2020 Vice Presidential Selection

On Monday, NBC News reported

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., blasted Kamala Harris in a social media post Monday, calling her a “DEI vice president,” using the initialism for “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.

"The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president," Burchett said on X.

He also referred to Harris as "a DEI hire" in a brief interview Monday, telling CNN that during the 2020 campaign candidate Joe Biden said “he was going to hire a Black female for vice president.”

“What about white females? What about any other group?” Burchett added.

Biden said at a March 2020 Democratic debate that he’d choose a female running mate but did not mention race or ethnicity. Other top running mate contenders at the time included Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

On July 20, 2020 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had revealed

 he was considering four Black women to be his running mate, and has been receiving extensive vetting briefings about each potential candidate.

“I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and among them there are four Black women,” Biden told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on “The ReidOut.”

He said he is getting a “two-hour vetting report” on each of his potential picks, and that he and his team have gone through “about four candidates” so far. “Then, when I get all the vetting done of all the candidates, then I’m going to narrow the list, and then we’ll see. And then I’m going to have personal discussions with each of the candidates who are left and make a decision,” Biden said.

Biden is considering a broad tier of candidates to be his running mate, after pledging earlier this year to pick a woman for the job. CNN previously reported that Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Rep. Val Demings of Florida, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice and Rep. Karen Bass of California are among the Black women being considered.

Warren and Whitmer were on Biden's long list. However, everyone at the time understood that Biden's short list consisted of black women. Later in the day after Harris was selected, an NPR station explained

Four days after the election, then-House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said

that he had privately urged President-elect Joe Biden to pick a Black woman as his running mate before Biden chose Kamala Harris, America’s first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president-elect.

“Joe and I talked about it several times when he was trying to make his decision,” Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who’s the highest-ranking African American member of Congress, told CNN’s Dana Bash on Saturday. “He had said it would be a woman. And I don’t mind saying now, I said to him in private that I thought that a lot of the results would turn on whether that woman (would) be a Black woman.”

When Jim Clyburn talks, people listen. As an NPR station explained 

As the Harris criticisms ticked up in the weeks before the pick, Biden's campaign tried to diffuse them. "Ambitious women make history, change the world, and win. Our campaign is full of ambitious women going all out for Joe Biden," Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, tweeted in late July.

Ahead of Harris' selection, a group called We Have Her Back — which includes former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and leaders from Planned Parenthood and the National Women's Law Center — sent a letter to various media outlets demanding fair coverage of the vice presidential candidate.

"Women have been subject to stereotypes and tropes about qualifications, leadership, looks, relationships and experience. Those stereotypes are often amplified and weaponized for Black and Brown women," the letter said, urging the media to resist popular coverage tropes such as "likeability" and "electability" for candidates who happen to be women — analysis they said is hardly ever applied to male candidates.

"Black and Brown women" were the individuals valued by We Had Her Back and

Biden's pick came amid intense pressure from Democrats not only to pick a woman, which he promised to do in March, but also to pick a woman of color. That drumbeat began well before George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis police but intensified amid sustained protests across the country.

Harris will be the fourth woman on a major party's national ticket. All three women to run for president and vice president have lost: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in 2008 and Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.

Evidently, Harris had the inside track over the other black women because she had been a friend of the late Beau Biden when both were state Attorneys Genera. The selection of the California senator was hailed by progressives, liberals, and centrists across the country because she was a certain kind of woman- a black woman or a woman of color, depending upon the label.

Now Kamala Harris has been selected by Democratic power brokers as the party's presidential nominee in part because she is the sitting Vice President- a very unpopular Vice President but still with the advantage of holding that office. Curiously- though not particular surprisingly- she has been challenged by no one, despite Democratic officials and liberal/progressive pundits insisting that the Party has a "strong bench."

And why should she? In today's Democratic Party, Kamala Harris has an advantage which Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, even Gretchen Whitmer- each of whom has been mentioned as part of that formidable bench- doesn't have.

But that's not the point. Harris has had the advantage of serving under the incumbent Democratic President, Joe Biden, who endorsed her for the presidency to avoid all the nasty questions and controversy which inevitably would have arisen had he not done so. Quickly making her the presumptive presidential nominee was the obvious default position.

Not so, though, her selection in August, 2020 as Joe Biden's running mate, which is the move to which Representative Burchett was referring, and for which he is being criticized. Democratic honchos and mainstream journalists are hailing the ascension of Kamala Harris specifically and explicitly because she is a black woman (or black and Asian-American woman). If that wasn't an example of hiring someone because of principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, it' will be a surprise to everyone who celebrated the selection of Kamala Harris because she is black, female, and if victorious, would make "history."

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Victory is Theirs

News quiz: Which best describes the outcome for Fox News yesterday in the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems?

a) a victory

b) a huge victory

c) a phenomenal victory

A usually sober congressman, evidently not sober at the moment he hit send or "tweet":

I don’t think much about Tucker Carlson. But I guess he spends a lot of time thinking about me. So it’s pretty goddamn sweet that the day Tucker’s employer confessed that Tucker is a 24 karat liar Tucker goes on to spend his first post-confession show lying about me.

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) April 19, 2023

The press release in question reads

We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.

Fox News therein did not specify any particular host or which claims they were talking about. It did not admit that either the network and/or any particular host was responsible for the claims. They did not concede that any claim was knowingly inaccurate and merely acknowledged the court's rulings- not that they were accurate. Other than that, it was a true confession.

Jeremy Peters and Katie Robertson of The New York Times reported

Fox News abruptly agreed on Tuesday to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election, averting a lengthy and embarrassing trial just as a packed courtroom was seated in anticipation of hearing opening statements.

Particularly important to the American people

Fox News’s last-minute settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday earned banner coverage on every television news network but one: Fox News.

The $787.5 million settlement was covered only three times by Fox News in about four hours after the settlement became public, amounting to about six minutes of coverage. For most of the day, including during the network’s prime-time shows, hosts appeared to be focusing on other issues, like illegal immigration and Covid-19’s possible origins.

And the figurative bottom line is

Under the terms of the settlement, Fox News will not have to apologize or admit to spreading false claims on network programming, according to a person familiar with the details of the agreement.

The question thus arises as to why Dominion would have agreed to a settlement which allows Fox News to continue to do what it does best, manipulate its viewers.

CNN and MSNBC punditry, though inclusive of lawyers, journalists, and others, is dominated by lawyers, especially on matters related to the law.

Few of them will tell the truth. In some cases they are not lying but really, truly believe in their profession. In this case, several have said that the deal has now revealed that Fox News was lying. This is intentionally misleading because they are aware that consumers of MSNBC, CNN, or a national newspaper already knew the network was fabricating. Most viewers of Fox News, whose coverage of the matter was virtually nonexistent, didn't know and still don't. 

A welcome exception, Elie Mystal gets close to divulging the bias of civil litigators.

They had Fox by the absolute neck and let them go for 787.5 million dollars. WHICH IS A LOT OF MONEY for a corporation. But also not a lot of money when weighed against Fox's damage to American democracy.

I get it. And it's bullcrap. Two things can be true at the same time.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) April 18, 2023

 

If I were their lawyers, I probably would have told them to take the money. The preference of most civil litigators is to take the money and run. In some cases- not this one- there is a significant chance that the jury would rule against them if the case were taken to trial. 

But even in this case, in which there was little chance that the defendant would win at trial or that the decision would be overturned on appeal, there is serious pressure for the plaintiff to settle. Their attorneys get their cut and they get it relatively promptly. The plaintiff usually believes there is a principle involved, in this case that their business should not be irrepairably harmed  but that motivation can be overcome because a media company lies about it in order to promote a myth about a presidential election.

Understandably, however, their attorneys, who themselves were not slandered, don't care about viewers being intentionally misled. Given the common approach for litigants, it wouldn't be surprising if Dominion's attorneys convinced their client that the only real principle involved is that the offending party be penalized severely for damaging the company- and that the better part of a billion dollars would go a long way toward that.

So you can call it a "huge" or a "phenomenal" victory. But unless you're Representative Swalwell (not coincidentally, a lawyer) or take at their word some of the shills for the legal profession on cable news, you'll know it as a very good day indeed for Fox News and its parent company.

            

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Why They Call It A Cult

On Tuesday, Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, became another Republican to give public testimony to the select committee investigating the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.

There's a whole heartland full of people to whom Bowers truly spoke. Part of why his testimony was so powerful is BECAUSE he spoke to them in a way they might accept. Part of that come from acquiescing to ways where he is a lot like them.
In this case, it's GOOD he said that.

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) June 22, 2022

"Duty To Warn" is an anti-Trump "association of mental health professionals."  However (or therefore) DTW fails to understand that the message which can be reasonably taken form Bowers' testimony s that the President's actions were not so heinous that he wouldn't enthusiastically support him again as leader of the Free World (or as Chris Hayes unironically and inaccurately refers to him as then "the most powerful man in the world").

Bowers need not have endorsed Trump to spare himself the kind of harassment indirectly brought to him and his family by the guy to whom he was given a thumbs up. He could have reinforced the idea that he is a conservative Republican by saying that he wouldn't vote for Trump again but would happily support any other conservative Republican for President. If the ex-President were nominated for anther term, Bowers might have added, he would vote for any other conservative on the ballot. Anything but "run, Donald, run."

Noting Bowers' position on 2024 is not "a pointless hypothetical" and Chris Hayes explains why:

Rusty Bowers embodies a key part of this story because there are a few people, more than a handful, faced with a great moral test, who acted with integrity and ultimately that was what saved our democracy in the end.

But the other part of the story is that the Republican Party as a whole, as an institution, in American political life, is a continuing threat to the republic even if some of its members did the right thing when called to against great odds and great pressure. and Mr. Bowers summed that all up when after that testimony he gave, he told the Associated Press that despite everything that happened to him, his family, his community, and the assault on the capital on January 6, he would vote for Trump again. "If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I'd vote for him again," Bowers said "simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my mind it was great."

Maybe that's posturing but you know, I believe him. Mitch McConnell has said the same thing. I believe him. So has Bill Barr. I believe Bill Barr.

That's it in a nutshell, the problem that we all face. the distance between the genuine individual integrity that Rusty Bowers showed and the nature of this broader force that no one, not even Donald Trump, really fully controls. In the end, then  the whole is greater nd worse the the sum of its parts. The whole really is, right now, a mortal threat to our democracy.

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Breaking News- Joe Biden Is President!

Booking a liar can be useful for a journalistic purpose but Whoopi Goldberg had nothing of the kind in mind, as this tweeter points out:

The Kellyanne Conway segment on The View today was disgraceful. Whoopi gave a lying, conspiracy theorist, who still thinks the election was stolen..,airtime..airtime that put America back to the trump days. Shame on them at the View.

— Barb (@BarbL219) May 24, 2022

Oh, Sunny Hostin tried (video unavailable; thanks, Disney!). She asked (at 23:23) "Let me ask you this. Can you agree that Trump lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College and that there was a free and fair election?  Conway responded "I think it's pretty obvious that Joe Biden is the President. I can't believe we're still talking about this, respectfully."

Of course,we're still talking about it, and that's because people such as Kellyanne Conway will not admit that Joe Biden won a free and fair election. As other Republicans do periodically, Conway would say only "it's pretty obvious that Joe Biden is the President."  That is so obvious that even Liar-in-Chief Donald Trump acknowledges it with his condemnation of the President.

"Alternative facts" Conway continued " I write extensively in this book that I am the closest person to Donald Trump to tell him the earliest that he came up short." Not that he lost the election, mind you; rather, that he "came up short" among the votes which were counted.

If she is sincere, Conway can barely believe that her guy "came up short" because the election

broke my heart; I wanted him to get re-elected and I wish- I only wish that people who were in charge of the 2020 campaign with the $1.4 billion that they wasted had won outright and overwhelmingly.  He should have won huge. He had all these accomplishments. He's running against the guy who's stuck in the basement....

Hostin attempted a follow-up, which was drowned out by a couple of The View panelists speaking over the questioning along with a smattering of boos, enough that the host believed that Alternative Facts woman might not have the opportunity to continue her shtick.  Thus Goldberg admonished the crowd, remarking "listen, this is The View and this is her view, and she's talking about how she views and what she knows. Please don't boo her." She then went to break.

Kudos to Goldberg for the clever turn-of-a phrase with "this is The View and this is her view." But we don't know that Bowling Green massacre woman really believes this. She seems much too intelligent and much too dishonest.

Hostin tried twice more stating, as a question, to Conway "it's a year later, he's still lying" and "he's still lying."

But it was to no avail.  Conway wouldn't give a straight answer because host Goldberg had no interest in her audience getting an answer to Hostin's question(s). 

The segment featuring Alternative Facts woman did not have to be disgraceful.  Journalism could have been practiced had one of the panelists had her way and the host permitted it. Instead, it was simply "a lying, conspiracy theorist who thinks the election was stolen"- or won't acknowledge what she knows is reality.

.

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Replacement Theory And Trump Supporters

As displayed at the beginning of the recent Young Turks video below, three months ago Tucker Carlson wailed

The left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots....

The Democratic Party is not trying to replace or reduce the electorate, but instead to expand the electorate. Tucker continues

... with new people more obedient, voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say if that's true. So this matters on a bunch of different levels but on the most basic level, it's a voting rights question. If you change the population you dilute the political power of the people who live there so every time they import more voters, I become disenfranchised as a current voter....

Carlson does not lose the right to vote. His followers don't lose the right to vote. And what is happening is not importing more voters but allowing individuals constitutionally and legally eligible to vote to continue to vote.

In case you thought that Tucker was referring to race when he said "import" and "Third World," he wants you to know

So I don't understand why you don't understand this. I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement there- no, no, this is a voting rights question.

Carlson uses not a dog whistle but a blow to the head when he invokes "replacement" theory, a term and concept reinvigorated by author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement.” The French news network France 24 last year explained that.

Rooted in racist nationalist views, the great replacement theory purports that an elitist group is colluding against white French and European people to eventually replace them with non-Europeans from Africa and the Middle East, the majority of whom are Muslim. Renaud Camus often refers to this as “genocide by substitution”.

Notions of the theory date as far back as 1900, when the father of French nationalism Maurice Barrès spoke about a new population that would take over, triumph and “ruin our homeland”.

In an article for daily newspaper Le Journal, he wrote: “The name of France might well survive; the special character of our country would, however, be destroyed, and the people settled in our name and on our territory would be heading towards destinies contradictory to the destinies and needs of our land and our dead."

At the time Barrès was writing, “anti-Semitism was extremely mainstream”, says Dr. Aurelien Mondon, a senior lecturer of politics at Bath University in an interview with FRANCE 24. “Barrès spoke about the idea of racial purity,” he says, which is why the theory of population replacement became so popular among the Nazis, for example.

But after World War II, the French far right needed a new discourse to move back into the mainstream. Shifting away from biological racism towards cultural racism, the replacement theory gained ground in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and some French intellectuals were trying to find ways to move away from the margins,” Mondon says. Over the years, these ideas spread among the far right, which was becoming more and more mainstream in France, eventually paving the way for Camus to publish his book on the topic without being disregarded as too radical.

“Camus didn’t invent anything,” Mondon explains. “He put concepts together and coined the phrase, but his theory is part of a much broader context that contributed to the reshaping of the far right [in France.”

With the far-right Marie Le Pen currently posing a serious threat to Emmanuel Macron and democracy in France, the movement has newly taken on added importance. However, it helps make clearer the self-deception engaged in by Trump supporters who believe their hero won the 2020 presidential election. Sarah Longwell writes

I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.

For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why.

The anti-Trump Republican Longwell concludes

These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people. The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life. They hear from Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets—and from these sources they hear the same false claims repeated ad infinitum.

Now we are at the point where to be a Republican means to believe the Big Lie. And as long as Republicans leading the party keep promoting and indulging the Big Lie, that will continue to be the case. If I’ve learned anything from my focus groups, it’s that something doesn’t have to make sense for voters to believe it’s true.

As Longwell notes, the GOP does promote and indulge the "Big Lie" and these voters aren't unintelligent. Yet, they claim "flipped" votes overnight after polls closed; mail-in ballots as a "crock;" a "fixed" election; or  "something just doesn't feel right."  Scorned (or so they believe) for being Trump voters- and maybe for being racist- they won't be as forthright as Tucker Carlson, who has his own reasons for peddling racially divisive ideas.

Longwell concedes the Trump voters hear "false claims repeated ad infinitum" from "Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets."   Nonetheless, she maintains "these voters aren't bad or unintelligent people," and she's right about the latter.

But something is at work, and if it's not stupidity, Longwell needs to recognize that a person doesn't have to be a flat-out racist to be at least somewhat malevolent. If asked if liberals voted twice, immigrants voted illegally, or blacks were pressured by Democrats, many of her interviewees would have sounded a lot like Tucker Carlson. They are not helpless pawns, but have found a like-minded spokesman for their electoral interests.

 

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More Than A Temper Tantrum

In a piece in The New Republic, Donald Trump's outspoken niece, Mary L. Trump, recognizes the media

are so invested in the horse race that they fail repeatedly to inform Americans what is at stake—specifically, in this case, about the very real dangers facing American democracy—and instead speculate about whether a twice-impeached, two-time popular vote losing wannabe autocrat is going to run again in 2024. And if that is, indeed, the most important question they believe they should be asking, then perhaps they could, at the very least, explain why his doing so would be so dangerous to this country’s survival.

Ms. Trump refers to uncle Donald's statement on Wednesday in which he wrote

If we don't solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented) Republicans will not be voting in '22 or '24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.

Perhaps attributable to Ms. Trump's training as a clinical psychologist, she unfortunately believes that this

most recent threat, delivered via that Wednesday statement, is just another temper tantrum designed to coerce the Republican Party not simply to conduct “audits” in all states but to protect his terribly fragile ego. His compulsion to punish those who fail or refuse to support his delusions overwhelms his ability to think strategically. In order to get Donald to stop holding voters hostage in the next two elections, his party is going to have to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. At this point, it’s a sucker’s bet to assume they won’t at least try in order to assuage him. But trying won’t be enough for their perpetually enabled leader. They’ll have to succeed.

But the former President knows the math. In order to overturn the results of the 2020 election, results would have to be reversed in Pennsylvania and Michigan; or in Pennsylvania and Georgia; or in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada.  It would take more than one state. It's not going to happen, and he knows it.

ABC News' Chief Washington correspondent, though not specifically speculating on Trump's motive, notes the 2020 loser "helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms."

That's central to understanding the likely reason Trump is trying, by emphasizing "election fraud of 2020,"  to depress the vote in 2022. He knows the presidential election won't be overturned and promises Republicans therefore "will not be voting in '22 or '24."

If Republicans stay home, Democrats would retain control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. It's not as if Trump hasn't gone this route before.

In 2016 he successfully targeted blacks, evidently successfully, to discourage them from casting a vote for President that November. He attacked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the state of American culture and society generally, in his inauguration speech giving it the name "American carnage."  He called the US Senate races in January in Georgia "illegal and invalid," a charge which kept GOP turnout down, which consequently delivered victory to Democrats Warnock and Ossoff.

 

It's a strategy of discouraging voting, and it's in Trump's interests for Republicans to stay home in November of 2022, also. If Democrats thereby retain control of the House and the Senate, the ex-President would be well positioned in the primary contest and the general election to ridicule Democrats specifically and American government and life generally. 

Harry Truman was famously elected in 1948 by attacking the GOP "do nothing" Congress. But Democratic and Republican presidential candidates alike have profited handsomely from criticizing a congress controlled by the other party. For Donald Trump especially, that would be electoral gold. He is the favorite to win the nomination is 2024 but might need need a Democratic Congress to get elected, delusions and fragile ego aside.

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More Rational Than Assumed

Shortly after Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, The New York Times reported

Since Mr. Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon aides last week, Defense Department and other national security officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed

Fearful of Donald Trump’s actions in his final weeks as president, the United States’ top military officer twice called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the two nations would not suddenly go to war, a senior defense official said Tuesday after the conversations were described in excerpts from a forthcoming book....

According to the defense official, Milley’s message to Li on both occasions was one of reassurance. The official questioned suggestions that Milley told Li he would call him first, and instead said the chairman made the point that the United States was not going to suddenly attack China without any warning — whether it be through diplomatic, administrative or military channels.

Milley also spoke with a number of other chiefs of defense around the world in the days after the Jan. 6 riot, including military leaders from the United Kingdom, Russia and Pakistan. A readout of those calls in January referred to “several” other counterparts that he spoke to with similar messages of reassurance that the U.S. government was strong and in control.

The second call was meant to placate Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6. But the book reports that Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him: “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”

Trump responded Tuesday with a sharply worded statement dismissing Milley as a “Dumbass,” and insisting he never considered attacking China.

Although, considering the source, the latter statement is of dubious validity, it might not be far off.  At about the same time General Milley was worried about an attack upon mainland China, according to the Post, President Trump "asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting"

whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike.

So there was real fear that in the lame duck period, the President would launch a military strike upon one country or another.  Milley called Beijing after speaking to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reportedly had told him "He's crazy. You know he's crazy."

However, Trump did not order an attack upon Iran, mainland China, or any nation while he was intent on remaining in office by preventing certification of the electoral votes. On January 5, he had told Pence “No, no, no! You don't understand, Mike. You can do this. I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this”. On January 6 he rallied his supporters massed in Washington, using the word "peacefully" once and "fight" or "fighting" ten times.  He tweeted at Pence during the insurrection, describing it as a "time for extreme courage," for overturning the results of the election.

This is not how "crazy" behaves.  This is someone who accrued as much power as possible by shattering whatever laws and norms he could, monetized the presidency, and schemed to remain in power so he could escape the (otherwise) long arm of the law.  For the most part, he is a rational man and, far more thoroughly, an evil one.

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Forgetting That Terrorists Terrorize

Joseph R. Biden was elected President of the United States of America and Kamala Harris the nation's Vice-President on November 3, 2020. In statehouses around the country, on December 15 electors met and made official the Biden-Harris victory. And famously late in the night of January 6 and into the early morning of January 7, Congress certified the triumph of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris.

Therefore, all of the mainstream media- especially CNN and MSNBC- were correct when they told us definitively on November 6 that the election was over and decided   Yet, on January 20, as we do quadrennially on January 20, there will be a ton of money spent for an inauguration and related activities, thankfully curtailed this year because of the coronavirus (a last laugh for Donald Trump). Nonetheless, bread and circuses will be the order of the day and tens of millions of dollars spent to demonstrate visually what we all learned the first week of November, were reminded of the third week of December, and reminded again the first week of January..

Noting the increased security precautions for the January 20 event, former FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett tells ABC News

So my sense is, if we're going to have a conflict, a violent conflict, it's going to be in the outer perimeter between probably the DC police, maybe the Capitol Police, maybe the Park Police, depending on where it is. But it's not going to be the day, if you're a protestor, to try to do anything significant- nothing close, obviously, to last Wednesday.

It will be either nothing close to last Wednesday- or nothing at all.  And that is why this guy is right:

I’m no logistics guru and have no idea the ins and outs of how this works but kind of feel like these extra 5000 would have been better deployed 100 each to every state capitol building. https://t.co/VET5GvUG0x

— Danny Gold (@DGisSERIOUS) January 15, 2021

We have been boldly told for over a week now that the January 6 insurrectionists are "domestic terrorists" or more boldly told "terrorists." But if the threat posed by violent extremists is of a terrorist nature, the insurrectionists are far more likely to attack state capitols (or less likely, elsewhere) than the US Capitol.

That's the way it is with terrorists because they are intent on spreading fear, or terror. It's most effectively accomplished not by attacking lawmakers, believed to be malevolent, who are on the verge of certifying an election the perpetrators evidently believe was fraudulent.  They do so by attacking innocents, individuals or groups unrelated to the evil the terrorists perceive. And the attacks usually come where least expected.

Nevertheless, despite intelligence indicating that the capitals of all 50 states are vulnerable to attack on January 20, the federal government is pouring money into protecting the buildings and institutions in the capital city of Washington. Meanwhile, states have limited manpower and, even if they are not besieged and attacked, will be spending their limited revenues to protect their own buildings and citizens.

This is foolish if preventing terrorist attacks is the highest priority but an effective approach if perception is the highest priority. It's an effort to convince the world that we are, and remain, exceptional, whatever evidence of the past four years (and especially of the past year) indicates.

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Not The First Time

It didn't start yesterday.

George Will is accurate and being celebrated on left Twitter after noting "on Wednesday, the members of the Hawley-Cruz cohort will violate the oath of office in which they swore to defend the Constitution from enemies “foreign and domestic.” They are its most dangerous domestic enemies." And you can't beat (emphasis Will's) "Hawley — has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?"  (Hawley is right about $2,000 stimulus checks but the push by him and Sanders hasn't succeeded.)

Nonetheless, Will is trying to blow smoke up our posteriors when he advances the notion that there are three discrete parties in politics:

America’s three-party system — Democrats, Hawley-Cruz Republicans, and McConnell-Sasse Republicans — will continue to take shape on Wednesday. Watch how many of these Republican senators who might be seeking reelection in 2022 have the spine to side with the adults against Hawley-Cruz et al. and the Grassy Knollers among their constituents: John Boozman, Richard Burr, Mike Crapo, Charles E. Grassley, John Hoeven, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Richard C. Shelby, John Thune, Todd C. Young.

Today, they are assuring what was already assured, that Joe Biden will be inaugurated President on January 21, 2021. However, each one has sided with the authoritarian on nearly every vote in this regime. All of them delivered a stunning rebuke to the rule of law and American democracy when they ignored the overwhelming evidence against President Trump in order to vote not guilty at his impeachment trial.

During the impeachment hearing early this year, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned 

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can't. You can't trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change and you know it.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.

After the President was impeached, all 15 of those GOP senators, though (or maybe because) aware that Trump would cheat, then not go quietly if defeated for re-election, voted for acquittal.

This isn't the GOP's first rigging rodeo. CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer recalls

On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court authorized manual recounts in four counties and set a November 26th deadline. The next day, the Miami-Dade County canvassing board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet the deadline. To hunker down and avoid the media frenzy that had descended on Miami, the officials decided to move to a smaller room on the 19th floor so they could be closer to the ballot-scanning machine, according to an account in Salon.

But Republican operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers had organized a group of protesters to fly to Florida, and the mob of "50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties," as described by the Wall Street Journal, gathered in the high-rise building where the recount was taking place.

When New York Congressman John Sweeney, who was working for the Bush campaign, learned that the recount had been moved to another room, he ordered, the troops to "shut it down."

The protesters yelled and screamed, accusing the canvassers of trying to steal the election. The chants became fiercer and the demonstration increasingly raucous as they directly confronted the county officials. "Stop the count. Stop the fraud," they chanted.

Miami-Dade Democratic County Chairman Joe Geller bore the brunt of the protesters' ire. When someone handed him a sample ballot to test one of the voting machines, the protesters surrounded him and demand that he desist, accusing him of stealing ballots.

"This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me. At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death," he recalled. The police escorted Geller so that he could safely leave the building. Republican organizers denied that the situation ever became violent.

The strategy worked. Hours after the riot, the board decided to shut down its operations and the manual recount in Miami came to an end. (David Leahy, one member of the canvassing board, told the New York Times, "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process. That weighed heavy on our minds." But days later he denied the protests played a role in ending the manual recount.) The Supreme Court later handed the victory to George W. Bush, and a number of the participants in the Brooks Brothers Riot went on to serve in the administration and work in conservative politics.

Nor did the lying about the election process begin in 2020 as

“This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” recalled Geller, who is now a state legislator. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”

Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative who proudly admits to coordinating what he prefers to call the “Brooks Brothers Rebellion,” denies that things got violent.

“That’s all bulls---,” he told The Post. “There was no violence. There was no threatening behavior.”

Although senators Hawley and Cruz are straight-up authoritarians, their GOP colleagues chose to condone the President's crimes when they had the chance to shut them down.  Assaulting democracy is how Donald Trump rolls. But it's also how the Republican Party rolls.

 

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The Hope Of A New Day

Happy New Year and welcome to 2021!  In less than three weeks, President Donald Trump will be out of office and the country will become normal.

 

It's always good to start the new year off with  joke.  Here is a better one:

As we look ahead to 2021, I am filled with optimism that we can accomplish the good, hard, necessary work to confront the challenges we face and turn a new chapter in our nation’s history.

Wishing you and your loved ones a happy and healthy new year.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 1, 2021

Harris must have dipped, heavily, into the egg nog before concluding she is "filled with optimism" about the upcoming year.  In mid-2019, Ryan Grim reminded us of the effort at the tail end of 2012 by Democrats, a minority in the House of Representatives but majority in the Senate, to repeal the Bush tax cuts for thewealthy.  Senate Democrats had agreed to an extension, which

meant that the tax cuts were now expiring in 2012, and in order to repeal all of them — to go over what the media began calling the “fiscal cliff” — all Congress had to do was nothing. That, Harry Reid told me in an interview for my new book, was precisely his plan. “I wanted to go over the cliff,” said Reid, the Senate majority leader at the time. “I thought that would have been the best thing to do because the conversation would not have been about raising taxes, which it became, it would have been about lowering taxes.”

In other words, let all the rates go up, and then bargain with Republicans to reduce taxes just for the middle class and the poor. Then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell similarly knew the difficult position going over the cliff would put him in, and in preliminary talks with Reid, he agreed to let rates on people making more than $250,000 per year go back up, if to slightly lower levels to pre-Bush. (McConnell aides would later say that McConnell had not firmly conceded anything, and that negotiations weren’t finalized.)

McConnell had a strong sense that Reid intended to go over the cliff and put Republicans up against a wall. Told that Reid had since confirmed that he indeed wanted to go over, a Republican operative said he found the admission unsurprising. “That’s consistent with his body language at the time,” said the operative, who wasn’t authorized to talk on the record about the negotiations. “He knew he could blame it successfully on the hard right in the Republican Party. Negotiations had reached an impasse. It wasn’t just spin, Reid was ready to go over.”

Reid felt like he had successfully pushed McConnell to the brink, buoyed by House Speaker John Boehner’s inability to get his unruly conference to agree to anything. It was now Sunday, December 30, and Democrats only had to hold out until Tuesday to find themselves in a dramatically improved political position, as the dawning of the new year would mean the tax cuts expired and automatically reverted to pre-Bush levels. At that point, it would be Republicans left pleading for rate cuts.

In desperation, McConnell reached out directly to Biden, calling him on the phone and explaining that Reid was refusing to be reasonable. Over the course of the day, McConnell and Biden struck a deal. “Biden gave Republicans everything they wanted in exchange for fixing the fiscal cliff problem,” the GOP operative recalled.

It was a perfect twofer- selling out your own Party and the middle classes in one fell swoop, thus becoming the ideal presidential candidate for Democratic primary voters of South Carolina less than eight years later.

Now slightly more than eight years later, it is clear that the Republican Party has only been emboldened by timorousness of the kind characterizing the Obama-Biden Administration.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) December 31, 2020

Evidently filling the Vice President-elect with optimism are Republicans in one swing state, wherein

Eight of Pennsylvania’s nine Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have released a joint statement saying they will oppose the certification of Pennsylvania’s electors when Congress meets to count electoral votes on Jan. 6....

Seven of the eight lawmakers also were among the 126 signatories an amicus brief to a lawsuit, filed by Texas’ attorney general, that sought to throw out election results in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania. State Attorney General Josh Shapiro slammed the lawsuit as “seditious abuse"....

There has been no proof of voter fraud.

No proof, and not even any evidence. But Kamala Harris is filled with optimism and Joe Biden is reportedly "convinced we (Democrats and Republicans) can work together for the good of the nation," however he might define "good of the nation." As the post-election maneuvering to maneuver Joe Biden out of a victory continues, the incoming President may need a telescope to find more than a few Republicans who care about the national interest.

 

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Cunning

He's not as stupid as a lot of experts think. A political science professor:

Imagine if millions of Americans had received a stimulus check signed by Trump days before the election. Despite losing popular vote, he could have won via the Electoral College. It’s the irony of Trump, he’s so self-centered he routinely fails to advance his own self-interest.

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) December 22, 2020

There is no irony in it because, although President Trump didn't fight for a second stimulus, in September he

called on Congress to approve a fresh round of $1,200 stimulus checks for American families by reallocating $300 billion in unused coronavirus relief funds.

"We have $300 billion in an account that we didn't use. I would be willing to release it, subject to Congress, and use that as stimulus money and it would go right to the American people," Trump said Friday during a White House press briefing.

Although Trump said he considered redirecting the funds unilaterally, he was told he needed Congress' approval.

"It's money that we have — money that we built up and money that we haven’t spent, and I would love to give it to the American people as a very powerful stimulus," Trump said.

But McConnell didn't deliver. Steve M points to Axios' December 22 report that

President Trump lashed out at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday night for acknowledging Joe Biden won the election, sending a slide to Republican lawmakers taking credit for saving McConnell's career with a tweet and robocall....

"Sadly, Mitch forgot,” reads the top of the slide sent to Republican senators by Trump's personal assistant, written in red for emphasis. “He was the first one off the ship.”

... While both the message and its delivery targeted McConnell, they also carried a subtle warning to other Republicans who may follow suit as the president grasps at the last straws of his election-fraud claim.

Steve M notes that the day before this tweet, a liberal pollster had released a survey that showed incumbent McConnell twenty points ahead of Democratic challenger Amy McGrath. It's hard to believe that Trump was unaware of this finding when a mere day later, he would deliver an unequivocal and enthusiastic endorsement of McConnell.

Senator Mitch McConnell (@Team_Mitch) always delivers for the people of Kentucky, who will hopefully re-elect their powerful Senate Majority Leader. Mitch has helped us Make America Great Again, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement! #KYSEN https://t.co/Qtn1SUpPxy

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2020

Now that the election is over, the Senate Majority Leader helps craft a coronavirus bill framed as a stimulus to the economy, just in time to lift to victory David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and maintain a Senate majority. McConnell's deft legislative maneuver comes two weeks before the Senate runoff in Georgia- and seven weeks after the presidential election, when it could have lifted Trump to victory.

It is not surprising that Donald Trump would attack the Kentuckian, who after January 20 will become the most powerful Republican in the country and arguably its de facto leader. He is four weeks from becoming Trump's rival.

It's a crafty move, just as embracing candidate McConnell was crafty once Trump realized the former would surely win his race in Kentucky. It's also an illustration, however subtle, that for all of our suspicions that Donald Trump may be ignorant or ill, he may be the greatest example of the wisdom of  the phrase "crazy like a fox."

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Decisiveness Of SARS-CoV-2

Start with the truth and end with the truth, with the nonsense in the middle. Washington Post reporters

Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, Matt Viser and Michael Scherer have written a revealing post-mortem on the 2020 presidential campaign with the apt heading "How Trump's erratic behavior and failure on coronavirus doomed his re-election." In the following paragraph, they start and end with the truth, with nonsense in the middle:

But the president finally lost, aides and allies said, because of how he mismanaged the virus. He lost, they said, over the summer, when the virus didn’t go away as he promised; when racial unrest roiled the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death and protesters ran rampant through the streets; and when federal and local authorities gassed largely peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square across from the White House so Trump could stage a photo op. And he lost, they said, during a roughly three-week stretch from late September to mid-October, when an angry and brooding Trump heckled and interrupted his way through the first debate and then, several days later, announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Bless our liberal hearts that we comfort ourselves by believing there was in Trump's defeat a significant ideological component, that voters were so antagonized by urban violence that it upended the campaign of the right-wing racist. The Lafayette Square incident was a fiasco, demagoguery gone awry; however, there is little evidence that it had a significant impact on the election.

For all of Trump's bigoted values, the issue of urban violence receded into the background not only because the B/black L/lives M/matter protests declined in number but also with the campaign's failure to play its hand to the fullest. If it had understood that the election would be lost by the candidate who became the issue, it would have emphasized the following, here with a partisan, conservative, and misleading spin from The Federalist:

.... the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate was a huckster for a bail fund that sought to free violent criminals who were rioting on the streets of Minneapolis, and she was very effective at it. In the wake of deadly fires and looting, Harris asked her five million plus Twitter followers to donate money to bail out the “protesters” arrested in the riots.

Instead, and as the Post quartet writes

From the beginning, Trump and Biden made wildly different bets on the path to victory in 2020, taking divergent routes on nearly everything: from tone and message, to how to run their respective campaigns — and whether to wear a mask.....

Yet through it all, Trump kept returning to a faulty strategy of trying to wish, tweet and riff away the deadly virus. He forced his team to create an alternate reality in which he held massive rallies — supporters packed together, few sporting masks — and said that the coronavirus was only a modest threat and was going to disappear any day.

That was obviously going to prove a losing strategy as it made Donald Trump, rather than Joe Biden, the issue in the campaign.  Deaths from the coronavirus continued to mount and then...... Donald Trump got sick.

Trump's poll numbers significantly declined- more than I had expected- after that, probably for two reasons:

1) Trump had signaled many times that it was unnecessary to wear a mask and especially for him, the "Chosen One" and man of superior genes;

2) It represented a bad bet by the allegedly master deal maker, who gambled that Covid-19 would not intrude upon his recklessness.

Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairperson of the Republican National Committee (and obvious source for much of the Post story), said "shortly" before November 3 "if he loses, it's going to be because of covid." He did, and it was.

 

 

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For Some, The Time Is Right

It's not summer, but autumn. However, across much of the country- especially the upper Midwest and the Northeast- the weather is even better than in the summertime. Therefore, cue up  Martha Reeves:

Calling out around the world

Are you ready for a brand new beat

Summer's here and the time is right

For dancing in the street

They're dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)

Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street)

In New York City (dancing in the street)

This weekend they have decided to party hearty, hopefully understanding

- Heading into the election, Democrats were counting on record-breaking fundraising and a vulnerable GOP to flip a number of state legislatures in a crucial Census year. That would have allowed Democrats to redraw unfavorable congressional and state legislative maps that would influence election results for the next decade. Instead, it’s the Republicans that will do just that after Democrats seem poised to miss nearly all their statehouse targets. (Fortune)

- Speaker Nancy Pelosi has so far lost seven incumbents in Tuesday’s election, and that number could increase to about a dozen as more votes are tallied in New York, California and Utah. That would leave Democrats with a razor-thin margin — and an even more emboldened GOP minority — as the party looks to govern under a potential President Joe Biden.... The most likely scenario for Democrats is a net loss of between seven to 11 seats. (Politico)

- The potential for such far-reaching legislation all but vanished barely 24 hours later as Democrats saw their chances to reclaim the Senate slip away — and with it the ability to pass legislation on a party-line vote. Instead, House Democrats will be forced to make deals with a Senate that is still led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is likely to have little interest in legislation of the scope the Democrats were envisioning. (The Washington Post)

Democrats got beaten in state elections, lost seats in the House of Representatives after being expected to gain them, and are extremely likely to remain the minority in a Senate they were expected to gain control of. However, they did win back the presidency over a fellow whose empathy and love for Americans stricken by Covid-19 was encapsulated in "it is what it is."

Hence, the celebrations. House Democrats are attacking each other while there is dancing in the streets in big cities throughout the USA over Joe Biden's victory, House Democrats are attacking each other, diminishing what little chance Reverend Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossoff have in their upcoming Senate election runoff. If either of them loses, Mitch McConnell will remain in charge of the gov- uh, er, the Senate.  In what is an understatement and bullish- for Democrats- view of the political landscape, AP News on Thursday observed

And even if Trump were to ultimately lose, the closeness of the presidential contest raised the prospect that a Biden presidency would have difficulty enacting progressive priorities or quickly move past the cultural and partisan fissures of the Trump era.

In June, 2008, Barack Obama maintained his presidency would be seen as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Ocean rise didn't slow, the planet did not begin to heal, and now it's President-elect Joe Biden who "seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States."

Good luck with that. Fortunately, a large hunk of the celebrants realize it's not going to happen.  Unfortunately, Joe Biden may not, and unless Democrats begin to realize that control of state legislatures, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court are important political objectives, such celebrations in the future will constitute empty gestures.

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