Trump is More Paranoid and Dangerous than Nixon

A piece in the New Republic takes a frightening look at the lust for revenge and paranoia that will sweep into the White House on January 20, 2017, and the danger that Donald Trump poses to anyone that his warped and narcissistic mind may deem and "enemy."  Given Trump's pettiness, there could be few limits on his efforts to seek revenge and punish those who see him for what he is and the danger that he poses to the nation.  Add to Trump's dangerous personality the surveillance and other  powers that will be at his disposal, and all of us have cause to be very afraid.  Here are article excerpts:

Donald Trump and Richard Nixon have at least one thing in common: They are the two most paranoid and vindictive men ever to win the presidency. Both came to power armed with enemies lists, vowing to seek revenge against those who stood in their way. Both roamed the mansions of power late at night, raving against every perceived slight. Both were caught on tape describing the ways they enjoyed bending others to their will.

But Nixon, unlike Trump, was an introspective man. In one particularly fascinating moment of self-reflection following his resignation, he described to a former aide the habits that had enabled him to rise to the top of Washington’s greasy pole. When you’re on your way, he explained, it pays to be crazy.

“In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances,” Nixon said. “It is then you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage—because your competitors can’t risk what they have already.” That’s an insight that Trump put to good use during the Republican primaries, when he was willing to place high-stakes bets that his more experienced rivals were unwilling or unable to match.

But then you win, and your problems begin. “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top,” Nixon confessed. “You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it, because it is a part of you and you need it as much as an arm and a leg. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

The ways Richard Nixon chased that high are now a matter of voluminous historical record. None is more harrowing than his exploitation of the vast powers of his office to spy on those he perceived as threats to his power, and then seek to use the results of that surveillance to neutralize or destroy them.

The first phone tap on one of his own officials came in the fourth month of his presidency. That same year, federal agents snared a gay, closeted antiwar organizer named David Mixner in a “honey trap,” and threatened to release photographs of his assignation unless he ratted out his comrades. By the second year, an entire unit of the Internal Revenue Service was chartered in a locked, soundproof room to harass a blacklist of antiwar activists.

His enforcer, Chuck Colson, drew up “enemies lists” that included such fearsome figures as actress Carol Channing and Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton. The IRS was deployed to audit their taxes or take away the nonprofit status of their organizations. 

Donald Trump assembles enemies lists, too; his organs of cognition appear to be structured around the idea of revenge. There are Republicans who voted against him, like Senator Lindsey Graham. (“It’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear,” Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault exulted, “so that when we get to the White House, we know where we stand.”) There are media organizations he claims have covered him unfairly, like The Washington Post. . . . And it’s not hard to imagine that Trump’s list of targets will only grow longer as his power expands. Like Nixon, he has spent his entire life chasing the narcotic rush afforded by dominating others, the better to fill the void where a functioning soul ought to be.

But there are two key differences that set Trump apart from his predecessor in paranoia. First, his soul is sicker by miles than Nixon’s. And second, the surveillance apparatus he is about to inherit is far scarier than the one available to Nixon. . . . .  “Now we are about to hand over that entire apparatus to a paranoid, score-settling sociopath whose primary obsession seems to be with crushing his personal enemies.”

Today the government can monitor virtually every form of communication, including the contents of emails, phone calls, online searches, and a host of personal data.

It’s not hard to imagine the kind of damage Trump could do with the powers of the NSA at his disposal. “Let’s say you become part of the Trump opposition,” says Jon Stokes. “It probably won’t be long before Trump knows what kind of porn you like. Sure, that’s against the law—but the government has been breaking those laws for 20 years. We’ve just been doing it for noble, Jack Bauer reasons, not petty Donald Trump reasons.”

Consider, too, all the federal officials beyond the director of national intelligence who will serve at the pleasure of Trump. There’s the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, whom the president could illegally order to target enemies with tax audits, like Nixon did. The head of the Small Business Administration, which could cut off loans to Trump’s rivals. The entire Cabinet, which oversees billions of dollars in federal research grants and defense contracts and construction jobs. . . . And the head of military intelligence, who could use the Pentagon’s powers to spy on left-wing groups, as it did under Lyndon Johnson and to a vastly expanded degree under the paranoid auspices of Richard Nixon.

What will happen when President Trump orders some eyesore removed from his sight, only to discover the limits of presidential power? Revenge is a narcotic, and Trump of all people will be in need of a regular, ongoing fix. Ordering his people to abuse the surveillance state to harass and destroy his enemies will offer the quickest and most satisfying kick he can get. The tragedy, as James Madison could have told us, is that the good stuff is now lying around everywhere, just waiting for the next aspiring dictator to cop.

Be very, very afraid.

Rubio’s Empty Rhetoric on Terrorism

Although perhaps not as utterly despicable in his choice of language as Donald Trump or Ben "Rabid Dogs" Carson, Marco Rubio has jumped fully aboard the Republican fear mongering wagon.  And like his GOP brethren, other than making inflammatory statements and threatening to make Americans even less free and subject to even more domestic surveillance, he has nothing to offer  except fear and bigotry.  Indeed, ISIS is likely grabbing sound bites from Rubio, et al, to make a new round of propaganda films to further ramp up claims that the West is against Islam itself.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Rubio's shameless self-prostitution.  Here are excerpts:

At first glance, Marco Rubio’s first television ad as a presidential candidate seems unassailable. He says the world is facing a “civilizational struggle between the values of freedom and liberty, and radical Islamic terror.”

“What happened in Paris could happen here,” Mr. Rubio says, looking slightly less bewildered than usual. The Florida senator goes on to say: “These aren’t disgruntled or disempowered people. These are radical terrorists who want to kill us.”  So far, so good.

Then he said that “they” want to kill us “because we let women drive, because we let girls go to school.”

While it’s true that radical Islam rejects women’s rights, Mr. Rubio’s analysis is just as shallow as the argument that European nations’ colonialism or more recent acts of American stupidity, committed primarily by President George W. Bush, excuse acts of sociopathic mass murder.

But what’s really wrong with Mr. Rubio’s commercial, and his candidacy, is that he offers not the slightest idea of what he would do as president to combat terrorism — other than to further undermine Americans’ civil liberties under the guise of counter-terrorism and to turn away legitimate refugees because they happen to be Middle Eastern Muslims.

Mr. Rubio talks about the assault on “Western values” by Muslim terrorist groups, but he supports proposals to freeze the entry of some 10,000 U.N.-designated refugees from the Middle East, based on a series of lies he and other Republicans like to tell about President Obama’s refugee policy.

“What needs to happen here is you can’t let people in unless they complete a background check.”

Sounds good, except that the refugees in question have completed background checks and will have to complete many more before they set foot on American soil.

[R]efugees must go through a long process to enter this country. “If there’s any doubt at all, they’re not allowed in,” he said. “It takes 18 months, 24 months, while these people sit in wretched refugee camps in Turkey, in Jordan, in Lebanon and if there’s any doubt, they’re not allowed in. Marco Rubio doesn’t know what the process is. There is a process, and it’s worked.”

Mr. Rubio also seems confused about the right way to discuss things like terrorism and national security in a presidential campaign. On Fox News on Sunday, Chris Wallace rather hilariously asked Mr. Rubio if he thought his “foreign policy credentials” (which are nonexistent) were giving him a “boost with voters” after the terror attacks in Paris and other places.

“I obviously am not happy about the events,” he said, to everyone’s great relief, “but I think it’s a positive development that it suddenly has forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security.”

Mr. Rubio said: “I hope that we focus on that more, not just for political advantage, but because the world has become a very dangerous place.”

Maybe Mr. Rubio can start with himself. Instead of just seeking political advantage after the horrors in Sinai, Lebanon, Paris, Mali and elsewhere, perhaps he could come up with something useful to tell voters about why they should entrust him with the job of president.

The GOP's Race Away from Inclusiveness

If one thinks back to the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, one will recall all the promises that the Republican Party would make a concerted effort to be more inclusive and strive to fill the fictional GOP big tent.  Booby Jindal - who just saw his would be presidential campaign crash and burn after prostituting himself to white Christofascist extremists - said the GOP needed to stop being the "party of stupid" and many said there simply were not enough aging whites to allow the GOP to win national elections.  Fast forward to today, and the GOP has gone in exactly the opposite direction from that promised in early 2013 and the racism and religious fanaticism seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.  GOP presidential candidates are attending "kill the gays" gatherings and the party base wants to treat Syrian refugees much like Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.  All of this nastiness is, of course, wrapped in the American flag and professions of Christian values.  A piece in Politico looks at the demise of the GOP's call to inclusiveness.  Here are excerpts:

Poor Reince Priebus. After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, touted his shiny new 100-page report on reinventing the GOP at the National Press Club in March 2013. It was called the “Growth and Opportunity Project.” Priebus’ message was earnest and direct: The GOP needed to practice inclusion, not exclusion, if it was to have any chance of winning the presidency. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too,” the report said.

That was then. In the meantime, the GOP’s leading presidential contenders have serially and successfully thumbed their collective noses at the party establishment. Already Donald Trump and Ben Carson have upended the race with stands like castigating illegal immigrants. But amid widespread fear of terrorism triggered by the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, the GOP is now mired in its ugliest intra-party debate yet—about whether Muslims living in the United States constitute a potential Fifth Column.

[T]he party establishment is once more being outflanked by its militant wing, which has long depicted Muslims as first and foremost loyal not to America but to Islamic Sharia law. . . . . whether Trump and Carson really believe in their gibberish about Muslims-Americans is almost beside the point: If they score electoral successes, they will reshape the GOP in their own image. And to some extent they already are. 

To be sure, Carson’s likening some Muslim refugees to “rabid” dogs and Trump’s musings, which he has attempted to rescind, about creating a federal registry for Muslim-Americans—how would he even decide who was or was not truly a Muslim; by drawing on the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws?—are triggering something of a backlash on the mainstream right.

For all their pious disavowals of Trump’s fiery rhetoric, establishment candidates like Bush and Rubio are backing House Speaker Paul Ryan’s push for suspending a Syrian refugee program, with Bush exempting “Christians.” Meanwhile, neoconservative outlets like Commentary magazine are warning that “any plan to admit tens of thousands of Syrians is a huge gamble with American security.

So what’s going on? How has the party departed so far from the vision Priebus laid out just two years ago?

There are two factors at work. The first is that as the GOP embraces the theme of America’s precipitous decline under President Barack Obama, it’s jettisoning the crusading and optimistic foreign policy credo of George W. Bush. After over a decade of warfare in the Middle East, the notion that Washington can single-handedly transform Muslim societies in America’s image attracts derisory snorts on the right as well as the left. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, by contrast, is harkening back to the Bush legacy by endorsing a federal agency to disseminate “Judeo-Christian values” to Iran Russia, China and the Middle East . . . But many conservatives—both candidates and their constituents—are adopting a darker view of the Middle East, which is that it is irredeemable and thus poses a dire threat to the very existence of western civilization. 

The second reason goes back to the end of the Cold War. During the past century, the GOP focused on the internal subversive threat of communism and often depicted liberals as traitors. Now many on the right have seamlessly moved on to hunt for Muslim traitors as part of a third World War against a foreign enemy. They’ve been identifying domestic traitors and declaring a broader war against Islam for years, but have been, for the most part, speaking to deaf ears. . . . Now after Paris, the radical right is grabbing the opportunity to push their case to a wider audience.

Up until now, the most conspicuous example of the GOP’s persistent anti-Islam strain, of course, has been the campaign to depict Obama as a closet Muslim. . . . . The search for traitors has also been going inside the ranks of the GOP itself. Take the stalwart anti-tax activist Grover Norquist whose wife Samah Alrayyes is of Palestinian origin. Along with former George W. Bush administration official Suhail Khan, he has regularly been accused by former Reagan administration Defense Department official Frank Gaffney of being a secret Muslim Brotherhood agent.  . . . . egged on by the attacks in Paris, all this that was once on the fringes is now beginning to get wider circulation in the GOP. Today, mainstream conservative magazines and politicians are raising similar doubts about Islam and Muslims.

Yet a new nationwide Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that while public fears of a terrorist attack in America have increased, over three-quarters of the respondents rejected the idea of discriminating among refugees on the basis of religious faith.

Adding the demonization of Muslim-Americans to the GOP brand might well sabotage the party’s chances before it has even entered the national competition. . . . Specifically, it would do well to recall the postmortem that took place after the party suffered devastating losses in the 1953 midterm elections. Then as now the party was bitterly divided between its establishment wing and radical populists such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy that helped doom it at the polls.

Today, the party is flirting with national registries and a secret police to track down illegal immigrants. Will it really bang its drum about this in 2016?

2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Rules that NSA Telephone Data Collection Illegal

This blog has repeatedly maintained that the bulk collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency is illegal.  Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit confirmed this view by finding that the telephone medadata collection was illegal.  The scope of the now confirmed illegal domestic surveillance of Americans was first revealed by Edward Snowden who is now facing federal charges for in effect alerting the public to the fact that the NSA was breaking the law.  With the new court ruling, Congress will be forced to address the lawlessness of our national security agencies.  The infighting and partisanship should make for great spectator sport.  Here are highlights from Politico:

A court ruling Thursday against the National Security Agency’s phone data collection sparked a war of words between the Senate’s leaders over the future of the program — with little hope of a quick breakthrough.

With lawmakers facing a May 31 deadline to extend or reform parts of the PATRIOT Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid both refused to cede ground.

“According to the CIA, had these authorities been in place more than a decade ago, they would have likely prevented 9/11,” McConnell said on the floor of the chamber. He called soon-to-expire provisions of the PATRIOT Act “ideally suited for the terrorist threat we face in 2015.”

Reid, meantime, called for an immediate vote on the USA Freedom Act, a surveillance reform bill advancing in the House that would end the telephone metadata program.

“Instead of bringing the bipartisan NSA reform bill up for a vote, Sen. McConnell is trying to force the Senate to extend the bulk data collection practices that were ruled illegal today,” he said. “It would be the height of irresponsibility to extend these illegal spying powers when we could pass bipartisan reform into law instead.”

The court decision injected a new element of uncertainty into the already rancorous debate in Congress over whether to extend the PATRIOT Act provisions, including Section 215, used to justify the NSA’s bulk data collection, first revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. If Congress doesn’t act by May 31, the provisions will expire.

Reid’s office threw cold water on the idea of a short-term solution, saying he “will use the tools at my disposal to stop any attempt to extend these powers for any length of time without reforming them.”

Privacy zealots from both parties on Thursday applauded the court decision, saying it should grease the skids for lawmakers to approve the USA Freedom Act.

“Today’s federal appeals court ruling confirms what we’ve been saying all along: Bulk collection of data is not authorized under the law and is not accepted by the American people,” said Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who are all sponsors of the USA Freedom Act in the House.

National security hawks were quick to question the ruling’s durability, citing the potential for other courts to weigh in and the possibility of an appeal to the Supreme Court.

What the NSA has been doing would have been a dream come true for Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and other ruthless dictators.   It speaks volumes as to how much freedom of privacy American citizens have lost.  Currently, America ranks among the worse nations in the world when it comes to domestic surveillance and lack of personal privacy.