Will the Media Re-Elect Trump?

Meet the Press gives Sarah Huckabee Sanders a platform to spew lies.

It's only the early stages of the lead up to the 2020 presidential election and already much of the mainstream media appears set to repeat the mistakes of the 2016 election campaign cycle as Trump and his minions lie with abandon and find little or no challenge or push back from talking heads and anchors.  These instances of journalist malfeasance go far beyond the absurd obsession of false equivalency where somehow dishonest statements and outright lies are treated as a counterpoint to actual fact and science based positions of Democrat elected officials and candidates. A column in the Washington Post by former Republican Jennifer Rubin takes the media to task and focuses on both Trump's lies and the lies of his minions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Liz Cheney, one the daughter of little more nowadays than a scamvangelist and the other the daughter of the cynical liar, Dick Cheney who pushed to have America squander thousands of lives and billions and billions of dollars in the Iraq War fiasco (one would almost believe that lying is genetic). Lies and untruths need to be challenged and exposed as lies. Here are column highlights:

The New York Times gives prominent placement on its home page to list all of President Trump’s juvenile nicknames for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including the racist Native American slur directed at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). This serves no purpose other than to highlight his name-calling and reinforce his abusive conduct.

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders goes on “Meet the Press” to repeatedly accuse former FBI director James B. Comey of treason. She insists everyone knows about corruption at the top levels of the Justice Department. . . . She claims “they” leaked information and lied. (Who? What information? When?) . . . Sanders falsely insists the FBI was guilty of “unprecedented obstruction and corruption.”

Trump’s press secretary is not challenged on her exaggerations, distortions and outright lies, although she in essence concedes Trump has already made up his mind, issued his verdict and is expecting the attorney general to come back with evidence.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance White tells me, “I think what is crucially important to remember here is that two FBI agents can’t launch a coup against a president, even if they want to.” She explains, “Our system is set up so that independent judges must sign off on warrants and wiretaps. And given all the contact between the campaign and Russia, it would have been irresponsible for the FBI not to investigate.” She adds, “I have never heard a response from Trump to that point.”

The same Trump talking points were used by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) without challenge on “This Week.”

This is balderdash. In no sense were either of them [Peter Strzok and Lisa Page] “in charge of launching the investigation,” and in any case, private gossip doesn’t amount to “treason.” Cheney is not challenged on her assertions. Were Trump appointees former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray also guilty of treason?

Aside from repeating the same factual distortions, White suggests that Cheney “needs to read the Constitution, because this can’t possible be treason.” She says, “It’s irresponsible for an elected official to engage in talk of coups and treason, knowing it’s untrue but also that there is a possibility it could incite additional attempts at violence.”

Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe concurs. Cheney “is too smart to believe even a bit of what she’s saying. That makes her prattling away about a ‘coup’ and particularly about ‘treason’ especially pernicious and dangerous,” he says. “Only dictators threaten those who dare to question and investigate their use of power with prosecution for treason.”

The mainstream media must pick up its game. Its role is not to act as Trump’s megaphone for childish insults, which directly aids his efforts to defame presidential opponents. It’s one thing to explain that Trump uses insults and to debunk them; it’s another to reinforce and popularize them.

More important, Republicans who repeat blatantly untrue talking points should not go unchallenged. To do so merely assists Trump in his war on the truth and his efforts to smear national security officials. Republicans would like to bury an already-completed inspector general’s report that found Strzok and Page did not influence the investigation.

The courts are doing their part. House Democrats are doing their part. Now, the media need to exercise the same diligence in calling out Trump’s lies. Instead of learning from the mistakes of 2016 — when Trump was allowed to spew his racism and falsehoods at length on live TV coverage of rallies — the media risk a repeat by simply recycling his slurs and lies. Do better, please.

What Manafort's Plea Deal May Mean

Some - including Der Trumpenführer - claimed that Paul Manafort would never enter into a plead deal with Robert Mueller's investigation.  Today, those claims crashed and burned as Manafort plead guilty to two charges and agreed to cooperate with Mueller's team in exchange for avoiding a second lengthy and costly trial.   The speculation now, of course, is what goods does Manafort have to offer Mueller in exchange for the plea deal.  If there was nothing of value, Mueller would not have accepted the deal.  Odds are Trump will be issuing twitter attacks on both Manafort and the Russiagate investigation.  A column in the Washington Post by former Republican, Jennifer Rubin, looks at the development.  Here are highlights:

The Post reports:

President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded guilty Friday to two criminal charges under terms of a plea deal that includes his cooperation as a potential witness for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. . . . .

That’s the news Trump never wanted to hear. The prospect of just such a deal is why his lawyers reportedly dangled the promise of a pardon in front of Manafort’s lawyers. A plea deal that could put the Russians inside Trump’s campaign blows to smithereens the notion that only low-level, non-players or those distantly related to the campaign had Russian connections. Trump, who was praising Manafort to the heavens just weeks ago, will find it hard (but not impossible) to now smear him as a liar.

“The relentless Mueller push continues — as does that of the rule of law,” observes former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen. “The reported cooperation agreement could be devastating to the president — and those around him. Manafort for example could  implicate not only the president in the Trump Tower meeting — but also others who were involved such as Don Jr. or [Jared] Kushner. The same is true on the mysterious [RNC] platform change, and indeed on all the possible collision offenses.”

The plea certainly explodes Trump’s claim that Mueller is engaged in a “witch hunt.” The only “hoax” here is the pretense that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on inside the Trump campaign or that it was too disorganized to have spent time colluding with Russians.
Trump also loses the argument that Mueller is wasting taxpayer money. As part of the plea deal, Manafort is going to cough up $46 million in forfeited assets, according to news reports.
What we will find out in the days and weeks ahead is just how much Manafort knows and how much he can tell us about what Trump knew regarding Russian interference on his behalf. For Republicans who have been carrying water for the president, it might be time to put down the buckets and run for their political lives. Frankly, voting for impeachment and removal might be a good option for Republicans at some point. Before we get there, however, there are the midterms, which are shaping up to be a wipeout for the GOP.

Veteran GOP Strategist Quits GOP Over Trump and "Cowardly" Republicans

It seems that as Donald Trump and his racist followers double down, more thinking Republicans are abandoning the GOP which has become something ugly and hideous and filled with spineless wonders who prostitute themselves to any lengths to avoid a primary contest against challengers who not that many years ago would not even have been allowed on a county or city committee much less be allowed to be a candidate backed by the GOP.  Once Trump claimed the GOP nomination in 2016 it became clear that the GOP no longer has any standards unless those standards are comprised of narcissism, perpetual lying, rank racism, and objective fact free delusions.  The latest exodus from the GOP involves long time GOP strategist and former George W. Bush White House staffer and John McCain campaign staffer Steven Schmidt.   Schmidt even went to state that in its current form, the Republican Party is a threat to American democracy.  Huffington Post looks at Schmidt's exodus from the GOP:

Veteran GOP strategist Steve Schmidt renounced his Republican Party membership on Wednesday and pledged to vote for Democrats in an effort to preserve “what is right and decent” in the United States.

In a series of scathing tweets, Schmidt blasted the GOP as “corrupt, indecent and immoral” and “fully the party of Trump.”

“It is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders,” tweeted Schmidt, an MSNBC political analyst who has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. “Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.”

Schmidt, who served as an adviser in the George W. Bush White House, strongly condemned the Trump administration’s policy of separating families caught illegally crossing the border into the U.S.

“This child separation policy is connected to the worst abuses of humanity in our history,” he tweeted. “It is connected by the same evil that separated families during slavery and dislocated tribes and broke up Native American families. It is immoral and must be repudiated.”

Schmidt, who said in July that Trump had the “impulse control of a little child,” joins a growing chorus of political pundits and lawmakers to rebuke the administration’s practice of separating children from parents facing prosecution for illegally crossing the border.
 

Schmidt also lashed out at Republicans who either are apologists and or his enablers saying "With the exception of a few Governors like Baker, Hogan and Kasich it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders."  Another former Republican taking aim at Trump enablers within the GOP is columnist Jennifer Rubin. In a column in the Washington Post, she lambasted Paul Ryan and others:

This is moral madness, a betrayal of universal human values that marks the lowest point in the Trump presidency — or any presidency since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

There is no point, ever, at which Fox News executives stop raking in money and sending their hosts out to pander to ignorant anti-immigrant audiences. (A patch of Fox TV and film talent is up in arms, some threatening to leave for another studio.) There is never a time when House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) says, “You know, my church and my conscience don’t allow me to participate in such evil,” or when anyone in the White House has the decency to quit rather than lie and help perpetuate the policy.

There surely is never a moment [Trump] the president stops lying, . . . . He is, unbelievably, getting worse, and there is no one in the administration willing to resist.

There are plenty of signs that the public has finally had enough of Trump’s lying and the GOP’s inhumanity. A massive protest is planned for June 30 near the White House and in 132 cities across the country. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a blistering attack on Trump’s policies.  At least eight governors(including two Republicans) are now recalling National Guard troops assigned to help with the border crackdown.

There is far more that can be done — from voters calling and showing up at lawmakers’ offices and appearances, to cutting off donations flowing to GOP candidates and PACs.

[T]he Republican Party has disgraced itself and lost the moral authority to govern. Anyone and everyone with an “R” after his or her name who did not condemn the policy and take meaningful action to eliminate it will be attacked for this disgraceful chapter. Really, should they be reelected for anything — ever?

This from a former Republican.  Schmidt and Rubin have belatedly reached a point I reached many years ago. Yes, Trump is an outright evil, but I remain insistent that the evil began to overtake the GOP with the rise of the evangelical Christians - the most selfish, hate-filled, cruel people one can encounter - began their takeover of the GOP base. Moderate Republicans of old and the so-called country club Republicans never countenanced such evil.  That began with with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and has now metastasized in the form of Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr., and, of course Trump, who made a pact with the devil with them.  

The Republican Apostates

I left the Republican Party years ago when I saw the beginnings of the monstrous thing the GOP has become, fueled in large party in my view by the rise of the Christofascists within the party base and a willingness of the party leadership to prostitute itself to those sought to undermine American democracy and force their beliefs (and often racism) on all of society.  Now, the Christofascist trait of lying about virtually everything has metastasized through out the GOP.  How else to explain for example Paul Ryan and the GOP's claims that the Trump tax bill is good for average Americans?  The same holds for claims that granting licenses to Christofascists is about protecting "religious liberty."  When I left the GOP, it wasn't pretty, especially since I had also "come out."  I was dragged through the mud by former "friends" and my past efforts for the party and reputation for "doing my homework on issues" all meant nothing.  Now, many others who held far loftier positions than I in the GOP who have put morality ahead of surrendering to Trump/Pence and the toxic GOP base are finding themselves likewise treated as apostates.  Some have formally left the GOP which has proven what I figured out long ago: it cannot be reformed from within.  Unlike some of these people, I always opposed the Iraq War. A long piece in Esquire looks at this new group of Republican exiles/apostates.  Here are excerpts:

Some of the guests were liberal journalists whose faces were as familiar as their bylines: Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Drew, Andrew Sullivan and David Corn. But among them, too, was a cadre of the uprooted and displaced, writers, intellectuals, and pundits who, had they gathered in Paris or London—well, Ottawa, anyway—might have worn the haunted glamour of émigrés and exiles, though in this case they are strangers in the same precincts where they once felt very much at home. Call them Republicans with a conscience, conservatives without a party, or simply, as most do, the Never Trumpers. 

Liberals and conservatives have always commingled easily in Washington, but a year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, old lines are blurring and new alliances are forming in remarkable ways. Exhibit A is the owner of the grand house on Foxhall Road: David Frum, a former hardcore conservative and speechwriter for George W. Bush. It was Frum who, with another Never Trumper, Michael Gerson (now a Washington Post columnist), coined the phrase “axis of evil” in 2002 and promptly entered the annals of liberal infamy. These days, however, Frum is better known as a heretic and outcast, primus inter pares of the Never Trumpers. The week that had just ended was no more or less lurid than many others in the first year of Trump’s America, that bottomless tasting menu of national debasement. . . . . it didn’t seem odd to be celebrating, near a lighted pool with fountain spouts on a warm Indian-summer night, the publication of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (sample chapter: “Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”), which had just that week gotten a rave in The New York Times. . . . the book’s author, Post columnist Anne Applebaum, gave brief remarks. She thanked her “beloved friends the Frums,” who “care about the things I care about,” Today, it is the Never Trumpers who are holding out against “forced collectivization”—imposed by the leaders of their own party—and feel locked in an epochal struggle, with a great deal riding on the outcome. To them Trumpism is more than a freakish blight on the republic. It is a moral test. “We’ve seen a moment before when holders of property gambled that their best hope of retaining their property was to disenfranchise fellow citizens,” Frum told me. “We’ve seen before when important parts of society put their faith in authoritarianism. Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything—‘It’ll just happen automatically.’ ”

This is not the sort of thing Frum said in his former life, as a wunderkind of the American Right. But for him, as for many of the guests at his party, the rise of Trump changed the old refrain “It can happen here” into something more dire and pressing: “It’s happening now and must be stopped.” . . . . it’s a sign of how far things have come that these insiders have now become outlaws.

[A] small but influential band of Republicans, not yet called Never Trumpers, were warning that he was an authentic global menace. One august figure on the Right, the Post columnist George Will, renounced the Republican party in June 2016, declaring himself unable to witness its submission to Trump.

What was missed was the message the Never Trumpers were trying to send, and how genuinely alarmed they were. “There wasn’t a single conservative I talked with at the beginning of 2016 who thought Donald Trump was a remotely acceptable candidate for president,” says Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign-policy writer who served as an advisor to John McCain in 2008 and Marco Rubio eight years later. In March 2016, as Trump closed in on the nomination, another neocon, William Kristol, a founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to engineer a third-party escape hatch. It went nowhere. Two years on, Boot has quit the Republican party and says of his Never Trump confederates, whose numbers seem to shrink by the day, “Right now we could all fit in my living room.” Boot’s tone, plaintive but defiant, is common among the Never Trumpers. . . . This latter group sometimes sounds like liberals, but its members are in fact counter-Republicans who mean to take their party back, or blow it up.

His [Frum's] bill of particulars against the movement and the party he once championed long predates Trump and Trumpism. In the essays and columns he writes for The Atlantic, in his fluent commentary on MSNBC, in his smart Twitter observations (he has close to six hundred thousand followers), and in his new book, Trumpocracy, Frum’s sharpest jabs are aimed not at the “kleptocrat” Trump but at House and Senate Republicans whose “ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity” and were a “radical attack on American norms of governance.” His pages on the “Rigged System,” the Republican campaign to disenfranchise African-American voters in no fewer than twenty states, burn with the white-hot anger we would expect to read in The Nation, . . .

The Never Trumpers have their own history to live down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism.

Jewish conservative intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been pretty stalwart.” That’s not surprising, given the anti-Semitic odor that clings to the alt-right pockets of Trumpism. It also stirs troubling memories of the long history of white ethnocentrism on the American Right, from the Depression-era demagoguery of Father Coughlin through the “Christian Front”–style offensives against the civil-rights movement in the fifties, up through Pat Buchanan’s attacks on the pro-Israel “Jewish lobby.”

This may explain the Never Trumpers’ defensiveness. “I’m a registered Republican,” Frum told me recently, as if trying to convince himself that the party he once belonged to still exists . . . somewhere.

Frum dates his apostasy to the 2008 election, which he wrote about as a conservative journalist (for National Review) and policy expert (for the American Enterprise Institute, the Beltway’s premier conservative think tank). Everyone knew it was going to be a tough year for the Republicans. . . . The Democrats had a charismatic presidential candidate in Barack Obama. John McCain, the Republican nominee, was overmatched and showing his age. In desperation, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain’s team hadn’t vetted Palin with any rigor, but Frum did, informally. “YouTube was still a very new thing,” he recalls, “and I remember watching all the video I could find. There wasn’t much, maybe three hours.” It was enough to see the obvious. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about Alaska.”

Palin’s ignorance alone was disqualifying. Even worse, Frum remembers, she had a brilliant but disturbing campaign style. “She had a genius for finding the stress points in American society and turning people against people,” he says, meaning her insinuating praise of small-town “real America” and her accusation that Obama, the nation’s first black presidential nominee, had been “palling around with terrorists.” Palin didn’t invent this style of demagoguery. But she was, in Frum’s telling, the purest practitioner.

After the election, he began to rethink. The trouble wasn’t McCain’s drubbing. It was the conservative embrace of Palin, which seemed tied to “the collapse of support for the Republican party by the young and the educated,”

Conservative opponents of the ACA were well aware of the bill’s provenance. But since attacking Obamacare worked at election time, they pretended otherwise, inventing the fiction of “repeal and replace.” The same dishonesty explains why they couldn’t come up with a workable substitute: Obamacare was the GOP plan.

All of this is obvious today, but Frum saw it happening in real time. Though he is by temperament and talent an intellectual pamphleteer, he’s also a first-rate wonk. His book Dead Right, published in 1994, stripped bare the myth of Ronald Reagan as the vanquisher of big government.

As he was pushed further out of the circle, something inside him was freed up. He began to reinvent himself as a conscientious objector to the Republican party, criticizing it from within. In 2011, he wrote a blistering cover story for New York magazine in which he said the GOP had “lost touch with reality.” All its policy ideas, he said, boiled down to a single fetish: “more tax cuts for the very highest earners.” (Six years later, Trump’s GOP made a prophet of him with its tax “reform” bill.) Frum also wrote a takedown of Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek.

“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe,” says Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post writer who has declared war on both Trump and his GOP. “They’re not Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.” It is ideological groupthink, the Right’s own political correctness. And it gives credence to the old argument, rooted in the culture wars of the nineties, that a great many conservative writers and policy experts are intellectuals manqué, tightly leashed by wealthy donors, just like the Republican politicians they promote.

The good news is that the Never Trumpers are getting a close hearing. Whatever mistakes they made in their time of devotion, they have emerged as the best exegetes of the conservative god that failed. No one else understands it so well—its means, its ends, its methods, its costs. “The problem with the devil’s bargain is that the devil never delivers,” Frum says. “That’s the point of the story.”

 Like me, these people, all strong conservatives, are finding that they GOP they thought they knew is dead and that they party in reality left them, not vice versa.  I hope they continue the fight. Would that more of them had begun it sooner.

Has Mike Flynn Already Flipped on Trump?

As noted in previous posts, speculation as to whether or not former Trump BFF Michael Flynn will go "states evidence" and cooperate with Robert Mueller in order to save his own (and his son's as well) is already rampant.  Of course, if Flynn flips and testifies against Trump, Pence and/or their minions, the consequences to Der  Trumpenführer and his toxic regime could be catastrophic (something I hope comes to pass).  A column by former conservative writer Jennifer Rubin looks at a list of who Flynn might well take down and help to convict.  The piece is worth a read.  Another piece in Vanity Fair looks at the possibility that Flynn has indeed already flipped.  Here are article excerpts:

The conspicuous lack of charges against Michael Flynn and Michael G. Flynn, despite reports that Robert Mueller already has enough evidence to arrest the former national security adviser and his son, invites the obvious question: has the elder Flynn already turned state’s witness? The tantalizing possibility that Flynn, like George Papadopoulos, has flipped, gained new currency last week when The New York Times reported that Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, had ended an agreement to share relevant information about the ongoing Justice Department investigation with Donald Trump’s legal team—a move that could presage a new arrangement with Mueller. Jay Sekulow, an attorney for Trump, dismissed that interpretation at the time, telling the Washington Post, “No one should draw the conclusion that this means anything about General Flynn cooperating against the president.” But a new report that Kelner met with members of the special counsel’s team suggests that Flynn has, in fact, cut some kind of deal.

According to ABC News, Kelner visited Mueller’s offices in Washington, D.C., on Monday—a development that could indicate the two sides are discussing a plea deal. (Keller declined to comment on the meaning of the meeting.) That could have far-reaching implications for the president and members of his campaign. Of the many Trumpworld characters ensnared in Mueller’s probe, Flynn is perhaps one of the most pivotal; not only does he lay claim to some of the most questionable Russian contacts, but he could also prove to be immeasurably valuable in revealing whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried, it’s the man who acted as a key adviser to Trump during his insurgent bid for the White House, the transition, and the early, tumultuous days of his presidency.

Flynn’s testimony could also prove critical in the matter of former F.B.I. director James Comey, whom Trump fired after Comey declined to curtail his investigation into Flynn. (Comey’s dismissal, by Trump’s own admission, was prompted by the Russia investigation, though how exactly that relates to Comey’s interest in Flynn remains to be seen.) An obstruction of justice case “requires a corrupt motive, a corrupt intent,” as Kendall Coffey, who was a Florida U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration, recently told told my colleague Chris Smith. “How much did Trump know about Flynn’s conduct? What were their conversations? Did Trump tell Flynn that he was getting a lot of help from the Russian government?”

What Flynn is willing to say likely depends on what Mueller already knows. . . . Whatever leverage Mueller has over Flynn, however, may be less compelling than his focus on Flynn’s son, who served as de facto chief of staff at his father’s lobbying firm. Sources who spoke to ABC News said that if the former national security adviser had decided to work with the special counsel, it would likely be to take the pressure off his namesake in a “third party credit” deal, wherein prosecutors offer leniency to another person in exchange for the principal subject’s cooperation.

Flynn may be the most dangerous player in Mueller’s “most wanted” card deck—and, with his son in potential legal jeopardy, also the most unpredictable. So far, the White House has been able to spin allegations of Russian collusion as hysterical and overblown . . .

Flynn, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, would not have been naive, for example, about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, for which he was fired. Perhaps he was reckless . . . . But he should not have been ignorant of what is now evident: that the Russian government was making an all-out push to compromise, recruit, influence, or collude with multiple members of the Trump campaign simultaneously. Whether any of those efforts crossed the line into criminal behavior remains for Muller to determine.

Quotes of the Day: Jennifer Rubin and Jeff Flake

Real news outlets - which excludes Fox News and Breitbart - is covered with coverage today that looks at the denunciations of Donald Trump by GOP Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and GOP Senator Bob Corker.  However, the rebukes actually went beyond Donald Trump.  By extension they applied to every Republican office holder and even to those who voted for Trump and revel in his misogyny and dangerous narcissism.  One of the best summations of this indictment of those who are complicit in Trump's ugliness, bullying, racism and  damage done to America's democracy is in a column in the Washington Post by former conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin.  Here are excerpts:

The message to the GOP and the rest of the country is sobering. If you are going to speak out, as Flake did in a blistering book criticizing Trump, and remain loyal to principles like free trade, immigration and fiscal sobriety, there is no place for you in Trump’s GOP. Moreover, remaining in Trump’s GOP means tolerating, if not enabling, Trump’s noxious mix of dishonesty, bullying, protectionism and racism. It is not a party that tolerates questioning of Trump — or, apparently, our generals. It is not a party that defends the First Amendment or the independence of the courts. 

Many of my Republican "friends" keep trying to keep their heads firmly burrowed into the sand, but the time has come where each of must decide if we are on the side of truth, honesty, morality and decency or  on the side of Trump and the hideous thing that the Republican Party is becoming.

As for Flake's comments today, here are some excerpts via CNN:

We must never regard as "normal" the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.

None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that this is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences, and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.

It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, Why didn't you do something? Why didn't you speak up? -- what are we going to say?
 Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do -- because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum -- when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. . . . . . But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing—until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.

I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit. . . . . giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

We were not made great as a country by indulging or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorying in the things which divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are. 

When I resigned from the Republican Party more than a decade and a half ago after 8 years as a precinct captain and City Committee member, I did so for the reasons Flake enunciated.   Adhering to principles and morality and Constitutional values always supersedes loyalty to Party.  Yet, that is not the case with a majority of Republicans nowadays. Moral and decent Republicans need to exit the GOP and vote Democrat whenever possible to blunt the hideousness that is flowing through the GOP from the White House down. 

Trump Reveals His Inner Bigot/Racist/Fascist

Many continue to express shock at the behavior and statements of Donald Trump, yet I am dumbfounded by their claimed shock.  One needed only to look back over Trump's career all the way back to when his companies were hit with civil rights law suits here in the Norfolk, Virginia, area for discriminating against blacks to know that the man has racists inclinations.  Then of course, there is Donald Trump's arrest at a KKK rally in Queens, New York, in 1927 (Der Trumpenführer denies that the arrest happened even though documentation proves that it happened).  Add to this Trump's embrace of birthers who were outraged by a black man occupying the White House.  The evidence of Trump's foulness is available at every turn, including the course of his business dealings for decades. No one hid any of this.  Instead, people simply chose to close their eyes and allow themselves to support a toxic, amoral man.  To now plead surprise over Trump is to either admit that one is an idiot or a disingenuous liar.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

President Trump’s initial response to events is always the truest expression of his outlook. The scripts that follow are post-facto damage control by his staff and never stick. In the case of Trump’s remarks on the horrific events in Charlottesville — his third go-around — he not only undid his aides’ handiwork but also confessed the words he read on Monday didn’t represent his true views.

“First, he tried to argue that he initially hesitated to condemn the explicitly racist elements at Charlottesville only because he didn’t have enough information to do so.” When has Trump ever required facts to make an assertion? Indeed, after three days he decided that the facts as we all had seen them — neo-Nazis and white nationalists chanting anti-Semitic statements, bearing tiki torches, engaged in street battles, and one of their ilk committing an act of domestic terrorism, killing one and injuring dozens — didn’t really matter. He alone was convinced there was equivalence between the neo-Nazi and the protesters objecting to the white supremacist message. . . . But only one side killed someone, right? Trump did not make that distinction.

And to top it off, he equated Robert E. Lee, who waged war against the United States and fought to continue enslavement of fellow-human beings, with George Washington. Plainly, the New York education system, Fordham University and Wharton School of Business have failed Trump, promoting him without ensuring that he possessed basic reasoning skills and a grasp of American history. But in these institutions’ defense, he is unteachable, we have learned.

Unless and until Republicans are willing to censure the president, withhold endorsement for a second term and vigorously pursue avenues for impeachment, they are wasting their breath and our time.

How bad was his press conference? Well, when you lose Fox News you might as well throw in the towel. (Fox News’s Kat Timpf declared, “It’s honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I’m wondering if it was actually real life what I just watched. It was one of the biggest messes that I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened. . . . It shouldn’t be some kind of bold statement to say, ‘Yes, a gathering full of white supremacist Nazis doesn’t have good people in it. Those are all bad people, period.’”

We  should be clear on several points. First, it is morally reprehensible to serve in this White House, supporting a president so utterly unfit to lead a great country. Second, John F. Kelly has utterly failed as chief of staff; the past two weeks have been the worst of Trump’s presidency, many would agree. He can at this point only serve his country by resigning and warning the country that Trump is a cancer on the presidency, . . .

Finally, Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible.

The Rottenness of Today's Republican Party

Past generations of Republicans would be turning over in their graves if they could see what has become of the Republican Party.  Hatred of the poor, incessantly lying, supporting a morally bankrupt individual solely to retain power, turning a blind eye to possible treason, and supporting religious extremism and trashing the First Amendment's ban on an established religion - these are now the norm for the Republican Party.  I left the Republican Party years and years ago and I suspect that more will follow me.  Republican columnist - or perhaps former Republican based on this piece - Jennifer Rubin vents in a column in the Washington Post and lays out the argument of just how horrible the Republican Party has become. How "friends" who vote Republican can close their eyes to this in disturbing.  Are these people as morally bankrupt as they would appear to be. Here are highlights from the column:

President Trump has had more-scandalous weeks. He has had weeks with more bombshell bad-news stories. But no week has matched this one in revealing the moral and intellectual rot at the center of the GOP. Pandemic intellectual dishonesty and celebration of uncivilized conduct now permeate the party and its support in the conservative ecosystem. Consider what we saw and learned this week:

• Trump in Saudi Arabia disclaims any concern for human rights.

• Trump bullies NATO allies in public (and physically shoves one leader).

• Trump’s budget is built on a rickety scaffold of math errors, economic nonsense and fantasyland predictions.

• Trump’s advisers defend massive cuts to the safety net, coupled with huge giveaways to the rich.

• The Congressional Budget Office score, which the House did not require before voting on a mammoth health-care bill, confirms that GOP leaders falsely claimed they protected people with preexisting conditions.

• Trump’s lawyers contemptuously swat away a request for information relating to his receipt of foreign monies, finding that it is too impractical to abide by his own promise and the Constitution.

• Trump has nothing but praise for thuggish autocrats, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

• Trump continues to pursue a Muslim ban, repeatedly struck down by the courts as bigotry disguised under the cloak of national security.

• A GOP congressional candidate, conclusive evidence suggests, attacks a reporter and apparently lies about it (he later apologizes for actions he denied less than 24 hours earlier), but party leaders do not repudiate him or demand that he withdraw.

• Jared Kushner, the beneficiary of egregious nepotism, now is a focus of the FBI’s Russia investigation, bringing a once-in-a-lifetime scandal one step closer to the presidency.

• Sean Hannity is forced to stop propagating a detestable hoax about a young man’s murder; Fox News after a week withdraws the original false report without much explanation or an apology.

This is the state of the GOP — a refuge for intellectual frauds and bullies, for mean-spirited hypocrites who preach personal responsibility yet excuse the inexcusable.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism. 

Anti-Trump Republicans have debated whether the GOP can be “reformed” or must be abandoned. Where would one even begin to reform a party such as this . . . . It would take a clean sweep of not merely officeholders but also right-wing media outlets to recover anything approaching the intellectual rigor and moral decency conservatives used to cherish.

The country needs two parties and benefits from the ideas associated with classical liberalism (small “l”) — the rule of law (over the law of the jungle), respect for the dignity of every individual, prosperity-creating free markets (including trade), values-based foreign policy. The Republican Party no longer embodies those ideals; it undermines them in words and in deeds. It now advances ideas and celebrates behavior antithetical to democracy and simple human decency. Center-right Americans, we have become convinced, must look elsewhere for a political home.

The last bold faced language sums things up well in my view:  The GOP now advances ideas and celebrates behavior antithetical to democracy and simple human decency.  And 81% of evangelical Christians support this agenda.  Their moral bankruptcy is nearly complete.

The Questions Republicans Will Have to WAswer

In a little over a half hour the second presidential debate begins and while no one can predict what Donald Trump will say or do - personally, I hope Hillary pushes his buttons and he goes off and shows his ample ass - but whatever the outcome, many Republicans will have to be held to account for the part they played, often willingly, in destroying what little moral standing the GOP still had. The party of so-called "family values" has shown beyond doubt that it has no core values other than calculating self-promotion and willing self-prostitution to the morally bankrupt.  Thankfully, I left the GOP years ago and do not have to feel dirty by association with those who have no moral compass, thrive on hate and bigotry, and would overthrow the U.S. Constitution in order to impose a Christian version of Sharia law.  Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin, who for too long was an apologist for the GOP, frames the questions that Donald Trump's sycophants should be forced to answer.  Here are column excerpts:

In an extraordinary 36 hours, Donald Trump’s campaign has disintegrated.The list of Republican defectors is long and growing. The Post reports that the “Access Hollywood” tape is not the only new evidence of Trump’s lechery:

Another burst of offensive remarks by Trump emerged Saturday as CNN aired a review of hours of newly uncovered audio from shock-jock Howard Stern’s show. Trump spoke of his daughter Ivanka’s breasts, three-way sex and not dating women who are older than 35. He also described barging in on nude Miss Universe beauty pageant contestants in their dressing room, characterizing his visits as inspections.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports: 

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Saturday told party officials to redirect funds away from nominee Donald Trump to down-ballot candidates, according to an official informed of the decision. In practical terms, the party will be working to mobilize voters who support GOP House and Senate candidates regardless of their position on the presidential race.

The GOP is, in essence, now campaigning against its own nominee, whom dozens of its elected officials have repudiated. This is unprecedented, to put it mildly. It is nothing less than the incineration of a national party and its nominee a month before the presidential election.

Those elected GOP leaders who have still not jumped ship appear morally obtuse, not to mention pathetic. One finds it hard to image the Republicans plotting their futures (e.g., Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Ted Cruz) will come out of this election looking like legitimate prospects for 2020.

Vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, who — according to friendly leaks trying to preserve the image of a good Christian — is distraught about all of Trump’s doings, is not so distraught as to step away from Trump. . . . . He is every bit as tainted as Trump — and does not have the excuse he is psychologically unbalanced or ignorant. He is simply opportunistic and craven.

Hillary Clinton smartly is saying absolutely nothing until the debate tonight. She’s not about to distract voters from watching Trump’s self-destruction. 

What can we say of the GOP officials who only now stepped away from Trump — or still have not? If insulting prisoners of war, birtherism, racial and ethnic bigotry, and previous slurs against women were not enough to shake their confidence in Trump, one is entitled to ask why the latest revelations put them over the edge. They’ll have to answer for that in the days and months ahead. How would they be so blinded by partisanship as not to heed the warnings about Trump’s twisted psyche, outlandish views and unelectability?

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan . . . Having failed the test of character and leadership, it’s not clear what he can offer the party in the way of leadership after the election.

As for the other members of the political hall of shame, Reince Priebus disgraced himself and sold his party and the country short by assisting Trump every step of the way. If the GOP still exists, he should be banished from holding any office, elected or otherwise. 

Those Republicans who have stuck with Trump to the bitter end justifying the most heinous conduct . . . . most especially the evangelical throng that still vouches for him — should be banished from polite company. They’ve failed the most elementary test of honesty and decency.

Recent events necessitate widespread, dramatic housecleaning on the right.  . . . . The fundamental split is now one of character and basic decency. The future of the GOP and the conservative movement will rest with those who got it right from the get-go and refused to enable a dangerous, evil character. 

Thoughtful Republicans and center-right independents need to re-examine their media outlets of choice and disown Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Breitbart and the flock of other intellectually corrupt and morally bankrupt talk-show operators who have no standing to lecture the party or country on much of anything.

The 2016 presidential election will be a spectacular defeat for the GOP. Perhaps it will be enough to drive a stake through a party that has outlived its usefulness — or at least puncture the careers of the legions of apologists, enablers and cowards without whom Trump would never have gotten the nomination.

Ouch!  Even two years ago I would never have predicted that Rubin would be writing a column that expresses my long standing views of the GOP.   I am keeping my fingers crossed on what happens during the debate.

Jennifer Rubin: Cuccinelli’s Got Problems

Meanwhile, the debate continues as to whether or not the drastic drop in the public view of the Republican brand is part of the reason that GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli appears to be tanking in the polls.  Personally, I suspect that most of Cuccinelli's problems trace right back to Cuccinelli himself: his corruption - think money from Star Scientific and Consol Energy - and his scary religious extremism and extreme positions on social issues, including his anti-gay and anti-women jihads.  Jennifer Rubin is a conservative columnist who I generally dislike, but of late she seems to have been zeroing in on the systemic problem of today's GOP and the problems that Cuccinelli has created for himself through his slavish obedience to hate merchants at The Family Foundation and knuckle dragging climate change deniers.  Rubin has let loose on Cuccinelli in a blog post.  Here are excerpts:

Last night I received a recorded phone message from a group called the Tea Party Patriot Fund. In the guise of a poll, the ad for Republican gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli II asked if I supported the giant tax hike  by the “current governor” (alluding to the sales tax hike to pay for transportation) and whether I favored Medicaid expansion. The ad is noteworthy in several respects.

It was, like nearly all of Cuccinelli’s campaign (and this was a third-party ad, which cannot be coordinated with the candidate), entirely negative. The message is that Democrat Terry McAuliffe will raise taxes and expand Medicaid. Unfortunately for Cuccinelli, he’s managed to push down McAuliffe’s numbers but not raise his own, leaving McAuliffe the least-horrible choice for many voters.

In addition, this group doesn’t think that the transportation bill is popular. In fact, polling says it is, and, moreover, Cuccinelli hasn’t run on repealing it. (Had he done so, perhaps those fiscal conservatives wouldn’t be considering Sarvis). It’s part of the confusion about Cuccinelli — will he try to make the law work or seek to scuttle it?

And finally, telephone ad arguments against McAuliffe are weak. The House of Delegates is overwhelmingly Republican and the state Senate is evenly divided, neither of which is likely to change much in the November election. What are the chances the legislature will vote to raise taxes or to expand Medicaid? Not large. . . . .

One thing that would not have helped[Cuccinelli]  — although hard-line conservatives are brushing up this excuse — would have been to run harder on the social issues. He is already losing big in areas (Northern Virginia) and with groups (e.g. younger voters, women) who think he’s too extreme on social issues. Unlike Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who didn’t run on social issues and was able to win Northern Virginia and the women’s vote, Cuccinelli has been unable to escape being tagged as an extremist on these issues. On TV in Northern Virginia, you get one anti-Cuccinelli ad after another, most emphasizing his stance on contraception, abortion, etc.

Sometimes the voters do stumble upon a truthful, general proposition, even if they don’t have all the particulars exactly right. Cuccinelli is a very aggressive, confrontational politician who deeply believes in his positions on social issues, which are generally to the right of most voters in the most-populous areas of the state. That’s a fundamental problem with his candidacy.
Some say he’s “old Virginia” (akin to rock-ribbed conservatives like former Gov. George Allen, who held office 20 years ago) in a “new Virginia” (more diverse, tolerant, moderate, more residents not born in-state). If he does lose (which seems likely), that will be as good an explanation as any.

I find it ironic that some in the GOP are trying to say Cuccinelli is another George Allen.  George Allen - who was a law school classmate of mine who I spent an enjoyable evening with at our 20th alumni reunion - had his issues.  But he was never, ever has been the insane extremist that defines Cuccinelli.  Cuccinelli owes his gubernatorial nomination to The Family Foundation - an extreme far right Christian organization that seeks a theocracy and forced conformity with Christofascists beliefs - and Cuccinelli is one of these true believers.  More and more Virginians seem to be figuring this out and find the prospect of a Governor Cuccinelli to be nothing less than frightening.