Trump’s Hitler Like Disregard for the Truth

Fact checking has shown that close to 75% of what Donald Trump says is either completely or largely false.  The man lies with abandon.  More frighteningly, he seems to believe whatever the lie is that is rolling off his lips at any given moment in time.  Trump's apologists argue that all politicians lie.  While this my be true to some extent, especially in today's Republican Party, in fact, no one lies as much and dangerously as Donald Trump.  Only among the conservative professional Christian set does one find even a close level of dishonesty (which may help to explain evangelical Christian support for Trump).  As a column by Richard Cohen suggests, there are historical comparisons to Trump, and none good.  In the column, Cohen compares Trump and Adolph Hitler's similar levels of lying and apparent belief in the truth of whatever the lies may be that they are promoting.  Here are highlights:

I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is.

Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced that the Jews had declared war on Germany. It was a preposterous statement because Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population and had neither the numbers nor the power to make war on anything. In fact, in sheer preposterousness, it compares to Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — a position he tenaciously held even after Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate.

At the time, people tried to make sense of Hitler’s statements by saying he was seeking a scapegoat and had settled on the Jews. Not so. From my readings, I know of no instance in which Hitler confided to an intimate that, of course, his statements about Jews were, as we might now say, over the top. In fact, he remained consistently deranged on the topic. He was not lying. For him, it was the truth.

Trump’s fixation on Obama’s birthplace is similar. It was not, as far as he’s concerned, a lie. It was a strongly felt truth that he abandoned only last week and then only under intense pressure — not out of conviction. . . . Like a child, he had his fingers crossed.
 Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.

It’s a mistake to make the unreasonable compatible with the reasonable — to think, say, that Trump cannot be serious about this birther stuff or building a wall or likening the difficulties of becoming a billionaire to the loss of a son in Iraq. That was the authentic Trump, a man totally unburdened by concern for anyone else.

There is no lie that cannot be believed. Even after Germany had murdered most of Europe’s Jews, allied investigators at the end of World War II found that many Germans believed, as historian Nicholas Stargardt put it, that their country’s defeat only “confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry.’ ”

Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.

The GOP Died This Weekend; A Preview of A Trump Presidency

Try as I might, it is impossible to not write about the never ending lies and misogyny of Donald Trump and a political party, the GOP, which has demonstrated that morality and common decency no longer matter.  I remain utterly convinced that Trump is a threat to America and its constitutional form of government.  The man is a demagogue of the worse order and utterly unscrupulous as the countless contractors and/or victims of Trump university can painfully recount.  Even more frightening is the abuse of power that can likely be expected should Americans commit collective political suicide and put Trump in the White House.  Two op-eds in the Washington Post look at both the GOP's suicide and then another outlines what we might expect under a Trump presidency.  Here are highlights from the first by a conservative columnist that looks at the death of morality in the GOP:

Those Republicans mortified by the presidential nomination of Donald Trump have been pondering a series of questions over the past few months:

• Have Republicans put party above country in backing Trump?

• Can the GOP survive Trump?

• Should the center-right let bygones be bygones after the election?

The answers have become clear over the past few days. Trump’s campaign put out an egregiously false statement on Thursday claiming Trump “ended” the birther controversy in 2011 and blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the racist smear. Trump, without explanation or apology, on Friday announced the president was in fact born in the United States. A series of surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway, Gov. Chris Christie and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, fanned out on Sunday to double down on the lies, reiterating this was all Clinton’s fault and insisting, despite Trump’s multiple utterances since 2011, that he had not fanned the racist fires and built his political image on birtherism.

It is noteworthy that NBC’s Chuck Todd, CBS’s John Dickerson, CNN’s Jake Tapper and ABC’s Martha Raddatz all grilled — and in some cases decimated — the Trump surrogates, demonstrating that responsible journalists do not abandon the topic when Trumpkins try to deflect but press and press again for answers.  They remind us this must be front and center at the debates, and moderators should not move on until Trump answers their queries.

Also. let’s not forget that in a second stream of deplorable rhetoric Trump has also suggested violence might come Clinton’s way. This weekend he declared that her security detachment should disarm and we will “see what happens.”

To top it off, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus , who has carried Trump’s water and defended his egregious remarks, on Sunday threatened “penalties” would be enacted on the Republican nominees (e.g., Ohio Gov. John Kasich) who refused to endorse the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, pathological liar.

No matter what Hillary Clinton’s faults — and they are many — it is hard to seriously argue that a man who would lead a racist conspiracy  theory and then try to blame his opponent is fit to be president. Trump, like a small child caught misbehaving, simply denies the evidence or blames someone else or lashes out in anger.

As for the fate of the GOP, the evidence mounts that it cannot go merrily on its way after the election. A party that would sanction people who call out a racist deserves to go out of business. A party whose congressional leaders remain supportive of a nominee who incites violence, perpetuates racism, blatantly, and traffics in conspiracy theories loses the moral authority to govern.

All very well said.  As noted, yet another column cautions what could happen under a Trump presidency where lies and conspiracy theories would likely flourish and the nation could well face a constitutional crisis unlike any other to ever confront it.  Here are excerpts from this piece:

It’s important to acknowledge when you’ve been wrong, and I’ve probably never been so wrong as I was in an op-ed published on April 13, 2010. At the time, I was stunned by a terrible tragedy: the crash of a plane that had carried the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski. He had been flying to the Russian city of Smolensk to visit the memorial at Katyn, where Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish officers in 1940. Several dozen senior military figures and politicians were also on the plane, many of them friends of mine and colleagues of my husband, who was then the Polish foreign minister.

In the sweep of emotion that followed the crash, comparing the event to Katyn, I wrote this sentence: “This time around, nobody suspects a conspiracy.” As an excuse, I offer the fact that the tragedy initially seemed to bring people together. 

But my optimism was premature. The president’s brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski,  . . . . like Donald Trump, he saw that a conspiracy theory could help bring him to power.

Much as Trump used birtherism to inspire his core voters, Kaczynski, in the years that followed, used the Smolensk crash to motivate his supporters, that minority of the Polish population that remains convinced that unnamed secret forces control the country, that the “elite” is manipulated by foreigners and that everything that has happened in the country since 1989 is part of a sinister plot. And it worked. 

But there is just no evidence of one at Smolensk. Within hours of the crash, Polish forensic experts were on the ground. They immediately obtained the black boxes and transcribed them meticulously. The cockpit tape can be heard online, and it makes the circumstances painfully clear. The president was late; he had planned a live broadcast from Katyn. When Russian air traffic controllers wanted to divert the plane because of heavy fog, he did not agree. . . . . “Be bold, you’ll make it,” he told them. According to the official report, written by the country’s top aviation experts, the plane hit a tree, then the ground, and then broke up.

In the wake of Trump’s grudging renouncement of birtherism, the insidious, racist theory that gave rise to his political career, it’s worth pondering what happened when Law and Justice came to power. Within days of taking office, the new government removed the official report from its website. (It’s still available online.) More recently, police and prosecutors entered the homes of the aviation experts who testified in the original investigation, interrogated them and confiscated their computers.

A new (and well-paid) government commission was formed, containing a group of cranks and “experts” — including an ethnomusicologist, a retired pilot, a psychologist and other people with no knowledge of air crashes. . . . . None of these theories has ever been accompanied by the slightest hint of genuine evidence. . . . As in communist Poland, a fictionalized version of history, one that suits those in power, could eventually be on the curriculum.

One of the first things Law and Justice officials did upon taking power was launch an open attack on Poland’s constitutional court, and to re-politicize the independent prosecutor’s office. At the same time, they have put all of the country’s secret services in the hands of a man who has been convicted of fabricating documents, and whom they then pardoned. They might have had many motives for making these changes. But if nothing else, they could use these tools to “prove” one of the ludicrous theories using faked evidence at public show trials, another communist innovation. 

Trump, like Kaczynski, pushed a patently false conspiracy theory hard for many years, despite the utter lack of evidence. Last week, he found it expedient to discard that theory, but once he is president, he might find it expedient to adopt it again — or perhaps to push one of the many others he has championed. As president, he can then use the state — the Justice Department, the security bureaucracy, the FBI — to pursue them. A Trump administration could make birtherism the excuse for fake investigations, hearings and even trials that would do terrible and irreversible damage to U.S. politics and the rule of law.

It all sounds unthinkable, of course. But if you’d asked me five years ago, or even one year ago, I would have told you that the transformation of the Smolensk conspiracy theory into state ideology was unthinkable, too. And yet it has come to pass. 

 Far fetched?  Perhaps, but a year and a half ago, Trump running for the presidency was a laughing matter.  Yet, through calls to hate and bigotry and conspiracy theories he rode the ugly elements of the GOP base to win the GOP nomination.  I for one believe it is too dangerous to risk seeing what the man could do with the powers of the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies to harass or prosecute opponents.  The man is amoral and a narcissist of the first order.  He is DANGEROUS and must be defeated.

Kathleen Parker: Trump, A Con Man Among Heroes

I continue to find it telling that conservatives and Republicans who all too often turned a willing blind eye to the ugliness that motivated much of the party base and the self-prostitution that GOP elected officials regularly engaged in are now shocked that the selling of the GOP's soul has finally culminated in Donald Trump as the party standard bearer.  While Kathleen Parker has strayed from the GOP reservation ,more than other conservative pundits shocked by Trump's rise, had she and others criticized Democrats less and addressed the hideousness in their own party, perhaps the Trump nightmare could have been avoided.  Her latest piece  in the Washington Post looks at Trump's unqualified nature for the presidency.  Here are highlights:

At long last, Donald Trump has set himself free.

At a highly choreographed event Friday, the Republican nominee for president of the United States finally issued his verdict on the birthright of our two-term president, who, it turns out, is a real American!

“Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump intoned to the great relief of no one.

Well, howdy-do. Welcome to planet Earth, son.
But Trump’s announcement was merely a curtain call on a theatrical production otherwise known as Free Publicity for Trump. For the preceding 24 hours, Trump gleefully baited and dragged the media through Con Man’s Swamp, first refusing to answer the question posed by The Post’s Robert Costaabout whether Trump still thought Obama wasn’t born in the United States, then building suspense Friday morning that he would make a “big announcement.”

Awaiting him on the dais was a gathering of war heroes, who spent 20 minutes extolling Trump’s virtues, many of which one has never before associated with the nominee — his intellectual curiosity, his great temperament and his raw intelligence.

Only Trump could believe such things about himself — and he obviously did. Nearly glistening from the mist of blown kisses, he beamed like a boy with a brand new toy.

Now, I don’t doubt that those on the stage sincerely support the Republican nominee. And nothing I say about Trump is intended to reflect on these extraordinary Americans, especially not on Michael Thornton, a retired Navy SEAL, whom I single out because he happens to be a friend. I commend his remarkable story to anyone seeking perspective and inspiration.

My heart sank just a little when I saw Thornton standing behind Trump, even though I’m aware that it’s difficult for many battlefield veterans, especially those from the Vietnam era, to find a Clinton acceptable as commander in chief.

Seeing Trump wedged among men who had served heroically, several of whom risked their own lives to save others, had an effect more minimizing than elevating. Trump avoided the draft, too, with a doctor’s excuse, often available to sons of the rich, and otherwise isn’t qualified to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Medal of Honor recipients.

“Selfish men, bullies, and braggarts don’t perform well in battle. And those believing in their own extraordinariness rarely if ever accomplish feats worthy of the MoH.”

Trump has finally owned up, if way too late to make any difference. But one should keep in mind that the birther movement was racist to its core. And the man who would be president led the charge. 

In case readers have not figured it out, Trump sickens me.  What sickens me even more is the number of Americans who are supporting a racist con man.  That speaks volumes about America and none of it good.  It certainly shows that claims of America's exceptionalism are untrue, especially in the day of Donald Trump.

Why Blacks Loathe Donald Trump

A Black Lives Matter sign outside a rally for Donald J. Trump in Des Moines, Iowa.

There are many segments of American society that hate Donald Trump.  For starters, there are Hispanic voters who take umbrage at Trump's depiction of them as would be rapist and criminals.  Then, of course, there are women voters who view - correctly, in my opinion - Trump as a foul sexist pig.  The there is the LGBT community which rightly sees Trump's promises to leading Christofascists as an ominous threat.  And then there are blacks who according to some polls support Trump the least of any demographic.  A column in the New York Times looks at why Trump is so despised by black voters.  Here are column highlights:

So now Donald Trump is campaigning for the black vote. (Long, awkward pause.)

Like so much of what Trump has said and done, this new outreach forces writers like me to conduct scatological studies, framing Trump’s actions in their historical and intellectual absurdity.  But, here we go.

Trump, who got a shocking 1 percent of support among black voters in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, has been urged to reach out to black voters.

A day after The New York Times published an article pointing out that “the Republican nominee has not held a single event aimed at black voters in their communities, shunning the traditional stops at African-American churches, historically black colleges and barber shops and salons that have long been staples of the presidential campaign trail,” Trump ventured to a suburban town outside Milwaukee that is 95 percent white and 1 percent black to tell the black population of America — a population that has been consumed in recent years by a discussion of police misconduct and extrajudicial killings — that “the problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.”

The speech was tone deaf, facile and nonsensical, much like the man who delivered it.

Then within hours of making that speech, Trump shook up his campaign in part by naming Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the campaign’s chief executive.  This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:

“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

“The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”

How are you reaching out to the black community when you step on your own message with such an insulting hire?

All of black America is looking askance at Donald Trump. He has no credibility with black people, other than the handful of black staffers and surrogates who routinely embarrass themselves in their blind obsequiousness.

Trump has demonstrated through a lifetime of words and actions that he is no friend of the black community. . . . . He erupted like a rash onto the public consciousness on the front page of The New York Times in 1973 because he and his father were being sued for anti-black bias at their rental property.

This is the same man who took out full-page ads blaring the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” in New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers made up of four African-American boys and one Hispanic boy, who were accused and convicted of raping a white female jogger in the park. A judge later overturned the convictions in the flimsy cases and in 2014 the Five settled a wrongful conviction suit with the city for $41 million.

Trump is the same man who stepped into presidential politics by becoming the embodiment of the Birther movement, relentlessly demanding to see President Obama’s birth certificate.

This is the same man at whose rallies African-Americans have been verbally and physically assaulted.

This is the same man who has scandalously maligned Muslims, apparently not realizing that it’s estimated that approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American.

Donald Trump is the paragon of racial, ethnic and religious hostility. He is the hobgoblin of retrograde racial hegemony.  And this is the man who now wants to court the black vote? Puh-leese …,

Federal Birther Lawsuit Filed Against Ted Cruz

The political campaign warfare between neo-Fascist Donald Trump and extremist Ted Cruz has intensified as a birther law suit is filed against Ted Cruz.  While Trump is not outwardly connected to the federal lawsuit, many suspect that Trump supporters are behind the filing which seems aimed at kneecapping Cruz in advance of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.  Bloomberg Business looks at the lawsuit and some of the likely political machinations behind it. The lawsuit can be viewed here.  Here are some article highlights.

Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz should be disqualified from the race because he isn’t a “natural-born citizen,” a fellow Texan claims in a “birther” challenge filed against the senator in a U.S. court.

The suit seeks a court definition of the term to clarify whether Cruz -- who was born in Canada to an American mother -- can or can’t serve if elected.

“This 229-year question has never been pled, presented to or finally decided by or resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Houston attorney Newton B. Schwartz Sr. said in his 28-page complaint. “Only the U.S. Supreme Court can finally decide, determine judicially and settle this issue now.”

Claiming that “time is of the essence” because of the rapidly approaching Iowa caucuses and March 1 Super Tuesday primaries, Schwartz asked that the case be expedited for resolution by the nation’s highest court as soon as possible.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump pressed the issue during a televised candidate debate Thursday evening in South Carolina, saying he’s bringing up Cruz’s Canadian birthplace “because now he’s doing a little bit better” in the polls. Trump insisted that Cruz receive a judgment from the courts because it would be bad for Republicans to have the issue hanging over their presidential or vice-presidential nominee.

“There is a big overhang. A big question mark on your head,” Trump told Cruz. “You can’t do that to the party.”

Schwartz, 85, said in a phone interview he isn’t connected to any particular campaign, though he personally “probably” supports Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic nomination.

The case is Schwartz v. Cruz, 4:16-cv-00106, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas (Houston).

Frank Rich: The Importance of Donald Trump

Many on both the right and the left are dismayed by Donald Trump's  presidential candidacy which seemingly defies historical comparisons.  Other than the clear fact that he enjoys hearing himself talk and that his egomania knows no limits, it is hard to discern what Trump's real agenda is in running for office.  Whatever, his true motivation, some think that Trump is doing the nation a service by exposing just how corrupt and ridiculous America's election system has become.  Moreover, he is daily exposing the real face of today's GOP and its base: birthers, bigots, racists, hypocrites - the list is lengthy.  One writer who believes that Trump may wittingly or not be doing a public service id Frank Rich of New York Magazine who has authored a column on Trump.  Here are length excerpts:

As the summer of Donald Trump came to its end — and the prospect of a springtime for Trump no longer seemed like a gag — the quest to explain the billionaire’s runaway clown car went into overdrive. How could a crass, bigoted bully with a narcissistic-personality disorder and policy views bordering on gibberish “defy political gravity,” dominate the national stage, make monkeys out of pundits and pollsters, and pose an existential threat to one of America’s two major parties?


In the midst of all the hand-wringing from conservatives and liberals alike, Politico convened a panel of historians to adjudicate. Two authoritative chroniclers of 20th-century American populism and race, Alan Brinkley of Columbia and David Blight of Yale, dismissed the parallels. Brinkley, the author of the definitive book on Long and Coughlin (Voices of Protest), said Trump was a first in American politics, a presidential candidate with no “belief system other than the certainty that anything he says is right.” Blight said Trump’s “real antecedents are in Mark Twain” — in other words, fictional characters, and funny ones.

There is indeed a lighter way to look at Trump’s rise and his impact on the country. Far from being an apocalyptic harbinger of the end-times, it’s possible that his buffoonery poses no lasting danger. Quite the contrary: His unexpected monopoly of center stage may well be the best thing to happen to our politics since the arrival of Barack Obama.

In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share. He is, as many say, making a mockery of the entire political process with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics. But the mockery in this case may be overdue, highly warranted, and ultimately a spur to reform rather than the crime against civic order that has scandalized those who see him, in the words of the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, as “dangerous to democracy.”

Trump may be injecting American democracy with steroids. No one, after all, is arguing that the debates among the GOP presidential contenders would be drawing remotely their Game of Thrones-scale audiences if the marquee stars were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.

What has made him more entertaining than his peers is not his superficial similarities to any historical analogues or his shopworn celebrity. His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago. That character is a direct descendant of Twain’s 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office — often the presidency — on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior. Trump has taken that role,
  Trump has taken that role, the antithesis of the idealist politicians enshrined by Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin, and run with it. He bestrides our current political landscape like the reincarnation not of Joe McCarthy (that would be Ted Cruz) but of Jay Billington Bulworth.

Trump’s shenanigans sometimes seem to be lifted directly from the eponymous 1998 movie, in which Warren Beatty plays a senator from California who abandons his scripted bromides to take up harsh truth-telling in rap: “Wells Fargo and Citibank, you’re really very dear / Loan billions to Mexico and never have to fear / ’Cause taxpayers take it in the rear.” Bulworth insults the moderators of a television debate, addresses his Hollywood donors as “big Jews,” and infuriates a black constituent by telling her he’ll ignore her unless she shells out to his campaign.

There have already been some modest precedents for Trump’s real-life prank — most recently, Stephen Colbert, who staged a brief stunt run for president in 2007. The comic Pat Paulsen, a Smothers Brothers acolyte, ran for president intermittently from 1968 into the ’90s, aiming to call attention to the absurdity of politics.

Some kind of farce, nonetheless, is just what the modern presidential campaign has devolved into. By calling attention to that sorry state of affairs 24/7, Trump’s impersonation of a crypto-fascist clown is delivering the most persuasively bipartisan message of 2016. 

Trump lacks the comic chops of a Colbert or Paulsen, and, unlike the screenwriters of movies like Bulworth and Nashville, he is witless. His instrument of humor is the bitch-slap, blunt and cruel — Don Rickles dumbed down to the schoolyard. But when he hits a worthy target and exerts himself beyond his usual repertoire of lazy epithets (Loser! Dope! Slob!), he is funny, in part because his one-liners have the ring of truth. When Eric Cantor endorsed Jeb Bush, Trump asked, “Who wants the endorsement of a guy who lost in perhaps the greatest upset in the history of Congress?” When Trump’s presidential rivals attended a David and Charles Koch retreat, he tweeted: “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch brothers. Puppets?” Twitter inspires his best material, as does Bush.  

Trump’s ability to reduce the head of his adopted party to a comic functionary out of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta is typical of his remarkable success in exposing Republican weakness and hypocrisy. The party Establishment has been trying to erect a firewall against the onslaught by claiming, as George Will has it, that Trump is a “counterfeit” Republican and that even “the assumption that today’s Trumpites are Republicans is unsubstantiated and implausible.” 

Trump does take heretical economic positions for a Republican — “The hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder!” — but on the matters of race, women, and immigration that threaten the GOP’s future viability in nonwhite, non-male America, he is at one with his party’s base. 

Take Trump’s peddling of “birtherism,” for instance. It’s been a right-wing cause since well before he took it up; even Mitt Romney dipped into that racist well in 2012. It took a village of birthers to get Republicans to the point where only 29 percent of them now believe that Obama was born in America (and 54 percent identify him as a Muslim), according to an August survey by Public Policy Polling. Far from being a fake Republican, Trump speaks for the party’s overwhelming majority. 

Charles Krauthammer, another conservative apoplectic about Trump’s potential to sabotage the GOP’s 2016 chances, is arguing that Trump’s incendiary immigration stand is also counterfeit Republicanism — an aberrational “policy innovation.” The only problem is that Cruz, Walker, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson have all supported Trump’s “policy innovation” calling for an end to the “birthright citizenship” guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. 

With women, too, Trump embarrasses the GOP by saying in public what “real” Republicans keep private. The telling moment in the Fox News debate was not when Megyn Kelly called him out for slurring women as “fat pigs” and “dogs” but the cheers from the audience at Trump’s retort, in which he directed those same epithets at Rosie O’Donnell. 

Republican potentates can’t fight back against him because the party’s base has his back. He’s ensnared the GOP Establishment in a classic Catch-22: It wants Trump voters — it can’t win elections without them — but doesn’t want Trump calling attention to what those voters actually believe. 

I have always loved Rich's writing.  He's outdone himself.  He is correct that by design or not, Trump has indicted the GOP on its bigotry and hypocrisy.

The Radicalization of the GOP

A piece in Salon raises a question that needs to be answered: why is the mainstream media so afraid to report on the insanity - and outright racism - now the norm in much of the GOP base?  Like religious extremists, the media is afraid to call out birthers and other conspiracy theory advocates in the GOP and the sad reality that facts and objective reality simply no longer matter to a seemingly growing segment of the GOP base.  And what's worse, by failing to do so, the media is enabling the crazies to pass as "normal" and pull others along with them.  One of the two major political  parties has wondered off into extremism and lunacy, yet the media refuses to report on it and mere parrots talking points not based in reality.  The result is serious harm to the future of America.  Here are column highlights:

The Republican birther brigade really is one of the most astonishing political stories in recent years. What’s truly bewildering and newsworthy is that the birther ranks are apparently expanding and likely number in the millions nationwide. The fact that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump personally vouched for the baseless, anti-Obama conspiracy theory has only elevated its significance.

So why does the press continue to largely turn a blind eye to the telling spectacle? . . . The media’s birther blind spot is part of the larger press failure to grasp, and accurately detail, the truly radical nature of the Republican Party under President Obama.

For instance, since June 1, the New York Times has published approximately 180 articles or columns that included the word “Trump” five or more times, according to Nexis. But just a handful of those have made any mention of Trump’s previous birth certificate folly. The same goes for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times . . . 

[T]he press has never come to terms with the Republican Party’s deep birther roots, and therefore hasn’t come to terms with the radical revolution unfolding on the far right. This campaign season seems like an obvious time to do so. “We need to reckon even more urgently with what can now be called the ‘Trumpists,'” Harvard professor Danielle Allen recently noted, highlighting their birther streak.

[T]hat’s been the press’ telltale failure in covering conservatives and Republicans in recent years: Facts often don’t matter to them. They occupy their own tribal space and digest the same misinformation that simply feeds their often-paranoid views of Obama and Democrats.

As Mother Jones’ David Corn recently noted, “Many Republicans clearly see the president as a foreign-born secret Muslim with a clandestine plan to weaken, if not ruin, the United States–remember the death panels–and they have a dark, nearly apocalyptic view of Obama’s America.”

So why the Beltway press’ reluctance to drill down deep into this troubling phenomenon? What’s behind the Beltway-wide decision to pretend there isn’t something seismic and disturbing going on within the Republican electorate?

Has the modern political press ever had to deal with such a large portion of the partisan electorate that’s actively allergic to facts the way birthers are? Probably not.

But I also don’t think the current path of routinely downplaying the birther phenomenon and its extraordinary pull within the Republican Party is the right way to handle the story. By too often turning a blind eye to the birther juices fueling Trump’s ascension, the press overlooks a defining trait in conservative politics today.

Media laziness allowed America to be duped into the Iraq War disaster.  Media laziness is allowing extremism in the GOP to grow.   It bodes ill for the nation's future. 

Tom Cotton - A Male Michele Bachmann?

I will admit that I cannot help myself when it comes to piling on GOP Senator Tom Cotton.  The man seems hell bent to become the male replacement for the seriously unhindered Michele Bachmann.  Like Bachmann, Cotton seems to revel in his ignorance and willing to say literally anything required in order to thoroughly prostitute himself to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at Cotton's effort to out crazy Bachmann.   Here are highlights:

Cotton actually has as much in common with the Frank Gaffney/Crazy Town Steve King/Michele Bachmann world. Related yes, but not precisely the same. Here's the lead quote from that MoJo [Mother Jones] article. "Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they're willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism. They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas."  Sound familiar?

Cottonites think the (Barack Hussein) Obama White House is infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and is bringing down the border fence to facilitate incursions by the Mexican Drug Cartel/Hezbollah/ISIS alliance to launch the decisive attack your local convenience store.

Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

One has to wonder what the reality free members of the GOP base will do now that Republicans have finally admitted that there was no Benghazi scandal after a two year endless search for a grand conspiracy.  But at last tThe House Select Intelligence Committee—controlled by Republicans—has finally released its report that concludes that there was no conspiracy or scandal - after, of course, the midterm elections have safely pasted.  Will the report sway the irrational elements of the GOP base?  Probably not.  After all, these folks still haven't accepted the reality that Barack Obama was born in America.  Mother Jones looks at the release of the House Committee report.  Here are excerpts:

For two years, . . .  Republicans have been on an endless search for a grand conspiracy theory that explains how it [the Benghazi attacks] all happened. Intelligence was ignored because it would have been inconvenient to the White House to acknowledge it. Hillary Clinton's State Department bungled the response to the initial protests in Cairo. Both State and CIA bungled the military response to the attacks themselves. Even so, rescue was still possible, but it was derailed by a stand down order—possibly from President Obama himself. The talking points after the attack were deliberately twisted for political reasons. Dissenters who tried to tell us what really happened were harshly punished.

Is any of this true? The House Select Intelligence Committee—controlled by Republicans—has been investigating the Benghazi attacks in minute detail for two years. Today, with the midterm elections safely past, they issued their findings. Their exoneration of the White House was sweeping and nearly absolute. So sweeping that I want to quote directly from the report's summary, rather than paraphrasing it. Here it is:

• The Committee first concludes that the CIA ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi....Appropriate U.S. personnel made reasonable tactical decisions that night, and the Committee found no evidence that there was either a stand down order or a denial of available air support....
   
• Second, the Committee finds that there was no intelligence failure prior to the attacks. In the months prior, the IC provided intelligence about previous attacks and the increased threat environment in Benghazi, but the IC did not have specific, tactical warning of the September 11 attacks.
   
• Third, the Committee finds that a mixed group of individuals, including those affiliated with Al Qa'ida, participated in the attacks....
   
• Finally, the Committee found no evidence that any officer was intimidated, wrongly forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement or otherwise kept from speaking to Congress, or polygraphed because of their presence in Benghazi. The Committee also found no evidence that the CIA conducted unauthorized activities in Benghazi and no evidence that the IC shipped arms to Syria.

It's hard to exaggerate just how remarkable this document is. It's not that the committee found nothing to criticize. They did. The State Department facility in Benghazi had inadequate security. Some of the early intelligence after the attacks was inaccurate. The CIA should have given more weight to eyewitnesses on the ground.

But those are routine after-action critiques, ones that were fully acknowledged by the very first investigations. Beyond that, every single conspiracy theory—without exception—was conclusively debunked.

Late on a Friday afternoon, when it would get the least attention, a Republican-led committee finally admitted that every single Benghazi conspiracy theory was false. There are ways that the response to the attacks could have been improved, but that's it. Nobody at the White House interfered. Nobody lied. Nobody prevented the truth from being told.

It was all just manufactured outrage from the beginning. But now the air is gone. There is no scandal, and there never was.

Why does the cynic in me now suspect that the GOP base will claim that the GOP controlled report was the result of a conspiracy?  

It Is Still All About Race: TheTruth About GOP Wins

I'm exhausted after a frenzied day at work and many of the polls don't look good if one supports progressive values and looks forward to the days when overt racism, Gilded Age style greed, and deference to religious extremists are relegated to the past.  Adding to the aggravation is the closeness of the Virginia U.S. Senate race which I hope will still shift to Mark Warner.  That said, a piece in Salon sums up what some are too hesitant to say about the 2014 midterm elections:  the main motivations pushing Republican successes are the same old poisonous influences that have haunted America for far, far too long.  Namely, racism first and foremost followed by religious extremism.  Since parts of North Carolina fall within the Hampton Roads TV viewing area, one had to endure numerous political ads attacking Democrats for "not opposing gay marriage" and constant efforts to tie Democrats to America's black president.  Here are some article highlights:

In 1964, there were five black members of the House of Representatives — barely over 1 percent — compared to the 11 percent of the population who were black. But the American people were evenly split, 30 to 31 percent, on whether blacks should have more or less influence, with 28 percent saying things were “about right” as they stood. What’s more, those opposed to government social spending programs were three times more likely to say blacks should have less influence compared to those supporting social spending.

“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans,” she [Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu] told NBC News in an interview. “It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”

This is hardly earth-shattering news from the state that brought us Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1890s, and the deeply racialized devastation of Katrina less a decade ago, after which even President Bush admitted that “deep, persistent poverty” in the area “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” Speaking of Katrina, according to a PPP poll last year, the good people of Louisiana “were evenly split on who was most responsible for the poor Hurricane Katrina response: George W. Bush or Obama, 28/29.” Given that Obama was a first-year senator at the time of Katrina, it’s not hard to see what Landrieu was driving at.

[P]redictably, fourth-tier 2016 GOP presidential wannabe Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor, instantly made an ass of himself, calling her comments “remarkably divisive,” which takes a lot of chutzpah, coming from a racial panderer who just three years ago pledged he would sign a “birther” bill if it reached his desk.

Birtherism, you see, has become the GOP’s more widespread manifestation of racial codespeak in the Obama era. Although Obama deftly quieted the elite media trolls with the release of his long-form birth certificate just after Donald Trump had ridden birther hysteria to the top of the GOP primary field in April 2011, the GOP base was never really dissuaded. In fact, nine months later, in January 2012, a YouGov poll found that more Republicans than ever questioned Obama’s citizenship.

You’re not supposed to call it “racism,” because racism means KKK mobs in hoods, and police siccing snarling dogs on young children, and we’re not like that anymore — see, we’ve got armored vehicles and sound cannons now!

But 40 years of data from the General Social Survey — the gold standard of American public opinion research — say otherwise.  They tell us that Southern whites overwhelmingly blame blacks for their lower economic status, ignoring or denying the role played by discrimination, past and present, in all its various forms, and that the balance of Southern white attitudes has barely changed at all in 40 years. 

A 2011 study from Tufts (press release/full study) found that whites as a whole see racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in discrimination against blacks over the decades are reflected in increases in discrimination against whites, so that now whites are more discriminated against than blacks.  This perception is not simply mistaken, it’s downright delusional, flying in the face of mountains of objective data.

[W]e find that there has been only a modest overall change in attitudes since the 1970s, but that this change is significantly concentrated in the Democratic Party, with relatively minor changes in the Republican Party,  . . . 

What all the above boils down to is that blaming blacks for being poor remains broadly popular in America today, and that taking note of continued discrimination is not. A modest majority of Democrats outside the white South disagree, and this creates a political fault line that Republicans have repeatedly exploited across the decades, with no end in sight.  When conservatives get too crude — as was the case with Cliven Bundy, for example — this threatens to upset the apple cart, and appearances must quickly get restored. But it’s the crudity, not the underlying attitude of blaming blacks, that has fallen out of favor. This would hardly surprise a Southern gentleman of this or any other century.  It’s just the way things are supposed to be. Always have been. Why ever change?

GOP Star Witnesses Debunk Right-Wing Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

The right wing has been salivating over supposed bombshells that would damage Barack Obama - who they despise because of his race - and Hillary Clinton in connecting with the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  And yesterday, they hoped to set the bombshell off, precept it didn't happen.  Their star witness debunked their wild conspiracy theories.  Yes, Benghazi could have been handled better, but the freepers are so over wrought with their hatred of Obama that objective reality never seems to factor into their fantasies.  Think Progress looks at the let down for the far right.  Here are excerpts:

The “whistleblowers” at today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on what really happened in Benghazi, Libya last September were supposed to break the dam that would lead to President Obama’s eventual downfall, in the eyes of conservatives. Instead, these witness actually served to debunk several theories that the right-wing has pushed on Benghazi, leaving the hearing a fizzle for the GOP:

1. F-16s could have been sent to Benghazi

Part of the prevailing theory surrounding the events the night of the Benghazi attacks is that the Obama administration did not do enough militarily to respond to the crisis. Gregory Hicks — a Foreign Service Officer and the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya — claimed during his pre-hearing testimony that fighter jets could have been flown over Benghazi, preventing the second wave of the attack from occurring. 

Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) questioned that statement, asking Hicks whether he disagreed with Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey’s assessment that no air assets were in range the night of the attack. Hicks didn’t disagree, saying he was “speaking from [his] perspective” and what “veteran Libyan revolutionaries” told him, rather than Pentagon assessments.

2. Hillary Clinton signed cables denying additional security to Benghazi

House Republicans came to the conclusion in their interim report on Benghazi that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to them about what she knew and when during her testimony this January. This includes her statement that at no time was she aware of requests for additional security at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi prior to the attack. 

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) used her time to take issue with this claim, asking all three witnesses about standard protocol for cables leaving the State Department. All three agreed with Maloney, that the Secretary of State’s name is placed at the bottom of all outgoing cables and telegrams from Foggy Bottom, whether the Secretary has viewed them or not, shooting down the GOP claim.

3. A Special Forces Team that could have saved lives was told to stand down

One of the most shocking reveals in the lead-up to today’s hearing was that a team of Special Forces in Tripoli were told not to deploy to Benghazi during the attack. That decision has led to an uproar on the right, including claims of dereliction of duty towards Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey for not taking actions that could have saved lives. 

During questioning, Hicks confirmed that the team was ready to be deployed — not to join the fighting at the CIA annex — but “to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack.” Hicks also confirmed that it was the second such team to be readied for deployment, with the first having proceeded to Benghazi earlier. Despite the second team not deploying, the staff was all evacuated first to Tripoli, then to Germany, within 18 hours of the attack taking place.

4. The State Department’s Accountability Review Board isn’t legitimate

Republicans have been attacking the State Department’s official in-house review of the shortcomings seen before, during, and after the assault in Benghazi. That criticism prompted House Republicans to write their own report. When asked point blank about the recommendations of the Board, however, the witnesses didn’t cooperate with the GOP narrative. “Absolutely,” Eric Nordstrom, the Regional Security Officer for Libya prior to the assault in Benghazi, answered when asked if he believes implementing the recommendations would improve security. “I had an opportunity to review that along with other two committee reports. I think taken altogether, they’re fairly comprehensive and reasonable.” Hicks, when questioned, said that while he had some issues with the process by which the Board gathered its information, he demurred on criticizing the report itself.

 Reality means nothing to the far right and their political prostitutes in the GOP.  Hence, be assured the conspiracy theories will remain alive and well in freeper land.  Remember, these folks still insist that Obama wasn't born in America.

Cuccinelli Signs Insane Book for Kool-Aid Drinking Crowd

It is frightening at times just how insane some among the Virginia populous seem to be.  How else to explain an adoring crowd of reality and modernity denying Kool-Aid drinkers enthusiastically gathering around the certifiably insane Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli as he signed copies of his anti-government screed that in truth describes the denial of liberty rather than its protection.  Fredericksburg.com looks at the scary display of insanity.  Here are highlights:

Virginia’s Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli signed about 100 copies of his new book for customers at the Barnes & Noble in Central Park Friday night.

“The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty,” which was released on Tuesday, “explores the numerous courtroom battles fought against the Obama administration,” according to Cuccinelli’s publicist. 

The book claims that the federal health care law, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies have violated the Constitution by exercising unparalleled control over Americans.

That message struck a chord with Rob Clark of Stafford, who arrived at Barnes & Noble almost two hours before the event started.  “We need to get back, as a nation, to the basics,” Clark said. “We’re not as strong of a country as we once were.”

The book-signing drew a crowd of Cuccinelli followers from the Fredericksburg area, as well as many from Richmond and from Northern Virginia. Leading up to the attorney general’s arrival, the crowd buzzed about his upcoming campaign for governor of Virginia. 

“There’s a great turnout here. It goes to show the momentum the attorney general has going into the race,” said Virginia Republican Sen. Bryce Reeves, who represents Orange and Fredericksburg, as well as parts of Culpeper, Louisa, Spotsylvania and Albemarle counties.

Cuccinelli’s book has also gotten plenty of attention from Democrats in Richmond, who are hoping the Republican’s candid opinions will hurt his election chances. Several of them even staged a dramatic reading of parts of it Tuesday in a Capitol Square office building.

Of course, for Kookinelli and his followers "getting back to basics" translates to increased special rights for Christofascists, the stigmatizing of LGBT Virginians, treating women as chattel to be controlled by angry white males, disenfranchising blacks and minorities and an utter disregard for the U. S. Constitution and U. S. Supreme Court rulings.

Anti-Gay, Anti-Immigrant, Birther Groups File Joint DOMA and Prop 8 Briefs

I have often maintained that the Christian Right, White Supremacy groups, Tea Party and anti-Immigrant groups have all more or less coalesced into basically one Christofascist/white supremacy under the banner of the GOP.   The factions are unified by who they hate - which is everyone who isn't a white evangelical/fundamentalist Christian - and as yet further proof of this reality a group of wing nut/racist/anti-gay organizations have teamed up to file amicus briefs in the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases pending before the U. S. Supreme Court.  As one might expect, the batshitery is off the charts and might actual help those seeking to see both DOMA and Prop 8 struck down since they show the clear animus that motivates those in favor of the anti-gay laws.  Right Wing Watch looks at these deranged briefs that represent a who's who of the lunatic fringe.  Besides being anti-gay, they want the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings reversed, along with past equal protection decisions.  Here are highlights:

Citizens United’s National Committee for Family, Faith and Prayer filed two no-holds-barred amicus briefs last week, one in defense of Prop 8 [pdf] and one in defense of DOMA [pdf]. They were joined in both by the anti-immigrant groups Declaration Alliance and English First; WorldNetDaily affiliate the Western Center for Journalism; the Institute for Constitutional Values (founded by white supremacist ally Michael Peroutka, who also argues that the solution to school violence is to abolish schools); Gun Owners Foundation (the research wing of Gun Owners of America); the extremely and occasionally comically anti-gay Public Advocate; the birther group U.S. Justice Foundation; Protect Marriage Maryland and others. Far-right Virginia Del. Bob Marshall and Sen. Dick Black joined the DOMA brief. Both are signed by Michael Boos, general counsel of Citizens United, and by Herb Titus, an attorney with a sideline as a birther advocate [who son is doing 30 years for a ponzi scheme].

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the filings contain passages like this one, in the Prop 8 brief, arguing that laws against homosexuality affirm rather than deny the humanity of gay people:

Second, while the discrimination against Blacks in America denied them their rightful status as a member of the human race vis-à-vis their white counterparts, the discrimination against homosexuals affirmed their status as full and equal members of the human race. Indeed, the very definition of the “crime against nature,” was employed to emphasize that the sexual behavior condemned was contrary to the law of human nature. Homosexual behavior, then, while unnatural did not mean that those guilty of it were any less human.

Or this one from the DOMA brief arguing that gays and lesbians have not historically faced discrimination because some criminal sodomy laws also “extended to opposite sex unnatural couplings”:

As a class, homosexuals have not been discriminated against in the way that the court of appeals has so “easily” assumed. The appellate panel below concluded that “the most telling proof of animus and discrimination is that, for many years and in many states, homosexual conduct was criminal.” Yet historically, even the crime of sodomy was not so targeted. Rather, it was defined as “carnal copulation against the order of nature by man with man; or in the same unnatural manner with woman; or by man or woman in any manner with a beast.”

But what is truly remarkable about the Citizens United coalition’s legal arguments is their eagerness to burn all bridges and declare everything they come across unconstitutional.  .  .  .  .  Not only should Lawrence and Romer be overturned, this group argues, but so should Bolling v. Sharpe, the 1954 Brown v. Board companion case that desegregated the District of Columbia’s public schools. Bolling was the first decision in which the Supreme Court explicitly found an equal protection component in the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, thus setting the stage for six decades of prohibitions on discrimination by the federal government – all of which the coalition would like to see go.

But these groups don’t just go after decades of legal precedent. They also personally attack two judges who ruled against Prop 8 before it reached the Supreme Court, in particular district court judge Vaughn Walker, who is openly gay:

With the understanding of Judge Walker’s personal interest in the outcome of the case, it becomes much easier to understand his finding every fact for the plaintiffs and his willingness to impute ill will to the proponents of Proposition 8. For example, having in his personal life rejected 6,000 years of moral and religious teaching, we can see how Judge Walker could readily determine that California voters were motivated solely by “moral and religious views…that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples [and] these interests do not provide a rational basis for supporting Proposition 8.”  .  .  .  .  Petitioners were entitled to have their case heard by an impartial judge – not one who was leading a secret life engaging in behaviors which he appeared to believe were being unfairly judged and criticized by the proponents of Proposition 8.

To say that these groups and their members are unhinged and scary is an understatement.