The Abdication of Senate Republicans

McConnell - lead betrayer of the Constitution.

I've mentioned a book "Mortal Republic" which looks at the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of imperial rule in Rome.  A major player in the demise of the Roman Republic was the Roman Senate which ultimately abdicated it authority and gave way to Octavian - later Augustus - the first Roman emperor.  The Senator's motives 2000 years ago parallel what we are witnessing as the Republicans in the United States Senate throw away any allegiance to their oaths of office and telegraph to Donald Trump (and by way of precedent, future presidents) that government will be by presidential fiat and that there are no restraints on presidential power.  Avoiding a primary and re-election - and self-enrichment for those like Mitch McConnell - is all that matters in the short term, with there being no long term agenda.  Given Trump's extreme narcissism and desire to be an American equivalent to Vladimir Putin, this abdication of authority should be terrifying to every American of good will who believes in democracy.  Senate Republicans have made it clear that to them, the rule of law, facts, and morality mean absolutely nothing. All that matters is avoiding Trump's wrath and that of his increasingly ugly base of support in order to stay in power.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans betrayal of all their party once claimed to stand for.  Here are highlights: 

REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive [Trump] president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)  . . . . Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether [Trump] the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.

So cowed are most of those “lots and lots” of Republicans that few of them dared to go as far as Mr. Sasse. Some have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.

Americans who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’ complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder of that came Friday in a New York Times report about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.

[T]here will surely be more reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much as the bully in the White House.

Inspector General: Russia Investigation Wasn’t an FBI Witch Hunt

Like Hitler and the Nazi regime, Donald Trump works to use two propaganda efforts to subvert the truth and to play to his knuckle dragging base.  One is to attack the independent media. that endeavors to report the truth regardless of whether or not it is popular with Trump and what Hillary Clinton aptly referred to as the "deplorables" in his base.  As a recent piece in the New York Times noted: Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit reporters: “Lügenpresse.” . . . .  which in English is “fake news.”  The other method is to promote conspiracy theories and outright lies.  One of the latter is Trump's refrain that the entire Russiagate investigation was a "witch hunt" and therefore should not be believed by his cult- like true believers. With the release of the Inspector General report, the Trump "witch hunt" mantra against the FBI suffered a major blow - much to the chagrin of Attorney General William Barr, perhaps, in my opinion, one of the most corrupt individuals to ever serve as Attorney General. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the inspector general report. Here are article excerpts:

Throughout both the Mueller and the subsequent House Intelligence Committee investigations of Trump campaign and administration dealings with foreign governments, [Trump's] the president’s allies have relentlessly promoted a counter-narrative full of lurid conspiracy theories. They all date back to an alleged “deep state” plot in 2016 to keep Trump from becoming president by using allegations allegedly planted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to accuse his campaign of colluding with Russia.

A long-awaited Department of Justice report in response to these claims from Inspector General Michael Horowitz has largely exonerated the FBI of charges of political bias, while criticizing the reliance on the so-called Steele Dossier in the agency’s application for a wiretap on one key Trump operative, foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Horowitz’s boss Attorney General William Barr is not happy about it, according to the Washington Examiner . . . . Barr made clear his displeasure with Monday’s report almost as soon as it came out.

While Horowitz suggested that the wiretap on Page was not properly secured, he views that sideshow as irrelevant to the bigger investigation and does not think it represents some sort of coordinated effort to invent a scandal designed to damage Trump’s campaign, as Politico explains in its takeaways from the IG report: . . . Horowitz found that the Crossfire Hurricane team — the codename agents gave to the Russia inquiry — did not receive Steele’s election reporting materials until after the investigation had already been opened using information about Papadopoulos the team received from a foreign ally.

Horowitz also found that the decision to pursue an investigation was above the pay grades of the “FBI Lovebirds” Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the key figures in the right-wing counter-narrative whose emails to each other displayed hostility to Trump.

Horowitz will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee later this week to discuss his findings, and you can be sure Republicans will make every effort to link his criticisms of the pre-Trump Justice Department and FBI to the “witch hunt” they are alleging during impeachment proceedings currently in the hands of the House Judiciary Committee. But it looks like slim pickings for those claiming that candidate or President Trump is an innocent victim of partisan shenanigans.

Mohammed bin Salman: America's New Saddam Hussein

Maddeningly, America rarely seems to learn from past mistakes and seems doomed to repeat past fiascoes.  The Vietnam War should have been a start warning for the USA not to launch the Iraq War, yet war mongers like Dick Cheney - who had avoided service in Vietnam himself - blindly pushed the hapless George W. Bush to launch yet another disastrous war that has squandered trillions of dollars and cost countless lives not to mention setting the stage for the disaster that is today's Middle East.  A column in the Washington Post looks at another disaster that the USA and most western nations are repeating and draws the parallels between the West's earl support of Saddam Hussein and Saudia Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman.  Simply having a perceived common enemy does NOT make one your ally, especially if that alliance requires deliberate blindness to human rights abuses and atrocities. Today's supposed expediency sets the stage for tomorrow's nightmare.  Here are column highlights:

Once upon a time, there was a brutal and reckless dictator of an oil-rich Arab country who, despite his well-documented excesses, was stroked and supported by the United States and other Western governments. His crimes were terrible, went the rationale, but he was modernizing his country and he was holding the line against Islamist jihadism and Iran. Anyway, there was probably no alternative.

The ruler heard that message. He concluded that, as long as he kept supplying oil and opposing Iran, he was free to butcher his opponents and bully his neighbors.

His name, of course, was Saddam Hussein. The bet made on him by the United States and its allies directly led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and from there to the “endless wars” in the Middle East that are now almost universally bemoaned by the West’s foreign policy establishment.

And yet, 30 years later, those mandarins and the politicians they report to are blindly repeating the mistake. They are saying they abhor the blatant crimes of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, including the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the torture and imprisonment of women seeking greater rights. They see his bombing campaign in Yemen as a war-crime-ridden disaster.

Yet, at the summit of the Group of 20 in Osaka, Japan, a week ago, they cheerfully clustered around him. Not just President Trump but also prime ministers and presidents from the big European democracies. And not just them but also the leaders of India, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have received Mohammed bin Salman warmly in the past six months.

Ask them why, and you get an all-too-familiar response: The crown prince, who is also known as MBS, is the best chance for modernization in Saudi Arabia. He’s fighting the Islamist extremists, and he’s allied with us and with Israel against Iran. The alternatives to him are worse.

[U.N. special investigator] Callamard conducted a five-month investigation into Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last October. On June 19, Callamard released a powerful report making the case that “Mr. Khashoggi has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia responsible” — and that Mohammed bin Salman was almost certainly complicit in the operation and in its subsequent coverup.

Callamard’s report called for a halt to the closed Saudi trial of 11 lower-level operatives blamed for the murder, and for an independent investigation by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, or the FBI. The report also called for sanctions to be imposed on Mohammed bin Salman and his foreign assets “until and unless evidence is provided and corroborated that he carries no responsibility for this execution.”

At the G-20 summit, Trump met Mohammed bin Salman for breakfast and declared he was doing “a spectacular job.” Later, [Trump] the president answered a question about Khashoggi by saying there was no “finger directly” pointing at the crown prince — though both Callamard’s report and a CIA assessment have done just that.

Trump notwithstanding, she is counting on justice to come from the United States. “I think this is the only place where political accountability is going to work,” she said during a meeting at The Post.

There is still some hope of that: Legislation pending in the House would require the director of national intelligence to report on those responsible for the Khashoggi murder, and would require a visa ban to be applied to them. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to consider other bills this week. But as long as Trump is president, Mohammed bin Salman is unlikely to face direct U.S. sanction . . .

Like Saddam Hussein before him, Mohammed bin Salman has concluded that he is immune. Women he ordered tortured are still in prison. His planes are still bombing Yemen. And he is taking the first steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Because Western governments do not stop him now, they will have to do it later — when the cost is likely to be far higher.

Those who do not know history - or, in this case, who choose to ignore it - are doomed to repeat it, often with even worse consequences down the road.  Saudi Arabia is NOT America's ally and MBS is no friend to decent moral people. 

The Danger of Forgetting the Lessons of History

One of the biggest failings of the American public education system is its failure to continue to teach civics - how government is supposed to work - and history/geography.  This failure plays into extremists and would be autocrats by allowing them to lie with impunity about the past - e.g., the Christofascist myth that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation" - and set the stage for a repeat of some of the worst disasters visited on man kind during the 20th century.  WWI ad WWII both were the result of unrestrained nationalism and many millions civilians of died as a result. With WWII, we saw an even more dangerous phenomenon as the Nazis refined a method to overthrow democracy and utilize hate and demonizing minorities to gain power and fool citizens into acting against their own true interest,  Again, millions died as a result.  Now, with a would be dictator occupying the White House whose main message is one of hate and division and who has proven that morality and decency mean noting to him, America seems poised to repeat not only mistakes from the past in its own history but to also condone the ugliest aspects of the 1930's and 1940's. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are largely clueless as to the dangerous precedents being repeated.  Former Republican Michael Gerson laments the situation in a column.  Here are highlights:

ONE OF THE worst things about our awful political moment is its historical forgetfulness. Many Europeans seem to have forgotten where chauvinistic nationalism and the demonization of minorities can lead. Many Americans seem to have forgotten that a foreign policy of America First allowed international malignancies to grow that made war inevitable and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. And many in Western countries seem to have forgotten the difficult, desperate project of building a moral and legal structure around the principle of human dignity in the aftermath of World War II.

Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and the U.S. are both atrocities and reminders. They ring with distant but unmistakable echoes of the nightmarish events of the 1930s and 1940s: the racial purity laws, the economic indignities, the despairing suicides, the liquidation of the disabled, the digging up of Jewish graves in cemeteries, the deportations, the ghettos, the shootings in batch after batch, the pits of corpses, the emptied orphanages, the terrified walk to the gas chamber.

It is worth trying to recall how shocking these events were to the conscience of the world. The institutions of the modern state — bureaucracy, propaganda, military power —had been harnessed to the purposes of sadism and mass murder. This indicted a highly sophisticated and educated European society — along with the very idea of sophistication and education as brakes on evil. It indicted other nations who did little, even after the crimes became obvious.

But the response was ultimately an idealistic one. The Allies would institute a new order of justice and human rights. The Tokyo tribunals and the Nuremberg trials were both legal and moral enterprises. The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said he would not seek convictions for "mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt … that involves moral as well as legal wrong. … It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar."

The moral response to World War II-era crimes found expression in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which speaks of "inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights."

[T]he most urgent, comprehensive attack on the universality of human rights now comes from the nativist right. In places such as Hungary, Romania, Germany, Poland and the United States, politicians are attempting to define nationality based on the dehumanization of cultural outsiders — Muslims, migrants and refugees. This type of politics is dangerous wherever it is practiced. In the United States, it also requires the renunciation of responsibilities rooted in the post-war acceptance of human dignity as the basis of global order and peace.

This is the cost of historical amnesia — the cost of electing an American president who is both ignorant of and indifferent toward the lessons of the past century, or any century. A president who always turns, by feral instinct, to an organizing message of bigotry and exclusion. A president who is throwing away an inheritance he does not value and unleashing forces that can easily move beyond control.

Be very afraid.  History can repeat itself when the majority of the public forgets the lessons of the past and how horrors were allowed to happen.  America's mass amnesia is frightening.  The 2018 midterms may yet prove to have put a break on Trump's excesses, but much more needs to be done.

We Need to Recall America's Past Failings and Remember the Pittsburgh Dead

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What Happened the Last Time Republicans Had a Majority This Huge?

Despite the fact that voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections was the lowest in 72 years, some in the Republican Party - generally the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP - incredibly see themselves as having a "mandate" to proceed with their agenda of doing everything to undermine Barack Obama and batshitery in general.  Call it hubris, detachment from objective reality or some thing else, the GOP might do well to remember some accurate history (something the GOP seems to have difficulty doing) so as to avoid the mistakes of 86 years ago.  A piece in Politico looks at that needed history lesson.  Here are excerpts:

Since last week, many Republicans have been feeling singularly nostalgic for November 1928, and with good reason. It’s the last time that the party won such commanding majorities in the House of Representatives while also dominating the Senate. And, let’s face it, 1928 was a good time.

America was rich—or so it seemed. Charles Lindbergh was on the cover of Time. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. . . . . and presidential nominee Herbert Hoover gave his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, a shellacking worthy of the history books.

The key takeaway: It’s been a really, really long time since Republicans have owned Capitol Hill as they do now.

But victory can be a fleeting thing. In 1928, Republicans won 270 seats in the House. They were on top of the world. Two years later, they narrowly lost their majority. Two years after that, in 1932, their caucus shrunk to 117 members and the number of Republican-held seats in the Senate fell to just 36. To borrow the title of a popular 1929 novel (which had nothing whatsoever to do with American politics): Goodbye to all that.

A surface explanation for the quick rise and fall of the GOP House majority of 1928 is the Great Depression. 

But what if the Republicans of 1928 owed their demise to a more fundamental force? What if it was demography, not economics, that truly killed the elephant?

In fact, the Great Depression was just one factor in the GOP’s stunning reversal of fortune, and in the 1930 cycle that saw Republicans lose their commanding House majority it was probably a minor factor.

[T]hey also failed to appreciate and prepare for a long-building trend—the rise of a new urban majority comprised of over 14 million immigrants, and many millions more of their children. Democrats did see the trend, and they built a majority that lasted half a century.

The lesson for President Obama and the Democrats is to go big—very, very big—on immigration reform. Like the New Dealers, today’s Democrats have a unique opportunity to build a majority coalition that dominates American politics well into the century.

For the 1928 GOP House majority, victory was unusually short-lived. About one in five GOP House members elected in the Hoover landslide served little more than a year and a half before losing their seats in November 1930.

[I]t was also an era of massive wealth and income inequality. In these days before the emergence of the safety net—before unemployment and disability insurance—most industrial workers expected to be without work for several months of each year. For farm workers, the entire decade was particularly unforgiving, as a combination of domestic over-production and foreign competition drove down crop prices precipitously.

In hindsight, we know that voters in November 1930 were standing on the edge of a deep canyon. But in the moment, hard times struck many Americans as a normal, cyclical part of their existence.

Unsurprisingly, then, many House and local races in 1930 hinged more on cultural issues—especially on Prohibition, which in many districts set “wet” Democrats against “dry” Republicans—than economic ones.

Then as now, the GOP refused to face the reality that the world and the nation were changing.  If we are lucky, we will see the same fate overtake the GOP as that which occurred in 1930 and 1932.  I for one will be hoping that history repeats itself.