Saturday, March 09, 2024
The North Carolina GOP's Gubernatorial Candidate is Batshit Crazy
After winning the GOP primary on Tuesday, North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson now has a very real chance of being elected governor of the state next November. What should voters know about Robinson before then? Well, for starters, that he’d like to go back to a time in American history when half of the population didn’t have the constitutional right to cast a ballot.
Yes, as HuffPost reports, a recently unearthed video from 2020 shows Robinson publicly declaring, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.”
While this is obviously shocking, it’s merely a drop in the bucket of the completely wild comments Robinson has made over the years. (Neither Robinson’s campaign nor his government office responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment.) As my colleague Abigail Tracy reported last July, the amount of disturbing remarks that have come out of Robinson’s mouth—on everything from women to LGBTQ+ people to Jews to feminism—could fill entire volumes. A mere sampling of that commentary includes:
- A post in which Robinson claimed that “feminism was planted in the ‘Garden,’ watered by the devil, and is harvested and sold by his minions”; one in which he wrote that “lesbianism and feminism” are destroying the family; another saying feminists are “as bad, if not worse, than racist[s]”; and one declaring that any man who refers to himself as a feminist is “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties.”
- The declaration that people who support equal rights for women are “sexist, hairy armpit having, poo-poo hat wearing pinkos.”
- A series of remarks in which Robinson called women “whores,” “witches,” and “rejected drag queens,” and women who breastfeed in public “shameless attention hogs.”
- Equating the LGBTQ+ community with “filth.”
- Quoting Hitler and basically telling people to get over the Holocaust.
- Saying he doesn’t trust Muslims.
Oh, and Robinson is a conspiracy theorist to boot, saying, among other things, that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if 9/11 turned out to be an inside job or if the 1969 moon landing had been faked; that he’s “SERIOUSLY skeptical” JFK was assassinated; and that Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg was a paid actor.
Trump, of course, wants Robinson to be the next governor of North Carolina, endorsing the guy for the job and absurdly calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Reminder: Trump’s Last Year in Office Was a Nightmare
One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.
Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence.
On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
So let’s set the record straight: 2020 — the fourth quarter, if you will, of Trump’s presidency — was a nightmare. And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.
Before I get there, a quick note to Stefanik: When Reagan delivered his famous line, America was suffering from a nasty combination of high unemployment and high inflation. March 2024 looks very different. While we, like other major economies, experienced a bout of inflation during the postpandemic recovery, most workers have experienced wage gains considerably larger than the price increase. And President Biden is currently presiding over a remarkable episode of “immaculate disinflation”: rapidly falling inflation with unemployment near a 50-year low.
[W]hat we really should be discussing is what happened to America when the coronavirus arrived.
Once we knew that a deadly virus was on the loose — and we now know that several officials warned Trump about the threat in January 2020 — the appropriate policy response was clear: do whatever we could to slow the rate at which the virus was spreading.
What kind of public action was needed? In the early stages of the pandemic, as scientists raced to figure out exactly how the virus spread, blunt measures were required: engaging in social distancing, blocking high-risk interactions as much as possible. These measures were costly: In April 2020, unemployment shot up to 14.8 percent. But America is a rich country that could and for the most part did mitigate the economic pain with financial aid to hard-hit workers and businesses.
And the logic of flattening the curve said that speed was of the essence. Every day spent dithering about whether to take strong action to protect public health meant more Americans dying unnecessarily.
Unfortunately, at the time, the man in charge denied, dithered and delayed at nearly every step of the way.
It’s well worth reading a timeline of Trump’s statements amid the growing pandemic, which some estimates suggest had already caused around half a million excess deaths by the time he left office.
On Jan. 22, Trump said: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
On Feb. 27, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
On April 3, he said: “With the masks, it’s going to be really a voluntary thing. You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it.” At that point, the main purpose of masks was not to protect the wearer but to protect those around him; why should exposing others to the risk of deadly disease be a voluntary choice? And why wouldn’t the president lead by example, by masking up?
On May 21, he answered that question, admitting he had worn a mask while visiting a Ford plant, but took it off when he went outside because “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”
And there’s much, much more. There’s no real question that thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s dereliction of duty in the face of Covid-19.
He responded to the only major crisis of his presidency with self-serving fantasies — with utter indifference to other Americans’ lives in an effort to boost his image.
Are we really supposed to feel nostalgic about 2020?
Friday, March 08, 2024
After Blocking Border Security, House Republicans Want to Defund the Police
For their next trick, House Republicans have decided to defund the police. Democrats should call them on it, and anyone who cares about law enforcement should be outraged.
The spending package pushed through the House on Wednesday by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) cuts the FBI’s operating budget by 6 percent, siphoning much-needed resources away from the nation’s premier police agency. And the measure cuts funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) — which, among other roles, is instrumental in battling gun violence and terrorism — by 7 percent.
So much for all of the GOP’s “back the blue” hot air. Republicans are determined to reduce the federal government’s ability to fight crime and make our communities safer.
I realize that irony left the building ages ago, but this really is rich. During the uproar that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Republicans loudly — and falsely — accused the Democratic Party of wanting to “defund the police.” No matter how explicitly leaders such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi made clear that the party wanted no such thing, Republicans persisted in trying to hang an anti-law enforcement sign around Democrats’ necks.
Led by Donald Trump, the GOP continues to paint cities run by Democrats as riddled with violent crime and general lawlessness — hellscapes where police are denied the resources and support they need to keep law-abiding citizens safe.
But if you look past what Republicans say to what they do, it’s the GOP that is literally taking steps to defund law enforcement. Johnson and his far-right majority in the House evidently care far less about preventing and punishing crime than they care about ideology. And, of course, about pleasing Trump.
In a statement, the House Appropriations Committee boasted that the spending bill “utilizes the power of the purse to address the weaponization of the growing bureaucracy within the FBI and ATF,” . . . . The key word there is “weaponization.” It is an article of faith among MAGA true believers that the Justice Department is being “weaponized” against Trump — and also, more broadly, against conservatives, Christians, gun owners, Trump voters and the “tourists” who engaged in “legitimate political discourse” by violently smashing their way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
Since Trump is the emperor of his party and since he desperately wants to escape being held accountable, the GOP can’t be the law-and-order party anymore. The House has decided to punish the FBI to keep Trump happy and advance the false narrative that he’s being persecuted. In addition to slashing the bureau’s operating budget, the House also cut the FBI’s construction account by 95 percent — at a time when the bureau is trying to replace its outdated headquarters building.
ATF is being punished for insulting the GOP’s shoot-’em-up ideology by playing a role in enforcing the nation’s gun laws and by compiling statistics on crimes committed with firearms.
Both agencies provide much-needed support to local and state police departments across the country. The next time a mass shooting occurs in some deep-red congressional district, I confidently predict that the relevant Republican member of the House will rush to the scene and thank the FBI and ATF for their assistance — after having voted to limit the agencies’ capacity.
Under Johnson’s leadership, depriving law enforcement of funding is becoming a habit. The bipartisan agreement on border policy, negotiated by one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, would have provided new resources to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents interdict illegal crossings, alleviate a humanitarian crisis and stem the influx of illegal drugs such as fentanyl. But Johnson refuses to bring the bill to the House floor.
Democrats campaigning should make Republicans own all of this if they want to take back control of the House in the fall. It is indeed true that one of our two major parties is taking concrete action to defund the police. That party happens to be the GOP.
Thursday, March 07, 2024
Trump is Mentally Declining Before Our Eyes
Despite the best efforts of the Beltway press to present him as a spry young man next to 81-year-old Joe Biden, it's getting harder by the day to ignore that 77-year-old Donald Trump is decompensating rapidly. He wasn't all that healthy or coherent to begin with but, lately, watching him speak has the feel of getting cornered by the weird creep at the nursing home. Around lunchtime on Monday, all three cable news networks cut to Trump awkwardly accepting the Supreme Court nullifying the 14th Amendment on his behalf. After a few semi-coherent, if gross, remarks about how he was "honored" by the ruling, Trump launched straight into a stream of paranoid jabber more appropriate for someone having a psychiatric episode on a city bus than for a major presidential candidate.
He started rambling about how he wanted "immunity" for all his crimes, claiming that without that, "You really don’t have a president, because nobody that is serving in that office will have the courage to make, in many cases, what would be the right decision — or it could be the wrong decision." By the time he got to defining "migrant crime" as a "new category of crime," both MSNBC and CNN were cutting away. Not because it wasn't newsworthy, but I suspect it was more a reasonable worry that viewers would be driven away.
It's much like the way folks avert their eyes when a delusional person on the sidewalk starts screaming at the demons he wishes to fight with "sticks and stones," to quote something Trump said about immigrants.
His appearance got stranger after most networks had muted him. A bit later, he complained that it takes him 10 minutes to wash his hair, which he somehow blamed on Democrats instead of on the full bottle of hairspray he uses on his remaining locks every morning.
Hard as it may be to believe, this lunchtime perfomance was less of a sundowning moment than his speech in Virginia on Saturday night. Trump repeatedly forgot what he was talking about, despite the Teleprompter, even drifting off at one point into literal babble. . . . Trump also forgot that Barack Obama hasn't been president in nearly eight years.
Most people who hear Trump speak these days get uncomfortable "Grandpa needs a nap but I worry he's going to bite me" vibes. But that doesn't seem to be registering at all with most Republican voters, at least not the ones who show up at his rallies. He could be up there prattling on about how a whale and a windmill are to blame for "The Apprentice" getting low ratings, and they'd keep cheering like he was the reincarnation of George Washington and George Wallace at the same time.
One commonly held theory is that Trump has always been a moron, creating an expectation of cognitive function so low that it's hard to notice he's failing to meet it. But even looking back at his dumbest White House moment — perhaps the suggestion that injecting bleach was a COVID-19 treatment — he didn't sound quite so out of it. . . . . Now he often sounds like a meth-head trying to explain the law of gravity to a dog.
[I]t's not just that Trump's own intellectual baseline is so low. It's that Republican voters have lost the ability to notice when someone isn't making sense, because they've fried their minds with right-wing propaganda. At best, these voters ingest a regular diet of Fox News fantasia, where millions of migrants are setting cities on fire in between casting illegal ballots. But the hardcore Trump fans, the ones who follow him around the country and buy merch at his rallies, go much deeper into the black hole. They live in a world where QAnoners announce the return of JFK Jr. as Trump's running mate and Newsmax hosts explain that Taylor Swift was making "Satanic hand gestures" at the Super Bowl.
Conservative arguments have long based on shoddy evidence, but once upon a time their exponents tried to pound them into a logic-shaped appearance. Now it's all just emotions, a series of post-verbal impulses to hate, fear, bullying and lashing out at phantoms.
Watching the audience at a Trump rally, it's clear they're half-listening, at best. His speeches could be composed of a series of words pulled at random, but as long as he drops in the key terms that get their juices flowing — "migrant," "crime," "Pelosi," "retribution" — they cheer wildly. It's why there's a musical soundtrack under his speeches — to let the audiences know the moment is very dramatic, even if they have no idea what Trump is going on about.
Even right-wing conspiracy theories aren't what they used to be. It was certainly hard to follow the "Benghazi" conspiracy theory, for instance, but you could tell that the people making that soap opera up were trying to create a storyline. With Trump's Big Lie, however, there's always been a remarkable lack of specifics about how the supposed theft of a national election even happened.
MAGA voters occasionally notice that their god-emperor is missing a step these days. The audience got really quiet during the Virginia speech, when Trump mistook Biden for Obama. I suspect they're aware that the outside world is beginning to notice how often Trump mixes people up. Not only does he routinely say "Obama" when he's supposedly talking about Biden or Hillary Clinton, he also talked at some length, about how Nikki Haley was "in charge of security" at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
MAGA voters probably understand that not being able to tell completely different people apart could hurt him in a general election where a certain amount of normal people vote. You can almost hear them flinching whenever he does it again.
Still, the culture of unintelligibility that defines the MAGA movement is so dense that most of them can't even perceive that Trump's verbal diarrhea is highly disconcerting to outsiders. Anyone who's watched comedian Jordan Klepper's interviews with Republican voters has witnessed that logic-free tone poetry is just the way Trump folks talk. Their views don't make sense, and they really don't care.
[I]t's pretty depressing to watch millions of Americans scramble their own brains, just so they can avoid trying to explain why they vote the way they do. But this whole debacle offers a ray of hope: Trump's decay isn't likely to sit well with ordinary voters. Right now, Trump consistently leads Biden in the polls, due in large part to swing voters who have somehow forgotten how awful things were under Trump. Most of those people haven't heard him speak in years, since they lack the self-loathing necessary to turn up the volume when they see his face onscreen. They likely have no idea how much worse he sounds these days.
Many more voters are likely to tune in closer to Election Day, and many will be shocked by seeing what more politically conscious folks have seen over the last couple of years: A guy who didn't have a lot of mental resources to begin with shedding brain cells by the minute. There are lots of good reasons to vote against Trump, with his fascist impulses at the top of the list. But for those voters who are concerned about the candidates' ages, Donald Trump's obvious cognitive decline should matter.
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Tuesday, March 05, 2024
How Republicans Bamboozle Rural Whites
It's become a tedious trope, the Beltway journalist who goes on a red state safari to ask Donald Trump voters if they still like Trump. It frustrates smart readers because invariably the answer is "yes" yet the rationale is typically incoherent babble. Even that would be fine, if these reporters dug an inch deeper, to get at the various bigotries that are actually driving the MAGA movement. Instead, most of them seem too in awe of redhats sitting in diners, as though they've just encountered a rare species of bird in the wild, to bother interrogating them in a way that reveals anything genuinely valuable.
If readers see the title "White Rural Rage: The Threat to Democracy," they might think it's more of the same. But this book, by former Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland, Baltimore professor Thomas Schaller, is a very different animal.
Waldman and Schaller believe that rural white people are functioning adults who have agency and are not the childlike ciphers of Fox News. As such, the book refreshingly holds rural white voters to account for their choices, and for willfully gobbling down right-wing propaganda. It calls on rural Americans to take responsibility for themselves, by asking harder question of what it would actually take to improve their communities.
Waldman and Schaller spoke to Salon about what rural America actually needs, and why Republican voters stubbornly refuse to admit it.
In 2016, Kevin Williamson wrote this piece about the white working class in National Review. A very controversial piece. He was asking, don't these people have agency? Aren't they part of the representational system with elected officials? Why don't they ask for more? Are they children? A lot of people took offense to that, and we're not making an argument as aggressive as that. He had a little bit more safe harbor to do that, coming from the right. But we're basically saying is that the problem here isn't the Democrats. They always get blamed for not doing enough or not reaching out or not being respectful.
Two-thirds of rural counties lost population between 2010 and 2020. That's incredible. And a majority of counties in the nation lost population between 2010 and 2020. To our knowledge that had never happened between two consecutive censuses. This is creating this rural ruin, as we call it. We understand the anxiety that that creates. The question is, what are you gonna do about it?
One option is to blame far away cities and liberals and minorities and woke and CRT and antifa and college professors like me for all of your problems. You'll be rewarded if you say that. There's a steady diet of conservative talk hosts, from Fox News and OANN and Newsmax, who will tell you that's where all your problems come from. Read Katherine Cramer's book, "The Politics of Resentment," about Wisconsin. That's where they think all the problems come from Milwaukee and Madison, and that everything that's going wrong in the upper part of Wisconsin is because of liberals in the cities and Blacks and in Milwaukee and the college professors in Madison. That might make you feel good on Election Day, but it's not gonna solve your material problems.
There's an irony in all of those safari articles where reporters go to the diner and find out that the Trump supporters still love Trump. Those are largely coastal, highly educated reporters who, in their own lives, are probably more liberal or at least center left. And yet they have assimilated all these ideas about how Trump country people have a kind of moral superiority to them and deserve this kind of respect.
So you get a reporter who works in Washington and grew up in Massachusetts, and goes to some place in Appalachia or to Ohio, and has assimilated this idea that these are the real Americans. And even if some of their views might be repellent, I have to treat them with respect because they're the true voice. And that I find deeply problematic. It's always worthwhile to understand people. But too much of that reporting is just deferential.
They want to get mad at us at this book and dismiss us as a couple of liberal professors who live in the DC area and went to fancy schools. That's fine. We can deal with it. But when Ted Cruz says, my pronouns are "kiss my ass" or "you can't limit me to two beers," now he's more insulting. What he is saying is, these voters are so easily won over by performative politics. I can reduce their core urges and reflexes to this. And I don't have to deliver a thing for rural Texas.
Nobody is more insulting to rural voters than the people who are giving them nothing and taking their votes. They claim Democrats are insulting, but Democrats are doing something for them and getting none of their votes. But nothing's more condescending than getting votes and doing nothing in return. J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik and Tom Cotton: All these people were educated at Harvard and Yale. They frankly laugh behind the backs of their own voters to some degree, right? Those are the people who are really insulting.
You see it in your home state of Texas almost more than anywhere else. Republicans have carefully gerrymandered the state legislative districts, using rural areas as a kind of a leverage to make sure they stay in power. Yet there are huge problems in rural Texas that the legislature never addresses. They've got terrible infrastructure problems. They've got problem with the water systems and the electrical systems. Because they refused to accept the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, rural hospitals are closing all over. There are people in Texas who have to drive 200 miles to get to prenatal care.
There was an an interesting study that we cite in the book that found that there were three things that really determined whether a rural area was going to be able to prosper economically: Do you have strong schools? Do you have good broadband so that businesses that rely on so they can prosper and flourish? Do you have access to contraception so women don't have to have babies before they're ready? If you have those three things in place, then your area can prosper. And those, of course, are three things that Republicans are undermining.
It's decimating. Rural America is older on average than any other part of the country. In the suburbs and the city, 40% of people tell their children they should consider leaving. But 60% of rural people tell their children they should leave. The best and brightest students are encouraged by their parents and their teachers to leave and get an education. Some of them may have come back to become a doctor or a lawyer locally. Most of them graduate school and, maybe they had loans, and they needed to move the city to make an income to pay it back.
Everywhere we went, people said weren't enough economic opportunities. The kids who were smart and ambitious, they decided to leave. So Mila Besich, just a good example. She's the mayor of Superior, Arizona, which is this dusty little town in the desert. When she was getting ready to graduate high school, her guidance counselor told her, you have to get out there. . . . . we heard the same thing from people in West Virginia: There just aren't really good jobs here. You can get a job at the Dollar Store, but what is that going to do for you?
The brain drain is also affecting the personality of rural and urban Americans. . . . . it's not just that red America and blue America have different economies and there are different attitudes. You can now predict on where people score on the basic big five personality characteristics. People who score high on "openness to experience" are more likely to leave rural America. People who score low are more likely to stay. It's creating a personality blue/red divide.
49% of rural youth said that their communities are unaccepting of gays and lesbians. That's about twice the rate in the suburbs and in the cities. That's another reason young people don't want to come back. In addition to few economic opportunities at home, they feel some hostility, especially if they're liberal.
Conservatives are constantly being told that not only that cities are hellholes and places that are alien to your values, but also if you send your kids to college, which is the path to more economic opportunity for most people, that they are going to reject you and your values. That they're going to hear all these alien ideas and that's going to break up your family. . . . A lot of kids do come home from college and say, "You know, Mom, Dad, I don't think you're right about this anymore." People don't like that.
This is also a media story. News media in rural areas has really been decimated. The newspaper industry is in crisis everywhere, but especially in rural areas. Local papers have shut down. The ones that remain got bought out by some private equity firm and they don't really report on local issues anymore. And they used to cover issues that can bind people together, stuff that that doesn't have to do with partisanship. . . . . If that source of information is not there, not only are people disconnected from what's going on in their community, but the only messages that they get, especially from Fox News and conservative talk radio, is all about how they are besieged. That they're surrounded by enemies who want to literally destroy them and their way of life.
We went to Llano, Texas, where they have one of these library controversies over whether there are going to be certain books allowed in the public library. The conservatives that we talked to, they all said, oh, we are the reasonable ones. . . . we also heard from a lot of people there who said that things have just gotten meaner since this thing with the library started. It's just all nasty, and we used to all like each other.
[Y]ou could argue that the rural whites who have been electing Republicans ought to elect Democrats. But at the very least, they ought to get themselves better Republicans. They need to start demanding more. There's many politically barren places where the Democrats don't go because they're never going to win and Republicans barely go because they know that they're always going to win. That population is not demanding anything of Republicans. Republicans come in at the end of the campaign and say, "Don't you hate liberals? Yeah, me too." And then they vote those people back into office. They need to start saying to their Republican representatives, "What are you actually doing for us?
You have people in rural areas saying socialism is destroying their economies. But if you look at why the mom-and-pop shop closed and got replaced by a Dollar General? That's late stage capitalism. That ain't socialism. Right? If you look at why hospital and treatment facilities are closing, it's because rural hospitals don't turn a profit. That's capitalism, pure and simple. The same people who are complaining that socialism and communism are taking over America are watching their communities being decimated by late stage capitalism. And they're pointing fingers at cultural elites in faraway cities.
Somebody needs to go in there and say, pay attention to what's destroying your communities. Pay attention to who did it and who voted for those people because it's not the people that you think it is. . . . . Which is not us saying that rural people are stupid. We actually think they're quite smart. As I told you, nobody insults them more than the people who take their votes and give 'em nothing in return. They're picking their pockets, electorally and politically and frankly they're picking their pockets of their future.
Very sad and extremely frustrating.
Monday, March 04, 2024
Sunday, March 03, 2024
Putin’s Useful Idiots Cling to Their Biden Impeachment Dreams
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, usually wears loud ensembles and sneakers to work. But for this week’s seven-hour deposition of Hunter Biden on Capitol Hill, Moskowitz came in all black: suit, tie and shoes.
“My colleagues and I are witnessing the death of the fake, faux, frivolous Joe Biden impeachment inquiry,” he said by way of explaining his somber garb. “In fact, as a Jewish American, when this is over I will say the mourner’s kaddish for this impeachment inquiry.”
Amen. To the extent there ever was life in the case against the president, it has died after a long illness.
But more fitting than the mourner’s kaddish would be to offer a Panikhida, the Russian Orthodox prayer service for the dead. For the House Republicans’ year-long attempt to impeach Biden, it now seems clear, was based on a Russian disinformation campaign — and House Republicans went along with it, either as useful idiots or knowing accomplices.
The Republicans’ star witness, Alexander Smirnov, has been indicted by a special counsel for fabricating the claim that Joe Biden received a $5 million bribe. He was apparently doing the bidding of Russian intelligence, with which, a court filing shows, he had recent contacts.
Before that, the Republican sleuths’ other key witness, Gal Luft, went missing. It turned out he had been charged in a sealed indictment with arms trafficking and illegal lobbying work — for China. He remains on the lam.
Republicans have also relied on the accounts of one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, who was sentenced to prison for defrauding a Native American tribe, and of a convicted fraudster House investigators went to visit last week at a prison in Alabama.
Clearly, they will take dirt from any source, no matter how dubious. Even then, they have produced nothing that shows Joe Biden was involved in any way in the businesses of his son.
Of course, Republicans don’t actually need any evidence to impeach the president, if they have the votes. But even the impeachment ringleader, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), has tiptoed away from this goal. He told a group of us staking out the Hunter Biden deposition on Wednesday that “the purpose of this investigation [is] to create legislation” — legislation to stop “the Bidens from continuing to enrich themselves.”
Wagging two index fingers, Comer admonished: “The American people do not want families to peddle access to the tune of $200,000.” Asked whether his legislation would also target the Trump family, which peddled access to the tune of about $2 billion, Comer ignored the question as he walked away.
The indictment of Smirnov is the most damning, for he had provided, in the words of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio), “the most corroborating evidence we have.” And the fabricated bribery allegation is just the latest case of MAGA Republicans trumpeting Kremlin propaganda.
They let Russia off the hook for its hacking of the Democratic National Committee and its extensive efforts to influence American social media to Donald Trump’s benefit in 2016, dismissing all that as the “Russia hoax.”
During Trump’s 2019 impeachment for trying to strong-arm Ukraine into providing dirt on Joe Biden for the 2020 campaign, House Republicans defended Trump by echoing Russian disinformation claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, was the country that tried to meddle in the U.S. election.
More recently, Tucker Carlson and other Trump allies have promoted Russian propaganda related to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed that “Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war,” while Carlson, visiting Moscow, called the city “so much nicer than any city in my country.”
Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and his House Republicans, some of them citing Russia’s talking points, are blocking funds for Ukraine’s war effort that the Senate passed overwhelmingly.
Are they unwitting tools of Moscow? Or willing conduits? At the very least, they don’t seem to care that they are serving as Vladimir Putin’s pawns. A dozen or so witnesses testified to House impeachment investigators that the president was not involved in his son’s businesses. The investigators have produced no evidence showing that the elder Biden benefited in any way from his son’s businesses or took any official action to help his son or his brother.
Yet Comer wants so much to believe otherwise that he’s willing to take the word of the indicted Smirnov over that of the FBI and of David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney serving as special prosecutor. Weiss’s court filing said that Smirnov acknowledges ties to Russian intelligence agencies and that he met in December with a Russian official “who controls groups that are engaged in overseas assassination efforts.” Smirnov was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”
“We all thought that after their key witness was indicted for lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and was meeting with Russian intelligence that they would stop degrading themselves,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Tex.) said during a break in the deposition. No such luck.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) argued that “if this impeachment inquiry continues, then Chairman Comer and Chairman Jordan are working with Russia to interfere in the November 2024 election on behalf of Vladimir Putin.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.), abandoning all qualifiers, declared: “Basically, the Republicans have become synonymous for Russians at this point.”
[W]ithout the Russia-fabricated bribery allegation, Republicans have nothing. Before Wednesday’s deposition, in the O’Neill House Office Building, Comer met with reporters in the lobby and read a list of the “evidence” he had against the president.
“What evidence do you have that either as vice president or as president Joe Biden used his political office in any way to benefit either Hunter or James Biden?” asked NBC News’s Ryan Nobles.
After that start, the deposition quickly devolved into farce, inside and outside the room. In the closed-door deposition, Republicans broke no new ground, instead grilling the president’s son about crucial matters such as his divorce, his drug use (a transcript released late Thursday had dozens of mentions of addiction) and his use of a speakerphone. They were contemptuous of the president’s son, and he of them.
A feisty Biden repeatedly invoked the influence-peddling of Trump’s son-in-law. “Unlike Jared Kushner, I’ve never received money from a foreign government,” he said, and “I don’t think you have Jared Kushner’s tax returns, do you?”
In his opening statement, Biden labeled the Republicans “dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father.” He scolded them: “You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion and sensationalism — all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”
Had they a scintilla of shame, House Republicans would shut down this embarrassing caper before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) shares more naked photos of Hunter Biden with the world. But there is no longer such a thing as shame. With a straight face, Comer still declares that “we’ve been very effective in getting the truth to the American people.”
It sounds better in the original Russian.
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