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Trump and the 14th Amendment
In the developing world the party in power does away with its opponents one of three ways: a bullet to the head, throwing them in jail or kicking them off the ballot. Good to see America, Leader of the Free World, is already at work on two of the three.
With it becoming ever-clearer that nothing in the courts is likely to stop Trump — polls show he can still win as a convicted felon from a jail cell — attention has turned to the third dirty solution, driving him off the ballot in as many states as possible to enable a Joe Biden walk-on win. The vehicle for this is supposedly the 14th Amendment, Section Three.
Section Three was ratified in 1868 following the Civil War as a way to keep former Confederate officials out of government. It reads in whole “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” (emphasis added)
The obvious ploy is to claim Trump engaged in some sort of insurrection on January 6 and with that making him ineligible to be president, his name should be automatically (self-enacting) removed from all ballots. Easier said than done; this use of the 14th Amendment is malarkey, will not succeed, and is simply another attempt at politically decapitating Donald Trump instead of beating him at the ballot box.
The problems with the 14th Amendment strategy begin with the question of whether the prohibition still exists. Written in 1868 to affect Confederate officials, the Article was overturned by Congress on behalf of several individuals. They could do the same for Trump. Then in 1872, the disabilities were removed, by a blanket act, from all persons
except Senators and Representatives of the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States.
Twenty-six years later, Congress enacted law that saidthe disability imposed by Section Three… incurred heretofore, is hereby removed.
Further standing in the way of actually using 14/3 against Trump is the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Powell v McCormack, which held a state cannot require of a congressional candidate declarations of loyalty, or affidavits averring lack of intent to seek forcible overthrow of the government. The decision went on to clarify that it was unconstitutional to require any requirements for office other than those already stated in Article I (age, residency, citizenship.) Loyalty to the United States or to its government is not listed as one of the standing qualifications for membership in Congress.
Is Trump subject to Section Three? President Trump was unique among all of his predecessors in that he did not hold any prior government position before he took the presidential oath of office in 2017. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment could only disqualify Trump if the presidential oath he took on that date was as an “Officer of the United States.”
Also left undefined is the standard of proof for “insurrection.” As a crime, insurrection has its legal definition. Trump, however, is not charged with insurrection (or sedition or rebellion) in any of the cases he now faces.
The 14th Amendment in its Section One also provides for due process, of which the adherents of 14/3 prescribe none, claiming the section is self-enacting and needs no enabling legislation or procedure.
Section Three remained largely dormant for many decades. January 6 (as well as a Pennsylvania Law Review article claiming Trump doesn’t qualify to serve as president under 14/3) have prompted renewed interest in the provision and its on and off again history. Active 14/3 challenges to specific candidates have been brought in Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and New Mexico, with contested offices ranging from County Commissioner to Senator (but not yet Trump.) Issues have emerged, including whether Section Three has been repealed; whether Congress has sole power to disqualify its members; whether voters have standing to challenge under Section Three; and questions of subject matter jurisdiction and federalism. Absent action by Congress (in process though not expected to succeed) the arguments over Section Three demand either that the whole thing be forgotten to history where it belongs, or the Supreme Court step in to sort out the significant legal issues, not the least of which is state versus federal power.
If you are keeping track of steps into the abyss, take a look at the core of what some current legal thinkers believe is 14/3: “Partisan officials in state governments, without specific authorization or checks and balances, should apply broad and uncertain definitions to decide who can run for office in a republic, when responsible officials with clear statutory and constitutional authority have not done so.” Seems instead like something for voters to decide, not out-of-context legalese from a previous century. This isn’t public policy, or even sound jurisprudence. This is a politicized legal fight. Sound democratic to you? Or maybe more like Democratic?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump and Kryptonite
As of summer 2023 we have in America reached an amazing place politically: the Republican front-runner and very possibly the next re-president of the United States, Donald Trump, is campaigning while basically on bail in four different jurisdictions. And nobody in America cares much. Actually, Americans sort of care, but not in any way that makes more sense than not caring. In the words of another pundit, “cheer, scream, or shrug… and sip a banana republic daquiri.”
Americans, depending on their beliefs, expect and would be satisfied if Trump was either in a jail cell or the Oval Office as of January 2025. Painting with a broad brush, for Republicans, they are convinced the charges against Trump are Third World-style political warfare waged by Democrats and mean little. Democrats see Trump as a Great Satan and view the charges as the last, best (after two impeachments and Mueller) hope for our democracy. Despite accomplishing fairly little as president (the Supreme Court appointments, though impactful, were basically luck, and no LBTQ concentration camps were opened or nuclear wars started) another four years of Trump will either save us or destroy us. Friends, there is little gray area out there, and even less appetite for the reality of the cases against Trump.
So maybe it is not such a surprise that 38 percent of us feel “exhaustion” over the possibility of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Some 52 percent feel either sadness or fear, or both, over the prospect. There is one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground: the belief that the country is headed toward failure. Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. Some 56 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
In the face of all this, the challenge for the judicial system to preserve faith in our democracy comes in several ways.
For example, how clear and “obvious” are the charges in each instance? There is a ever-growing distrust in public institutions, whether the government in general for failing to respond to public demands for more or less abortion rights, or the electoral system as a whole, or in this specific case, whether the judicial system can respond to what some perceive as unfair charges against Donald Trump. And make no mistake, each side sees a kind of unfairness in play; Republicans by and large see the charges as attempts to drive Trump out of the election or cripple him as a candidate while Democrats see the charges as a whole as the best of bad options, charging defamation when the real crime is rape, charging conspiracy when the real crime is the attempted overthrow of our democratic system.
Prosecutors must make the charges plain and of the “make sense” type, with no “ambitious charging.” Everything must be able to be explained and pass the sniff test to all but the most hardened opponents, whether they agree or not. This will be especially challenging for the thought crimes, the claimed conspiracies, whether Trump is somehow still guilty of something even though he not only did not overthrow the government and reverse the election, but that he had no realistic pathway to doing so. People will remember the impeachments beta, the Mueller Report, which came close to charging Trump with obstruction of an investigation which actually cleared him and found no predicate crime. The defense will try and muddle the waters and leave the public with a sense that Trump did nothing wrong really but the system was set up to get him somehow (not a hard case to make in several of the total of 90-some counts.) The more prosecutorial creativity (example, use of RICO in Georgia) and the more attempts to squeeze events into legal boxes they don’t quite fit in, the more challenge for the system to find a balance in explaining what is happening for the public to digest. Walking the public through the the minefield of ambiguity over classification in the Mar-a-Lago case is an example. Anything that is seen as partisan (conspiracy to do this, conspiracy to do that) fails the democracy in a mighty way.
Can the judicial system keep the language neutral? The most obvious partisan tells come from the language used, calling January 6 an insurrection for example. The judicial system should stick itself to neutral language and press both sides to do the same, perhaps agreeing to some terminology. Falling into the media trap of weaponizing the language is a real danger. Trump must be prosecuted based on what he did, not who he is. Acts must be on-their-face criminal, or they will be seen as political, Trump convicted of something, anything, just because he’s Trump and we need to send him to jail because all the other kryptonite failed. It’s a big ask; already the judge in his J6 trial has called those events a “mob attack” on “the very foundation of our democracy” and branded Trump’s claim the 2020 election was stolen a conspiracy theory.
Venue is important, and the system must show the flexibility to move cases to neutral venues when possible. Trying a case in a place like Manhattan or Fulton County, Georgia risks appearing to be the equivalent of an all-white jury in a 1950’s racial case. The jury pool in both states swings decidedly Democrat. Yet even then Salon decries the fact that a non-rigged jury might ruin the plan to convict Trump; “one MAGA juror can ruin it all,” they write. Both venues feature a local Democratic prosecutor (Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis) in a one-party jurisdiction. Would the indictments even have come down elsewhere?
Lastly, can the judicial system be seen as “timely?” Most everyone agrees the judicial system is failing on timing. Prosecutors in one batch of charges stemming from the events of January 6 want the trial to start at the beginning of the new year, ridiculously early for a case that has already produced 11.5 million pages of discovery (“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” a Trump lawyer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.” Can it all be relevant?) Lawyers for Trump instead asked a judge to push back the proceeding until April 2026, nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and some five years after the fact when Trump will either be immune one way or another as president, or a regular on Dancing with the Stars having failed at the polls. Both political sides walk away sure the game is rigged. The other cases against Trump face similar demands to begin very soon or for lengthy delays.
They’re right in a way over at MSNBC, democracy is indeed on trial, but not in the way most people who say that mean. Instead, what is on trial is our judicial system as it struggles to answer the cornerstone question here: can the system rise above partisanship, even when partisanship is the intent of one side or both, and produce results which however reluctantly will be considered fair by the majority of Americans? A “no” answer risks further shattering of public trust in our institutions, and further polarization of our politics, if not violence. It may just be that it is not whether you win or lose in this battle, but how the game is played.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ukraine and Propaganda
I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using his epic novel 1984 as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week’s Two Minutes of Hate will be split among Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. They may in fact be the same person, and we are certainly told they share the same goal: destruction of American democracy via the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
Something very sinister happened in the American mind space over the last few days. Ukraine, a country of little importance to the United States, suddenly became the sole focus of most media-consuming Americans. Constructed to appear organic, it is impossible to not imagine guiding hands behind the shift of every media outlet to a single story told in a single way. Leap frogging over one another, social media and traditional media competed for the most extreme Ukraine stories, all slanted towards unbelievability. One of the first was the Ghost Pilot of Kiev, who improbably shot down six Russian aircraft. No matter the video was undated and could have been taken anywhere anytime, and no matter when the whole story proved false and the images shown to have been created by home aircraft game sim software. This was followed by a tale of Ukrainian soldiers on some island who died valiantly rather than surrender, which also was not true because we learned days later they did indeed surrender.
America was flooded with images of gorgeous Ukrainian girls with AirSoft toy rifles volunteering for the front. Ukrainian cats are supposedly being trained to spot Russian laser sights. Pictures appeared of plucky people making Molotov cocktails to fight the Russians in the streets. FYI, those cocktails would a) have either evaporated their inflammant through the rag before use, you can’t make ’em days in advance or b) set fire to the thrower. Unless the rag is very, very tightly in the bottle, the inflammant will run down the thrower’s arm and set him afire. Propaganda has no time apparently for WikiHow. But the most intense propaganda has been reserved for the Ukrainian president, who has been labeled by the MSM as both a George Washington and a Winston Churchill. Combat reports of him patrolling the streets in cammies are now a standard feature.
The tell on all this is how unspecific the propaganda is. Yep, that’s Zelensky alright, but exactly where is he? When was the footage shot? We haven’t seen this much veneration of a foreign leader since the election of savior-o-the-day Iraqi Prime Ministers a decade or so ago. Same for all those images of tanks (are they Russian? Tonka?) rolling across snowy fields, or planes firing rockets into wooded areas. The Ukraine coverage is nearly fact-free. It’s all about narratives, hot girls with guns, little clips of tanks. But nothing about what is going on. Is one side winning? It’s all just emotion to stim you into equally meaningless acts on social media.
But it has worked. Shallow Americans are “standing with” Ukraine, throwing Russian alcohol off the shelves, lining up to eat at Ukrainian diners in New York, and of course posting their support across social media. Overnight we as a nation have become experts on the SWIFT system, and patriots ready to pay more at the gas pumps for freedom. My neighbor made a show of pouring out some old vodka but was unaware our state generates most of its electricity off Russian crude oil. Whatever, he’s doing what the teevee says to do. And yes, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider “absolutely” approves Ukrainians using “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as their anthem amid Russia’s invasion.
Alongside all this false and misleading information is the overnight disappearance of those fact checkers that plagued thoughtful journalism through the Covid era. The same people who would jump on an article for misquoting a protein statistic, or cancel an account for not following the party line on masking, are dead silent in the face of a tsunami of propaganda purposely painting an incomplete if not completely inaccurate picture of the war in Ukraine. So no surprise the former Ukrainian president lauded CNN as an “objective source of information as a contradiction against Russian information.” Twitter will label all tweets linking to Russian state media while allowing Ukrainian sources free reign. Everybody’s working the same angle here.
If any of this seems familiar, rewind to the 2016 presidential campaign, and then get back to the future.
The propaganda, having done its job of whipping Americans into a blood orgy demanding Putin’s death, has now begun its morphosis into tying Trump into all this. In doing so, the campaign builds on the remnants of 2016, when the Clinton machine falsely claimed the Russians elected Trump as their agent in place. USA Today writes “Trump’s bromance with Putin was very much on display… as the former president saw it, there was nothing to condemn [in Ukraine] but much to admire.” The NYT says “The American political right… has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of US conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview. Supporting Mr. Putin, as well as other authoritarian leaders, is yet another way in which the political right is weaponizing culture wars to further divide Americans.”
Salon explains “How Trump’s coup attempt [January 6] encouraged Putin’s Ukraine invasion” and says “Donald Trump and his regime consistently acted as vassals for Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia’s strategic interests.” WaPo noted “the implications of President Vladimir Putin’s actions against the United States in 2016 will finally sink in, especially for Republicans in Congress. The Vladimir Putin who planned, staged and launched a large-scale war on Ukraine is the same Vladimir Putin who ordered an aggressive, multifaceted, clandestine campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The Atlantic hauls out none other than Hillary Clinton to thunder “It’s a five-alarm national-security crisis. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.” Has-been with a platform Al Franken predicts Trump will win in 2024 and it will be the last democratic election. It’ll be a dictatorship.”
There are two things to worry about here. The first is the amazing speed with which a massive narrative can be forced across America in a coordinated fashion by traditional media, government, and social media. Overnight no other version of the story could be found. Ukrainian propaganda sucked all of the oxygen from the room so quickly it should scare us. The second thing to fear is how quickly American partisan political forces were able to hijack the initial anti-Russian narrative and repurpose it into a slightly revised version of 2016’s “Trump is a Russian asset.” No matter that that itself has been debunked as Clinton-made propaganda, the story line is somehow — meh, the details don’t matter — Trump and Putin are working together to destroy Ukraine on their way to ending American democracy.
Trump has nothing to do with Putin, or the Ukraine, and the latter two have nothing to do with American democracy. As in Orwell’s world, our thoughts are no longer are own. We are told how to think and increasingly, groomed how to vote.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Seeing the Future: The 2024 Presidential Campaign
I punched Elon Musk in the nose. I figured, why not, he’s a jerk. Little did I know my punch would dislodge a chunk of artisanal tofu he was in the process of choking on and save his life. To say thanks, he offered to pay for a private Spice Girls reunion (minus Posh) for me on the next Space X flight. I hesitated, and he smiled wickedly and said “Or you could be the first man to test my time machine…”I landed right in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
It had been a hard run for the Democrats. After a harrowing primary season with several hundred candidates confused voters, the Party simply started listing them on the ballots as the black one, the gender-ambiguous one, Beto, the guy who looked like Beto but was from Ohio, and no-chance Governors I, II, and III. Even this proved too much, and in the end Democrats nominated a visibly intubated Joe Biden for a second term. There was no attempt to hide the fact that Joe might be technically dead, with various medical devices animating him. Dr. Jill would always be at his side and catching her lips moving while Joe “talked” was a popular Tik-Tok meme. Kamala was listed for legal purposes as the VP but made no public appearances. It was unclear she still lived in North America.
Biden’s problems had accumulated over the last three years like a bad Sunday night snowfall. The Biden infrastructure plan, once called Build Back Better and priced at $3.5 trillion, had been ground down after years of debate to just offering free parking at some sporting events. A Dem plan to turn chanting of “F**k Joe Biden” into a joke fake Tindr profile proved embarrassing, as did suggesting America’s next aircraft carrier be named the USS George Floyd. Finally, after the Great 2022 Midterm Massacre, the Democrats gave up on actual legislation and stuck entirely to renaming Civil War memorials after modern day trans heroes. The final blow to Democratic power came when the Republican majority beat up the last Democratic senators in the cafeteria and stole their lunch money (“an attempted coup,” reported Maddow.) Colbert is still talking about it, threatening to tell a teacher on them all.
Foreign policy-wise, Biden was further embarrassed when the Taliban legalized casino gambling and turned Afghanistan into a global celebrity mecca. The last Americans were finally evacuated on George Clooney’s private jet. Desperate, the Biden administration tried to pick a fight with China. Things got hot after a Chinese warship supposedly rammed an American one in the Gulf of Tonkin, but the nascent war was stopped by Jeff Bezos. Bezos, through quiet acquisitions, had secretly become the world’s largest arms dealer, and ended the fight before it really began by cutting off supplies to both countries. By summer 2024, the only thing left for Democrats to run on was the slogan “Red, White, Blue, Not Orange” and rumors Trump had plans for a new hotel-casino in Kabul.
Candidate Trump had not yet chosen his running mate. Instead of the usual nominating convention setting, Trump planned an Apprentice: VP Edition live TV special. After vetting multiple candidates by blood type (“The 25th Amendment may require him to donate organs to me,” Trump tweeted. Yeah, that’s back, too) the candidate planned what the MSM dubbed “political-style Squid Games” to make the final decision. Behind his new signature slogan, I Won’t Tell Your Wife You Voted for Me, Trump filled stadiums. By the end of summer he had mostly abandoned actual speeches in favor of simply scowling from the podium and spitting. MSNBC claimed Trump was secretly messaging voters that his saliva contained magic powers, while CNN focused increasingly on videos of its reporters punching random Trump voters in the stomach under its new ownership by the Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and Jeffrey Epstein Foundation.
The real news from 2024 is that the actual voting process had changed so much no one was sure how a winner would be chosen. Championed by California, actual “mail-in” voting began a year before election day and allowed anyone to vote via Twitter RT for Democrats, while requiring Republican voters to solve a series of increasingly complex puzzles to reveal the one polling place open to them in-state. Texas on the other hand passed new legislation stating all voters would be assumed to vote Republican unless otherwise noted, and allowing citizens to sue anyone who voted Democrat outside of Austin. As the country approached November 2024, there were 51 distinct and radically different systems. Afghanistan, which had applied for U.S. statehood, was being allowed to vote in 2024 after Jeff Bezos’ personal intervention following his acquisition of 98 percent of its arable land. Bezos’ earlier suggestion, that all voting be done via Prime Points, was pushed forward to 2028.
The future is grim. The once robust rumble-tumble political system had reached the point where the only viable candidates were two geriatric lab experiments. For the first time in history the sum of both candidates’ disapproval rating was over 100 percent. The voting process itself had devolved into something so crooked and complex the only thing left for the final fall from democracy would be to replace it with actual gladiatorial combat among Red and Blue voters. The absolute only thing American agreed on other than making AOC the permanent host of SNL was a bad idea was that no one believed any election results. The other thing generally understood was in the end who was elected president did not really matter much. No matter who was being kept alive in the Oval Office-ICU, nothing substantive was going to change. The real decisions were being made for sport and profit by the hyper-wealthy. Or it may be that we are just ungovernable. Seeing the future made the future looks hazier than ever before.
As for the rest, I need to be careful about what I disclose but the new iPhone costs more than the last one. Mick Jagger’s pact with Satan for eternal life seems intact. The most popular movie of 2024 is Casablanca II with Lady Gaga playing the Bogart role, and the most popular job for recent grads is borrowing money from the patriarchy (your dad.) And don’t throw away those Covid masks, you’ll still be wearing them in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Don’t Be a Palooka, Joe
Joe, I’m writing to ask a favor, a big one, for America. Don’t be a bum, a palooka. If you lose the election, lose it graciously. Don’t drag a damaged America through a long fight designed to cripple the next Trump term, the way Democrats did it in 2016. Those same voices are gonna want you to never concede, to “sue ’til it’s Blue” but you gotta resist them and do the right thing. Don’t be the guy to wreck America. You don’t appear much in public, so I hope this message in a bottle reaches you.
I gotta tell you Joe, while two months in America can change a lot, it doesn’t look like November 3 is gonna be your night, kid. So far you got nothing to offer but you’re not Trump, and because I know you play some poker, that’s stretching a pair of twos too far. Pennsylvania new voter registrations added 150,000 more Republicans than Democrats. Trump is beating you on Latino outreach, Joe, and owns the Cuban vote (as well the formidable Jewish vote) in crucial Florida. One pollster my TAC colleagues spoke with on our podcast believes that the “shy Trump voter” effect is even stronger today than it was in 2016. You see the raw data, but I bet your pollsters are undercounting Trump support. You gotta admit, Trump’s line about you — he sent your jobs to China and your sons to war — cuts pretty deep.
That matters I know the way many Trader Joe Americans noodle around when they want to see if it’s OK to talk positively about Trump. They’re afraid even at my age I’m gonna blast them for admitting they are doing OK in the economy, their retirement savings rebounded since the March fall. Once they open up, they’re afraid of you, Joe, afraid you’ll lose control to the progressives nipping at the party’s heals and with that they see chaos. When Elizabeth Warren sneaks in a pro-BLM message during your convention, they don’t see the justice they titularly support, they see chaos. And the crap they roll their eyes over happening in New York is now in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Swing states, Joe, on literal fire under Democratic leadership. Trump as the safe candidate, crazy, huh?
I know you are counting on left behind out of work Americans without 401ks as your people, but Joe, they aren’t. Those folks are in fact Trump’s base. They don’t blame him, they think he fights for them. You and I can have a lo-carb beer alongside a little Maalox, or maybe just some nice Jell-O, after you retire and try to make sense of that, but you can’t say it ain’t so, Joe.
So whattaya got? You cried wolf more times than Mrs. Blitzer. The sky never fell. Russiagate was a lie built on falsified FISA documents, sleazy CIA-aligned operatives, and paid-for propaganda. Impeachment was so weak it collapsed. Large numbers of voters don’t blame Trump for COVID, and statistics show the worst economic damage to individual voter’s wallets has been done by Democratic governors willing to act against their own citizens to help politically damage Trump. A Democratic governor keeps kids from school and you want the parents to blame Trump? Your party Goebbels’ are down to whimpering about violations of the Hatch Act most non-Beltway American know nothing of and care less about, and the Post Office. The Post Office, Joe? That’s your big talking point two months out? You sounds like Marcia Brady trying to snitch on Greg.
(Joe, seriously, enough with the post office. The USPS handles 472.1 million mailpieces a day. There are only 153 million registered voters in the U.S., and typically only about 60 percent of them even bother to vote. You still get your paper Lands End catalog; handling the ballots is nothing.)
Worse yet, you aren’t the only candidate using the Not Trump strategy. Your real opponent is Stay Home; that’s where a lot of the Never Trumpers may end up. Some important number of voters are not going to vote for Trump, but they don’t see much in you. They will “vote” by staying home, again. Last election about 42 percent of eligible voters stayed home and given they tended to be young and of color they likely cost Hillary the election; registered voters who didn’t vote were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out. You’re strategy is based on people who think they can solve problems by changing the channel. Most of those younger “democrats” aren’t. They hate Trump a little more than they hate you, but they’re not part of your party. They’d really like a third party, for change, but until then they’ve made it pretty clear they won’t vote for crappy candidates like you just because Nancy Pelosi tells them to.
More? You didn’t get any post-convention bounce, not even with five nights of free media and both Obamas. Nice try with Kamala, by the way, but the only people who vote based on the VP choice want you dead, Joe. And talk about a plan backfiring, research suggests the more Democrats message democracy is dead and Trump is going to win by cheating no matter what, the lower Democratic turnout will be. And that’s on top of recent polls suggesting voter enthusiasm (which drives turnout) for you lags Trump in key battleground states.
So sorry Joe, it does not look good. I’m sure you see more sunlight than I do, and a lot can happen in the world around you and Trump in the next two months. It ain’t over, and the race doesn’t always go to the swift and the strong, but that is the way you place your bets.
And that brings me to the favor I’m asking of you, Joe. If you really lose, concede. Thank everyone, promise Kamala will be back fighting in 2024, and affirm democracy worked. Don’t gin up a Konstitutional Krisis. If you really really have unambiguous proof of fraud, lay it all out in one splash, no weeks of leaks and hearings, and make sure it is clear enough all but the most committed ideologues have to admit you are right and let the process continue. You will save America.
Everybody sees instead what the people around you are planning. Even you warned Trump will steal the election. Rep. James Clyburn said he believes the president “plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold onto office.” The Atlantic and The Washington Post regularly run stories speculating that Trump will usurp the election or reject its results. Hillary dictated you “should not concede under any circumstances” because “eventually I do believe he will win.” Her strategy for you is “a lengthy legal battle after the election,” the Sue ‘Til Blue plan which envisions November 3 as only an opening act, followed by lengthy counts and recounts of mail-in ballots, followed by court challenges, all in hope of shifting public opinion toward not accepting the election. Hillary made a good run at that four years ago, convincing a fair number of people her popular vote win meant the Electoral College didn’t count. You’ve sat with her after a couple of glasses of white wine, Joe. She really believes she won, doesn’t she? But you and I know that’s some Third World trip, not paying attention to elections whose results you don’t like.
The poster child for being a Good Loser, Al Gore, is teeing it up for you as well. Gore believes the military will eventually have to remove Trump from office. But pay attention to Gore’s whole statement, the part when he said “there’s no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. You can always explore the option of dragging something out, tearing the country apart, mobilizing partisans against one another in the streets and all of that, but it is not a wise course for our country.” Gore of course is talking about Trump doing all that, but I’m talking about you, Joe.
America can’t handle it, Joe, so please don’t bring it on us. Don’t listen to the voices saying you have to save democracy by refusing to accept the election results. We are so divided as a nation that you refusing to go along with the vote, fanning the flames by claiming the popular vote is controlling, insisting racism lost you the election or otherwise playing to the divisions could set off something that will be hard to control. It could ruin whatever confidence Americans have in our system, flawed as it may be. You won’t inspire people, you will inflame them. You opponent is a predator and will fight a nasty campaign. Go ahead and fight hard back. But when it is over, don’t fake losing, own losing. The critical tool for ending of democracy is people’s conditioned readiness to believe it does not work anymore.
Joe, we’re both old enough to love the movie On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando at his most perfect. You remember the key scene, in the car with his mobster brother. Brando, a prize fighter who could have gone all the way, got talked into taking a fall to make the mob money betting against him. Brando realizes giving in, doing what the dark forces wanted him to do even when he knew it was so wrong, ruined him. He made some money, and the mob guaranteed him an easy job for life in thanks. But he knew he was a bum, a palooka, when he maybe could’ve had class, could have been somebody.
Brando’s brother failed to tell him the right thing to do. I’m here for you, Joe. Leave Hillary and Stacey Abrams in the history books as bitter losers. Fight your fight, Joe, and then do the right thing for yourself, your legacy, for America.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is 2020 Already Decided?
Does anyone in the Democratic Party understand the 2020 election is going to hinge on purple voters in a handful of key states? After years of culture warfare the red and blue bases are set. Electoral College, not midterm, math applies. It is easy to predict a close vote deciding the election.
If the Dems have any inkling of all this, then it is unclear why their primary candidates are talking about things like reparations, Mayor Pete’s hubby, why we must have a woman president, that AOC/Omar (D-Late Night) are the future (and maybe they are; all flash and no substance, D-Late Night), how Stacey Adams got cheated and so deserves to be at least a Senator, identity politics, trans- anything or #MuellerPutinTaxGate. While many purple voters do care about LGBT rights and having a woman in the White House, it is less clear they will vote that way when other issues are of concern.
Democrats run a real risk of under-emphasizing the gulf between social media and the real world. If you fell from outer space and only had Twitter to help you understand this election, you would be convinced the electorate is demanding a female, black, left-handed nominee to drive through a legislative agenda centered on banning hate speech. A significant portion of the MSM lives in that world, so disgusted by Trump that some three years into his administration they still cannot accept the idea that people actually voted for him (Esquire’s political columnist adds an asterisk to the word president* to signify the election was bogus.) Post “Trump is literally Hitler ya’all” and thousands will “like” and agree into a self-reinforcing coma. They’re missing that Democrats who do not share political content on Twitter are more likely to identify as moderate or conservative. In fact, early polls suggest gender and race are not decisive factors for Democratic voters. Too few people talking to each other create narrow, and wrong, impressions that may prove fatal for 2020.
The central Democratic plank — Trump Bad Man — is not what Dems expected it to be at this point in the 2020 campaign. Russiagate collapsed. There will be no obstruction trials, no impeachment hearings on afternoon TV. Trump is still the only president since the end of the Soviet Union who hasn’t yet dragged the country into any new war, and he has toned down some of the pre-existing ones. The economy did not collapse. A trade war did not devastate any place. Trump got 57 miles of the wall paid for, and had the Supreme Court validate his “Muslim Ban.” Trump continues to enjoy strong ratings on the economy and for combatting terrorism, two issues of heightened importance in family-oriented suburbs. The Resistance piffed away, achieving little while its Hollywood heroes molested each other. The Women’s March ate itself over infighting. And all the Dems have to go into Michigan with is “we still haven’t seen his taxes.”
Dems did take control of the House and have done what… with that power? Pelosi, who has tamped down the impeachment rabble and dropped shade on her angry freshmen, seems to have a better sense of this than most. All purple voters who chose Dem in the midterms been is more empty talk of socialism, demands for less white supremacy, and a need for more investigations. Plus a quickly-failed Green New Deal alongside lots of anti-Israel chatter that can alienate a potential Jewish voting block in battleground Florida. The Dems could have made a decent DACA-for-the-Wall deal, and gone into 2020 with a popular victory for some of the most vulnerable immigrants. Instead they got just the wall, and watched Trump declare a national emergency over their dead body to get it. At the same time, what Obama recently labeled a “circular firing squad” haunts the party, with the guns aimed right now at Joe “I’m Your Handy Man” Biden. Who is pure enough? Let’s ask Al Franken!
House Democrats pushing for the release of the Mueller report say they are oddly not hearing much interest on the subject from their constituents back home. “The vast majority of what I hear is about kitchen-table issues,” a Michigan representative said. Because while the Dems may not have much to offer up, the voters indeed have their own lists.
People are anxious over immigration, and many uncomfortable with Trump’s actions. But unless the Dems come up with specific answers to that anxiety they will punt away the issue. There is no doubt communities across the midwest and elsewhere have been dramatically affected by immigration. Some for the better, some less so. Cultural values have been challenged without anyone seeming to care. It is not a new story in America, but it does matter, because purple voters understand the impact on their communities and they see it daily. They are well-aware the New York Times pundit’s great-grandfather came over from Poland with five dollars in his pocket, hell, their grandfather came over from Poland with two dollars in his pocket. Even if the media won’t ask the hard follow up questions, they’ll still exist in voters’ minds.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is traveling here and there announcing she is today “ashamed” of immigration positions she supported just a few years ago, solid Trumpian things from blocking certain benefits for undocumented immigrants to establishing English as an official language. She proclaims her 180 degree change of view hoping to win the primary so she can downplay in the general election how she proclaimed her 180 degree change of view. It is unlikely purple voters will see this as the serious leadership on immigration issues they crave.
Multiple candidates say they will abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. Every country on earth controls its own borders in some fashion. So abolish ICE. And then?
Purple voters don’t live in the multicultural holiday camp of Brooklyn, and know it is not 1900 anymore with an economy demanding millions of new farmers and manual laborers. They understand not everyone agrees, but also know you can’t tell groups of people what they believe is just wrong, racist, and un-American, at least not and expect their votes. Dems tried and failed to enact gun control legislation by saying people who owned a hunting rifle in Iowa were complicit in killing children in Florida. Nobody wants to see kids in cages. But “We’re not Trump” by itself only goes so far.
Claiming the economy is in shambles is also a bad strategy when it plainly is not. It makes Dems look out of touch. The economy is doing very well for the band of purple voters who have 401ks; the DOW was at 18,000 when Trump took office and it’s above 26,000 now. Yes, yes, Obama helped but that’s not how credit gets apportioned on the ballot. You don’t have to agree with them or even understand it fully, but many are convinced they accept food stamps because they have to while other people accept them because they are lazy. It’s not about jobs, it’s about good jobs somehow still isn’t the message. Got infrastructure plans? Less well-off purple voters understand economic inequality at a gut level; most Dems sell it as a minority problem pandering for black support and forget many of those purple voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania are poor and very white.
Many voters know there is no such thing as a mass of POC as white Dems imagine it. This is a false construct Dems are wasting energy on. There is, in just one example, a real cleavage between established later-generation Hispanics and new arrivals (55% of Hispanics believe immigrants’ illegal crossing of the border with Mexico is an important problem. Some 97% of foreign-born Hispanics in America identify as Hispanic, while only 50% of fourth-generation or higher Hispanics do.) Few Asians outside of social media traps imagine they have much in common with urban blacks. Every Asian immigrant, for example, expects his kids to live in the suburbs someday. He’s too busy with three jobs to spend time complaining about how unfair things are.
People need help with healthcare. But at some point Medicare for All has to move beyond a tweeted slogan and explain how the government will simply do away with the multi-billion dollar private insurance business, force doctors to change how and how much they are paid, explain how to legislate drug prices, and institute price controls for all medical services to keep the system from going broke (you need all those parts, that’s how it works in other countries.) And of course, explain how to pass the legislation and then fund all this. “We’ll tax rich people” makes as much sense as “We’ll ask Beyonce to set up a really big GoFundMe.” “Check my web page for the details” is not going to be 2020’s killer debate line.
In 2016, both Sanders and Trump stood out from other candidates for their willingness to frame the campaign as an existential struggle, using terms like “revolution” and “movement” to drive home their anti-establishment credentials. With Democrats now seeking to redefine themselves after more than two decades of dominance by the Clintons, such terms have become the norm. Purple voters may easily see such words as code for too-left, too-progressive ideological politics they are wary of backing.
While the effect on purple voters is unclear at present, “Whither Bernie” looms large. The 2016 Bernie never imagined he’d do much more than use the primary to air his signature issues of healthcare and economic reform. That’s why in the beginning he didn’t run against Hillary so much as alongside her, always gentle on her tender spots like those damn emails. But his message about Wall Street excesses and income inequality resonated. Bernie 2020 starts with a large block of serious supporters and some good ideas. But it is very hard to see how a guy five years older than Trump who talks about socialism is going to fare. Last time around the Dems buried Sanders in a rigged primary and lost many of his supporters. It is unclear how the eventual Democratic nominee (you don’t really think the DNC will run an independent old man with no corporate love, do you?) will handle him this time around to try and retain those voters. It is also unclear how many voters will be hesitant to back Bernie, wondering in the end which other candidate they’ll be traded to this time.
It’s a primary, so candidates think they are talking mostly among friends to the Base. But in a 24/7 always-on world statements now are amplified and will be remembered. This is an old story for Republicans, who in the past used to say crazy racist things to small rural groups to win primary votes, and then try to clean up their act back in town. The old “must do X to get nominated and then renounce X to get elected” paradigm doesn’t work anymore.
A good example is Mayor Pete, who has made a little set piece out of calling out Mike Pence. Pete recently said “If you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is with my creator.” Who is Pete talking to here? Homophobes are not going to change their minds, and evangelicals are not going to be brought over by being told their reading of God’s word is wrong. Nope, Pete is pandering to a small segment of the Democratic base focused on LGBT issues. Once upon a time that was a workable strategy, different approaches for different audiences. But not today. How is his approach going to play to purple voters worried about a broad range of pocketbook issues? If Mayor Pete, who so desperately wants to be this year’s Plain Spoken Warrior Poet from the Heartland, ends up in front of possible Trump voters in Ohio explaining he won’t be The Gay President, he’ll lose. Ask around; how’d that I’m going to be The Woman President thing work out in 2016?
So here it is: Democrats, if you want a better chance at winning in 2020 instead of just congratulating yourselves you were right while recounting the popular vote, tone down the Trump hate. Stop emphasizing identity politics. Have specific plans to offer on immigration, infrastructure, and healthcare. Talk about economic inequality more broadly, and STFU about socialism. Be very careful what you feed the base in the primaries lest you have to walk it back in the general election. Pay more attention to real life purple voters and less to social media. Get your angry freshman women off and your candidates on the front pages. Resolve your Bernie problem well. Stop alienating the very voters who can push you to victory.
At this early stage, Joe Biden (age 76 to Trump’s 72, lost twice) and Bernie (lost once, age 77) seem like the best the Democrats have and that’s pretty sad. It’s still very early days, but we’re watching Dems set the stage to blow it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump, Russia, the Birth Certificate and the Election That Will Not Conclude
Too many people, many driven by racism, refused to accept the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
The votes were clear, the will of the people overwhelming, but to minds blocked by disbelief, there had to be another way to prevent Obama from taking office or failing that, from legitimately exercising power.
Enter the birth certificate. What could be more disqualifying than Obama not being an American citizen? Obama had already “admitted” his father was not an American citizen, and there were all those photos of him as a young man in Indonesia. The accusations played to the fear that someone not loyal to the United States (might he be a Muslim, too?!?) would occupy its highest office.
The silliness of the idea that Obama was not an American citizen still lurks in some of the danker corners of the Internet. More significantly, the concept the birth certificate unleashed — maybe the election wasn’t ever going to be over — is now more than background noise. It is a real threat to democracy.
Trump WonLike the Big Bang, disbelief that Trump actually won has been exploding ever-outward since November 8. The idea that the Russians had somehow “hacked” him into office surfaced even before the final vote tally. But first there were the recounts (the numbers couldn’t be right; they were.) The voter fraud (there wasn’t.) The Electoral College needed to be circumvented (it couldn’t be.) Or maybe actually it was the popular vote which mattered just this one time and Clinton should move into the White House (Nope, people who believe this failed 9th grade civics badly.)
Following the Inauguration (with several prominent Democrats refusing to “normalize” it by attending), action overnight shifted to impeachment; when can things get started? Impeachment would be based on (as the media stumbled to remember 9th grade Civics) the Emoluments Clause, the Hatch Act, the Logan Act, denying the authority of the courts over immigration, nepotism, Chinese trademarks, sweetheart deals with dictators, Mafia money in real estate, firing the FBI director, or obstruction of justice. The 25th Amendment!
Once-cogent pundits like Lawrence Tribe and Robert Reich morphed into human cottage industries proclaiming the impeach-ability of various Tweets, actions, and statements. Spiderman, save us!
But with the apparent lack of traction behind any of those things, the boil burst into a giant pile of… Russia.
Those Taxing RussiansThen there are are demands for The Tax Returns.
Beginning deep back into the campaign and continuing through today, Democrats and the media have created a strawman out of Trump’s taxes, insinuating smoking guns of shady Russian money must abound. Trump’s refusal to release the documents, for whatever reason, is twisted to be further proof of the explosive secrets they must hold (“nothing to fear, nothing to hide!”.)
Unless each of us personally has the chance to comb through Trump’s 1040’s, no one will ever know The Truth.
Left unsaid is that while Democratic politicians, media pundits, and the two of us have not seen Trump’s taxes, the IRS, FBI and Treasury Department have. Trump and his myriad corporate entities have been filing taxes forever, and have been subject to audits on an ongoing basis. Any investigations at the FBI and/or other agencies either have access to or can seek access to Trump’s taxes through subpoena, as well as decades of other financial disclosures and records. The pros have been at work for some time, literally since the 1980s or earlier, and nothing has emerged. That has been left out of the reporting on this issue.
What the media seems to desire is a bit of paper showing Trump conducted some business with someone somewhere in Russia. The value of such a document remains questionable in proving… something bad. It is hard to imagine anyone involved in New York City real estate not working with Russian money at some point. Long before all this was the focus of such intense media attention, the New York Times wrote a non-partisan, deeply researched series of articles on foreign money in general, and Russian money in the specific, flooding the New York market. The Times concluded, without reference to Trump at all, that that “flight of wealth accrued in the chaotic capitalism of post-Soviet Russia has been a powerful force behind the luxury condominium boom reordering New York City’s skyline.” Russian money in New York real estate is, well, sort of normal.
On the political side, contacts between foreign ambassadors and influential Americans happen constantly, sought by both sides. Our American ambassadors and State Department diplomats are specifically charged with building such contacts overseas. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who also met the Russian ambassador, did so at the Republican Convention this summer. The ambassador was attending, along with 80 other foreigners, as a guest of the Obama State Department, which brings foreign diplomats to the conventions to “witness democracy.” And yes, every country weaves its spies into that heady mix. Much has been made of the fact that the Russian ambassador has met with many people connected with the Trump campaign. It’s actually sort of normal.
Or maybe none of this matters — Trump will be impeached for the next thing that happens! Yeah, that one!
So… What Happened?If we blow away all the smoke, what is left?
A set of more-or-less agreed on facts is nearly non-existent; even the official existence of actual investigation(s) is mostly based on leaks and general statements.
Someone, probably connected in some way to some entity in Russia, exposed emails from inside the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign that reflected badly on how the Committee treated Bernie Sanders. How that did or did not help send Trump into the White House is pretty close to unanswerable.
Separate from that, people connected to Trump had various interactions with Russians. Trump’s initial appointee as national security adviser, Michael Flynn, took money from Russian TV station RT.com, and lied about meeting the Russian ambassador. Neither action is illegal, though most people would agree neither was proper, and both served as grounds for his firing.
Trump’s son(s) had a meeting with Russian persons to talk about what dirt they had on Hillary. They didn’t have any dirt. Not illegal, not smart, but not grounds for impeaching anyone.
Where things get sticky is validating the next step: that some or all of those things and others — the leaked emails, Trump corporate entities doing business with Russia, contacts with Russian officials, Flynn’s lies — add up to the fact that a large number of Americans, arguably almost all of whom did not vote for Trump, believe now in some way Trump was helped into the White House by the Russians, and in fact may be fully under the control of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Decisions in the Oval Office itself are being made, they believe, based on how they can favor the Russians, not the United States. That’s a helluva accusation. It could impeach a president. It could destroy the Republican party. It could negate the 2016 election.
Saving Democracy by Destroying ItAnd so a frothy mix of Democrats and a media that by and large favored Candidate Clinton has emerged to prove that the president of the United States was helped into office by a hostile foreign government and/or is controlled in office by that government, claims unprecedented in American history. Maybe any nation’s history.
First tries were offered to the intelligence agencies to “save” American democracy by unearthing information so unambiguous underlying a number of ambiguous acts that it would lead to a swift impeachment. Early in Trump’s tenure many on the left looked to the NSA or CIA to reveal intercepts that would take Trump down with his own words. Hopes were raised when some information almost certainly from intel sources was leaked to the Washington Post, and led directly to Flynn’s firing. A murky foreign intelligence service-connected “dossier” implying the Trump campaign interacted with Russian spies, flavored with some salacious details of golden showers, appeared, but was never shown to be valid and quickly faded from view.
Hope shifted to the FBI, who allegedly had been conducting some form of old-school G-man style investigation since July 2016. The FBI would never confirm even the existence of such an investigation into Trump himself, but his firing Comey seems to have poisoned in the minds of Democrats any investigation that might exist. FBI Director James Comey, last seen by many Democrats as one of two individuals (Putin is the other, of course) who caused their candidate to lose to Trump in the first place, was reborn as Washington’s Last Honest Man.
Enter the Special ProsecutorSo with the FBI no longer trustworthy enough to help impeach Trump, enter a special prosecutor. Robert Mueller will impeach Trump.
A special prosecutor is a lawyer appointed to investigate and possibly prosecute a specific potential wrongdoing for which a conflict of interest exists for the usual authority. So, Comey’s replacement, even though he would not be doing the prosecuting (and neither would have Comey) can’t be seen as independent enough to do the job. You need someone special.
The people now strongly favoring a special prosecutor do have a few wires crossed. No matter who is in charge, the FBI only gathers evidence and does not determine whether a crime appears to have been committed. That decision rests with a prosecutor going to a Grand Jury, typically the Attorney General or someone below him in the Department of Justice. The desire of Democrats is a special prosecutor would do much more in this case, actually lead the FBI and others’ investigation. They would be “independent,” except that the system does not actually create a fully free-standing judicial system, and the special prosecutor in fact still reports to the Attorney General, the nation’s chief law enforcement official, in this case Jeff Sessions, who has himself recused himself from all matters Russia.
That means a Special Prosecutor would instead report to Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who helped fire Comey, and a Trump appointee himself. Rosenstein is able to veto the special counsel on decisions he doesn’t agree with, as well as request explanations “for any investigative or prosecutorial step.” Rosenstein would also be able to fire the special prosecutor.
A Congressional CommissionSo even a special prosecutor would be under the authority of a Trump appointee. So maybe what’s needed, one hears some muttering, is not the NSA, CIA, FBI or a special prosecutor, but a Congressional commission. A commission like the ones Congress created to investigate the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11.
Unlike the NSA and CIA, who look for espionage and full-on treason, or the FBI and a (special) prosecutor who look for actual crimes, a Congressional commission can just… look. And that seems to be the whole point, to set in motion a process that will keep questions about Russia and Trump in the news through at least the 2018 midterm elections, maybe beyond, freed from the complexities of legal standards of guilt and innocence.
In the words of one prominent proponent of such a commission:
A special prosecutor… seeks crimes. The criminal law is a heavy tool, and for that reason it is thickly encased in protections for accused persons.
A select committee of Congress or an independent commission of nonpartisan experts established by Congress can ask the broad question: What happened? A select committee or an independent commission can organize its inquiry according to priority, leaving the secondary and tertiary issues to the historians. A select committee or an independent commission is not barred from looking at events in earlier years statutes of limitations. A select committee or an independent commission seeks truth.
This is an intelligence question with policy implications, not a prosecutorial question with legal implications. For example, if Russia preferred Trump because Putin liked Trump’s pro-Russia campaign policies — well, policies can be changed. But if Russia preferred Trump because Russian entities have some financial or other hold upon him — that’s something the country would need to know now, even if no crimes were involved.
There is No Smoking Birth CertificateTrump has been a public figure for decades, his actions as a real estate developer documented and reviewed by his enemies, opponents, and creditors. America’s intelligence agencies have always monitored transactions with Russia, Trump’s and everyone else’s, in detail. The New York Times and the Washington Post haven’t seen Trump’s taxes, but the IRS has, for decades. So even though Congress hasn’t passed judgement on them, law enforcement has. Meanwhile, if the FBI wants to arrest Mike Flynn or any other Trump associate for espionage they can that today, or could have in November, and implying that has not or will not happen because Comey was or is not the director is nonsense.
Unless or until something fully unexpected emerges, there is no “birth certificate.”
Instead, Democrats, assisted by a media that appears to have stepped over the line from watchdog to abetting conspiracy, are trying to undo an election. Their efforts are unlikely to succeed, as they did not succeed with Obama, but if you think this process won’t be used again against whoever wins in 2020, well, you’re being foolish. The clumsiness of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, is nothing compared to the approach being tried with Trump-Russia. We’ve moved in a few months from Jill Stein demanding crowd-funded vote recounts to leaks of intelligence intercepts used to get the sitting national security advisor fired.
People are getting more skillful at the game, learning more about the tools available. Stirring up the crowd, creating a yearning, setting a precedent that there is no need to accept the results of an election. A new political weapon has been unsheathed. America is playing with fire.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Russians, Trump and the Deep State (Rising)
I want to scare the hell out of you.
People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.
One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?
When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.
Forget for a moment what you think of their actions, but pay attention: both our domestic intelligence service (the FBI) and our overseas intelligence service (the CIA) played significant roles in our election. Still not sure what the Deep State is? It’s that.
Forget what you “agree” with, and focus on what happened. In July the FBI exonerated Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing in connection with her private email server. Yep, there was highly classified material, but that didn’t matter. Nope, the Russians and/or everybody else never hacked into her server, and nobody on her staff ever clicked Podesta-like on a phishing link. Nothing to see here. And then in October the FBI swung again and said well maybe there was something to see, buried conveniently on known-idiot Anthony Weiner’s laptop already in their possession. Funny about that. Anybody seen once marked-to-go places Huma Abedin lately?
As for the CIA, they managed to leak like Grandpa’s adult diapers throughout the campaign that Trump and Putin… something. Trump owes money to Russia. Trump’s computers communicate with Russia. Trump’s advisors work for Russia. Trump wants to build hotels in Russia. When none of that really stuck, it turned out the hacks into the DNC servers were done by Russians — in cahoots with arch-villian Julian Assange — ordered personally by Putin to elect Trump. All because Trump was Putin’s stooge, as the argument completed its circle.
UPDATE: When last week’s intelligence community report that “proved” the Russians did the DNC hack failed to really do much past a news cycle or two, it should be no surprise at all that this week a leak dropped on CNN that the Russians may have “compromising material” on Trump. Now, that leak supposedly came from anonymous sources from a classified synopsis included in a version of last week’s report that was based on allegation made public in the summer but only very recently “confirmed” by a former British intelligence officer who worked privately doing opposition research for an unnamed Trump Republican opponent.
If Trump could not be defeated, he would be delegitimized. Overnight the left/liberals/progressives/whatever turned into red-blooded supporters of the CIA and 21st century Cold Warriors, with anyone from that one asshole on Facebook you argue with to Pulitzer-prize winning journalists who disagree, labeled as Russian stooges, spies, fellow travelers and the like.
The result? A new Cold War, sold to the American people over the course of about a month.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the old Cold War wrapped up, there was left a gaping hole for the Deep State. They nearly literally had nothing to do. Budgets were being cut, power in Washington defused. 9/11 was a helpful and timely accident; the War on Terror would provide the much-needed Cause to blow up spending and reconstruct status and power.
And the War on Terror started off with great promise for the Deep State, dovetailing nicely with long-sought Conservative projects such as remaking the Middle East and controlling the Persian Gulf. The future was wide open, Afghanistan a stupid but necessary prelude to the real first act in Iraq.
But despite the power of the Deep State, mistakes are made and nature finds a way. The War on Terror became a global clusterf*ck. Failures accumulated: Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. Libya, Syria, the messy Arab Spring, relations with Pakistan. You can’t really trust any of those folks to get it, we want a war that doesn’t end but looks good. Beheadings on TV simply stir people up at home and there is not much we can do about them.
Now, to be fair to the War on Terror, it had a good run. It normalized domestic spying and the omni-presence of security everywhere in America, and set up a nice bureaucracy to manage all that in Homeland Security. It got Americans used to see armed military, and militarized cops, on the streets.
But what was needed was a global struggle that made us look like we were winning without it ever ending.
If only there was some sort of model for that…
The Russians. Every American fear rolled into one guy, Putin, who might as well come from a Hollywood super-villian workshop. Unlike messy terrorists, who wanted, whatever, Sharia or a Caliphate, damn foreign words, Russia wanted old-fashioned territory, stuff on maps like Crimea and the Ukraine that mattered not a whit to America, but could be played domestically as Struggles for Freedom (C). The Russkies had troops with actual uniforms, and all the old propaganda materials were laying around. The Russians also knew how to play ball, blasting back through their RT and Sputnik channels nobody really watches but are right there to label as threats to our democracy. The Russian version of the Deep State knows a good deal when they see one, too.
Clinton was the perfect figurehead, already warm friends with one of the last dessicated Cold Warriors, Henry Kissinger, and already more than predisposed to cast the Russians into their role. Trump, well, he didn’t seem to get it, and, when it was becoming clearer he might win, he needed to be made to get it. The Deep State appeared to have some internal dissension; that publicly popped up when it appeared the FBI and CIA were not sure which horse to back in the latter days of the campaign and how to do it. Hey, mistakes were made, sorry, even the Deep State is kinda human.
Well, it was messy and dragged on past the actual election, but everything is settled now. The intelligence report that just came out made things clear: Russia is the bad guy, Trump now the cuck of the Deep State, things are back to “normal.” Funding will pour into the military, intelligence, and security communities. Since the war will be a cold one, the U.S. can declare periodic victories just like in the old days over things like the Olympics, chess matches, dissidents saved, spy stuff We Can’t Tell You About but will leak out anyway. We can have proxy wars and skirmishes that seem like huge deals but can usually be managed in scope. Any troublemakers at home, in or out of the White House, can be labeled Russian sympathizers on CNN and Maddow and dealt away quickly.
Overall, the 1950s weren’t that bad now were they?
BONUS: One currently outstanding question is whether the manipulations of the Deep State in our election became public by accident, such as after 9/11, or whether someone (us? Trump? Putin?) was meant to see them for some purpose. Hang on to that question.MORE BONUS: Yes, yes, this is all conspiracy nonsense. The moon landings were faked and 9/11 was an inside job by the Mossad. There is no Deep State, or Trump really is a Russian Manchurian candidate, or the spiders from Mars are actually pulling the strings or I am reading those weird Geocities-like websites for preppers and soon will be posting cheesy animated GIFs of flags waving, whatever. I’m also a Russian, or Edward Snowden, or being paid by someone to write this. Whatever you need to tell yourself, and you should never believe what I say and say how sad it is that this is what I’ve come too. I’ll kill a puppy in your honor. Thanks!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Hillary Lost, According to Hillary
It wasn’t her fault.The Clinton campaign, and Hillary herself, summed up her loss by blaming FBI Director Comey as an individual, the FBI as an organization, and of course the Russians and the Russians and the Russians and Putin himself for the loss. “Angry white men” got tagged as well. Nobody likes Huma Abedin anymore, either. That’s pretty much it.
The Russians
In a speech to her wealthiest donors, as a group kinda wondering what happened to the approximately one billion dollars they gave to the campaign, Clinton was damn paranoid perfectly on point:
Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” [the attacks] were ordered by Putin “because he has a personal beef against me.
Clinton laid out her scenario clearly, basically that based on some remarks she made in 2011 that Russian election were not fair, Putin lay in wait for five years until he could hack the DNC emails and crush Hillary’s chances to win against one of the most amateur campaigners ever to join an American election.
Comey
Hillary went on to say the hacking was only one of two “unprecedented” events that led to her defeat. The other was the release of a letter by Comey shortly before the election disclosing new questions about emails handled by her private server. The letter, she said, cost her close races in several battleground states. “Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the FBI letter” not that there was actually any evidence of that.
The ever-dutiful New York Times added “In Moscow, fear of Mrs. Clinton has loomed as large or larger than any warmth for Mr. Trump.”
An article in the Times also added “Liberals say Mr. Trump’s victory is proof that the Electoral College is biased against big states and undemocratically marginalizes urban and nonwhite voters,” and that Trump “was lucky.”
The Entire FBI, Maybe Also Obama
As for the FBI as an organization defeating Hillary beyond the Comey letter, that charge was lead by Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, who said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization’s computers “daily, hourly” until after the election, contradicting Obama’s assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Vladimir Putin to “cut it out.”
Clinton campaign chief John Podesta said the FBI did not provide adequate cybersecurity help to the DNC, and accused the Trump campaign of direct collusion with the Russians.
Angry White MenLast to pile on was the Old Dog himself, Bill Clinton, who told the world (actually, just a handful of media in Katonah, New York) “Trump doesn’t know much,” but that he does know “how to get angry, white men to vote for him.” Bill, when asked about Russian cyberattacks said, “you would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on.”
The Unmentionables
Left unmentioned in the Clinton list of reasons she lost were the private email server, her clear violations of national security, the tangled relationship among many State Department decisions, access to her as Secretary of State, and the Clinton Foundation, the vast sums of money she earned from the Wall Street firms she promised to reign in, the hypocrisy of accepting large sums of money from foreign governments in general, and in the specific how her claimed support for the rights of women and girls can coexist with millions of dollars of Foundation donations from Arab nations with some of the worst human rights records toward women, and how her core argument — nothing was illegal — ignored the more important questions of what kind of honesty, ethics, and transparency. Plus any strengths Trump as a candidate may have had and the judgement of the American people, whatever.
BONUS: So, hey, Democrats, a tip: if you select a weak candidate with as much political baggage as Clinton carried, and blame everything on “someone else,” then try and overturn the election via needless recounts, active campaigns to upset the Electoral College, timed leaks from the CIA, and threats of impeachment, you will probably lose the next time, too.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
North Korea Election Monitors Leave New York in Disgust (Satire?)
A team of North Korean election monitors left New York City in disgust, claiming that democracy was “dead to them.”
Following a long series of primary election issues across the United States, where local scams, manipulated caucuses and voter disenfranchisement ran wild, the United Nations requested the North Koreans provide a team of election monitors (above) to oversee the highly-contested New York primary. In choosing North Korea for the job, UN officials cited the “great similarities between the North Korean and American systems.”“You people make me sick,” said team leader Kim Young Hee, spitting onto a homeless man living inside LaGuardia Airport who was clawing at his socks for nourishment. “All we hear on your stupid Voice of America shortwave broadcasts and smuggled laser discs of old American Idol shows is democracy this, democracy that from you capitalist pigs. Then we arrive and what do we find? A paper ballot-based voting system right out of the 1950s, run by ignorant old people who have no experience, little training and too much free time. In Pyongyang, they’d be working in the uranium mines, not hassling first-time voters and African-Americans!”
Comrade Kim went on to cite the unequal application of voter ID laws, the way polling sites were shifted around without notice, and the fact that some 150,000 registered voters in New York were left off the polling lists and were thus unable to vote. He also could not score Hamilton tickets after being promised by a guy in the men’s room “he’d be right back with change”, but said he would leave that out of his report to the UN.“And all this when less than half of your eligible voters even bother to show up? In North Korea, we have 100% voter turnout every election, and stuff runs like clockwork. The Party would be locking up whole families of the officials involved in this kind of clusterfutz. Now, I’ll admit, we have only one candidate running like your Republicans do, but seriously, you’re America, the people who found a way through your ‘fast food’ to feed the masses even cheaper than we do in North Korea. Jeez people, you don’t have this computerized yet? Hell, we do, using a 286 Gateway PC running a pirated copy of DOS 4.0. Losers.”
Wiping a healthy dollop of dog crap off his shoe after having set foot on a New York sidewalk (“I’d eat the bastard for that if we were back home”) Comrade Kim reminded his American handlers that if for some reason Dear Leader Trump lost in November, he’d always be welcome in Pyongyang.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Happy Day After Election Day
I expect to wake up on November 7 late, with an angry absinthe and Miller Lite hangover, so decided to write this blog post ahead of time.
Congratulations to _____, the winner. Democracy, peaceful transition, electoral college, who could have predicted it/it was just as we predicted.
But even though _____ won:
— We still will have tens of thousands of troops doing nothing more than dying at whack-a-mole in Afghanistan for another two years, followed by indefinite training missions and permanent bases in that God-forsaken country.
— The US will continue its drone wars, foolishly believing that the technology means war without risk because American lives are not at stake. In the big picture, they still are.
— Freed from election politics, the U.S. will resume making war against Iran.
— Guantanamo remains open, though our child prisoners there have now all grown.
— No one is accountable for a decade’s worth of kidnapping and torture.
— The Patriot Act is still in place and Americans’ civil liberties are worth the value of an expired coupon.
— In January 2013 the president will still order deaths off a disposition matrix. People will still be held in indefinite detention without trial at his mere word. Bradley Manning still will not have had his trial.
–Climate change, the homeless, veteran’s suicides, the economy, gun control, immigration, blah blah blah.
Hell, pass me that bottle. I’m gonna have another drink and go back to bed.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
How Can She Say That?
So Yemen just had an “election,” the money shot of their Arab Spring. Now of course there was only one candidate running for president, Vice President Abdurabu Mansur Hadi, who has been acting president since November, has been vice president of Yemen since 1994. He is the hand-picked successor to his boss, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for 33 years. Saleh remains in the US on a State Department issued “medical visa,” though his treatment has apparently forced him to move from an apartment at the Ritz-Carlton in New York to California. The State Department also made sure that Saleh has diplomatic immunity for his many years of crimes against his own people. It is unclear how many mileage points you need for diplomatic immunity, but Saleh has ’em while Syria’s Assad clearly does not.
Despite the Yemeni election being just one guy, who is the hand-picked successor to an evil thug autocrat, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland had a near-death level orgasmic reaction to the presidential election in Yemen– “The United States congratulates the Yemeni people on carrying out this successful presidential election and taking the next step in their democratic transition. Our understanding is that turnout was very high — and particularly high among women; among young people, voters under 30. And it just shows quite a bit of enthusiasm and ownership by the Yemeni people for this transition going forward.”
Other popular rulers elected as the sole candidate in their “elections” include Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
No doubt such a statement of pleasure by the State Department over the Yemeni race has dramatically increased US credibility throughout the Middle East.
Right… I’ll have whatever she is having.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ayad Allawi Sums it Up: Iraq is So Screwed
Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister of Iraq, leads the largest political bloc in Iraq’s Parliament. He won the popular vote in Iraq’s last (likely last ever) election in March 2010, but was out-maneuvered for the Prime Minister’s job by al-Malaki and al-Sadr, brought together by the Iranians as the US sat back and just watched it happen, 4474 soldier’s lives flushed away in a desperate act of a coward’s political expediency. State was ready to accept any deal that created any kind of government, hoping that “good news” would allow the US to finally claim victory in Iraq. Mission Accomplished Mr. Ambassador! And thanks for your service!Allawi, shown here with a deeply constipated George Bush, is no saint himself, but does sort of sum it all up for Iraq in this Op-Ed, originally in the Washington Post.
As the Arab Spring drives change across our region, bringing the hope of democracy and reform to millions of Arabs, less attention is being paid to the plight of Iraq and its people. We were the first to transition from dictatorship to democracy, but the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain. Our transition could be a positive agent for progress, and against the forces of extremism, or a dangerous precedent that bodes ill for the region and the international community.
Debate rages in Baghdad and Washington around conditions for a U.S. troop extension beyond the end of this year. While such an extension may be necessary, that alone will not address the fundamental problems festering in Iraq. Those issues present a growing risk to Middle East stability and the world community. The original U.S. troop “surge” was meant to create the atmosphere for national political reconciliation and the rebuilding of Iraq’s institutions and infrastructure. But those have yet to happen.
More than eight years after Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown, basic services are in a woeful state: Most of the country has only a few hours of electricity a day. Blackouts were increasingly common this summer. Oil exports, still Iraq’s only source of income, are barely more than they were when Hussein was toppled. The government has squandered the boon of high oil prices and failed to create real and sustainable job growth. Iraq’s economy has become an ever more dysfunctional mix of cronyism and mismanagement, with high unemployment and endemic corruption. Transparency International ranks Iraq the world’s fourth-most-corrupt country and by far the worst in the Middle East.
The promise of improved security has been empty, with sectarianism on the rise. The Pentagon recently reported an alarming rise in attacks, which it blamed on Iranian-backed militias. The latest report to Congress by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction notes that June was the bloodiest month for U.S. troops since 2008 and concludes that Iraq is more dangerous than it was a year ago. Regrettably, Iraq’s nascent security forces are riddled with sectarianism and mixed loyalties; they are barely capable of defending themselves, let alone the rest of the country.
Despite failing to win the most seats in last year’s elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki clung to power through a combination of Iranian support and U.S. compliance. He now shows an alarming disregard for democratic principles and the rule of law. Vital independent institutions such as the election commission, the transparency commission and Iraq’s central bank have been ordered to report directly to the office of the prime minister. Meanwhile, Maliki refuses to appoint consensus candidates as defense and interior ministers, as per last year’s power-sharing agreement.
The government is using blatant dictatorial tactics and intimidation to quell opposition, ignoring the most basic human rights. Human Rights Watch reported in February on secret torture prisons under Maliki’s authority. In June, it exposed the government’s use of hired thugs to beat, stab and even sexually assault peaceful demonstrators in Baghdad who were complaining about corruption and poor services. These horrors are reminiscent of autocratic responses to demonstrations by failing regimes elsewhere in the region, and a far cry from the freedom and democracy promised in the new Iraq.
Is this really what the United States sacrificed more than 4,000 young men and women, and hundreds of billions of dollars, to build?
The trend of failure is becoming irreversible. Simply put, Iraq’s failure would render every U.S. and international policy objective in the Middle East difficult to achieve, if not impossible. From combating terrorism to nuclear containment to energy security to the Middle East peace process, Iraq is at the center. Our country is rapidly becoming a counterweight to all positive efforts to address these issues, instead of the regional role model for democracy, pluralism and a successful economy that it was supposed to be.
It is not too late to reverse course. But the time to act is now. Extending the U.S. troop presence will achieve nothing on its own. More concerted political engagement is required at the highest levels to guarantee the promise of freedom and progress made to the Iraqi people, who have suffered and sacrificed so much and are running out of patience.
It is necessary, and achievable, to insist on full and proper implementation of the power-sharing agreement of 2010, with proper checks and balances to prevent abuse of power, and full formation of the government and its institutions on a nonsectarian basis. Malign regional influences must be counterbalanced. Failing these steps, new elections free from foreign meddling, and with a truly independent judiciary and election commission, may be the only way to rescue Iraq from the abyss. This solution is increasingly called for by Iraqi journalists and political leaders and on the street.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 may indeed have been a war of choice. But losing Iraq in 2011 is a choice that the United States and the rest of the world cannot afford to make.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
US v. Iran, Round 874
An Iraqi election poster decrying both US and Iranian influence in Iraqi domestic affairs.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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