Trump Was Warned Early and Often

Trump apologists continue to try to use lies and media spin to absolve Donald Trump from massive malfeasance in office in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  Although warned in January of what was coming, Trump dithered and labeled the warnings as misinformation put out by the mythical "Deep State." A lengthy piece in the New York Times reviews the many early and frequent warns that Trump refused to take seriously, being more concerned with maintaining highs on the stock market and engaging in his non-stop narcissism.  Hopefully, history will be very ruthless in it assessment of Trump and, in the nearer term, one can only hope that voters come to realize how massive Trump's failure was and punish him by not re-electing him in November.  The Times piece is long but a must read.  Here are some highlights:

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

[Trump] The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.

Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.

[D]ozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

·         The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

·         Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

·         The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. [Trump] The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

·         Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

·         By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by [Trump] the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

There had already been an alarming spike in new cases around the world and the virus was spreading across the Middle East. It was becoming apparent that the administration had botched the rollout of testing to track the virus at home, and a smaller-scale surveillance program intended to piggyback on a federal flu tracking system had also been stillborn.

In Washington, [Trump] the president was not worried, predicting that by April, “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.

Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.

But Dr. Messonnier had jumped the gun. They had not told the president yet, much less gotten his consent.

On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.

The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office. It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.

Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226.

Fox News Preparing for Lawsuits Over Coronavirus Misinformation

One lawsuit has already been filed against Fox News for what amounts to consumer fraud for its lies and untruths during the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic when the network largely parroted or amplified the untruths coming out of the Trump/Pence regime, including claims that the whole matter was a Chinese hoax. It appears the network grasps the reality that more lawsuits will follow. The irony, of course, is that while desperately seeking to protect Donald Trump and bludgeon Democrats and parts of the news media that actually report facts as opposed to propaganda, Fox News endangered its own viewers who remain the most likely to disregard the seriousness of the pandemic and to ignore the safeguards recommended by medical experts.  The other irony is that purveyors of lies like Hannity claim they never said things that are documented on video.  They seemingly believe everyone is a stupid as their viewers. Fox News deserves to pay a very high price for the harm it has done to the nation.  Here are highlights from a piece in Vanity Fair:

Just over a week ago, former Fox Business host Trish Regan parted ways with the network, ostensibly because she called the coronavirus melee “yet another attempt to impeach...demonize, and destroy the president.” That the comments, which mirrored those of nearly every other Fox host at the time, would result in her termination seemed disproportionate, and last week a member of Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch’s front office told the Daily Beast that Regan represented “a sacrificial lamb”—a scapegoat for critics who lampooned the network for dangerously misinforming its viewers about a deadly pandemic. Regan’s ouster failed to achieve this goal, and according to new reports, Fox is now lawyering up, bracing for a litany of public-interest lawsuits and letters of condemnation for pedaling misinformation for weeks prior to coronavirus’s explosion in the U.S. 

The first such consumer-protection complaint came from the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) on Thursday, which named Murdoch,__ Fox News, AT&T, Comcast, and other related entities as defendants. Seeking nominal damage, the suit claims the “defendants acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, which is now recognized as an international pandemic.” . . . . We believe it delayed and interfered with a prompt and adequate response to this coronavirus pandemic.”

Well past the olive branch phase, Fox is reportedly ready for whatever court battles come next. “The strategy is no settlements, even if it costs way more to fight the lawsuit and seek sanctions for ambulance-chasing lawyers,” an executive told the Daily Beast.  He recalled the Murdochs’ successful evasion of two lawsuits related to conspiratorial Fox coverage of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, which were dismissed in 2018 . . . .

This time, however, might be very different from the Rich case. During a Sunday appearance on MSNBC, my colleague Gabriel Sherman said Fox insiders had expressed “real concern...that their early downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this.” He went on to say that while the Murdochs are “privately taking coronavirus seriously”—Rupert Murdoch quietly cancelled his 89th birthday party on March 11—top hosts like Regan and Sean Hannity were actively “telling viewers that it’s a hoax...If it actually winds up being proved that people died because of it, this is a new terrain in terms of Fox being possibly held liable for their actions.”

A number of public opinion surveys suggest Fox succeeded in swaying the perception of coronavirus among its viewers. Despite COVID-19 deaths mounting to more than 10,000 in the U.S., and case numbers here surpassing 350,000, 79% of Fox News consumers who responded to a Pew Research survey last week believe the media “slightly or greatly exaggerated the risk of the pandemic.”

A mid-March poll conducted by Survey 160 and Gradient Metrics poll revealed that Americans who tune into Fox News are more likely to ignore Centers for Disease Control advisories to stay at home than both non-Fox-watching Republicans and Democrats.

A similar poll from YouGov and The Economist conducted in mid-March showed that, compared to consumers of other types of news media, Fox News viewers are the least likely to express concern about coronavirus.

“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers—and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” states the letter, enumerating misleading coverage.

In an interview with Newsweek, Hannity himself fired back at the letter in an attempt to rewrite history.  . . . ...I never called it a ‘hoax,’” he said. . . . . On March 9, Hannity implied that media outlets covering the virus were doing so to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” Two days later, he insisted that the seasonal flu is “much more dangerous” than COVID-19 and argued that “we’re all dying” anyway. 

 One can only hope that Fox News' history of outright lies finally catches up with it and that it suffers a serious financial reckoning.  As for its viewers, perhaps deaths among its  knuckle dragging viewers will cause some to wake up and change the channel. 

Is Trump’s Base is Smaller Than He Thinks

Republicans remain cowed and intimidated by Donald Trump's base of racists, religious extremist, and greed driven plutocrats, hence their reluctance to admit publicly that Trump is unfit for office and needs to be impeached for seeking election interference from foreign governments. However, a column in the Washington Post suggests that Trump's unwavering core of supporters is perhaps far smaller than both he and spineless congressional Republicans believe.   If this analysis is correct, and if Republicans get grow a pair and stop being intimidated by the crime boss like part head, then perhaps the cancer in the White House can be removed. Of course, just how involved Mike Pence has been in these illegal activities - so far it appears he was up to his ears in it despite his sergeant Schulz act - could also play a factor it their willingness to send Trump out of office. Here are column highlights:

The debate over impeaching President Trump reveals an irony: Those who favor it have far more respect for the president’s supporters than those who oppose it.

Critics of impeachment argue that the effort to remove Trump from office over his open invitations of foreign meddling in our elections will only ignite the Trump “base.” Those who say we should let this all go see his backers as an excitable immovable bloc of people closed to reasoned argument or new information.

Thus are roughly 40 percent of our fellow citizens cast as an unthinking blob that will embrace anything Trump says and turn out in droves in 2020 to beat back the elitist fake-newsers and deep-staters no matter what the facts are.

Those of us who support impeachment don’t deny that there is a “Trump base” but insist that mountains of polling evidence show that it amounts to 25 to 30 percent of voters at most. The rest of the 46 percent who voted for Trump have real doubts about who he is, how he behaves and what he is doing to our country. Even those of us who disagree with them on a variety of issues see this substantial part of Trump’s constituency as made up of rational and engaged citizens open to persuasion.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, found that only 24 percent of registered voters strongly approved of Trump’s performance, while 44 percent strongly disapproved. Significantly, 74 percent of Democratic registered voters strongly disapproved of Trump, but only 50 percent of Republican registered voters strongly approved of him. Which base would you rather have going into this fight — and into 2020?

The 24 percent are the folks you see at the Trump rallies. Trump’s more tepid approvers (17 percent of registered voters in this survey) tend to stay home, take in the news and ask questions about what’s going on.

The big gap between strong approvers and strong disapprovers was very predictive of the 2018 election turnout that gave Democrats control of the House. Those elections showed that many who voted for Trump in 2016 were prepared to vote for Democrats two years later. This was a telling sign that a sizable share of Trump’s voters are not lockstep apologists.

Recall that the three key Trump states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin elected Democratic senators and governors last year. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin picked up 14 percent of Trump’s 2016 voters, while Sen. Bob Casey won 12 percent of them in Pennsylvania and Sen. Debbie Stabenow got 9 percent of them in Michigan. If a Democratic presidential nominee can achieve those numbers next year, Trump loses. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted Sept. 13 to 16,. . . . only 30 percent said they had “very positive” feelings toward him [Trump], and only 25 percent said they both liked Trump personally and approved of most of his policies. The bottom line is that too much political analysis (wrongly) sees this hard core as representing all of those who backed Trump in 2016 because they wanted to send one message or another (or because they loathed Hillary Clinton). In fact, a lot of Trump’s one-time supporters do not believe everything they hear from him or Fox News. A fair number of them don’t like him very much. Economically minded working-class Trump voters will notice that his signature promise to restore manufacturing is being broken before their eyes as new economic numbers point toward a manufacturing recession.

Those advancing the case for impeachment believe that, whether the Senate removes Trump from office or not, it’s important to make clear how corrupt and dangerous his behavior has been. More Trump voters are listening to these arguments than their pretend-friends want us to believe.

Again, I hope this analysis is correct and that spineless Republicans will wake up to this reality.

It's Time to Admit the USA Has a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem

I can't wrap my head around what level of hate motivates one to murder innocent people that one does even know and who have never done any direct harm to you merely because they have a different skin color or speak a different language.  Yet such hatred seems to be growing in America and the occupant of the White House continues to give a knowing nod to such hatred even as he on occasion makes disingenuous condemnation of violence.  Such is white nationalism in America today.  And making matters worse is law enforcement's failure to treat white national extremists with the same level of concern and surveillance as that given to Islamic terrorism even though white nationalists have killed more Americans than Islamic terrorist since 9-11.   Add to this toxic mix the fact that America's insane gun laws allow such murderers to legally buy guns with which to inflict their carnage (both shooters in El Paso and Dayton appear to have legally purchased their weapons).  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the problem over taking America that literally leaves no one safe.  As the piece notes, you are either against such violence or not and, I would add, if you are a Trump supporter, at a minimum, you tacitly support it).  Here are highlights:

If one of the perpetrators of this weekend’s two mass shootings had adhered to the ideology of radical Islam, the resources of the American government and its international allies would mobilize without delay.

The awesome power of the state would work tirelessly to deny future terrorists access to weaponry, money and forums to spread their ideology. The movement would be infiltrated by spies and informants. Its financiers would face sanctions. Places of congregation would be surveilled. Those who gave aid or comfort to terrorists would be prosecuted. Programs would be established to de-radicalize former adherents.

No American would settle for “thoughts and prayers” as a counterterrorism strategy. No American would accept laying the blame for such an attack on video games, like the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, did in an interview on Sunday when discussing the mass shooting in El Paso that took 20 lives and left 27 people wounded.

Even a casual observer today can figure out what is going on. The world, and the West in particular, has a serious white nationalist terrorist problem that has been ignored or excused for far too long. As President George W. Bush declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we must be a country “awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.”

There are serious questions about how the United States has approached Islamic extremism, but if even a degree of that vigilance and unity of effort was put toward white nationalism, we’d be safer.

White nationalist terror attacks are local, but the ideology is global. On Saturday, a terrorist who, according to a federal law enforcement official, wrote that he feared a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” was replacing white Americans opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. In a manifesto, the gunman wrote that he drew some inspiration from the white nationalist terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead. The F.B.I. is investigating the El Paso mass shooting as a possible act of domestic terrorism. The motive behind another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, is under investigation.

In April, another terrorist who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., echoed the words of the Christchurch suspect, too, and appeared to draw inspiration from a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall.

An investigation by The Times earlier this year found that “at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks, professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in their tactics.” White supremacy, in other words, is a violent, interconnected transnational ideology. Its adherents are gathering in anonymous, online forums to spread their ideas, plotting attacks and cheering on acts of terrorism. Online communities like 4chan and 8chan have become hotbeds of white nationalist activity. Anonymous users flood the site’s “politics” board with racist, sexist and homophobic content designed to spread across the web. Users share old fascist fiction, Nazi propaganda and pseudoscientific texts about race and I.Q. and replacement theory, geared to radicalize their peers.

These communities aren’t new. . . . Yet, in recent months, conversations in one anonymous 8chan forum in particular have evolved. They increasingly focus on carrying out acts of white nationalist terror. . . . Posts actively incentivize the darkest impulses of the most dangerous users. In May, an anonymous user posted a screed on “Target Selection,” providing a blueprint on how to increase the body count during mass shootings. The community celebrates and compares the number of casualties from shooting to shooting. . . .

Technology companies, too, appear unwilling to treat white nationalist terror online the way they have dealt with the online spread of radical Islamic terror groups, such as the Islamic State. Companies like Facebook and Twitter took bold action to remove tens of millions of pieces of ISIS and Al Qaeda propaganda and accounts between 2014 and 2018. Similar standards have not been applied to white nationalists, perhaps because, as a 2018 report from researcher J.M. Berger, who specializes in online extremism, notes, “The task of crafting a response to the alt-right is considerably more complex and fraught with land mines, largely as a result of the movement’s inherently political nature and its proximity to political power.”

While its modern roots predate the Trump administration by many decades, white nationalism has attained a new mainstream legitimacy during Mr. Trump’s time in office.

“You will not replace us,” white nationalists proudly chanted at Charlottesville in 2017. (Mr. Trump himself proclaimed that there were “fine people” on both sides of that deadly event.)

In May, bemoaning an “invasion” of immigrants, Mr. Trump asked how immigrants could be stopped during a rally in Florida. “Shoot them,” someone in the crowd yelled. Mr. Trump gave a smirk and said, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” as the crowd exploded in ghoulish laughter.

Far more Americans have died at the hands of domestic terrorists than at the hands of Islamic extremists since 2001, according to the F.B.I. The agency’s resources, however, are still overwhelmingly weighted toward thwarting international terrorism.

Moderate members of the political right must do more to condemn white nationalists, even if the president condemns them from one side of his mouth and extols ethnonationalism from the other.

Most importantly, American law enforcement needs to target white nationalists with the same zeal that they have targeted radical Islamic terrorists. Ensuring the security of the homeland demands it.

There can be no middle ground when it comes to white nationalism and the terrorism it inspires. You’re either for it or against it.

The GOP Defines Patriotism As Complacency About Racism

If there has been any benefit to be derived from Donald Trump's racist tweet storm, it is that far right "intellectuals" - something that is increasingly an oxymoron - and the base of the GOP equate white skin and indifference to racial inequality, if not out right racism, with being a "true American" and a patriot.  Given Trump's words and his long history of racism, including racial discrimination in housing in apartment properties his family owned in Norfolk, Virginia, it is near impossible to say the man is not a racist if one indulges in any shred of honesty, yet the right refuses to condemn him. Why?  Because it supports the underlying premise that only whites are true Americans. Everyone else is supposed to be happy to be in America and keep their mouths shut when it comes to enunciating America's many flaws. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the redefining of patriotism and the right to be an American with skin color.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted several things that respectable conservatives do not wish to defend. No National Review columnist has seconded Trump’s assertion that U.S.-born congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” And only a few GOP officeholders have implored Ilhan Omar to heed the president’s guidance, and return to the “crime infested” place from which she came.

But beneath these distastefully forward flirtations with white nationalism, many conservative intellectuals see an argument worth redeeming. Trump’s chief complaint with “the squad” of progressive nonwhite congresswomen was that they had been “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States … how our government is to be run” (apparently, the voters who elected AOC & Co. are not among “the people of the United States,” and opining on government operations is an aberrant behavior for members of Congress).

GOP operatives have been trying to pretend that this was his only point: Far-left Democrats hate our great country. Congressional Republicans got the memo. . . . Trump, meanwhile, shifted his emphasis from whether AOC & Co. are American to whether they deserve to be.

Once sanitized by GOP message-makers, Trump’s stance ceases to be overtly racist. Ilhan Omar’s claim to national belonging is now negated by her anti-American attitude, not her Somali origins. And yet the moment one examines what “anti-American” means, in this context, the true color of Trump’s nationalism becomes plain.

[N]one of the congresswomen in question have said that they “hate America.” They’ve merely expressed dissatisfaction with its present state and challenged popular conceptions about its past — prerogatives of citizenship in a free society that Donald Trump has never denied himself. . . . And Trump has no compunction about goring the sacred cows of conservative nationalism. He has expressed contempt for American prisoners of war, said that George W. Bush did not keep us safe, questioned whether the U.S. government was more “innocent” than Vladimir Putin’s, and declared that America had done “a tremendous disservice to humanity” in the Middle East.

Clearly then, neither Trump nor his defenders believe that dissent is inherently unpatriotic. It is something about the content of the congresswomen’s dissent — and perhaps the congresswomen themselves — that causes conservatives to see their protests as expressions of unforgivable ingratitude.

Of course, that something isn’t difficult to discern. The American right refuses to recognize any distinction between the claim “racial inequality was fundamental to our nation’s founding, and remains a pervasive force in American society today,” and an expression of “hatred” for the United States. This refusal is not peculiar to Trump or his loyalists. Even the president’s most highbrow (and lukewarm) apologists regularly denounce the anti-Americanism of progressives who express dissatisfaction with the state of racial progress in the U.S.

Take Charles C.W. Cooke. On Monday, the National Review’s senior editor penned a column arguing that Ilhan Omar had a moral obligation to “temper her critiques of American politics and culture” because she came to the U.S. as a refugee, and therefore owes this country a debt of gratitude.

But directly engaging with Omar’s dissent would create a problem for the pundit, because not once in the Washington Post column he cites does the congresswoman say “America is a disaster” or “needs complete rethinking.”

Omar clearly expresses disappointment with the United States. But the cause of her disappointment is the discrepancy between her country’s egalitarian ideals and its inequitable realities. Her defining mission, as a politician, is to close that gap and realize the “promise that’s not kept.”

The difference, as Cooke subsequently makes clear, is that Omar’s critique challenges America’s racial innocence, while Trump’s does not.

Beto O’Rourke has no allergy to praising America. But when asked about what he would do to combat racism at a campaign event, he did acknowledge the fact that white supremacy was a de jure reality in the American republic for its first 188 years of existence, and that the legacy of centuries of race-based subjugation has not been fully eradicated in the 55 years since 1964. If Cooke regards the public airing of this sentiment as an invitation to “cultural suicide,” one must ask whose culture he wishes to preserve.

African-Americans have deeper roots in our country than virtually any other U.S. community. The hard labor of black slaves served as a (if not the) primary engine of American prosperity throughout our civilization’s first centuries of existence. Chattel slavery didn’t just fill the coffers of southern planters; “as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers,” historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write, slavery “proved indispensable to national economic development.”

And yet for the unspeakable sacrifices that their ancestors made in service of our nation’s development, black Americans have never been compensated. Rather, most were systematically excluded from the wealth creation that followed the Second World War. And studies suggest that African-Americans still face de facto discrimination in housing, employment, and the criminal-justice system.

Why would it be more “grateful” of Omar to evince indifference to the maltreatment of a deeply rooted American community whose past subjugation is inextricable from the comforts and opportunities that she presently enjoys? Or, to put the question more pointedly: Why does Cooke — a British-American immigrant who earns his livelihood at a publication that defended southern segregation and apartheid — believe that his relative complacency about racial progress is a mark of gratitude rather than entitlement?

The ostensible answer is that Cooke believes white, conservative Americans are entitled to his (and Omar’s) gratitude, while black liberal ones are not, no matter how long the latter’s “people” have been here. This belief does not appear to be conscious. But absent that premise, his argument becomes unintelligible. . . . 

On the same day that Cooke’s reflection on Omar’s ingratitude went live, the National Review’s editor Rich Lowry published an editorial with nearly identical flaws. . . . Like Cooke, Lowry does not quote the object of his critique because that would make it harder for him to misrepresent her argument.

As a response to Rapinoe’s actual argument, Lowry’s history lesson is a non sequitur. Her complaint is with America’s racial order, not its flag. But like Cooke, Lowry refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two. On a surface level, both columnists assail the left for equating love of America with indifference to white supremacy; in actual fact, it is Cooke and Lowry who insist on that equation.

Trump has made the color of conservative nationalism more plain to the naked eye. But a tacit faith in white Christian Americans’ superlative claim to national belonging has always been native to the creed.

At a Crossroads for Republican "Friends"

Back in September of this year, the New York Times ran an op-ed allegedly authored by an anonymous insider at the Trump White House who sought to justify his collusion with a dangerous and malignant occupant as a form of "resistance" and effort to basically protect the nation from Trump's worse impulses and excesses.  Stated another way, the author tried to convince readers that he/she had not thrown away all morality and decency despite the appearances of having made a pact with the devil.  Fast forward three months and the chaos and corruption at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has only intensified with the stock market having its worse December since the midst of the Great Depression, military decisions being made that appear to be huge gifts to Russia under the ruse of bringing the troops home, and acts of criminality circling closer and closer to direct connections Trump. An editorial in today's New York Times responds to the anonymous author of the September op-ed which challenges the pretense that unknown author presented.  By extension, the challenge extends to every one of my Republican "friends" who voted for Trump: are you going to stand for morality, decency and the rule of law or will you stand with Trump.  You simply cannot have it both ways and, yes, you will be judged by how you decide.  Here are highlights from today's column:

In September, you acknowledged that you were a member of the “quiet resistance” within Donald Trump’s administration. You told us that you and others were “working diligently” to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” You said that while you agreed with many of the president’s policies, you were appalled by the president’s amorality, his chaotic management, his “repetitive rants,” his fondness for dictators.

You also believed that your efforts to resist Trump were often successful. On foreign policy, you noted, the administration’s policies were far more sober and serious than the president’s reckless rhetoric.

You were wrong. This week proves it. Assuming you haven’t departed the administration already, now would be the time for you to go. Ditto for all of your fellow “resisters.”

This is the central lesson of James Mattis’s stunning resignation on Thursday. . . . But Mattis is the highest-ranking cabinet member to resign over differences of policy and principle since Cyrus Vance quit the State Department in 1980 after Jimmy Carter’s Desert One fiasco. He is the only defense secretary to leave this way since the position was created in 1947.
 Mattis resigned because he no longer shares your analysis. He no longer believes he can be a steadying or blocking force in the councils of government because it isn’t clear there are “councils of government.” A president who sticks it to his own team while sticking with a foreign strongman is not worth sticking by.

Mattis also resigned because he has concluded that the problem with Trump isn’t that he’s an empty vessel. It’s that he’s a malignant one.

Here was the fundamental mistake in your view of Trump: You thought he could be handled. You thought of him as a child who simply needed to be kept away from dangerous toys, as former economic adviser Gary Cohn did when he removed a letter from the president’s desk ordering the end of the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement.

But our Commodus-in-Chief isn’t just an irascible buffoon whose worst impulses can be confined to Twitter but whose policy instincts largely align with yours. Trump thinks of himself as a man of ideas. Withdrawal from Syria, along with partial withdrawal from Afghanistan, is consonant with the quasi-isolationism he’s preached for decades. He is sympathetic to Erdogan, as he is to other tyrants, because he is indifferent to considerations of human rights and civil liberties.

The Trump Doctrine is the doctrine of unaccountability. It’s also the doctrine of dishonor. And this is what should most concern you and whatever is left of your in-house resistance. The United States is about to abandon our allies to the tender mercies of thugs. We are breaking our word to those who helped us decimate the Islamic State. We are standing aside so that Erdogan, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and the Taliban can roll in, and ISIS can fight on.

Until now, you may have convinced yourself that real honor lay in putting up with it — with the craziness of your boss and the disdain of your neighbors — because the good of the country (as you see it) demanded it. And until now, you had Mattis to serve as your role model.

But Mattis is going. And the argument can no longer be sustained. If Trump is capable of doing this to Mattis, what’s to keep him from soiling your carpet, too? And even if he never gets to it, you must know by now that you are no longer keeping a bad thing from getting worse. All you are doing is disguising how bad it is, thereby helping it to become worse.

Trump will never have trouble surrounding himself with ambitious and unscrupulous flunkies. Do you want that to describe you? Get out while you still can, whoever you are.  

For Fox News readers, Commodus was a Roman emperor who was assassinated in no small part due to his megalomania and increasingly tyrannical rule.  Upon his death, the Senate declared him a public enemy and all statutes of him were destroyed. 

Fall of the American Empire; the GOP's New Katrina

Thousands dying in Puerto Rico due to the Trump/Pence regime's failure to provide adequate hurricane relief seemingly failed to force far too many Americans to recognize the monster who had been elevated to the White House.  Thankfully, now - although at horrible human cost - the hideous force family separations going on at the nation's southwest border (Trump plans to double down on the barbarism) seem to be belatedly forcing recognize that Trump's election has triggered a national emergency while at the same time showing once and for all that the Republican Party is the party of cruelty and racial hatred.  The irony is that Trump's mind dead, racist and religious extremist base believes Trump is "making America great again" even as he destroys the country's moral standing in the world and is unraveling trade policies and alliances which will only diminish America economically.  One can only hope and pray - if one still believes in prayer - that the daily horrors will convince decent moral Americans and Hispanics in particular that they must turn out as never before and vote to defeat Republicans at every level come November 2018. While removing Trump and Pence from office may be difficult, the cancer they represent can be controlled. Two pieces are worthy of note.  One in Politico looks at how the cruelty on display may harm the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans want to talk about tax cuts. Instead, they’re talking about kids in cages.

Rather than touting lower taxes and a steady job market, House and Senate Republicans are being forced to answer for President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies — whether it’s separating migrant kids from their parents, removing DACA protections or building a border wall. And that’s likely bad news heading into November.

[A]s the White House blames Congress for the crisis at the border, GOP lawmakers are struggling to craft a proposal that unites their own party, let alone one that can win bipartisan support and become law. And with no congressional solution in sight, Hill Republicans worry that Trump’s immigration crackdown could swamp their success on the economy and overshadow all the things they want to run on in the midterm elections.

And the renewed focus on immigration is almost all self-inflicted, from Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to his relentless focus on the border wall to his “zero tolerance” policy for border-crossers, which has already led to more than 2,300 children being separated from their parents.

Hugh Hewitt, a leading conservative media voice, raised the prospect that the family separation crisis could become “the Republicans’ new Katrina and the president’s new Katrina” in an interview with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on Monday.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 66 percent of Americans who participated in the survey oppose Trump’s move to separate migrant kids from their parents. But 55 percent of Republicans back the action.

A column in the Washington Post notes in part (take the time to view the picture and see what is being done in the name of every American citizen):

John Moore may have lost the midterm elections for the Republican Party and badly damaged the reelection prospects of President Trump. Moore is the Getty Images photographer who snapped a viral picture of a crying 2-year-old Honduran girl at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. But this one is worth a million tweets. In political consequence, it is like the one taken of President George W. Bush surveying the devastation of Hurricane Katrina— by peering out the window of Air Force One. As Bush himself later acknowledged, the photo made him look “detached and uncaring.” It reinforced his frat-boy image. 

Of course, Trump is nowhere near the crying Honduran girl. But his fingerprints are all over the picture. . . . Moore’s picture is of a very special category — the pain of innocent children. It is reminiscent of the one Nick Ut of the Associated Press took of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.  

But back to the Politico piece.  Yes, you read the quote correctly: 55% of Republicans support Trump's horrific and cruel policy.  55% of Republicans support this!  Remember this on election day in November.  

As bad as the forced separation policy may be, the larger damage being done to America by the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers is even more pervasive and seems intended to end the pax Americana that has existed for 70 some years.  All so Trump can appear "tough" and "winning" to his morally bankrupt base. Here are excerpts from a column in the New York Times:

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

What do these stories have in common? Obviously they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there’s also a larger context, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. What we’re witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values — the values that actually made America great.

America has long been a powerful nation. In particular, we emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself — for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles.

By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.

But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.

The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that’s another story.) 

[T]he modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that “prosperous trade among nations” was an essential element in building an “enduring peace.” So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

So all the things happening now are of a piece. Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations.

And rejecting our ideals won’t make us stronger; it will make us weaker. We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we’re throwing all that away. . . . Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully — one whose bullying will be far less effective than he imagines.

Are Republicans Already Beginning to Worry About the Judgment of History?

Democrats condemning GOP white washing - will history do likewise?

Yesterday, the Republican members of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee released a report finding that the committee had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.  The report was released over the protests of Democrat members of the committee and after the Republican majority had refused to interview witnesses and/or review other evidence that might have led to a contrary finding.   Driving home I happened to catch statements of former RNC chair Michael Steele who suggested that history might be far less than kind to these Republicans.  Indeed, in my own mind - and I am a former Republican myself - the House Intelligence Committee Republicans opted to side with possible, if not likely, treason.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some GOP members of the committee who seem to be trying to cover their despicable behinds.  Here are article excerpts:

The leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation seemed to back off Tuesday from the most surprising finding in the GOP’s report that Russia was not trying to help President Trump, as the panel’s top Democrat trashed the product as a political gift to the White House.

Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) told reporters Tuesday that “it’s clear [Russian officials] were trying to hurt Hillary [Clinton]” by interfering in the 2016 election and that “everybody gets to make up their own mind whether they were trying to hurt Hillary, help Trump, it’s kind of glass half full, glass half empty.”

That equivalence stands in sharp contrast to the conclusions of a 150-page GOP-drafted report Conaway announced to the news media on Monday that concludes that the intelligence community “didn’t meet the standards” of proof necessary to determine that Russia meddled in the 2016 election with the aim of helping Trump.

His comments came after other panel Republicans, including Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) gave interviews in which they stressed that there was evidence that Russia had tried to damage Clinton’s candidacy.

The report’s findings on Russia’s intentions in interfering is just one area of the document with which Democrats on the panel took issue Tuesday after being presented with it in the morning.

The panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who called the report “not a serious work,” said the document was proof that Republicans were willing only to “go through the motions of an investigation . . . to give the pretense of trying to find the truth.”

Schiff added that the report was “little more than another Nunes memo in long form,” . . . . Democrats accused Republicans of using the Nunes memo to undermine the Russia investigation — a charge they also applied to Tuesday’s GOP report.
 Schiff and other Democrats on the committee released a 22-page “status update” Tuesday night, listing the various witnesses, firms and documents the panel had declined to subpoena or otherwise examine, along with the reasons that each would be relevant to the investigation. It also lays out areas of inquiry that the minority members say the GOP abandoned by terminating the probe earlier than Democrats would have liked. Democratic committee members pledged to forge ahead with the investigation and eventually issue their own report, although they do not have the ability to subpoena witnesses and other information without the panel chairman’s buy-in.

They reserved special vitriol for the GOP’s decision not to more aggressively pursue uncooperative witnesses such as former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, whom Conaway had previously considered holding in contempt.

Schiff said. “This majority doesn’t want to know the answers, and it has set a precedent now that will affect future congresses’ ability to get answers from the executive.”

Like too many Republicans of today, German politicians in the late 1920's ands early 1930's sold their souls to Hitler and the Nazi Party for what they saw as short term advantage.  Long term they sold their souls and have been damned by history and left their descendants  bearing a burden of shame.   I truly do not understand the mindset that predominates within today's Republican Party. 

The Sleazy Republican Case Against Mueller’s Probe

With more and more circumstances indicating that many in the Trump presidential campaign knew of efforts to coordinate with Russian operative - collude with the, in you will - Trump and his whore like apologists are becoming increasingly desperate to find means to distract evangelical Christians and other low information Trump voters from realizing they voted for likely traitors.  Hence the throwing of  everything but the kitchen sink out this past week in the disingenuous hope that something would stick and generate a counter scandal story line for the feckless mainstream media that has the attention span of a parrot my parents once had.  Throw out something shiny and the bird would forget what it had been focused on moments ago.  All of these actions are part and parcel with Der Trumpenführer daily Twitter shit-storms that ultimately are only meant to distract (in my view, the responsible media needs to start ignoring and not reporting such lie based outbursts).  One of the sleaziest of these efforts is the one seeking to sully Robert Mueller and have him removed from his current special counsel position for one reason alone: he is getting closer to taking down Trump and, if the nation is lucky, Mike Pence as well.  A column in the New York Times looks at this sleazy effort which is all too typical of today's Republicans.  Here are column excerpts:  

In the matter of Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia connection, administration apologists make three significant claims in an effort to discredit the former F.B.I. director’s work. Let’s have a look at them:

First, they insist that the intelligence dossier compiled by British ex-spook Christopher Steele that’s one basis for the F.B.I.’s own investigation has been discredited or is at best uncorroborated. In the same vein, they claim that Fusion GPS, the research firm that helped pay Steele for the dossier, is little more than a “sleazy operator.”

The truth about Fusion is that it is paid to dig up dirt by whoever is willing to pay for the dirt. Its business model relies on the Beatles’ timeless insight that “everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”

But questions about Fusion’s credibility, client list or aggressive tactics are irrelevant. Fusion brokered the dossier but Steele produced it. What’s relevant is his credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims.
These check out. . . . . At least one of Steele’s possible Russian sources was found dead and three others were charged with treason, suggesting, as one Wall Street Journal news account noted, that the Kremlin was cleaning out the moles who had betrayed its hand in last year’s election meddling.

As for the allegations themselves, former C.I.A. station chief John Sipher laid out the decisive case for their broad truthfulness in a lengthy article in September in Just Security.

“Well before any public knowledge of these events,” Sipher notes, Steele’s report “identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to discuss the receipt of stolen documents. Mr. Steele could not have known that the Russians stole information on Hillary Clinton, or that they were considering means to weaponize them in the U.S. election, all of which turned out to be stunningly accurate.”

(After this column went to print, The Times reported that Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page met with Russian government officials in a July 2016 trip to Moscow, something he has long denied. This further confirms another claim made in the Steele dossier.)

This brings us to the second anti-Mueller contention, which is that his indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud connected to his political work in Ukraine, along with news of the guilty plea entered by Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the F.B.I., is merely evidence of the slimness of the special counsel’s case.

The nonchalance about Manafort’s illicit ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine is almost funny, coming from the same people who went berserk over China’s alleged meddling on behalf of Democrats in the 1996 presidential campaign.

But if nothing else, the Manafort indictment underscores the Trump campaign’s astonishing vulnerability to Russian blackmail.

Did that vulnerability explain the campaign’s bizarre intervention (denied by Manafort) to soften the Republican Party platform’s language on providing help to Ukraine?

Why did the campaign pursue a course of semi-secret outreach to Russia through George Papadopoulos, giving him just enough visibility to let the Russians know he was a player but not so much visibility as to attract much media attention?

These questions require answers, which is what makes calls to remove Mueller from his job or have Trump pardon Manafort, Papadopoulos and even himself both strange and repugnant. Since when did conservatives suddenly become conveniently bored with getting to the bottom of Russian conspiracies?

Thus the third Trumpian claim: That the real scandal is that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid for the Steele dossier. Somehow that’s supposed to add up to “collusion” between Clinton and the Russians, on the remarkable theory that Steele was merely retailing Kremlin-invented fables about Trump.

If Clinton was the beneficiary of the Kremlin’s designs, why did it leak her emails? And why would Putin favor the candidate most hostile to him in last year’s election but undermine the one who kept offering improved relations?

You already know the answers. The deeper mystery is why certain conservatives who were once Trump’s fiercest critics have become his most sophistical apologists. The answer to that one requires a mode of analysis more psychological than political.

The answers?  The vast majority of Republicans now place loyalty to their political party above loyalty to the nation and the U.S. Constitution.  Indeed, it is as if the Republican Party has become the party of treason.  Never in my lifetime, especially during my days as a GOP activist did I ever think we would come to this point.