protest, “But I’m not a racist. I have a black friend/co-worker/neighbor, etc.” The election of the first Black President led many believe that we had entered a “post-racial society.” In arguments elsewhere about structural racism in the US, my opponents have cited Obama’s election as proof that race issues were now over. Would that it were so. Trump’s election has revealed American Apartheid as it really is. Howard Zinn and others have brought the receipts to show American history is a procession of mass murder and colonial appropriation, an uncomfortable truth we remain unwilling to hear. And the resurgence of the hard edge of neo-confederate militia rage and racist taunts from Charlottesville to Michigan highlight the dark stain on America’s soul.

America is as divided as it was in the 1850s, in that tense time of conflict before the Civil War. The windfall of territories gained in the wake of the War with Mexico led to arguments about how those territories would be apportioned between slave states and free states. This led to the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills abolishing slavery in Washington DC, admission to the Union of California as a free state, and enhancement of the Fugitive Slave Act. This last required northern magistrates to act as agents and slavecatchers for southern slave-owners. The Compromise also provided for existing territories to be admitted as “slave” or “free” depending on the inhabitants’ electoral will. This led to “Bleeding Kansas,” those battles waged between roving bands of abolitionists and slaveholders, and where abolitionist John Brown made his bones. A period of widespread domestic terror.

Much has been made of the rural-urban divide, which is actually the 21st-century code for racism. In a recent National Review column, Rich Lowry observed that Trump is

“the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between,” including “the 1619 Project.”

Those who live in Trump country, where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence, care little for what he does as long as it gives them license to hate liberals. The bigger the outrage, the louder the applause. Thus when Trump said, “he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue...,” he was correct. Non-Trump-cult members who wonder “how can they still back Trump after this scandal or the next” fail to understand the underlying motivating factor of his support. It’s “fuck liberals.” Since according minorities their constitutionally-guaranteed rights would require an acknowledgement of America’s actual history of racism, it is vigorously opposed by change-resistant conservatives determined to preserve the prerogatives of white entitlement.

Attempts to have a logical, rational conversation with Trumpists invariably reveals a person who believes their well-being depends upon avoiding things they’d rather not know. Or who will replace evidence with an alternative set of facts, generally created of whole cloth and breathed into life like a golem through repetition in right-wing media.

Consider QAnon, that hatchery of right-wing fucknuttery. Scratch their “Save the Children” marketing disguise and find revealed a narrative similar to that in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. Central to the mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

Consider the current package of accusations:

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Thus are “The Protocols” repackaged by QAnon for Americans largely ignorant of history. Some have even suggested that QAnon is a Nazi cult, rebranded. What is appalling is that so many of our neighbors, relatives, and “friends” are so credulous.

As David Pollard has observed,

Trump’s support among white males remains basically unchanged over the past four years. This, not Republicans, is his real base — a clear majority of white males continue to support Trump, and it hasn’t been that long since they were the only people allowed to vote. Whites, and male whites moreso, have voted against every Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And let’s be clear — I didn’t say, old white males. Young white males of all voting-age groups remain committed, almost as much as their older counterparts, to support Trump. Their entrance into the voting age cohorts has barely caused a ripple in the plurality of white males supporting Trump. That may surprise you until you consider that a disproportionate number (about half) of young voters are nonwhite (only a quarter of boomers are nonwhite), so looking at the entire youth cohort’s seemingly progressive attitudes obscures the reality that most young whites hew to the same extreme right-wing politics that the majority of old whites subscribe to; there’s just fewer of them.

We’ll leave it for you to consider that it means that a majority of white males of all ages are knowingly prepared to vote again for a blatantly corrupt candidate, a pathological liar, mentally deranged, uninformed, racist, sexist, utterly without principle, and increasingly untethered to reality. One whose “White House Science Office” takes credit for ‘ending’ the pandemic as infections mount to all-time highs.

But after 20,000 lies, who’s left to quibble?

“I love the poorly educated.” Donald J. Trump

Trump may lose the election, but white American males (and some true-believing females) aren’t going anywhere. They are the product of our systemically racist, sexist, patriarchal culture, born to preserve the prerogatives of white men of property while denying justice to the nonwhite, the native, the immigrant, the female, the “weak.” While they also control the courts, the banks, the legal system, and law enforcement, created in their likeness to support and preserve white male power, they are quick to snap into a well-practiced victim pose whenever challenged.

This past summer, members of the ShutDownDC movement protested at Chad Wolf’s home. They said,

“We know there are no career consequences for these men and women. We know there are no financial consequences for these men and women. We know there are no legal consequences for these men and women. We must make social consequences for these men and women. We must make it uncomfortable for them. We will not be good Germans. We will not be the people who sat by and watched our neighbors commit these atrocities and said nothing because their kids were home.”

The differences between both sides of a culture war are as strong as the conflict between “slave” and “free” in the 1850s, and are likewise framed in moral absolutes. No matter what happens on or after November 3, Trumpism remains with or without Trump. How will we live with its followers?. And whether or not there are “consequences” for their actions, the stink of Trump will never wash away, and what has been seen can’t be unseen. Nor will it be forgotten.

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libertariantaoist · 8 years ago

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Donald Trump has a problem – he’s virtually alone. It isn’t just that he strays significantly from his own party’s orthodoxy on major foreign policy questions. His conundrum is that even his own cabinet choices very often depart from the Trumpist canon, a fact that may undermine his ability to actually implement his foreign policy vision.

That vision, in my view, involves unpacking the post-WWII international order and updating it to focus on what Trump believes is the twin dangers to US interests: radical Islamic terrorism, as he puts it, and socioeconomic “carnage” on the domestic front. In order to do that, such institutions as NATO – founded when the old Soviet Union was America’s main adversary on the world stage – must be retooled, or, if necessary, abandoned, in favor of new alliances and structures designed to meet new threats. In Trump’s view, we are stuck in the past, fighting yesterday’s wars while our allies drain our resources and our real enemies go about their business undisturbed.

In terms of specifics, what this translates into is a rapprochement with Russia, which will be recruited into a US-led “anti-terrorist” coalition designed, first of all, to fight and destroy ISIS, and perhaps also to contain China short of war.

In an interview with the Times of London and the German newspaper Bild, Trump indicated that he envisions a grand bargain with Vladimir Putin: an end to US sanctions and our aggressive military stance in Europe in exchange for major mutual cuts in our respective nuclear arsenals, perhaps coupled with a Russian guarantee that their “near abroad” is safe from Moscow’s designs. Furthermore, Russia would be transformed from an adversary into a partner in our endless “war on terrorism,” with Trump essentially farming out much of the work involved in subduing and eliminating the ISIS “Caliphate” to Putin and Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. This would eliminate the need for US troops on the ground, reducing our role to air support and perhaps the injection of Special Forces to carry out limited tasks.

The US military and national security bureaucracy is implacably opposed to this: that is the source of the CIA’s open hostility to Trump, and the rather crude effort to tie him and his campaign to the Kremlin. Both parties oppose détente – never mind an alliance – with Russia, for any reason whatsoever, although the Trumpian wing of the GOP is moving toward the President on this issue.

Thus we had the spectacle of Marco Rubio demanding that Rex Tillerson condemn Putin as a “war criminal,” which the would-be Secretary of State pointedly refused to do. However, in response to relentless hammering, Tillerson agreed that the US should have reacted to the Russian reacquisition of Crimea with “a proportional show of force,” arming the Ukrainian coup leaders with “defensive” weapons and otherwise “standing up” to the Russian “menace.” Trump, on the other hand, has denied that Ukraine is a vital US interest, and seems likely to reduce if not eliminate US support for Kiev, which was involved in an active effort to deny him the presidency.

The newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, is even worse. Pressed during the hearings to separate himself from Trump, he readily complied:

“Since Yalta, we have a long list of times we’ve tried to engage positively with Russia. We have a relatively short list of successes in that regard. And I think right now, the most important thing is that we recognize the reality of what we deal with, with Mr. Putin, and we recognize that he is trying to break the North Atlantic alliance, and that we take the steps, the integrated steps, diplomatic, economic and military and the alliance steps, the working with our allies, to defend ourselves where we must.”

The invocation of Yalta underscores just how sclerotic the national security bureaucracy has become: they’re still living in the cold war era. And you’ll note that Mattis never enumerates the “long list” of attempts to come to terms with Russia, although one could recall Ronald Reagan’s historic agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that partially denuclearized Europe and essentially ended the cold war – which is what Trump hopes to achieve or even surpass.

If Mattis thinks there are “a decreasing number of areas” where US and Russian interests align, then he has the complete opposite view of his boss, who clearly thinks it would be “nice if we could get along with Russia” and considers a good relationship with Putin an “asset.”

Another problem is Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick for CIA director, who averred during his confirmation hearings that Russia is “threatening Europe” and is “doing nothing” to eliminate ISIS as a factor in the Middle East. I guess all those bombing raids on radical Islamist fighters are just more fake news.

However, it’s hard to say that Pompeo and the others disagree with Trump’s fundamental deviation from post-WWII US policy, which is that the cold war legacy of seeing Russia as the principal threat is outdated. As the BBC reported, “when asked what was the greatest security threat to the US, [Pompeo] cited terrorism foremost and lumped Russia in behind North Korea and China.” This view, however, is still a far cry from what appears to be Trump’s position, which is that Russia is a potential ally that needs to be integrated into the international order.

Senator Ron Wyden is currently holding up Pompeo’s nomination, on the rather weird grounds that the CIA appointee may want to use information gathered by the Russians against Americans. Yes, that’s how far the anti-Russian hysteria has penetrated into the consciousness of the Democratic “resistance.” One wonders if Sen. Wyden objects to the Russians’ attempt to warn us about the Tsarnaev brothers.

Speaking of anti-Russian hysterics, Pompeo also pledged that he would take pains to support members of the intelligence community who “were afraid there would be political retribution” for the spooks’ brazen efforts to undermine Trump’s presidency, and promised to “have their backs at every single moment. You have my word on that.”

I find this rather hard to believe: will Trump really stand passively by while the “intelligence community” launches a witch-hunt to delegitimize him as a “Russian puppet,” as Hillary Clinton put it?

Trump’s inaugural address was a fiery challenge to the Establishment – even as they stood around him, he lambasted them for enriching themselves at the expense of the “forgotten man” and vowed to take on the Powers That Be. Yet those same powers are amply represented in his own cabinet choices – especially Mattis, who represents the old guard in the Pentagon.

I think the divide between Trump and his cabinet is a bit overstated, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. While the President is no doubt a willful man, there’s always the danger that he’ll allow himself to be diverted from his own agenda. He’s pledged to take so much on in so short a time that even someone with so much energy is bound to get bogged down by relentless opposition from every quarter.

I liken Trump to Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Convinced that the “bourgeoisie” had infiltrated and taken over the Chinese Communist Party, Mao reached over the heads of the Party and appealed directly to the masses. In a famous wall poster tacked up in Beijing’s Tiannanmen Square, Mao directed his followers to “Bombard the Headquarters!” – that is, the headquarters of the Communist Party, where the “capitalist-roaders” were ensconced.

Trump is attempting the same gambit, using the twenty-first century equivalent of the wall poster – his Twitter account. With every political faction in Washington arrayed against him – from the neocons on the right to the left-wing of the Democratic party – Trump must depend on his own resources, and those of his inner circle, to upend the Establishment and chart a new course for American foreign policy.

Will he be able to do it? I don’t know, but what I do know is this: he is aiming for nothing less than a fundamental shift in the course our foreign policy has taken since 1945. The ship of state is a vast and unwieldy vehicle, one that isn’t turned around in a day – but I, unlike all too many of my anti-interventionist friends and colleagues, give him credit for trying.

A big part of the problem is that the Trump administration is having major problems filling the thousands of jobs in the national security bureaucracy. The reason is because his revolutionary ideas are abhorred and opposed by the “foreign policy community,” which has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Another problem is that many of the anti-interventionist and “realist” scholars and think-tankers who supposedly want to scale down the Empire and bring America home have a personal distaste for the President that overrides their alleged principles.

As Trump would say: Sad! I would say it’s disgraceful.

#justin raimondo #anti-war #donald trump #us foreign policy

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Democracy Grief Is Real https://nyti.ms/2LRLcSL

I have been in a deep depression since Thanksgiving and feel totally defeated and exhausted so I'm heartened to know there's a reason for it. 😭😭😭

Democracy Grief Is Real

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

By Michelle Goldberg | Published Dec. 13, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now held by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Obama, we’ve never before had a president that treats half the country like enemies, subjecting it to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with a straight face that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican Senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world; The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing the Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit, and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

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Ukraine’s Leader, Wiser to Washington, Seeks New Outreach to Trump

President Volodymyr Zelensky still needs backing from the administration. He is proposing a new ambassador and weighing hiring lobbyists to build better ties.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Andrew E. Kramer | Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated 12:44 PM ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Eager to repair their country’s fraught relationship with Washington, allies of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine have met with lobbyists with close ties to the Trump administration, hopeful of creating new channels of communication.

After more than two months of anxious waiting, Mr. Zelensky finally appears to have won support from the White House for a candidate to fill Ukraine’s vacant ambassadorship to the United States.

And Mr. Zelensky, still deeply dependent on American assistance, has been signaling, in hardly subtle fashion, that he and his officials will not assist in the impeachment process, keeping quiet in particular about the fact that his government knew weeks earlier than it has publicly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had frozen nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Nearly every world leader has struggled to figure out how to deal with Mr. Trump. But few face greater pressure to find the answer — or more hurdles to doing so — than Mr. Zelensky.

Wiser now to the ways of Washington, he and his team are carefully trying to reestablish themselves in a variety of ways as an important ally with a substantive agenda deserving of Washington’s attention and support.

They have a long ways to go. Mr. Zelensky’s team has been discouraged by the absence of expected support from Mr. Trump for Ukraine’s peace talks with Russia, as well as the lack of follow-through from the White House on a promised Oval Office meeting with Mr. Zelensky that the administration had quietly signaled might happen in late January.

Mr. Zelensky’s allies were frustrated further by Mr. Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. And when the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani paid an unexpected visit to Kyiv last week in a continued effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump’s political opponents, no Ukrainian government officials met him.

Asked by an official at the German Marshall Fund on Friday what the Zelensky administration wants from Washington, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, who has been in Washington this week meeting with administration and congressional officials, said “all we are asking from our colleagues in the U.S. administration is fair treatment.”

He added, “We don’t want to be shamed and blamed.”

The continued push to try to overcome Mr. Trump’s grudge against Ukraine suggests Zelensky administration officials have concluded that impeachment will fail in the Senate and that they will almost certainly need to work with Mr. Trump for at least another year, and possibly another five years if Mr. Trump is re-elected.

“Our relations are not in good shape,” said Olena Zerkal, a former deputy foreign minister under Mr. Zelensky. “I don’t believe in any chemistry between our leaders.”

Mr. Zelensky’s willingness to accommodate the Trump administration has hardly gone unnoticed in Kyiv.

After the White House released a rough transcript of a July 25 call between the American and Ukrainian presidents, Mr. Zelensky was panned in Ukraine on social media for seeming too eager to please Mr. Trump. That included signaling a willingness to pursue the investigations sought by Mr. Trump into political targets like the family of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Monica Zelensky,” the Ukrainian president was called on social media in Kyiv, in a reference to the intern whose sexual relations with Bill Clinton led to the last impeachment proceedings of an American president.

Even a White House visit, if it happens, risks being seen not so much as a triumph for Mr. Zelensky as more kowtowing to Mr. Trump, who could cite it as evidence he never linked such a visit, or American military assistance for Ukraine, to investigations that would benefit him politically.

“In Kyiv, we have to place bets on the current power in Washington,” said Nikolay Kapitonenko, professor at the Institute of International Relations. But outreach to the Republican administration is not risk free, he said, adding, “Zelensky understands that taking any side is dangerous.”

The importance of American support for Ukraine — and the desire for more of it from Mr. Trump — has been on display in recent days.

An American diplomat traveled to Kyiv to express support for the Ukrainians headed into Mr. Zelensky’s first face-to-face meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday in Paris.

But Trump administration officials privately told the Ukrainians that Mr. Trump himself would signal support, according to Americans and Ukrainians familiar with the matter, either via Twitter, as first reported by The Daily Beast, or possibly even an invitation for Mr. Zelensky to visit the White House next month. While Mr. Trump posted more than 100 tweets on Sunday, none expressed support for the Ukrainians headed into the peace talks.

The Trump administration had also resisted calls to levy sanctions against a Russian gas pipeline that would circumvent Ukraine. The White House reportedly worked to undermine congressional efforts to block the pipeline, though sanctions language was added to a $738 billion military policy bill that passed the House on Wednesday. And the military assistance that Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of using as leverage to force the investigations reportedly still has not fully reached Ukraine.

Those are among the issues that may help explain why the Ukrainians are considering stepping up their lobbying in Washington, despite potential political and financial costs.

During his campaign and early in his presidency, Mr. Zelensky proclaimed that he had no need to hire lobbyists like the government of his predecessor. “I never met a single lobbyist,” he said. “I don’t need this. I never paid a coin and I never will.”

Yet, in the weeks before Mr. Zelensky was elected in April, his advisers quietly worked with a Washington lobbying firm, Signal Group, to arrange meetings in Washington with Trump administration officials, as well as congressional offices and think tanks that focus on Ukraine-United States relations.

Mr. Zelensky distanced himself from the arrangement, even though Signal Group reported in a filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, that it was paid nearly $70,000 by Mr. Zelensky’s party through a lawyer named Marcus Cohen. Mr. Cohen, on the other hand, claimed that the money came from his own pocket, not from Mr. Zelensky’s party.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, which oversees FARA, sent a letter to Mr. Cohen requesting information about the arrangement, then urged him to register as a foreign agent, according to people with knowledge of the situation. One of the people said that the division also audited Signal Group’s filings, informing the firm in a letter in October that the inquiry was closed.

Signal defended its FARA filings as accurate, and referred questions about Mr. Cohen’s representations to him or Mr. Zelensky’s team. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Zelensky “may find that it is best to be his own spokesperson on this subject for a while to prevent others from interpreting his words for him,” at least until “trust can be rebuilt,” Heather A. Conley, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of European and Eurasian affairs from 2001 to 2005, said in an email.

Ms. Conley, who is director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was among the think tank officials who met with one Mr. Zelensky’s advisers in April in a meeting arranged by Signal and Mr. Cohen.

They discussed Mr. Zelensky’s anticorruption and economic overhaul plans, Ms. Conley said, adding, “Ukraine faces a fraught landscape in Washington — with or without a lobbyist.”

The discussions about hiring a lobbyist, which are described as preliminary, have divided Mr. Zelensky’s team.

Some are concerned that hiring a lobbying firm with ties to Mr. Trump could jeopardize Democratic support. And some are wary of becoming involved with K Street at all, because of the specter of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for crimes related to his lobbying for a deeply unpopular former Ukrainian government.

Yet two of the firms being discussed for possible lobbying engagement have links to Mr. Manafort, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

A representative of one of the firms, Mercury Public Affairs, which worked with Mr. Manafort on his Ukraine effort, met in Kyiv last month with a top aide to Mr. Zelensky. The lobbyist, Bryan Lanza, has ties to the Trump White House, and was in Ukraine on unrelated business according to people familiar with the meeting.

It was arranged by an American lawyer named Andrew Mac, who himself registered last month with the Justice Department as an unpaid lobbyist for Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Mac, who splits his time between Washington and Kyiv, was appointed by Mr. Zelensky last month as an adviser responsible for building support among the Ukrainian diaspora.

In a sign of the scrutiny in Kyiv on its new government’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Trump, and efforts to calm it, secretly recorded video and photographs circulated of Mr. Lanza’s meeting with the Zelensky aide in a restaurant.

In an article featuring the photographs, a Ukrainian news outlet noted that Mr. Lanza helped lift sanctions against the corporate empire of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin ally. That arrangement was assailed by critics in Washington as a sweetheart deal that represented a capitulation to the Kremlin, while Mr. Lanza also lobbied to help remove potentially crippling sanctions on the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

Mr. Mac said Mr. Lanza had been “very effective in working for his clients on difficult matters.”

Another firm that was discussed by Mr. Zelensky’s aides, Prime Policy Group, also has a Manafort link — albeit a more dated one. It was started by Charlie Black, a former business partner of Mr. Manafort’s in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Black’s firm has represented other clients in Ukraine, including Sergey Tigipko, a Ukrainian billionaire and former official in the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Mr. Black said he had not had any conversations with Mr. Zelensky’s team about a possible contract, but would not be opposed to such an engagement.

Mr. Mac met this month in Washington to discuss Ukrainian energy issues with the former Representative Billy Tauzin, a Democrat turned Republican from Louisiana who is now a lobbyist. While someone with knowledge of the deliberations said Mr. Tauzin was not being considered as a potential lobbyist for Ukraine, he has connections that could be helpful. His congressional staff once included Dan Brouillette, who was confirmed this month as secretary of the Energy Department, upon which the Ukrainian government has relied for help with its power supply during brutally cold winters.

Ms. Conley suggested that Mr. Zelensky would be better served by an ambassador than a lobbyist, but the process of filling that vacancy has not been quick.

At least three names had been floated in recent months, and the Zelensky administration’s current preference for the position, Volodymyr Yelchenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, had been awaiting approval since late September or early October, according to people familiar with the process. They said that the State Department had signed off on Mr. Yelchenko weeks ago, but that the Ukrainians had grown anxious waiting for the White House to do so.

Officials in Kyiv were told that the approval would be formally communicated this week, they said. The White House and State Department did not respond to questions about the approval of Mr. Yelchenko.

Some attributed the delay to a quiet push by some Trump allies for a prospective ambassador who is closely aligned with Mr. Giuliani, Andrii Telizhenko, who had served as a low-ranking diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington under the previous government.

He was embraced by Mr. Trump’s allies after claiming that the former American ambassador to Kyiv and other Ukrainian officials worked to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. In recent months, Mr. Telizhenko has worked closely with Mr. Giuliani to advance those claims. As part of the effort, the two men traveled together to Hungary and Ukraine last week to record interviews with former Ukrainian officials for a series of programs by a conservative cable channel seeking to undermine the impeachment proceedings.

It is unclear whether Mr. Zelensky’s team ever seriously considered Mr. Telizhenko as an ambassador candidate.

Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv.

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The Party That Ruined the Planet

Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.

By Paul Krugman | Published Dec. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren’t paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.

But the terrifying political news and the terrifying climate news are closely related.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.

But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.

As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

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Donald Trump Wanted Another Roy Cohn. He Got Bill Barr.

EVEN BETTER.

By Caroline Fredrickson, Ms. Fredrickson is the author of “The Democracy Fix.” | Published December 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

President Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Demanding a stand-in for his old personal lawyer and fixer, Mr. Trump has actually gotten something better with Bill Barr: a lawyer who like Cohn stops seemingly at nothing in his service to Mr. Trump and conveniently sits atop the nation’s Justice Department.

Mr. Barr has acted more like a henchman than the leader of an agency charged with exercising independent judgment. The disturbing message that sends does not end at our borders — it extends to countries, like those in the former East Bloc, struggling to overcome an illiberal turn in the direction of autocracy.

When Mr. Trump sought to have President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announce an investigation of his political opponent, he likely expected a positive response. After all, politicized prosecutions had been part of Ukraine’s corrupt political culture for years.

On Monday, when Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Justice Department, released a report that affirmed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was justified, Mr. Barr immediately turned on his own agency in defense of the president.

“The F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said.

Similarly, Mr. Barr’s response to the report from Robert Mueller on Russian interference and Mr. Trump’s purported presidential misconduct was to cast doubt on his own staff, questioning their work product as well as their ethics and legal reasoning. Even before he became attorney general, Mr. Barr questioned Mr. Mueller’s investigation of the president for obstruction of justice in a 19-page legal memo he volunteered to the administration.

And where he could have neutrally passed Mr. Mueller’s findings to Congress, he instead took the widely criticized and unusual step of making and announcing his own legal conclusions about Mr. Mueller’s obstruction inquiry. He followed up this Cohn-like behavior with testimony in the Senate, where he insinuated that the United States government spied on the Trump campaign. Mr. Barr apparently has decided that, like Cohn, he serves Donald Trump and not the Constitution or the United States, flouting his oath of office and corrupting the mission of the Justice Department.

In the past, the United States has, however imperfectly, advanced the rule of law and supported governments committed to an anti-corruption agenda. According to George Kent, a State Department official who testified in the House impeachment inquiry, Russia sees corruption as a tool to advance its interests. So when the United States fights a kleptocratic culture, it serves not only lofty humanitarian goals but also our national security. Mr. Zelensky ran a campaign and was elected on a platform that put fighting corruption at the forefront. He should have received extensive and unmitigated support in that effort.

In the former East Bloc countries, despite the hopes of many for a post-Soviet era where democracy would thrive, the parties and politicians in power have consolidated their control in a manner reminiscent of the Communist era.

Autocrats understand that supposedly independent institutions such as the courts and prosecutors are vital to locking in their power. In Romania, a crusading anti-corruption prosecutor who was investigating top government officials was fired at the same time as the government advanced legislation to cabin the ability of other prosecutors to pursue cases against political officials. Poland’s right-wing populist Law and Justice Party has attacked the independent judiciary and has sought to remove judges who do not follow the party line. Hungary has followed suit. Bulgarian politicians have persecuted civil society groups that have criticized their abandonment of the rule of law.

While several United States ambassadors have attempted to support anti-corruption efforts in the region, they have been continuously undercut by the White House. In addition to firing Marie Yovanovitch, who served as ambassador to Ukraine, in part because of her anti-corruption focus, Mr. Trump hosted Viktor Orban of Hungary in Washington over the objections of national security officials who did not want to elevate a corrupt leader with close ties to the Kremlin; furthermore, the president has tried to cut funding for anti-corruption programs.

Mr. Trump’s focus on cultivating foreign leaders who can help his re-election has overwhelmed our national interests in the region. That is certainly a shame for the anti-corruption activists in former Communist countries who have depended on our help and leadership since the end of the Soviet era and who have seen their justice system turned to serve political ends.

But for Americans, we must worry that we face a similar domestic situation: a prosecutor who bends to the political needs of the president. Mr. Trump may no longer be able to call on Roy Cohn, but he now has a stronger ally in the United States’ top law-enforcement official, who thinks that if the president does it, it can’t be wrong.

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How Trump Weaponized the Justice Department’s Inspector General

The president and his allies have turned investigations into a political tool for use against their enemies.

By James B. Stewart, Mr. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist. | Published Dec. 13, 2019, 6:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Dec. 13, 2019

In his report on the origins of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and in testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the Department of Justice demolished President Trump’s most sensational allegations about the Russia inquiry: He concluded that the opening of the investigation was lawful and legitimate, that there was no improper “spying” on the Trump campaign and that the F.B.I. wasn’t part of some “deep state” conspiracy to overthrow the president.

That hardly stopped Mr. Trump and his allies. The report “was far worse than expected,” the president asserted — after already predicting it would be “devastating.” “This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught, they got caught red-handed,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Attorney General William Barr was quick to pile on, too: “The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said in a Justice Department statement.

Media coverage and Senate hearings quickly shifted to the F.B.I.’s procedural failings, which Mr. Horowitz labeled “gross incompetence.” By the end of the week, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the F.B.I. was indeed part of some sinister coup attempt — precisely the opposite of what Mr. Horowitz had concluded.

So much for the supposedly nonpartisan and independent office of the Department of Justice Inspector General — a position that, before the Trump administration, most Americans hardly knew existed. To a striking degree, Mr. Trump and his allies have turned the post into a potent weapon aimed at his supposed enemies in the federal law enforcement agencies.

Their ability to wreak political havoc with the latest Horowitz report is part of what has now become a clear pattern: Call for an investigation of a favorite Trump target; speculate about the likely outcome; seize on any collateral evidence that emerges; spin the results; then move quickly to the next investigation. Repeat.

The White House and Republicans in Congress insisted the inspector general open an investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry, even though it was already thoroughly covered in a report from the special counsel Robert Mueller. Investigators armed with virtually unlimited time and budget will nearly always find something (as critics of the special counsel role have long argued).

Mr. Horowitz uncovered some new details, and the irregularities he discovered in the F.B.I.’s FISA application process may well prompt a needed overhaul of the standards for intrusive surveillance of American citizens. But Mr. Horowitz conceded that even if all of those problems had been corrected, he couldn’t say the outcome would have been any different. Nor do they fundamentally change our understanding of how and why the Russia investigation began — already reported in considerable and accurate detail, including in this newspaper and in my recent book, “Deep State.”

But no matter how redundant, such investigations can serve as useful fishing expeditions. Six House committees conducted investigations of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks. All of them absolved her of any wrongdoing. But it was in one of those investigations that a committee uncovered her use of a personal server for her email correspondence, which led to the F.B.I.’s Clinton email investigation. That provided candidate Trump with his “Lock her up” chant — and arguably cost her the presidency.

Mr. Horowitz, citing requests from members of Congress and the public, spent 17 months examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case. His conclusion: There was “no evidence” that the decision not to seek charges against Mrs. Clinton was “affected by bias or other improper conclusions,” the opposite of what Mr. Trump had been asserting for months.

But during that investigation Mr. Horowitz uncovered hundreds of texts between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, that suggested animus toward Mr. Trump and also revealed that the two had in the past engaged in an extramarital affair — information eagerly disseminated by the Justice Department and Trump allies.

Since then Mr. Trump has tweeted about Ms. Page over 40 times, caricaturing her and Mr. Strzok as “love birds” conspiring to bring down the president, with Mr. Trump often using the most vulgar terms to whip his supporters into a partisan frenzy. At a rally in October, Mr. Trump simulated an orgasm while saying: “I love you, Peter! I love you, too, Lisa! Lisa, I love you. Lisa, Lisa! Oh God, I love you, Lisa.”

Citing that incident as the last straw, this week Ms. Page sued the Department of Justice for unlawfully releasing the texts, which she said had “radically altered” her day-to-day life.

The existence of an investigation provides the president and his allies with unlimited opportunities to speculate about the outcome, while the inspector general is bound by confidentiality restrictions until the report is released. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, confidently predicted the inspector general’s report would demonstrate a “system off the rails” before he read it.

This may help explain why Mr. Trump, in his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government to open investigations of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, didn’t really care whether the Ukrainians actually conducted such an investigation — only that one be announced. That would have given him and his allies the opportunity to speculate about what the investigation was finding to tar the Bidens without any risk that an investigation would exonerate them.

It doesn’t matter if the report itself turns out to be something of an anticlimax. To his credit, Mr. Horowitz didn’t abandon the objective evidence in an effort to please his overseers. He certainly didn’t reach the answers about Russia or the Clinton email investigation for which President Trump and his allies so fervently hoped.

Yet there’s just enough in the Horowitz report to fuel “deep state” conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump has seized on reports from the inspector general to excoriate James Comey, Andrew McCabe and other former F.B.I. employees as “traitors.” Many media reports have focused on Mr. Horowitz’s “scathing” criticism of the F.B.I. rather than his broader conclusions.

Mr. Trump can be confident that few people will actually read the dense, legalistic prose of the Horowitz report — just as relatively few Americans read the entire Mueller report — which shows the F.B.I. largely fulfilling its mission in extraordinary circumstances.

The pattern has already started again. Mr. Trump has moved on to the next Russia investigation being conducted at Mr. Barr’s behest by United States Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut. This week Mr. Durham took the extraordinary step of criticizing the Horowitz report, fueling renewed speculation that this time Mr. Trump will finally get a result he wants.

“I do think the big report to wait for is going to be the Durham report,” Mr. Trump said, once again speculating about a report that hasn’t been written. “That’s the one that people are really waiting for.”

James B. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist and the author of “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law.”

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trunewsofficial · 6 years ago

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Cancelation of Pence Trip to New Hampshire Shrouded in Secrecy

This morning—just as news was breaking about a fire on a Russian submarine that killed 14—it was announced that Vice President Mike Pence had abruptly canceled his plans for the day. The vice president was originally scheduled to travel to New Hampshire to take part in a planned opioid crisis event at a recovery center. Approximately 200 people had arrived for the event in Salem. Air Force 2 was slated to land in Manchester at 11:25 a.m., but according to White House officials it never took off from Joint Base Andrews. Instead, the vice president was recalled to the White House, where he met “briefly” with the president. Originally, the change of plans was attributed to an undisclosed “emergency.” But then the vice president’s spokeswoman, Alyssa Farah, told reporters it wasn’t an emergency, but rather a “situation” that required a “diversion.” Immediately, the mainstream media began running in overdrive with speculation about what could be happening. Has the president fallen ill? Are we going to war with Iran? Is it Syria? Are we closer to World War III than we ever imagined? Eventually, a senior administration official told reporters the change had nothing to do with the health of either the president or vice president. Then, the vice president’s spokeswoman added that the diversion had nothing to do with any national security matter: “Something came up that required the vice president to remain in Washington, D.C. It’s no cause for alarm. He looks forward to rescheduling the trip to New Hampshire very soon.” Not long thereafter, news reports emerged of an active shooter situation at the Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth, N.H., about 40 miles east of Manchester. While the facility and it being on lockdown had no impact on the cancelation of the vice president’s event, it certainly added significant intrigue to what was already a bizarre situation. Six hours into the media circus surrounding the matter—and the rest of the world’s geopolitical news slate—White House reporters were still demanding answers from the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short. One reporter’s account of that exchange: Press: “Can you tell us what happened? Why cancel the New Hampshire trip?” Short: “There will be more later.” Press: “When later?” Short: “Weeks from now.” It’s entirely possible Short’s response was just cheekiness given the breathless reporting the situation has received from the mainstream media. If not, that would seem to add yet another layer of intrigue—and endless possibilities. One of which was floated earlier this week by TruNews: President Trump intends to pick a different running mate for 2020. And while much of the speculation has surrounded former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, TruNews has previously reported that FOX News Channel host Tucker Carlson might also be a contender for the job. And now The Spectator’s Washington Editor Curt Mills is reporting his sources say there’s a high likelihood the president is ready to pull the trigger on just such a change. In an article published Monday, he wrote: “First, Tucker gets Trump. The duo have personal chemistry far exceeding the rapport that Pence or Haley enjoy. Haley bitterly opposed Trump during the 2016 primary and a former senior administration official has long informed me that her hiring during the transition was a ‘keep your enemies closer’ affair. In Carlson, Trump would get to anoint an heir apparent he actually likes. “Second, Tucker gets Trumpism, and Trumpism gets Tucker. He is eminence grise of a new intellectual right befitting the Trump era, and appeals to people who have started to become disgruntled in President Trump. “It’s been speculated before that Carlson might enter a 2024 race, but Trump might want to bring him into his fold sooner than that. Trump often complains of ideological clashes with his own officials. That’s partly why he already relies on a shadow cabinet, anchored by Carlson, as proved by last week’s called-off strikes on Iran. “A Vice President Carlson could lay low, moreover, and empower a new generation of Trumpist conservatives from the Naval Observatory. Trump in his first term has had to appoint Bush-era officials who have no idea what drives Trump’s movement. Carlson knows Trumpworld far better. “If Tucker jumped into the 2024 race, as has been widely discussed, excitement among the activist class would be barely containable. If he jumped into 2020, excitement would boil over. “Third, it would work. As evidenced by his conquering of Bill O’Reilly’s time slot on Fox, Carlson is a fearsome debater and fearless operator. Far from being ‘just a talk show host,’ as he often says of himself, Carlson is becoming a political force.” In the meantime, the speculation will continue to spin until the media are sufficiently assured they have the facts. The question now is: Will they like the answers they get? (Photo Credit: The White House) source https://trunews.com/stream/cancelation-of-pence-trip-to-new-hampshire-shrouded-in-secrecy

#TRUNEWS - Rick Wiles

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hellofastestnewsfan · 6 years ago

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This article was updated on Sunday, October 7 at 2:56 pm.

Unlike Senator Susan Collins, who took pages upon pages of text on national television to tell us something we already knew, I will cut right to the chase: I am out of the Republican Party.

I will also acknowledge right away what I assume will be the reaction of most of the remaining members of the GOP, ranging from “Good riddance” to “You were never a real Republican,” along with a smattering of “Who are you, anyway?”

Those Republicans will have a point. I am not a prominent Republican nor do I play a major role in Republican politics. What I write here are my views alone. I joined the party in the twilight of Jimmy Carter’s administration, cut my teeth in politics as an aide to a working class, Catholic Democrat in the Massachusetts House, and later served for a year on the personal staff of a senior Republican U.S. senator. Not exactly the profile of a conservative warrior.

I even quit the party once before, briefly, during what I thought was the bottom for the GOP: the 2012 primaries. I didn’t want to be associated with a party that took Newt Gingrich seriously as presidential timber, or with people whose callousness managed to shock even Ron Paul. It was an estrangement, not a break, and I came back when the danger of a Trump victory loomed. I was too late, but as a moderate conservative (among the few left), the pre-2016 GOP was the only party I could call home.

Small things sometimes matter, and Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally to accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not even for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.

I have written on social media and elsewhere how I feel about Kavanaugh’s nomination. I initially viewed his nomination positively, as a standard GOP judicial appointment; then grew concerned about whether he should continue on as a nominee with the accusations against him; and finally, was appalled by his behavior in front of the Senate.

It was Collins, however, who made me realize that there would be no moderates to lead conservatives out of the rubble of the Trump era. Senator Jeff Flake is retiring and took a pass, and with all due respect to Senator Lisa Murkowski—who at least admitted that her “no” vote on cloture meant “no” rather than drag out the drama—she will not be the focus of a rejuvenated party.

When Collins spoke, she took the floor of the Senate to calm an anxious and divided nation by giving us all an extended soliloquy on… the severability of a clause.

The severability of a clause? Seriously?

It took almost half an hour before Collins got to the accusations against Kavanaugh, but the rest of what she said was irrelevant. She had clearly made up her mind weeks earlier, and she completely ignored Kavanaugh’s volcanic and bizarre performance in front of the Senate.

As an aside, let me say that I have no love for the Democratic Party, which is torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other. As a newly minted independent, I will vote for Democrats and Republicans I think are decent and well-meaning people; if I move back home to Massachusetts, I could cast a ballot for Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Democratic Representative Joe Kennedy and not think twice about it.

But during the Kavanaugh dumpster fire, the performance of the Democratic Party—with some honorable exceptions like Senators Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar—was execrable. From the moment they leaked the Ford letter, they were a Keystone Cops operation, with Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono willing to wave away the Constitution and get right to a presumption of guilt, and Senator Dianne Feinstein looking incompetent and outflanked instead of like the ranking member of one of the most important committees in America.

The Republicans, however, have now eclipsed the Democrats as a threat to the rule of law and to the constitutional norms of American society. They have become all about winning. Winning means not losing, and so instead of acting like a co-equal branch of government responsible for advice and consent, congressional Republicans now act like a parliamentary party facing the constant threat of a vote of no-confidence.

That it is necessary to place limitations, including self-limitations, on the exercise of power is—or was—a core belief among conservatives. No longer. Raw power, wielded so deftly by Senator Mitch McConnell, is exercised for its own sake, and by that I mean for the sake of fleecing gullible voters on hot-button social issues so that Republicans may stay in power. Of course, the institutional GOP will say that it countenances all of Trump’s many sins, and its own straying from principle, for good reason (including, of course, the holy grail of ending legal abortion).

Politics is about the exercise of power. But the new Trumpist GOP is not exercising power in the pursuit of anything resembling principle, and certainly not for conservative or Republican principles.

Free trade? Republicans are suddenly in love with tariffs, and now sound like bad imitations of early 1980s protectionist Democrats. A robust foreign policy? Not only have Republicans abandoned their claim to being the national-security party, they have managed to convince the party faithful that Russia—an avowed enemy that directly attacked our political institutions—is less of a threat than their neighbors who might be voting for Democrats. Respect for law enforcement? The GOP is backing Trump in attacks on the FBI and the entire intelligence community as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the web of lies, financial arrangements, and Russian entanglements known collectively as the Trump campaign.

And most important, on the rule of law, congressional Republicans have utterly collapsed. They have sold their souls, purely at Trump’s behest, living in fear of the dreaded primary challenges that would take them away from the Forbidden City and send them back home to the provinces. Yes, an anti-constitutional senator like Hirono is unnerving, but she’s a piker next to her Republican colleagues, who have completely reversed themselves on everything from the limits of executive power to the independence of the judiciary, all to serve their leader in a way that would make the most devoted cult follower of Kim Jong Un blush.

Maybe it’s me. I’m not a Republican anymore, but am I still a conservative? Limited government: check. Strong national defense: check. Respect for tradition and deep distrust of sudden, dramatic change: check. Belief that people spend their money more wisely than government? That America is an exceptional nation with a global mission? That we are, in fact, a shining city on a hill and an example to others? Check, check, check.

But I can’t deny that I’ve strayed from the party. I believe abortion should remain legal. I am against the death penalty in all its forms outside of killing in war. I don’t think what’s good for massive corporations is always good for America. In foreign affairs, I am an institutionalist, a supporter of working through international bodies and agreements. I think our defense budget is too big, too centered on expensive toys, and that we are still too entranced by nuclear weapons.

I believe in the importance of diversity and toleration. I would like a shorter tax code. I would also like people to exhibit some public decorum and keep their shoes on in public.

Does this make me a liberal? No. I do not believe that human nature is malleable clay to be reshaped by wise government policy. Many of my views, which flow from that basic conservative idea, are not welcome in a Democratic tribe in the grip of the madness of identity politics.

But whatever my concerns about liberals, the true authoritarian muscle is now being flexed by the GOP, in a kind of buzzy, steroidal McCarthyism that lacks even anti-communism as a central organizing principle. The Republican Party, which controls all three branches of government and yet is addicted to whining about its own victimhood, is now the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs.

So, I’m out. The Trumpers and the hucksters and the consultants and the hangers-on, like a colony of bees who exist only to sting and die, have swarmed together in a dangerous but suicidal cloud, and when that mindless hive finally extinguishes itself in a blaze of venom, there will be nothing left.

I’m a divorced man who is remarried. But love, in some ways, is easier than politics. I spent nearly 40 years as a Republican, a relationship that began when I joined a revitalized GOP that saw itself not as a victim, but as the vehicle for lifting America out of the wreckage of the 1970s, defeating the Soviet Union, and extending human freedom at home and abroad. I stayed during the turbulence of the Tea Party tomfoolery. I moved out briefly during the abusive 2012 primaries. But now I’m filing for divorce, and I am taking nothing with me when I go.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2y7IVft

#Blogger

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roguenewsdao · 7 years ago

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CIA Partisans in Media and on Twitter Furious Over Director Pompeo Meeting with VIPS' William Binney, Undermining their 'Russia Hacked the DNC' Narrative

Since LaRouchePAC promoted VIPS and the Adam Carter/Forensicator findings that the DNC emails could have only been downloaded at flash drive speeds by an insider at the scene, Fox News nightly host Tucker Carlson has had Binney and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) on his program undermining the entire 'Russians hacked the election' story. Tucker Carlson's willingness to cross party lines and question the bipartisan #BlameRussia #BlamePutin narrative for everything has infuriated many ex-spooks and wannabe spooks on Twitter. Last night Carlson repeatedly challenged former DNC consultant turned bestselling book promoter Donna Brazile regarding the failure of the DNC to turn over the servers to the government, never receiving a straight answer from her as to how and why that occurred. Brazile, who had written in her book that she feared for her own life after colleague Seth Rich was gunned down on the streets of D.C., basically hemmed and hawed and dodged the question:

British 'ex' GCHQ man Matt Tait, a crony of James Comey's pal Benjamin Wittes who pushes ridiculous claims of a pro-Trump Republican seeking to recruit him for obtaining Hillary's 33,000 deleted private server emails from the Russians, has railed against Binney on his Twitter feed. Former CIA agents turned social media starring #NeverTrump ers Ned Price and John Sipher have been apoplectic about Pompeo's willingness to hear Binney out, denouncing this as a Trumpist corruption of the totally non-partisan intelligence community's integrity. Nevermind that introducing the Steele dossier into the intel community through Trump hating agency chiefs James Clapper, John Brennan and James Comey in of itself represented a serious, Democratic partisan corrupting of intel collection and analysis. But Sipher in particular has been outspoken in defending the Steele dossier, a trashy piece of oppo research paid for by Hillary Clinton operatives, as a somehow authenticated piece of intelligence (regarding which, now former DNI Clapper would later laughably tell CNN it 'didn't matter' who paid for it, a position that in any other circumstances trained intelligence officers would dismiss as ridiculous).

In typical spook double speak, Sipher also allows in touting the dossier as legit that it may contain FSB/SVR disinformation fed to Christopher Steele's sources, as the 'former' British spy could no longer visit Russia and had to gather his (bogus) intel remotely. In his arrogance, counting on total deference from Democratic partisans with press passes, Sipher doesn't think anything of admitting that perhaps partisan Trump hating Democrats running DNI, CIA and FBI may have been punked with disinfo by Putin's security services. Sipher strikes us as a classic, "Heads I win, tails you lose, and I'm always right" personality.

If -- as Republican lawmakers like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) suspect and former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has alleged the 'dirty dossier' was used as a basis for obtaining FISA surveillance warrants -- then the abuse rises to at least the same level or worse as anything Nixon did in unleashing agencies against domestic political enemies. If Binney's story is just a crackpot claim -- and no one in the cyber security community takes seriously the idea that Crowdstrike lied or more likely, conflated multiple phishing attacks on the DNC that may have happened with an insider leak Democrats fanatically insist did not occur, why their sudden alarm? The question answers itself -- these individuals realize deep down if that if NSA/GCHQ had tapped trans-Atlantic (and Internet nodes leading into Russia) cable data to back up their 'Russian hacking' claims it could've been easily ordered declassified by President Obama on his way out of office. That point was made by Bill Binney from the very beginning of the 'Russian hacking' story in 2016. In January 2017 VIPS wrote a letter to the lame duck occupant of the White House urging Obama to do just that, and declassify the evidence.

Obama of course, never replied to Binney or former Reagan CIA daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern. But the growing evidence is now making an impact in Washington, that LaRouchePAC's dossier on political assassin Mueller and the VIPS notes on how Wikileak's disgruntled Bernie bro (Seth Rich?) source -- and not the Russians -- actually downloaded the DNC emails shared with Wikileaks. As LaRouchePAC writes below, the skeptics and the public need to keep pouring on the pressure to smash open the spooks cover up of their attempt to cement a Clinton crime family/Democratic deep state and Cold War 2 hoax into place for all time. -- JWS

PRESS RELEASE Former NSA Analyst Binney Meets with CIA at Trump's Request to Dispute Russian Hack

Nov. 7, 2017 (EIRNS)—The Intercept published an article today under the byline of James Risen and Duncan Campbell, which states that Bill Binney, the former National Security Agency expert who has exposed the fraud of the "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers, met with Director of Central Intelligence Mike Pompeo on Oct. 24 at the specific request of President Donald Trump.

Binney presented the CIA with his demonstration that there was no Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and of John Podesta, the central tenet of the Russiagate hysteria now gripping the United States. Binney states that Pompeo asked him whether he would be willing to meet with the FBI and NSA, and that Binney said he would, of course, meet with these agencies. He had not heard back from Pompeo at the time of the article.

The Risen-Campbell Intercept article rails against Pompeo for meeting with Binney and claims that the CIA Director hearing actual evidence about the non-existent Russian hack at the request of President Trump means that Pompeo is not an honest broker of relations between the President and the CIA. This assertion rests on the the completely false idea peddled by the news media and the coup maestros that the Justice Department and similar institutions are independent of the Presidency, which, of course, under our Constitution, they are not.

In what is probably a directly related development, the Justice Department and the FBI leaked to the Wall Street Journal Nov. 2nd that they had evidence by which to indict six Russians for the DNC/Podesta hacks, but would not be doing so until 2018. The same Wall Street Journal article informs us that the Department of Justice and FBI are handling this aspect of Russiagate rather than Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But, wait, you may ask, isn’t that the central thing Mueller was supposed to be investigating?

Other than the Alice in Wonderland features of all of this, one thing is certain: both the DOJ and press hacks like Risen are simply terrified of the truth suddenly beginning to break into daylight.

The Pompeo-Binney meeting, of course, represents a major break in the counter-coup scenario which the LaRouche organization has played a role in bringing about. Time to escalate.

Bill Binney will be appearing on Nov. 12, at 4:00 p.m., at Symphony Place in Manhattan, 95th and Broadway, at a showing of the film about him, "A Good American." Binney, Sean Stone, and Diane Roark will discuss the film, his role at the NSA, his criticism of the NSA regarding the failure to stop 9/11, and the Russiagate hoax, and will take questions from the audience.

See also the LaRouchePAC.com article below -- "Trump in Asia -- The New Paradigm Can Emerge This Week" November 8, 2017

Despite the best (i.e. worst) efforts of the neocon Republicans, the Obama/Hillary Democrats, and the British and Obama intelligence networks, to sabotage President Trump's historic visit to Asia, the diplomatic tour is thus far promising to see the United States engaging — and perhaps joining — in the new paradigm for mankind as defined by China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Not only did the "Legal Assassin" Robert Mueller indict a former Trump campaign manager (for issues having nothing to do with Trump or Russia) just before the scheduled Asia tour, but he is now leaking that he has enough evidence to indict retired DIA chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, which could take place just as Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping, or when he meets with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in Vietnam over the weekend. It is certain that the corporate media will attempt to bury the reality of Trump's agreements in Asia behind a barrage of British fake news about Russiagate.

But reality is overwhelming the British fairy tales. Trump was in South Korea yesterday, where he has expressed optimism that a solution to the North Korean crisis is coming into focus, as a direct result of China, which, he said, is "trying very hard to solve the problem," as well as similar support from Russia. This must have caused hysteria in the Mueller camp back home.

Also, in China, the new U.S. Ambassador Terry Branstad told Xinhua that there is tremendous excitement on both sides of the Pacific about Trump's visit, and deep feelings that "this could be very historic and significant." He said that there is an intention to "advance economic cooperation and prosperity in both America as well as in China."

Meanwhile, both political parties in the United States are in a state of disintegration — something Lyndon LaRouche has long welcomed, and promoted, as necessary to allow the population to break out of the straitjacket of party politics, and to address the truth directly. As long ago as 2004, LaRouche wrote, in the essay Toward a Second Treaty of Westphalia: The Coming Eurasian World":

"In an existential crisis, such as the present world situation, which has those or similar attributes of a threatened general breakdown of the system, the danger comes chiefly from the leadership which fails to break with the pre-established policy-shaping trends, the failure to break in the way President Franklin Roosevelt did in his 1932 election campaign, and in the turnabout in U.S. policy which he introduced beginning his first hours in the Administration.... The great leader for a time of crisis is one whose selection breaks the rules, those rotten rules which are the relevant expression of the relevant, essential corruption."

This is potentially the case with Donald Trump, who is certainly breaking the "rotten rules" of the two Wall Street controlled political parties, attacking the corrupt leadership of the Republican Party equally with the leftover Obama/Hillary crowd in the Democratic Party, while also willing to work with the few honest elements of each. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche said: If Trump fully joins the New Silk Road, he could go down as one of the greatest of American Presidents.

Helga LaRouche today drew attention to the irony in the crisis within the Democratic Party. Here are the people who are screaming against "dictatorship" in Russia and China, who rant that Xi Jinping is the new Stalin who denies the people their rights, who is chosen only by the elites. This ignores, of course, the fact that both Putin and Xi Jinping enjoy massive support from the overwhelming majority of their populations. And, now, the world knows (in part due to the Donna Brazile book released this week) that the oh-so-democratic Democratic Party elite had chosen their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton of Wall Street, over a year before the Democratic Party primaries and convention, in which "the people" are supposed to elect their candidate. And, they sabotaged the campaigns of each of her opponents. So much for what Lyndon LaRouche calls the "two potty system."

We are experiencing a pregnant moment in history, a phase change, in which the old order is disintegrating, but the new paradigm has not yet been established. It can be one of a new global era of peace and development, or it can collapse into depression and war. It can be a community of shared future, as Xi Jinping describes it, or a New Dark Age. To a great extent, it depends on every individual, each of whom, in a time of drastic change, has a power to move history, if they choose to act on the basis of their true humanity.

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tomorrowusa · 4 years ago

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It’s becoming increasingly clear that few people in this country are more Anti-American than the Trump MAGA crowd.

The loony right has even been booing US Olympic athletes.

During a late July rally, President Donald Trump claimed that “Americans were happy” about the women’s soccer team losing to Sweden — a loss that he blamed on “wokeism” turning the squad “demented.” Tomi Lahren called Team USA “the largest group of whiny social justice activists the Olympics has seen in decades,” accusing them in a Tuesday Fox News segment of engaging in “typical leftist so-called activism.” And after the men’s basketball team lost to France, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield said he “took pleasure” in their defeat.

The Olympics are just the latest way the Trumpsters hate America.

A lot of the far right wackjobs may wave US flags – but those flags are often defaced with snakes or Trump printed on them.

Conservative anti-Americanism still pays lip service to love of country: Its proponents declare themselves the true patriots, describing their enemies as the nation’s betrayers. But when the cadre of traitors includes everyone from election administrators to Olympians to the Capitol Police, it becomes clear that the only America they love is the one that exists in their heads. When they contemplate the actual United States — real America, if you will — they are filled with scorn.

To them America is some imaginary entity which resembles a pastiche of the pre-Brown v. Board of Education 1950s, the post-Reconstruction South, and a mutant form of Christianity which enshrines patriarchy and machismo.

The far right is even undermining law enforcement. They cheer for the overwhelmingly white January 6th terrorists and heap scorn on the police officers, disproportionately people of color, who tried to protect the US Capitol.

When Capitol police officers testified to the House about their experiences during the 1/6 attack, ostensibly pro-police conservatives vilified them. Fox’s Tucker Carlson laughed at Officer Michael Fanone’s claim to experience “psychological trauma” after the attack; fellow host Laura Ingraham gave out mock acting awards to the officers, implying their experiences were fake or ginned up.

The willingness to attack police officers who defended an attack on the seat of American government gets at the through-the-looking-glass ugliness of contemporary right-wing patriotism.

And it’s not just the semi-literate troglodytes on the right who promote this Anti-American attitude. Far right intellectuals have their own little think tank to promote and disseminate such thinking.

This kind of anti-Americanism isn’t just the province of Fox News provocateurs and base voters. It’s also prevalent in the movement’s most intellectually rarefied corners.

The hub seems to be the Claremont Institute, a think tank based in Southern California, and affiliated institutions like Hillsdale College. Claremont is undoubtedly the most radically pro-Trump of any major right-wing intellectual institution, its thinkers most willing to defend both his presidency and his false claims of a stolen election. Claremont’s output in the past year has been astonishingly radical, all but openly calling for regime change and rebellion.

The problem is that the MAGA crowd doesn’t just want to retreat into some wingnut safe zone but wants to drag the rest of the country along with them.

It’s time to tell the far right what they used to tell progressives:

America — Love It or Leave It! 🇺🇸

If they don’t like it here then the MAGA crowd should just move to Putin’s Russia. The undermining of democracy, the endemic corruption, and the official homophobia there would make them feel like they are in a MAGA theme park. Some of them have already been saying they’d rather be Russian – so they should just take the plunge and move there.

#right-wingers hate america #the far right #anti-americanism #donald trump #maga zombies #trumpists #republicans #2021 olympics #us olympic athletes #claremont institute #us capitol #insurrection #pro-trump terrorists #russia #trumpists would rather be russian #america – love it or leave it #zach beauchamp

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learnprogress · 8 years ago

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ALERT: Dan Rather Just EVISCERATED Trump, Embarrasses Him With 1 Powerful Demand.

Legendary journalist Dan Rather just called Trump out like you wouldn’t believe. He’s DEMANDING Trump acknowledge the Americans who died this week during far-right terrorist attacks that were inspired by Trump’s OWN depraved rhetoric.

Rather’s been waiting like the rest of us for Trump to say ANYTHING about the Americans that were murdered in cold-blood this week by far-right Trumpist loons. When no response materialized, Rather took to his Facebook page to eviscerate our AWOL president.

“Their names were Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best,” Rather started. “One was a recent college graduate. The other was an army veteran and father of four. I wish we would hear you say these names, or even just tweet them.”

“They were brave Americans who died at the hands of someone who, when all the facts are collected, we may have every right to call a terrorist,” Rather said. “A third brave man, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, was wounded in the knife attack.”

“This story may not neatly fit into a narrative you pushed on the campaign trail and that has followed you into the White House. They were not killed by an undocumented immigrant or a ‘radical Islamic terrorist,’” Rather said. “They were killed in an act of civic love, facing down a man allegedly spewing hate speech directed at two teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. That man seems to have a public record of ‘extremist ideology’ – a term issued by the Portland Police Bureau.”

“This ‘extremism’ may be of a different type than gets most of your attention, or even the attention in the press,” Rather said. “But that doesn’t make it any less serious, or deadly. And this kind of ‘extremism’ is on the rise, especially in the wake of your political ascendency.”

“Perhaps Portland, Oregon is off your radar. It is, after all, a rather liberal place. It’s even a ‘sanctuary city.’ But it is still an American city. And you are its President.”

“Two Americans have died leaving family and friends behind,” Rather solemnly concluded. “They are mourned by millions more who are also deeply worried about what might come next. I hope you can find it worthy of your time to take notice.”

If this post from Rather doesn’t give you goosebumps, then perhaps nothing will. The two Americans who died this week are HEROES for trying to protect two innocent girls from a racist bully, and yet Trump has NOTHING to say about their incredible sacrifices.

Every moment Trump continues to stay silent on this attack is FLAGRANTLY disrespectful. The families of the heroes who died deserve so much better than this.

POLL: Should Trump speak out about this horrific attack?

What do you think? Is it high-time Trump finally respond to this godawful terrorist attack?

Please take our poll below and let us know where you stand! This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, we ALL have to speak up!

It’s deeply disturbing that Trump is so AWOL on his responsibilities as president yet he still has the unqualified support of his base. They ARE the minority, yet with Russian help they’ve allowed Trump to exert his toxic vision upon our nation and the world.

The Resistance is the majority, though. If we stand up by the MILLIONS and put our voices together like Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for all Progressives to do, then there’s no stopping us as we take our country back and reverse each and every last one of Team Trump’s outrageous abuses.

Our readers do great work in spreading awareness. Let’s keep the streak going, please share this story on Facebook ASAP.

The post ALERT: Dan Rather Just EVISCERATED Trump, Embarrasses Him With 1 Powerful Demand. appeared first on Learn Progress.

from ALERT: Dan Rather Just EVISCERATED Trump, Embarrasses Him With 1 Powerful Demand.

#Donald Trump #Press #Dan Rather #donald trump #Ricky John Best #right-wing terrorist #Taliesin Myrdd

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globaltotal · 8 years ago

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Ukraine: Waiting for Donald, worrying about the EU

Ukraine's prospects are under threat from developments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Something is stirring in Ukraine. The most obvious cause is Donald Trump’s imminent inauguration on 20 January, and the widespread fear in Kyiv that his push for some kind of Yalta 2.0 agreement with Russia will be at Ukraine’s expense.

But another parallel cause is the fear that the European Union is losing interest in Ukraine. After Dutch voters rejected the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement at a referendum in April 2016 (though many were really voting about the Netherlands and Europe), the price of bringing the Dutch government into line was high. In fact, it took a triple reassurance just to get PM Mark Rutte to take the issue back to parliament for a vote to overturn the referendum result.

Those reassurances came in the European Council’s resolution of 15 December, which declares that ‘the Agreement does not confer on Ukraine the status of a candidate country for accession to the Union, nor does it constitute a commitment to confer such status to Ukraine in the future’. Furthermore, it ‘does not contain an obligation for the Union or its Member States to provide collective security guarantees or other military aid or assistance to Ukraine’. And finally, it ‘does not grant to Ukrainian nationals… the right to reside and work freely within the territory of the Member States’. While this resolution does not roll back existing, modest, European commitments to Ukraine, it was interpreted as a major setback in Kyiv.

Partly as a result, disillusion with the EU in Ukraine is spreading from the margins to the mainstream. Support for ‘entry into the EU’ is still holding up as the most popular foreign policy option, at 49 percent as of September 2016, not too far down from a peak of 55 per cent in December 2015.But the image of an EU racked by crises and too preoccupied to care about Ukraine is chipping away at this plurality, as seen by the growing popularity of the ‘Eurorealism’ trope (as in, ‘Let’s be realistic, our prospects are not good’).

This view is both real and promoted by Russian stooges like the Opposition Bloc and fake ‘think-tanks’ like the Ukrainian Policy Fund. With the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down, Russia has shifted its attention and resources to winning the battle for hearts and minds. Fake letters from ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians and workers are launched online or in social media, and then fed into friendly traditional media controlled by local oligarchs. This multifaceted anti-EU campaign, including a big drive to restore the ‘normal’ levels of Ukrainian-Russian trade that Russia has been busily destroying these last three years, will only grow in the short term, as Russia switches from anti-US propaganda as it sees how its relationship with Trump pans out.

‘Ukrainian Eurointegration’: The Ukrainians are barred entry to the locked doors of the ‘EC’(EU).

Whatever the cause, a series of commentaries and op-eds appeared over the holiday period airing previously heretical thoughts. Most controversial was the piece by leading oligarch Viktor Pinchuk in the Wall Street Journal on 29 December that recommended trading Crimea for peace in the Donbas and abandoning aspirations towards NATO and the EU. President Petro Poroshenko’s adviser Kostiantyn Yeliseyev produced a rejoinder in the Wall Street Journal on 4 January; Poroshenko also reportedly will not attend the traditional Ukraine event organised by Pinchuk in Davos. A collection of other rebuttals can be found here. But others have joined in on Pinchuk’s side, or close to it; some objecting to Pinchuk wanting to give away everything at once, others claiming that there was nothing heretical or treasonous about specific proposals, such as Vasyl Pilipchuk, head of the International Centre for Prospective Research, who argued for a 20-year moratorium on the status of Crimea, for Ukraine to stop ‘beating on the closed door’ of the EU, and even for a restoration of military and technical co-operation with Russia.

Another Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, currently still facing legal problems in Austria, has made similar noises to Pinchuk about reviving trade with Russia. Both men have a personal interest in their companies regaining access to Russian markets. But the campaign also anticipates and feeds a Trumpist agenda, when Ukrainians are profoundly split about how to approach his presidency after Trump’s string of pro-Russian comments and gaffes during the campaign.

The first thing Kyiv did after Trump’s victory was quietly to drop the local investigation against his former campaign chief Paul Manafort, who also worked for exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. A second gambit was to build bridges with the ‘traditional’ Republican Party. On a visit to Kyiv in December, three United States senators, John McCain (R-Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), together with Amy Klobuchar(D-Minnesota) promised that the US would not abandon Ukraine, and proposed even tougher sanctions on Russia. The group followed up once they were back home by launching a bipartisan bill in January that would toughen up Barack Obama’s belated reactions to Russian interference in the US election campaign, and encode some of his executive orders on financial support for Ukraine in law, making them more difficult for Trump to overturn. McCain, Graham and Klobuchar also visited Georgia and the Baltic States as part of their ‘reassurance tour’. But given McCain’s role in publicising accusations about Trump’s long-standing Russia links, the action may backfire. There were, hopefully exaggerated, claims that the damage to Ukraine-Trump relations had already been done.

Other Ukrainians have proposed aligning with Trump’s business instincts rather than confront his agenda head on, and the dilemma of whether to bandwagon with Trump or pre-empt his policies will only sharpen after the inauguration. According to Catherine Smagliy, who runs the Kennan Institute’s Kyiv office, Ukraine must ‘move away from the image of the victim, and focus on the development of economic and cultural cooperation. Don’t forget that the president is a representative of businesses, big business’, for which there could be big opportunities in Ukrainian industry, construction and agriculture.

Oleksandr Sushko of the Institute of Euro-Atlantic Partnership talks in a similar vein: ‘it is clear that we cannot carry on in the same rut. We need to propose new approaches, be more pragmatic. To explain and motivate the American side not only by Ukraine’s ability to confront Russia, but also by our ability to create an attractive investment climate, to become interesting for US investors. ’Significantly, not only has Kyiv announced a deal with the traditional Republican lobby group BGR, led by the former Republican Party leader and governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, to lobby Ukraine’s line in Washington; but BGR’s brief includes ‘strengthening US-Ukrainian relations and increasing US business investment in Ukraine’. This is the kind of language that Kyiv hopes that Trump will understand.

But Ukraine will have to redouble its effort after Trump’s inauguration, if it is not to be left out in the cold. There is much more that Ukraine can do in a practical vein. Some optimists have even argued that Trump is an opportunity for Ukraine, to show that it is not dependent on external sponsors and can get its act together on reform. Most obviously, Ukraine can advertise its high defence spending to show its value-added in a Trumpist world (Ukraine has been spending 5 percent of GDP on defence since 2014, plus huge contributions from the voluntary sector).

Some have argued that ‘Ukraine itself should create defences strong enough to make large-scale war inconvenient and very costly for Russia’, hoping that even Trump might be swayed by global opinion if Russia crosses that threshold. But Ukraine cannot defend itself alone. NATO membership prospects were already distant and will recede further under Trump, although public support stands at 39 percent. There will therefore be a growing trend towards alternative ideas, such as building a Baltic-Black Sea Alliance of local states uncomfortable with Russian pressures.

This concept was originally launched by (mainly) Ukrainian and Polish thinkers in the interwar period, and was briefly popular again the 1990s before Ukraine’s would-be partners found a more direct route to NATO. Now it is revving up again, albeit in different forms. Poland’s new authorities emphasise building links in the międzymorze (‘between the seas’), also now called the ‘ABC’ region (the triangle between the Adriatic, Baltic and ‘Czarne’, or Black, Sea). As a lesser alternative, there will be growing talk on both sides to allow for flexible partnerships across NATO boundaries – particularly between central European and Baltic NATO member states and east European partner states like Ukraine.

And then there is the EU, where Ukraine faces another difficult year in 2017. Potentially traumatic elections, ripe for Russian interference, in the Netherlands, France and Germany (plus possibly Italy and even the United Kingdom), will see continued obsession with migration from the Middle East and North Africa unfairly tainting Ukraine, too. As EU bureaucrats work on yet another reworking of the Eastern Neighbourhood Policy, Ukraine needs to show that the new Brussels buzzword of ‘stabilisation’ is not an alternative to reform. If Ukraine remains unreformed, it will remain unstable.

Just as a ‘Yalta 2.0’ between Trump and Vladimir Putin will not enforce stability over the heads of small states, internal opposition from those Ukrainians who violently oppose it will increase. (We do not know the details of any putative deal, but the most likely elements –any deal on Crimea, any reduction of sanctions on Russia, any attempt to force Ukraine to make constitutional accommodations with the Donbas ‘Republics’ – will be bitterly opposed in Ukraine).

Dealing with the EU will be completely different to dealing with Trump, however. Instead of talking business and realpolitik, Ukraine will need to get serious about tackling corruption and advertise some big reform success stories in the coming year if it is to improve relations with the EU. This may not be the top item on Trump’s agenda, but European public opinion cares more about whether Ukraine is worth saving; and Kyiv needs to do much more to make a convincing case in this respect.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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PLEASE read and share these two articles regarding the madness we are seeing with Trump and the New (Russian) GOP.

"The belief that Trump is the victim of a vast and ongoing conspiracy is a crucial element of the president’s enduring appeal to his supporters. If the allegations against the president are all completely false, then his supporters can continue to back him with a clear conscience, because anything and everything negative they hear about the president must be false. The consistency of that message is more important than the actual details, which frequently end up contradicting complex explanations for the president’s innocence that are often incongruous with each other, such as the insistence that Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “total exoneration” of the president, but also “total bullshit.”"🔥🔥🔥🔥

THE ‘RUSSIA HOAX’ IS A HOAX

A report by the Department of Justice inspector general debunks the claims that the investigation into political interference by the Kremlin was a left-wing conspiracy to depose the president.

By Adam Serwer | Published Dec 10, 2019 11:50 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted December 10, 2019 |

The IG report knocked down the various claims that Trump and his allies have made, one by one. The report confirmed that the Russia investigation originated, as has been previously reported, with the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat about Russia possessing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, which the IG determined “was sufficient to predicate the investigation.” The widespread conservative belief that the investigation began because of the dubious claims in the Steele dossier was false. “Steele’s reports played no role” in the opening of the Russia investigation, the report found, because FBI officials were not “aware of Steele’s election reporting until weeks later.”

If you are following mainstream news outlets, you know that in 2016, Donald Trump benefited from a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign designed to help him get elected, even as he sought permission from the Russian government to build a hotel in Moscow. You know that he deflected blame from Russia for that campaign, even as he sought to benefit from it politically. You know that shortly after the election, Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office that he didn’t mind their efforts on his behalf, inviting further interference. And you know that while those acts may not have amounted to criminal conspiracy, the president’s insistence that there was “no collusion” flies in the face of established facts.

If you are ensconced in the pro-Trump-propaganda universe of Fox News and its spawn, you know something different. You know that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” developed by the “deep state” and the media, an attempt by a fifth column within the FBI to engage in a “coup,” a conspiracy, a frame job, “nothing less than the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government.” Any evidence of wrongdoing by the president, in this universe, has been manufactured by Trump’s shadowy and powerful enemies—George Soros, liberals in the FBI, Barack Obama.

The belief that Trump is the victim of a vast and ongoing conspiracy is a crucial element of the president’s enduring appeal to his supporters. If the allegations against the president are all completely false, then his supporters can continue to back him with a clear conscience, because anything and everything negative they hear about the president must be false. The consistency of that message is more important than the actual details, which frequently end up contradicting complex explanations for the president’s innocence that are often incongruous with each other, such as the insistence that Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “total exoneration” of the president, but also “total bullshit.”

The Department of Justice inspector general’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, which was released Monday, found no evidence that any of the Trump conspiracy theories surrounding the origin of the investigation are true. The investigation was not launched on Obama’s orders, it was not an effort by pro–Hillary Clinton FBI agents to prevent Trump from getting elected, and it was not predicated on the existence of opposition research gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The president’s defenders have taken to referring to the entire investigation as “the Russia hoax,” insisting that the entire investigation was an effort by “persons within the FBI and Barack Obama’s Justice Department” who “worked improperly to help elect Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.” But the IG report shows that the “Russia hoax” defense is itself a hoax, and a highly successful one, aimed at reassuring Trump supporters who might otherwise be troubled by the president’s behavior.

The inconsistencies and contradictions of the “Russia hoax” narrative appear not to trouble the president’s supporters. Rather, as George Orwell wrote in 1944, “For quite long periods, at any rate, people can remain undisturbed by obvious lies, either because they simply forget what is said from day to day or because they are under such a constant propaganda bombardment that they become anaesthetized to the whole business.” The numbness to every new Trump revelation, no matter how shocking, is in part a product of the president’s success in fatiguing anyone who might be interested in what the facts are.

Republicans’ claim that the investigation began because the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain permission to surveil the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was false. The IG also “did not find any records” that Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told Papadopoulos the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Clinton, was an FBI informant sent to entrap him. The former FBI agent Peter Strzok and the former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who shared anti-Trump sentiments over text and have become key villains in the Trumpist narrative of a “coup,” never had the power to do what has been attributed to them. The IG report notes that Page “did not play a role in the decision to open” the Russia investigation, and that Strzok was “was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters.”

The IG report also determined that “the FBI had an authorized purpose when it opened [the Russia investigation] to obtain information about, or protect against, a national security threat or federal crime, even though the investigation also had the potential to impact constitutionally protected activity.” Moreover, the IG found “no evidence” that “political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” to investigate Trump advisers with ties to Russia.

There is, in short, no “deep state” anti-Trump conspiracy, no network of perfidious liberals in the FBI seeking to take down Trump. There is, however, voluminous evidence of reprehensible behavior by the president, first taking advantage of a foreign attack on the 2016 election for personal and political profit, seeking to obstruct the investigation into that interference, and then falsely concocting an elaborate conspiracy theory to avoid accountability for his actions.

Nevertheless, there are important systemic problems with the FBI and the way that the U.S. government approves invasive surveillance techniques on American citizens. The report notes that while the FBI had a sufficient factual predicate for opening the investigation, that is because the FBI and the Department of Justice must meet a “low threshold” for justifying such an investigation. In addition, while the IG report found no evidence that “political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek FISA authority on Carter Page,” the IG did determine that the Page FISA application was “inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation,” which misled the court as to the credibility of the FBI’s evidence when seeking authority to surveil Page.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss such findings as unimportant. But federal investigations are incredibly invasive, and having a stricter standard for the circumstances under which an investigation can be opened would help ensure that this authority is not abused; the Clinton Foundation investigation began—and this is no joke—with an anti-Hillary book paid for by the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. If the FBI is making errors in seeking permission to surveil current or former advisers to a presidential campaign, the most politically sensitive kind of investigation, it suggests that there are many more flawed applications to be found in operations where the investigations are not nearly so delicate. The process for seeking permission to spy on American citizens suspected of being foreign agents should be more adversarial than it is, if only to keep the government honest.

Republicans however, do not seem at all interested in the actual legal and policy concerns the report raises. Rather, they are following the lead of the president and his attorney general, William Barr, in mischaracterizing the report’s findings. “This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow—and a lot of people were in on it,” Trump declared, while Barr insisted, in a more lawyerly fashion, “The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

Both of these statements contradict the report itself, which found no political bias behind the opening of the Russia investigation. Barr’s statement is a matter of opinion, which expresses his monarchical belief that Trump was above the law even before he became president. But whether Barr personally feels the evidence was sufficient to open an investigation, the IG determined that by FBI and DOJ standards, it was.

Trumpists will now pin their hopes on Barr’s handpicked investigator, U.S. Attorney John Durham, to provide some shred of evidence for Trump’s “deep state” conspiracy. After investigations failed to produce justification for an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, whose actions helped put Trump in office prior to Trump firing him over the Russia investigation, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe, whose disclosures to the media harmed Clinton rather than Trump, and following two IG reports that found no evidence that the Russia investigation was the product of political bias, Durham will be under a tremendous amount of pressure from Barr to indict one of the president’s chosen enemies, if only to have a scapegoat to feed the right-wing propaganda machine and deter federal law enforcement from ever looking into criminal activity by the president or his allies again.

So the “Russia hoax” hoax continues, abetted by the sheer volume of conservative commentators and commentary capable of ignoring the text of the document and the weight of evidence, in favor of expressing obsequious loyalty to the president. By yelling falsehoods loudly enough, they hope to exhaust anyone with the ambition to determine the truth of the matter. And it might be working.

🎅🎄🦌🌲⛄🎄🎅🌲🦌🌲⛄🎄🎅🌲

The Russification of the Republican Party

GOP lawmakers used to oppose the president’s embrace of Putin and the Kremlin. Not anymore.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN | Published December 5, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted December 10, 2019 |

Just how far will Republicans go in following President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment.

Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine.

Earlier in Trump’s presidency, many Republicans sought to distance themselves from his warm tone toward Putin. But just this week alone, a number of Republican lawmakers, the official House Republican report rebutting impeachment, and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson have repeated Kremlin lines on Ukraine.

This flurry of GOP rhetoric comes as Democrats are raising alarm about the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to take action on the DETER Act, a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on Russia if it interferes again in 2020.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the act’s sponsor, has been unsuccessfully pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to attach the bill to a defense-authorization bill now in conference between the House and Senate, which would ensure its passage.

“Nobody has provided any substantive justification for opposing this measure,” Van Hollen told me in an interview. “All the testimony has been supportive of the DETER Act. And yet when you get behind closed doors, it’s not that anyone says they are opposed to it; they just won’t engage. McConnell would like to see this defeated without any of his fingerprints on it, but his fingerprints are there because he has refused to engage.”

Against the backdrop of Trump’s rhetorical warmth toward Putin, congressional Republicans have produced a mixed record on Russia. In 2017, virtually all Republicans joined with Democrats to pass legislation that prevented Trump from unwinding sanctions on Russia that former President Barack Obama imposed after the Kremlin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Most House Republicans also voted earlier this year to block the administration from ending sanctions against the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. And many congressional Republicans loudly criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria earlier this year, which was widely viewed as benefiting Russia’s position in the region.

But at the same time, the Republican-controlled Senate allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with lifting sanctions against Deripaska in January. Democrats also grouse that Senate Republicans have looked the other way as Trump has failed to fully implement the sanctions legislation passed in 2017. And Senate GOP leaders have blocked action on the two bipartisan bills targeting Russia, the DETER Act and the broader Defending American Security From Kremlin Aggression Act.

Impeachment is now providing a new test case to measure how far Trump has steered congressional Republicans toward greater accommodation of Russia.

This new front opened when Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly insisted during last month’s impeachment hearings that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election against Trump. That drew a stern rebuke from one witness asked to testify, the former Trump National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill, who warned that congressional Republicans were spreading “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

But Hill’s words have not stopped Republicans from reprising those arguments. In late November, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana claimed during a television interview that Ukraine, not Russia, might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. After retreating from that claim, he went on Meet the Press on Sunday and equated public criticism of Trump by some Ukrainian officials with Russia’s systematic interference campaign in 2016.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, during its investigation of 2016 election meddling, found no evidence of Ukrainian interference. But when asked about Kennedy’s comments this week, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s chairman, came closer to endorsing rather than repudiating them.

“Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton,” Burr told NBC. “Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?” Burr went on to liken Russia’s massive intelligence and hacking campaign to occasional public comments by Ukrainian officials critical of Trump. “The president can say that they meddled because they had a preference, the elected officials,” Burr said. Other Republican senators, including John Barrasso of Wyoming, offered similar arguments this week.

The report released on Monday by House Republicans likewise blurred the difference. “Publicly available—and irrefutable—evidence shows how senior Ukrainian government officials sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in opposition to President Trump’s candidacy,” the report insisted.

Tucker Carlson took these arguments to new heights on his show Monday night, not only minimizing Russian involvement in 2016 but questioning why the U.S. was opposing its incursion into Ukraine at all. “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson insisted.

No leading congressional Republicans have yet gone so far. But Republican foreign-policy experts are still worried about the attempts by GOP leaders to defend Trump by disparaging Ukraine.

“For starters, you end up validating the Kremlin line which they have been peddling since 2016: Yes, something happened, but it was because Ukraine did it and not us,” says Richard Fontaine, who runs the nonpartisan Center for a New American Security and was the top foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain of Arizona. “It’s one thing if Putin says these things, or if Kremlin spokespeople say these things; people, I hope, will take it with a gigantic mountain of salt. But when you have U.S. elected leaders saying these things, it gives it a significant dose of credibility, and that’s not a good thing.”

David Hale, an undersecretary in Trump’s own State Department, expressed that concern at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. When asked about the national-security ramifications of the rhetoric, Hale said pointedly, “It does not serve our interests.”

The accusations against Ukraine have drawn forceful pushback this week from Democrats, but only a few Republicans—most directly Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—have openly condemned them. “What you are seeing unfortunately is Republicans wanting to just adopt and parrot the Trump talking points, which also coincide with the Putin talking points,” Van Hollen said.

The big question now is how much of the GOP’s shifting tone on Russia reflects a lasting change, versus a temporary alignment with Trump or a tactical maneuver in the impeachment struggle.

Under Trump, the two party’s coalitions have unquestionably switched places on Russia. Through the early part of this century, more Republican than Democratic voters typically expressed negative views toward Russia. But since Trump’s election in 2016, Republicans have been more likely than Democrats to express a positive view about Russia.

Even before Trump’s election, some social conservatives lauded Putin as a defender of conservative social values and a potential partner in the fight against Islamic extremism, as Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top campaign aide and White House adviser, did in a 2014 speech. But the big movement in the GOP, according to polls, came after Trump started touting the potential benefits of closer relations with Putin—and questioning whether Russia actually interfered in 2016. In a poll by the Chicago Council released last February, just over half of Republican voters said the U.S. should seek a cooperative relationship with Russia, while nearly two-thirds of Democrats said America should mostly seek to contain Moscow. Among Republicans younger than 45, three-fifths wanted the U.S. to pursue a friendlier relationship with Russia.

Still, while more Republicans than Democrats now express positive opinions about Russia, even a large chunk of Republican voters express unfavorable views about Moscow and Putin, surveys have found. That encourages some GOP foreign-policy experts to believe the party’s flirtation with Russia may not outlast Trump.

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who served as a National Security Council aide to President George W. Bush, told me Trump’s accommodation of Russia is unlikely to precipitate any sort of lasting change. He argued that there is still enough skepticism in the party about Trump’s policy toward Russia—and the country’s international role more broadly—that the president risks eruptions of discontent that force him to retreat, like those he confronted over his withdrawal from Syria. Even inside the administration, he noted, most foreign-policy experts remain dubious of Putin, which helps explain why the administration’s actions toward Russia have sometimes been tougher than Trump’s accommodating rhetoric.

“No one knows for sure, including the president,” how far he can push the party, Feaver said. “The president is wandering around a mine field and doesn’t always know when he is going to step on a mine.”

That may be true. But the willingness of more congressional Republicans to amplify widely discredited arguments against Ukraine—despite repeated warnings from conservative national-security professionals that they are advancing Russian propaganda in the process—suggests that their tolerance for Trump’s repositioning of the party on Russia is only growing.

As Fontaine told me, historically, “one of the reasons people were attracted to the Republicans was because they were the party skeptical of the regime in Moscow.” That’s one more Republican tradition Trump has tossed onto the ash heap of history.

🎅🎄🦌🌲⛄🎄🎅🌲🦌🌲⛄🎄🎅🌲

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