GOP Message to Most Americans: Get Sick, Go Bankrupt and Die

Liar and modern day Pharisee, Mike Pence.

Sitting in Le Marais area of Paris as I type this post, several things come to mind.  One is that the French truly have a love of life and, unlike Americans work to live rather than live to work.  Another is that they are free from the constant fear of that one major illness or pre-existing medial condition that could wipe them out financially,  Why this freedom of such fear?  It's simple: France's healthcare system, rated by many as the best and most cost effective in the world. Yes, the French pay higher taxes, but walking around the city one sees few signs of poverty and an enviable lifestyle.  The contrast could not be greater compared to America where health care cost remain a continued concern for all but the very wealthy.  Indeed, the message the Republican Party seemingly sends to millions of Americans is like the caption of this post: get sick, go bankrupt and die.  This from the political party that pretends to embrace "Christian values"  and that now finds it strongest support from evangelical Christians and white supremacists (in my view, the two are increasingly synonymous).  A column in the New York Times looks at the menace of the GOP towards millions of Americans:  Here are excerpts:

Despite his reputation as a maverick, John McCain spent most of his last decade being a very orthodox Republican . . . . But he redeemed much of that record with one action: He cast the crucial vote against G.O.P. attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That single “nay” saved health care for tens of millions of Americans, at least for a while.

But now McCain is gone, and with him, as far as we can tell, the only Republican in Congress with anything resembling a spine. As a result, if Republicans hold Congress in November, they will indeed repeal Obamacare. That’s not a guess: It’s an explicit promise, made by Vice President Mike Pence last week.

In the case of health care, however, there’s an even deeper problem: The G.O.P. can’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act because no such alternative exists. In particular, if you want to preserve protection for people with pre-existing conditions — the health issue that matters most to voters, including half of Republicans — Obamacare is the most conservative policy that can do that. The only other options are things like Medicare for all that would involve moving significantly to the left, not the right.

Health economists have explained this point many times over the years; but as always, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

If you want private insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you have to ban discrimination based on medical history. But that in itself isn’t enough, because if policies cost the same for everyone, those who sign up will be sicker than those who don’t, creating a bad risk pool and forcing high premiums. That was the case in New York, where premiums for individual policies were very high before the A.C.A. For what Obamacare did was provide incentives to get healthy people to sign up, too. On one side there was a penalty for not having insurance (the individual mandate). On the other, there were subsidies designed to limit health expenses as a share of income. Republicans have tried to sabotage health care by doing away with the mandate, and have succeeded in driving premiums higher; but the system is still standing thanks to those subsidies.

The point, again, is that Obamacare is the most conservative option for covering pre-existing conditions, and if Republicans really cared about the scores of millions of Americans with such conditions, they would support and indeed try to strengthen the A.C.A.

Instead, they’re going to kill it if they hold on in two months. But covering pre-existing conditions is popular; therefore, they’re pretending that they’ll do that, while offering proposals that would, in fact, do no such thing.

Do they imagine that voters are stupid?  Well, yes. In recent rallies Donald Trump has been declaring that Democrats want to “raid Medicare to pay for socialism.”

But the more important target is the news media, many members of which still haven’t learned to cope with the pervasive bad faith of modern conservatism.

Sadly, when it comes to the GOP base, they are stupid.  Or, in the alternative, are so motivated by their racial hatreds that they blinded to the reality that they are voting against their own interests in most instances. 

Meghan McCain’s Eulogy for Her Father Rebuked Today's GOP

Traveling overseas is one way to escape what might aptly be called "Trump fatigue" but one never truly escapes the toxicity emanating from the Trump?pence regime.  The Internet has truly made it impossible.   Thus, it was with some relish that I followed Megan McCain'e eulogy for her father which hopefully will be  remembered for its explicit rebuke of the Trump-era Republicans who engage in cheap rhetoric, deep a callousness toward others that is the antithesis of the Christian values the pretend to honor, and a betrayal of country for sake of partisan power.  Making it all the sweeter was that Trump's daughter sat in the audience, not that the self-absorbed Ivanka and her hapless husband realized the message. The full text of the eulogy can be found here and is worth a read.  Here are some excerpts:

We gather here to mourn the passing of America greatness. The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly. Nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.

My father, the true son of his father and grandfather, was born into an enduring sense of the hard-won character of American greatness and was convinced of the need to defend it with ferocity and faith. John McCain was born in a distant and now vanquished outpost of American power and he understood America as a sacred trust.

He understood our republic demands responsibilities even before it defends its rights. He knew navigating the line between good and evil was often difficult, but always simple. He grasped that our purpose and our meaning was rooted in a missionary’s responsibility stretching back centuries.

Just as the first Americans looked upon a new world full of potential for a grand experiment in freedom and self-government, so their descendants have a responsibility to defend the old world from its worst self.

The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She is resourceful and confident and secure. She meets her responsibilities, she speaks quietly because she is strong. America does not boast because she has no need to.

The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.

That fervent faith. That proven devotion. That abiding love. That is what drove my father from the fiery skies above the red river delta to the brink of the presidency itself. 

It is good to remember that we are Americans. We don't put our heroes on pedestals just to remember them.  We raise them up because we want to emulate their virtues. This is how we honor them and this is how we will honor you.

Today's Republican Party has no column in the New York Times looks at Megan McCain's stunning rebuke of what today's Republicans represent.  Here are highlights:

But as Ms. McCain shared one of her father’s dying directives — “Show them how tough you are” — her voice stopped wavering. The warrior’s daughter steeled herself, drew her eyes up and stepped into battle.

“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again,” Ms. McCain said in a broadside against President Trump, “because America was always great.”

This passage from Ms. McCain’s eulogy, delivered as Mr. Trump’s own daughter Ivanka sat among the mourners, will be remembered for its explicit rebuke of the Trump-era Republican politics that Mr. McCain had condemned as too partisan, too tribal and, as Ms. McCain put it, defined by “cheap rhetoric.”

Her emotional call to arms was also proof — as if any was needed — that Ms. McCain is her father’s daughter, a paradoxical Republican figure willing to pay the price of being politically direct.

In the hours since Ms. McCain — the eldest and by far the most publicly visible child of Mr. McCain and his widow, Cindy — delivered her eulogy, conservatives have debated whether it was appropriate for her to have used the funeral to make a political statement, with one prominent Republican coming to her defense.

This surely would have delighted her father. Even with a deeply felt and loving eulogy, Ms. McCain, 33, did as Mr. McCain had done so often: provoked and divided his own political party in dramatic fashion.

Ms. McCain, who built her career as a blogger and writer and is now a co-host of “The View” on ABC, shares her father’s ability to pivot between righteous anger and effusive love in the span of a breath or two. Like him, she has honed a sense of timing: She understands how to toggle between each for maximum effect.

A disciple of her father’s straight-talk approach, Ms. McCain has long confounded Republicans who say they cannot easily suss out her beliefs, and she has frustrated Democrats who want to believe that she is secretly one of them — a sentiment that only grew on Saturday. She has said that abortion is tantamount to murder, but has been a proponent of sex education and birth control. She supports same-sex marriage. She also supports gun rights, but has said she favors some restrictions. She is not a politician. At least, not yet. So far, Ms. McCain has shied away from questions about running for office, in part because she has been vocally critical of the obstacles women in politics still face. But some conservatives have viewed her as destructive to their causes. A decade ago, when blogging about Mr. McCain’s run for the presidency, she found herself in open warfare with conservatives like Ann Coulter. Ms. McCain was banished from the campaign weeks before it ended. In the years since the 2008 election, the Republican Party has yielded to conservatives like Ms. Coulter, a onetime provocateur whose views now feel decidedly more mainstream, and paved the way for a president whose supporters tend to celebrate his divisiveness. [T]his past weekend, Ms. McCain was back at war with the president and some of his supporters, a point made crudely clear as a doctored image with a gun pointed at a grieving Ms. McCain circulated online. On Saturday, after a funeral where he was uninvited and unwelcome, Mr. Trump — whose animosity to Mr. McCain even led him to once mock the senator’s time as a prisoner of war — issued his own pointed tweet: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In the political world, Ms. McCain had at least one notable defender. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime ally and friend of Mr. McCain’s — and another surrogate uncle — said Ms. McCain’s eulogy had been a reflection of how her father raised her.

“If you say something bad about her dad, you will know it, whether you’re the janitor or the president of the United States,” Mr. Graham said on CNN. “She is grieving for the father she adored. I think most Americans understand that.” . . . . “She was direct,” Mr. Graham said. “The way John was.”

I respect her directness and refusal to throw out all morality and decency like far too many Republicans - indeed, I would almost all of them - have done as they have embraced the racism and rank immorality that define the Trump/Pence regime.  Kudos, Megan.

McConnell, Ryan and Pence: Three Men Unfit to Eulogize John McCain

Driving between the firm's office and stuck in traffic at the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, as I often do, I was listening to the POTUS channel on satellite radio and heard a portion of the ceremony for John McCain at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.  In the course of the ceremony, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence, men who are the antithesis of McCain's overall sense of honor and duty to country each spoke about McCain.  Indeed, their insincerity and praise of values they have thrown aside in a quest for power was enough to make one want to vomit.  I was not the only one disturbed by the dishonor to McCain by have these three men who are without honor or morality speak at the service.  Former Republican Jennifer Rubin let loose in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

I can think of only one living American politician who can compare to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in physical and moral courage, in international stature, and in length of career and breadth of accomplishments: President George H.W. Bush, who was shot down as a young pilot in World War II, who went to serve in Congress, the CIA, the vice presidency and the presidency and, like McCain, represents time-honored virtues. Aside from him, everyone else is going to come up short. That said, there are people worthy of expressing admiration and respect for McCain — two presidents who will speak Saturday at a memorial service, and former vice president Joe Biden, who spoke eloquently on Thursday.

And then there were the three who spoke on Friday. You had to control your gag reflex watching Vice President Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) extol McCain’s greatness as he was accorded the honor of lying in state.

Consider Pence for a moment. He began with a ludicrous declaration that broke all records for disingenuousness: “The president asked me to be here on behalf of a grateful nation, to pay a debt of honor and respect to a man who served our country throughout his life, in uniform and in public office. It’s my great honor to be here.” President Trump despised McCain and routinely mocked him. Suggesting that Pence was there to represent Trump would require him to insult and mock McCain. Pence accepted the vice presidency and stuck with Trump despite the “Access Hollywood” tape, despite Trump’s denigration of McCain’s service, despite overt racism and contempt for human rights. He has not batted an eye over the hush-money payments to women, the attacks on the rule of law, the evisceration of decorum. Only in Washington could such a spineless creature sally forth to declare McCain a hero.

To call McCain a hero is to recognize his heroic qualities, of which Trump has none. You can worship Trump or admire McCain; it’s metaphysically impossible to do both. Meghan McCain’s glare was an appropriate reaction to Pence’s hypocrisy.

McConnell acknowledged McCain as a “generational leader in the Senate.” McConnell said that McCain represented all the values the Capitol stands for. But what does McConnell stand for? He has accommodated Trump, ignoring or rationalizing his worst behavior. McConnell personally destroyed the comity in the Senate by denying Judge Merrick Garland a hearing and then extinguishing the filibuster for Supreme Court justices. He has refused to protect the rule of law by preventing a bill protecting the special counsel from reaching the floor. In short, he too is everything McCain is not, and has presided over the very changes in the Senate that McCain despised. . . . There is no principle for him beyond winning.

And then there was Ryan, come to pay his respects. When he repeated McCain’s admonition that “our identities and sense of worth were not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves,” you wondered whether Ryan is capable of self-reflection. . . . When exactly has Ryan exemplified those qualities? When has he demonstrated an ounce of courage to do what is right rather than expedient?

When Ryan urged us “to stand up and to embrace the cause of [McCain’s] life,” you wondered when and how Ryan will manage to do this. Might he remove Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) from chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, which Nunes has used to smear our intelligence community and the FBI? Perhaps he’d actually hold a hearing on the grotesque conflicts of interest and emoluments clause violation that Trump has committed? Don’t hold your breath. Instead of the causes dear to McCain — the rule of law, simple decency, the obligation to defend the country against abuses of power — Ryan has again and again taken the road of least resistance. He is quite simply a moral coward.

[H]aving this trio speak was the trade-off for allowing McCain to lie in state. In singing his praises, however, they demonstrated just how small, how weak they are. In the shadow of a giant like McCain, they should feel a pang of shame.

The reality is that nowadays Republicans who still value honor and morality are the ones who have left the party in disgust at its immorality and indifference to the rule of law.  Only the morally challenged and those driven by greed, a hatred of others, and a thirst for power at any cost remain.  I am proud to be a former Republican.

The Lament of A Moral Republican, a Disappearing Species

With the passing of John McCain one of the last consistent Republican voices of opposition to the travesty that is the Trump/Pence regime has been silenced. The political party that once respected science and knowledge now embraces ignorance and rejects objective scientific fact.  Similarly, the political party that once was rightly or wrongly identified as having a base of "country club Republicans" now counts evangelical Christian extremists and white supremacists as its core base.  And meanwhile, the mantra that "character matters" has been flushed down the toilet as the party standard bearer is thrice married, serial adulterer and self-admitted sexual predator who lies more or less constantly and has emboldened the ugliest elements of the far right.  Peter Wehner, who served in three Republican presidential administrations (those of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush) has a lament in the New York Times that looks at the destruction of everyday morality within the GOP and expresses foreboding over where the criminality and moral bankruptcy of the Trump/Pence is headed and the damage being done to both what is left of the GOP and the nation.  Here are excerpts:

There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.

When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.

For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.

Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. . . . It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. . . . It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president. Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative.

A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.

Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?

John McCain Dead at 81

When John McCain ran for president in 2000, I was an enthusiastic supporter.  That George W. Bush ultimately won the GOP contest and the 2000 election is a tragedy that, in my view, cost America and other parts of the world needless lost lives. By the time that the 2008 election rolled around, the cancer in the GOP was beginning to metastasize and  when McCain foolishly picked Sarah Palin - the insane idiot of Wasilla, in my view - there was simply no way that I could overlook the wrongheaded policies that McCain was embracing out of expediency to pander to the uglier elements of the GOP base.   All of that said, I never stopped respecting McCain as a man who, despite mistakes, tried to do the right thing, including voting against the effort to kill the Affordable Health Care Act. His sense of morality, opposition to torture and rejection of the racism of much of today's GOP is in stark contrast to the foul creature in the White House. An editorial in the New York Times looks at the man who died yesterday:  

With John McCain, you never quite knew. That was a big part of his appeal, one of the things that made him interesting, and also one of the things that drove people who value ideological consistency a bit batty.

As a professed maverick, Mr. McCain, who died Saturday at the age of 81, was bound to make somebody unhappy. Though for much of his career his votes on the Senate floor were mostly along party lines, his periodic challenges to Republican orthodoxy made him more popular among independents, Democrats and the tattered remnants of his party’s moderate wing than with the absolutists in the party’s base. Five years of torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp appeared to have left him with a pretty good idea of who he was, an ability to think for himself and the capacity to tune out partisan noises.

He had principles, and he had flaws, from time to time betraying those principles — most grievously in the 2008 presidential campaign. But in a Senate mostly devoid of the kind of commanding figures who once roamed its halls, he was a rare bird. And he could surprise you.

Especially his fellow Republicans. At a time of confusion and nastiness over immigration, it is worth recalling that he joined with Senator Edward Kennedy in 2005 and then again in 2007 to push a grand compromise that paired stronger controls at the border with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 or so million undocumented immigrants.

At a time when the political system is once again drowning in money from special interests, it is worth recalling that back in the early 2000s he co-wrote, with Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, a landmark bill to tighten the post-Watergate campaign finance reform laws.

At a time when the man who now occupies the White House and his cabinet factotums deny the plain reality of climate change, it is worth recalling that back in the early 2000s, Mr. McCain and Joseph Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, drafted the first serious bipartisan bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions by putting a price on carbon.

The campaign finance reform effort eventually succeeded, named for a companion bill in the House sponsored by Chris Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, and Marty Meehan, a Democrat from Massachusetts. The climate and immigration bills did not succeed, partly for want of Republican support. But even in defeat, Mr. McCain, through his willingness to tackle thorny and even politically toxic issues, gave hope for the future. His example still does.

A military man to the core, and the son and grandson of two decorated admirals, Mr. McCain held views on foreign and defense policy that were relentlessly hawkish; He lobbied hard for the ruinously misguided invasion of Iraq, as well as the bombing of Libya. At the same time, and despite his brutal treatment as a prisoner of war, he strongly supported Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to normalize relations with North Vietnam.

Mr. McCain’s final years in the Senate were a similar mix of independence and fealty to party norms. Last summer, he dramatically entered the Senate chamber and cast a decisive vote against the administration’s ghastly health care bill, partly on grounds that it had been concocted in haste and without hearings and had thus failed the basic requirements of sound legislative process. But not long afterward, he voted in favor of a similarly ill-conceived, backward-looking tax bill. (Mr. McCain was absent for medical reasons when the bill came up for final passage three weeks later and he did not cast a vote).

That vote provided precisely the kind of opportunity for one last display of the adventurous bipartisanship for which Mr. McCain was so well known. It was not to be. Still, there had been plenty such moments in a long and distinguished career. Mr. McCain was a charming, imperfect man, driven by a code of honor and self-aware enough to know when he had violated it. A Senate where the phrase “happy warrior” is an oxymoron will miss him.

My sincere condolences to the McCain family.

John McCain's No Holds Barred Book

While I have often disagreed with his positions, I have always had respect for the man and still wish that he, rather than George W. Bush, had been the 2000 Republican presidential nominee. So much tragedy and needless deaths might have been avoided in Iraq and elsewhere.  And compared to the current occupant of the White House - who I never give the title of "president" - McCain has always tried to maintain a level of moral decency and "American values" if you will.  Now, leaving Congress and with likely not much time left on this side of life, McCain's new book, Restless Wave, seems written with a view of how McCain will be viewed by history and he confronts not only some of his own biggest mistakes but also the moral cesspool the Republican Party has become as best symbolized by Der  Trumpenführer.  A review of the book in the Washington Post gives a brief summary of points in the book.  Here are highlights: 

Unlike the previous six books McCain and Salter have composed together, this one wasn’t written for voters. It was written for history. In an era of all-caps tweets and angry denunciations of supposed “witch hunts,” the Arizona Republican’s final book, published Tuesday, casts him as a profile in courage. McCain highlights his advocacy for the Iraq troop “surge” when it was toxically unpopular in 2007 and his decisive vote against repealing Obamacare in 2017. He finally tells his side of his 2008 Sarah Palin partnership. With what time he has left, the “maverick” — an appellation he has worn throughout his career, at some times more comfortably than at others — is going to put country first and tell the truth.

He expresses regret that he did not pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate 10 years ago. His best friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), “enthusiastically endorsed the idea” of bringing their colleague, who had been the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, onto “a national unity ticket.” But everyone else in McCain’s circle told him it would fatally divide the GOP.

McCain attributes the insufficient vetting of Palin, 44 and two years into her first term as Alaska’s governor, to his sulking about not being able to tap Lieberman. Taking the blame for her stumbles, he writes, “She was a skilled amateur performer asked to appear on Broadway twice a day.” I wish he had grappled more fully with the mayhem Palin’s selection created inside the GOP. It laid the groundwork for the ascent of Donald Trump a few years later.

Trump emerges as a bete noire in the book. When McCain after the 2016 elections received a copy of the “dossier,” detailing unverified allegations about the president compiled by an opposition researcher, he immediately turned it over to James Comey so the FBI could explore whether Trump was compromised by the Russians. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,” writes McCain.

But he also portrays [Trump] the president as an outgrowth of tectonic shifts in a party for which, just 10 years ago, he was the standard-bearer. Now he sometimes struggles to recognize it. “Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing to just not caring about it,” he frets. “And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States.”

McCain repeatedly criticizes conservative “talk radio blowhards.” He calls the House Freedom Caucus “the say-no-to-everything crowd.” He says nativists “need to be confronted, not ignored or winked at or quietly dismissed as kooks.” He mocks his 2016 primary challenger, Kelli Ward, for attacking him as “a champion of compromise.” “You’re damn right,” he responds. Former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are “self-proclaimed nationalist radicals.” “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub,” he writes.

All politicians self-mythologize. This book is an effort to codify McCain’s maverick brand. He puts extra emphasis on his work across the aisle, including a 38-page chapter about working with Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion from Massachusetts, on health care and immigration. He has kind words for other leading Democrats, too, including Hillary Clinton.

McCain says he’s a proud Reagan Republican. “Not a Tea Party Republican,” he writes. “Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican. Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican. Not, as I am often dismissed by self-declared ‘real’ conservatives, a RINO, Republican in Name Only.”

McCain’s maverick-iness has ebbed and flowed. He’s mostly been a reliable party-line vote since getting elected to Congress in 1982, but he’s broken with Republicans on a few key issues. He earned the enmity of appropriators in both parties by battling earmarks before that was in vogue, and he clashed with his own party leaders by agitating for campaign finance reform. 

He admits to some big mistakes: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong,” McCain writes. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

But the senator’s critique of [Trump] the current president is more sustained than any other. “For all our disagreements I never doubted President Obama shared the seventy-five-year bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity,” he writes. “I’m not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions.” . . . . “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” McCain writes. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

McCain does not want to be defined by opposition to Trump, . . . . He would, however, like to be remembered for his long crusade against torture. He devotes a meaty chapter to the topic and recounts apologizing personally to someone who suffered at the hands of his American captors while in Libya, over the objection of the CIA station chief. 

McCain wants to hold that moral high ground, and he’s peeved by any suggestion that he’s not worthy of claiming it. The senator tried to run an honorable campaign in 2008. He forbade his staff from mentioning Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor. In many ways, this gesture seems much more impressive now — after Trump spent years insisting that Obama was born in Kenya and demanding to see his birth certificate.

“I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last 10 years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door to the era of the American-led world order,” McCain writes. “I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded.”

McCain is one of the few remnants of the GOP I was proud to be a part of.  Sadly, those days appear to be gone forever as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into a complete moral cesspool.  From my own experience in the GOP, it is no surprise that the Christofascist have lead the way towards the GOP's moral bankruptcy. 

McCain, Palin and the GOP Descent into Insanity

When John McCain selected Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla - as his vice presidential running mate, he likely sealed his own defeat in 2008.  For many now former Republicans, Palin's selection began the exodus from the GOP and her proud embrace of ignorance, religious extremism and dog whistle calls to white supremacists embodied what has now come to define the Republican Party.  McCain in his twilight still does not fully accept his responsibility for paving the way for Donald Trump and transformation of the Republican Party into something foul and toxic.  But as a piece in New York Magazine notes, history may see McCain's horrible mistake as a pivotal moment in setting the course for the train wreck now consuming the nation.   I had long respected McCain who had been held prisoner at the "Hanoi Hilton" with a long time friend of mine, but his selection of Palin was just too much to stomach and helped confirm my support for Obama. Here are article highlights:

When historians — or, really any of us — look back at President Trump’s ascent to the presidency, they will identify many moments over the years, big and small, that could be identified as warning signs of the catastrophe to come.

But in purely political terms, one other moment leaps to mind: the day in 2008 when John McCain upended expectations by picking then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate. It’s not as if Republicans hadn’t worn the badge of anti-intellectualism before (see: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush). But Palin personified a dangerous new strain. She (infamously) didn’t read much; put forth few policy positions beyond “drill, baby drill”; excelled at whipping up crowds into a frothing frenzy; and attacked Barack Obama in brazen, personal terms. Stylistically, she seemed to be almost completely at odds with McCain, a deeply conservative traditionalist who prefers military wars to cultural ones.

But by and large, the GOP base adored Palin. Its loving embrace of such an unhinged figure was an early sign that the Republican Party was far more willing to tolerate qualities once thought to be disqualifying for public life than many people understood.

Throughout the campaign, and since, McCain has steadfastly defended Palin. But in a story reported from his Arizona ranch, . . . . reports that McCain does have regrets about his VP pick. The reason for his discontent — which he has elaborated on in an upcoming book and movie — is that he wishes he had trusted his instincts and picked Joe Lieberman instead.

[I]it’s striking that, even at this late stage, McCain won’t admit that Palin represents the same variation of grievance politics he now abjures.

McCain, who President Trump has taunted in grossly personal terms (“I prefer war heroes who weren’t captured”) has been one of the few Republicans to consistently take on the president. He has attacked Trump’s “spurious, half-baked nationalism” and furiously criticized his continuous praise of Vladimir Putin. And while he often votes for the president’s priorities, making his everlasting “maverick” label something of a joke, he was the deciding “no” to kill Obamacare repeal in the Senate, an act of apostasy that has earned Trump’s perpetual ire.

[McCain is] also out of sync with the GOP base in most other ways. He’s a national-security hawk in a time of Republican isolationism, a centrist on immigration in a party full of America Firsters. Beyond his policy positions, McCain is out of step in another important way: he wants Republicans to step back from the toxic, grievance-based ideology that now dominates the party.

McCain framed the problem as a bipartisan one. But it’s the Republican party where “the bombastic loudmouths” have really gained control in recent years, culminating in the party’s surrender to President Trump. John McCain has always called himself a maverick, but he’ll end his life as all but an outcast.

It is facile to draw a straight line from Palin to this sad state of affairs. But it is striking that, even now, McCain cannot, or will not, fully reckon with the forces he helped unleash.

When Will the GOP Silence Nunes?

I increasingly find it to be an embarrassment to admit that I was ever a Republican much less an activist and City Committee member for eight years.  Now, with the release of the Nunes memo - a piece of trash if there ever was one - in addition to being controlled by religious extremist and white supremacists, the Republican Party is being led by a mixture of the Three Stooges and a malignant narcissist.  My Republican ancestors would be both sickened and appalled and I feel most confident that they would all be active Democrats were they living today.  Indeed, John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla - as his running mate was the last straw for my late mother (she referred to Palin as "that woman").  What's frightening is that the Republican Party of 2008 looks down right sane and normal compared to the insane asylum the Party has become.  In a column in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin and one time GOP apologist ask the question of if and when someone in the Republican Party is going to act to stop the insanity and damage being done to the nation.  Here are column highlights:

With his memo, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) botched for a second time (remember the unmasking scandal) an attempt to discredit the intelligence community to protect President Trump in the Russia investigation. For a second time he resorted to a specious and factually defective non-scandal, hoping to play to the Trump cultists and their state TV channel, Fox News. Nunes is exceedingly terrible at this game. For example:

·        He managed to prove the dossier was not the basis of the Russia investigation; George Papadopoulos was.
·        He underscored that one couldn’t possibly “spy” on the Trump campaign by getting a FISA warrant, which was kept secret during the campaign, on Carter Page — who already had left the campaign at the time the warrant was sought.·        He did not attempt to tie the FISA warrant to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or to explain how the FISA court approved the warrant and its three extensions (which required a showing of progress in the investigation).
·        He misstated former director James B. Comey’s remarks about the dossier.
·    He underscored that at four different points, the FISA court thought there was probable cause to conduct surveillance of Page, thereby establishing that a suspected Russian agent had in fact worked on the campaign.

Nunes’s memo was so flimsy that even White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly told Trump it was a bust. The Post reports that Kelly told Trump that “the document was not as compelling as some of its advocates had promised Trump.” Oops. House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) — who spent endless time on the Benghazi investigation — was the only one on the Intelligence Committee to see the underlying intelligence. He gave Nunes’s effort a failing grade. “As I have said repeatedly, I also remain 100 percent confident in Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” he tweeted. “The contents of this memo do not – in any way – discredit his investigation.”  Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a statement blasting both the House and the president.  It was interesting who preferred to keep as far from Nunes’s calamity as possible  — Trump loyalist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), for example, as well as Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Meanwhile, ranking Democrat Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and other Intelligence Committee Democrats released a persuasive rebuttal to Nunes’s botched memo and declared they would again demand a vote to release their own memo (referencing classified material) publicly.

The memo was a disaster not only for the Trump-Nunes strategy but also for the country. A raft of national security experts eviscerated the memo and castigated Nunes for wrecking the oversight process. The Lawfare blog explained: “The bottom line is that there are multiple reasons to expect that Nunes has not given a full and fair account of the FBI’s FISA process and that his memo is as factually deficient as it accuses the Carter Page warrant application of being.”  They conclude, “At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system.” The only questions that remain are how long House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) is going to let this humiliating spectacle go on and how much damage he will permit to be done to the oversight process so Nunes can flail about trying to protect Trump and ruin public servants’ reputations. . . . . Mr. Speaker, haven’t you all done quite enough damage?

A lengthy piece in Politico similarly slams the Nunes memo: one can only conclude that the Nunes memo fails to make its case—and fails quite badly at that.

Will a Handful of GOP Senators Live Up to Their Own Principles?

In follow up to the last post, a different column in the New York Times ponders whether a half dozen or so Republican U.S. Senators live up to their claimed principles and vote against the horrific Republican tax bill now pending in the U.S. Senate.  As the prior post argued, the bill embodies the antithesis of the Christian social gospel message and seeks to harm the poor and middle class in order to give massive tax cuts to the extremely wealthy.  Some of those the column focuses on have shown moral courage in the past, although not always.  This bill is indeed a test of their basic morality and whether their principles matter as opposed to being something they merely give lip service to while puffing their own egos.  Here are column excerpts:

A small number of Republicans — fewer than 10 — will probably determine the fate of the Trump tax plan. The group includes five senators who have been independent enough in recent months to defy their party leaders, not just with words but actions, as well as a couple who may be newly willing to do so.

John McCain helped defeat the Republican health care bill, in protest of its secretive, rushed process. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against the same bill because they believed that middle-class and poor families had a right to health care access. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker ended their Senate careers rather than fully submitting to Trumpism. Then there are the two showing new signs of independence: James Lankford of Oklahoma and Jerry Moran of Kansas.

The tax bill is a test of all of them. For progressives, the bill is an easy call. It’s a huge tax cut for the wealthy, partly paid for with middle-class tax increases. For the same reason, the bill is deeply unpopular with voters.

But the Republican senators are in a tough spot. They are philosophically conservative. They believe in low taxes and small government. They share this belief with their Republican colleagues, their political base back home and, yes, their donors.

Yet all of the potential swing senators have a problem: This tax bill also contains provisions that betray their stated principles.

For McCain, the principle is the Senate itself. His current term is probably his last, given his cancer diagnosis, and he has been making a righteous stand on the behalf of the Senate — that it should aspire to greatness rather than operating as a banana-republic legislature that rams through bills. The tax bill violates that stand. . . . . The Senate has not held hearings where experts weighed the pros and cons, talked about unintended consequences and looked for (to quote a recent McCain speech) “compromises that each side criticize but also accept.”
For that matter, neither the House nor Senate has held serious hearings on any part of the tax plan. No other modern piece of major legislation has ever been so rushed — except for the health care bill that McCain doomed. Congressional leaders are rushing this bill because they know it’s unpopular, and their haste is making a mockery of the institution that McCain holds dear.

For Collins and Murkowski, the principle is health care. More specifically, it’s decent health care for the working-class families who dominate their home states of Maine and Alaska.  . . . . The repeal of the mandate would create turmoil in insurance markets, because fewer healthy people would sign up for coverage, raising prices for everyone else. Collins opposes the measure for that reason, while Murkowski supports it if it’s paired with other measures to stabilize health markets. But those measures would need to be sweeping to make up for the damage.

Then there are Corker, Flake, Lankford and Moran. Their principle is the deficit. “We don’t want to increase the debt and deficit as a result of tax cuts,” Moran said. If the bill adds “one penny to the deficit,” Corker said, he wouldn’t support it.

The current Senate plan adds more than 100 trillion pennies to the deficit in the first decade, according to the official estimate.

So what are the senators going to do?  I hope that they do not fold because doing so — doing what President Trump and Mitch McConnell want — is the easier political path. I dearly hope they do not follow the cynical tactics of a few of their colleagues who have made a show of opposing a Trump-backed bill only to change positions after being offered a fig leaf of change. None of us should expect senators to vote only for bills that we personally support. They have their own beliefs and principles. But I do think it’s fair to expect them to vote only for bills that are consistent with those principles. This tax bill is not — not even close.

How Trump Walked into Putin’s Web

Anyone who has followed Donald Trump's history closely understands that the man is driven by largely two thing: his narcissism and unquenchable ego.  If their is a third leg to Trump's persona, it is a love of money.  In order to satiate these forces, over the years Trump has been willing to deal with Mafia and underworld figures and skirt the law to the fullest extent possible.  New Yorkers are particularly aware of Trump's nasty history and it is one reason that the man is so unpopular both among the city's citizenry but also virtually all of its major media outlets.  But I digress.  With the Russiagate investigation continuing, two indictments handed down against Trump campaign players and a guilty plea in place, it is again relevant to consider the allegations of the Steele dossier which Der Trumpenführer has declared as "fake" and which Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and right wing "news" sites have condemned.  A very long piece in The Guardian looks at who former MI-6 member Christopher Steele and Vladimir Putin's Russia and how Donald Trump, always the ego driven narcissist allowed himself to be reeled in by Putin.   Here are article highlights (still lengthy) of the article which anyone serious about knowing the truth should read:

Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.

One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues – stolen shoes, women’s tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!

Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones.  The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation.  . . . One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.

The “diplomat” was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officer’s true employer was an invisible entity back in London – SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlin’s innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steele’s findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

It’s unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steele’s timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.

It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.

The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSR’s tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. 

The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists – the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions – were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.

The regime changed. The system didn’t.

One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGB’s main functions.

In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as “Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964”.  The breach wasn’t Steele’s fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldn’t go back to Russia.

In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russia’s genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the US’s traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.

By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6’s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.

And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. . . . . He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.

Steele didn’t quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.

That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasn’t easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. . . . . Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on one’s own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.

So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier? . . . . His name was Glenn Simpson. 

Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didn’t speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.

By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. 

Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques – and of football. . . . Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBI’s Eurasian serious crime division. This “lit the fuse”, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (£114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.

The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steele’s secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.

Trump’s political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican party’s aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz – all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. . . . . During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trump’s wealthy Republican critics, [billionaire] Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singer’s involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. 

Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trump’s next set of opponents.

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” Trump’s organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?

Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; “hair-raising”. As he told friends: “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”

“So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

“Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016.

It got harder from late July, as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

Steele’s collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit “TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion” during his 2013 stay at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel “where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia”. 

There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately “defiled” the Obamas’ bed. A number of prostitutes “had performed a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him”. The memo also alleged: “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

Steele’s sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trump’s team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.

Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports – classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked “confidential/sensitive source”. The names of prominent individuals were in caps – TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. 

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness – the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ – the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign”. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”

But all this frantic activity came to nought. . . . In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed [John] McCain about Steele’s dossier – its contents, if true, had profound and obvious implications for the incoming Trump administration, for the Republican party, and for US democracy. The implications were alarming enough to lead McCain to dispatch a former senior US official to meet Steele and find out more.

McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on 8 December 2016 lasted five minutes. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier.

McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required co-ordination across the top levels of US intelligence. . . . The US’s most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.

The dossier was on its way to the desk of the man who was still, for now, the world’s most powerful person: President Barack Obama.

It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. He wasn’t going to like it much.

Trump and his allies may try to blow off the allegations, but given Trump's history and Steele's past legitimacy, my gut tells me that the dossier is likely true - perhaps even its most scandalous allegations. Be very afraid for the nation.