Tag Archives: Dana Milbank

Republicans Are The Monster Hiding Under The Bed

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2020, Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary

… Hiding under the bed in plain sight for any whose eyes are actually open.  When even Mitch McConnell is fed up, you know it’s gone from bad to worse … just as we knew it would.  There was a time that politicians at least pretended to serve the nation and its people, but that time has passed for the Republican Party.

Kevin McCarthy joins the insurrection

By Dana Milbank

10 March 2023

Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.

It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.

The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?

“I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that,” McCarthy told The Post.

The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was “mostly peaceful”?

“I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy asserted.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive” portrayal of the insurrection?

You guessed it. McCarthy “didn’t see” McConnell do that.

The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.

How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?

“I didn’t watch it,” McCarthy said.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a “normal tourist visit”?

“I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said,” quoth McCarthy, and “I didn’t see it.”

When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?

“I haven’t read through it.”

Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state “find” enough votes to overturn the election results?

“I have to hear it first.”

Trump telling four congresswomen of color (three of them U.S.-born) to “go back” where they came from, prompting chants of “send her back” among his rallygoers?

“I didn’t get to see the rally.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with shouts and slander just off the House floor?

“I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened.”

Trump’s ludicrous allegation that former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered a staffer?

“I don’t quite know about the subject itself. I don’t know this subject well.”

Trump’s scandalous claim that Democrats inflated the death toll from a hurricane in Puerto Rico to “make me look as bad as possible”?

“I haven’t read it yet,” McCarthy pleaded.

At best, McCarthy’s willful cluelessness is just a dodge. But this week, McCarthy’s see-no-evil approach was just plain evil.

After Carlson aired his phony portrayal of the insurrection, several Republicans finally spoke up about Fox News’s lies: “Inexcusable and bull—-” (Sen. Thom Tillis, N.C.), “whitewashing” (Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C.), “dangerous and disgusting” (Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah).

Then there was McCarthy, questioned by reporters just outside the speaker’s office, which the supposedly “peaceful” insurrectionists had ransacked that terrible day.

“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” asked CNN’s Manu Raju.

“No,” McCarthy replied, adding some gibberish about “transparency” (which is the very opposite of Carlson’s fabrication).

“Do you agree with his portrayal of what happened that day?” Raju pressed.

“Look,” McCarthy said. “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”

Talk about dangerous and disgusting. Given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism. In doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold. McCarthy’s leadership team even endorsed Carlson’s fakery, promoting a link to the segment from the House GOP conference’s official Twitter account with four alarm emojis and a “MUST WATCH” recommendation.

Of course, were McCarthy to turn against Fox News, the speaker, weakened by the promises he made to secure the speakership, would be swiftly replaced by the likes of GOP caucus chair Elise Stefanik of New York (who claimed Carlson’s propaganda “demolished” the “Democrats’ dishonest narrative” about Jan. 6), or Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), who went on Carlson’s show to congratulate him on his deception.

So McCarthy sells out democracy to preserve his title. He gave the security footage to Carlson in the first place because he promised that to the far-right Republicans denying him the speakership during his 15-ballot quinceañera in January.

Even Fox Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has expressed some regret over the network’s role in perpetrating Trump’s “big lie,” saying it should have been “stronger in denouncing it.” The internal documents exposed in the Dominion lawsuit show beyond any doubt that Fox News hosts knew the truth about the 2020 election and yet encouraged viewers night after night to believe Trump’s lies.

Those hosts continue to deceive and manipulate viewers nightly. The same day Carlson aired his Jan. 6 fabrication, Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that he would have been willing to let Vladimir Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine. But when Hannity played excerpts of the interview on Fox News, the network edited out Trump’s proposed surrender.

The latest Fox News lies have proven too much for the Senate GOP leader. Though McConnell has enabled Trump at crucial moments, he said at a news conference this week that it was “a mistake” for Fox News to portray the insurrection “in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks.”

Yet McCarthy continues to put himself before his country. In just two months on the job, McCarthy “already … has done more than any party leader in Congress to enable the spread of Donald Trump’s Big Lie,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, charged on the Senate floor this week. The speaker, he said, “has made our democracy weaker.”

And McCarthy isn’t finished with his depredations. Greene, given a position of influence and respectability by the speaker, is launching a probe, complete with a field trip to a D.C. jail, into the “inhumane treatment” allegedly suffered by the accused insurrectionists awaiting trial. McCarthy has also given the green light to a new probe designed to challenge the conclusions of the Jan. 6 committee. The man who will lead that panel, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), declared this week that Americans “didn’t see the other side” of the insurrection.

“I think the truth is going to be somewhere between the violent videos and the supposedly peaceful actions there,” he said.

No. The only truth is that Jan. 6 was a violent attack on the seat of American democracy. There was nothing peaceful about an armed insurrection attempting to overturn an election — even if some people there that day weren’t themselves violent.

But that truth — and this democracy — are threatened by a dangerously weak speaker of the House, who has concluded that the only way to preserve his own power is to support Fox News in its sabotage of this country.

McCarthy’s QAnon Committee

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2022, Political commentary

It took the Republicans a few days to figure out how to manipulate Kevin McCarthy and get what they wanted in exchange for giving him the position he has aspired to for years, perhaps decades, but now they’re all saddled up and rarin’ to go!  We knew they planned committees to perform pointless and laughable “investigations” that will amount to naught but a waste of time and money at the end of the day, and they are off to a great start on that.  Washington Post writer Dana Milbank tells us about how closely the Republican Weaponization Committee resembles a QAnon convention in his latest piece.  It is a bit long, but I felt it was all important to give us a clear picture of what we are paying these people to do … or rather, not to do.

Yes, weaponization committee. We are all out to get you.

By Dana Milbank

10 February 2023

One thing is clear after Thursday’s first hearing of the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”: The weaponization panel’s weapon of choice will be the blunderbuss.

I don’t want to be conspiratorial about it, but House Republicans somehow turned Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Judiciary Committee hearing room, into the main ballroom of a QAnon convention. The witnesses — including world-class conspiracy purveyors Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Ivermectin) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-Ukraine bioweapons labs) — might as well have been auditioning to guest-host “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

It is possible that, by random chance, one of the witnesses may have said something that is factually true, but any pellet of accuracy was lost amid all the errant slugs that ricocheted crazily out of their muzzles.

They revisited the “Russian collusion hoax” perpetrated by the “fake dossier,” Fusion GPS, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. They conjured an “engineered” Trump impeachment and a “coordinated effort” to “sabotage any public revelation of Hunter Biden’s laptop.” They alleged maltreatment of Jan. 6 insurrectionists and suggested that embedded federal agents provoked the crowd to attack the Capitol. They went back a decade to revive the debunked charge that a politically motivated Obama administration sicced the IRS on tea party groups.

They imagined that the U.S. government funded the creation of the coronavirus, that the World Health Organization has been “captured by the Chinese government,” and that doctors have been wrongly “vilified” for treating the virus with hydroxychloroquine and other bogus treatments. They fantasized about a government coverup of harms caused by coronavirus vaccines. They imagined that ordinary people are being labeled “domestic terrorists” for asking questions at school board meetings or for flying the Betsy Ross flag.

Above all, the witnesses testified to their own victimhood. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) recited a long list of Democratic colleagues who are out to get him as part of a “triad” that also involves partisan journalists and the FBI. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party for Fox News after a failed presidential campaign, expressed her outrage that Hillary Clinton said mean things about her and that Mitt Romney made “baseless accusations of treason.” (Apparently, the senator from Utah and 2012 Republican presidential nominee is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy.)

“RonAnon” Johnson testified about a conspiracy so huge it includes “most members of the mainstream media, Big Tech, social media giants, global institutions and foundations, Democrat Party operatives and elected officials,” all working “in concert” with “corrupt individuals within federal agencies” to “defeat their political opponents and promote left-wing ideology and government control over our lives.”

You’ve caught us red-handed, senator! In fact, the weaponization committee needs only one more thing to complete its work: a scintilla of evidence.

White nationalists get a seat on the dais

Rep. Paul Gosar just won’t stop saluting those white nationalists.

The Arizona Republican has dined with them, traveled with them, spoken at their conferences, defended them on social media and promoted their racist themes. He lost his committee assignments in 2021 when he posted a cartoon video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a Latina.

But House Republican leaders, in their wisdom, restored Gosar’s committee status, giving him a seat on the House Oversight Committee. And Gosar this week repaid their confidence in him — by using one of the very first hearings of the committee to promote white nationalism.

At a hearing Tuesday on border security, Gosar declared that President Biden has “a plan … to deliberately open our borders and cede power to the cartels,” and thereby create chaos. “What is the answer to this mess for Biden and the Democrats?” he asked. “More big brother? More control? Even changing our culture?”

That is the very definition of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory: that the left is deliberately importing immigrants to replace White people and White culture.

As it happens, Democrats on the committee anticipated this. At the hearing’s start, they tweeted a warning about Republican lawmakers “who are using today’s hearing to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories.” The tweet linked to previous expressions of great replacement sentiments by panel Republicans, including Chairman James Comer of Kentucky (who said Democrats encourage illegal immigration as “part of their social equality campaign to fundamentally change America”) and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania (who claimed “we’re replacing … native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation”).

Republicans saw red after the Democrats’ mention of white nationalism — “offensive” and “inflammatory” was the view of Rep. Glenn Grothman (Wis.) — but then proceeded to validate the accusation.

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) both decried the migrant “invasion” of the country.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) informed the committee who the “million gotaways” — migrants who avoided capture the past two years — are: “stout young men … wearing camouflage, rolling hard … they’re carrying backpacks, they work for the drug cartels.”

And Republican after Republican claimed the Biden administration has conspired to endanger Americans with an “open border” policy.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials testifying at the hearing played it straight. Yes, they are overwhelmed by the number of migrants, and they need more agents. No, a border wall isn’t a panacea.

Perry repeatedly demanded to know “what changed” since the Trump administration ended to cause such a flood of migration. He was clearly fishing for the officials to blame Biden.

But John Modlin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, testified that the real cause was disinformation. Apprehended migrants, he said, primarily tell border agents that they heard the border “was open.” Said Modlin: “All it takes is a few people to say the right words.”

Now where would migrants get the false impression that the United States has an open border? Hmm.

McCarthy blames Biden for House Republicans’ State of the Union hooliganism

Fourteen years ago, I was in the House chamber when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shocked the world by shouting two words at President Barack Obama during an address to Congress: “You lie!” In the outcry that followed, House Republican leaders demanded Wilson apologize, which he did, calling the White House and issuing a public statement offering “sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

In retrospect, the episode looks almost quaint. Wilson might as well have been operating under Emily Post’s rules of etiquette compared with the boorishness of his Republican colleagues at Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reportedly asked Biden in advance not to use the phrase “extreme MAGA Republicans,” and Biden honored the request. The president’s goodwill didn’t end there. He opened by congratulating McCarthy and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He used the word “together” 20 times in the speech, hailing bipartisan achievements, offering to resolve the debt-ceiling standoff (“let’s sit down together and discuss our mutual plans together”) and closing with a rallying cry: “We’re the United States of America, and there’s nothing — nothing — beyond our capacity if we do it together.”

Republicans answered him with hooliganism and obscenity. Greene shouted “Liar!” at the president — not once, as Wilson had done, but over and over. As Biden talked about solving the debt standoff together, a woman in Greene’s vicinity (Politico identified her as Greene) shouted “bulls—!” at Biden. Some closer to the front — GOP Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) among them — whipped their heads around in surprise.

House Republicans by the dozens groaned, booed, laughed, jeered, waved their hands dismissively at the president and pointed their thumbs down — ignoring an attempt by McCarthy, seated behind Biden, to shush them. Several shouted “secure the border!” One shouted at Biden that fentanyl deaths are “your fault.” Rep. Ronny Jackson (Tex.) noisily chewed gum, Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.) interrupted Biden with a series of taunts (“don’t say it!”), Boebert shook her head in disgust, others shared laughs about messages on their phone screens, and, in the middle of the mayhem, GOP leaders Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer and Elise Stefanik sat stone-faced.

Decorum has broken down before during presidential addresses. Justice Samuel Alito shook his head and said “not true” during an Obama speech. Democrats groaned and booed during a Trump speech, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up her text after Trump finished. Trump called Democrats “treasonous” for failing to applaud him sufficiently.

If holding applause is treason, one can only imagine what capital offenses Republicans committed Tuesday night. And the shouting didn’t end on the House floor.

In Statuary Hall after the speech, I caught up with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.), who had been sitting next to Greene:

“He lied about the economy! He lied about the deficit! He lied about us cutting Medicare and Social Security. … He lied about the labor shortage! … He lied about burger joints! … He lied about policing. … He lied about Mr. Pelosi.”

“So overall, you liked it?” I asked Fallon.

“I loved the ending, because it was over,” Fallon replied, soon resuming his catalogue: “He said a couple of things like we’re going to work together. He’s lying there, too!”

Fallon shared with me and Joseph Morton of the Dallas Morning News three pages of scribbled notes he took during the address. Among his observations: Biden is a “SNAKE OIL SALESMAN” (and, of course, a “LIAR”) who “MUMBLES” (Fallon thought this evidence of a “health issue”), engages in “climate alarmism” and “CLASS WARFARE” and is apparently a “a communist — accuse him of central control.”

Even some Republicans thought Biden deserved a more “respectful” audience for his “cordial” speech, as Rep. Ryan Zinke (Mont.) told us. But it requires leadership to keep the hooligans in line — and House Republicans don’t have that. McCarthy went on Fox News on Wednesday and blamed the Republicans’ outbursts on Biden. “Well, the president was trying to goad the members, and the members are passionate about it,” the speaker said.

This is how McCarthy repays Biden’s goodwill? It’s going to be a long couple of years.

Probe of Hunter Biden’s laptop already needs a reboot

Rep. James Comer is rapidly establishing himself as the Chief Inspector Dreyfus of the 118th Congress.

First, the newly installed chairman of the House Oversight Committee said he would investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents from his time as vice president, but not President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Why? “The president has the authority to declassify documents,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Jan. 15. “The vice president does not.”

That rationale blew up a few days later, when it emerged that former vice president Mike Pence also mishandled classified documents. So Comer approached reporters in the Capitol basement on Jan. 31 in an attempt to establish a new justification for probing Biden but not Trump. But Comer succeeded only in confusing himself. “We’re very concerned about who had access to Pence’s documents,” he said — then stopped. “I said Pence. I’m sorry. Let me start all over. We’re very concerned about who had access to Biden’s documents.” Moments later, he added: “I want to be very clear, I was talking about Biden.”

Comer tried again this week, returning to CNN for an interview with Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday. This time, he said he wasn’t looking into Trump’s documents because “there’s a special counsel looking into everything at Mar-a-Lago.”

Collins pointed out that “there’s a special counsel looking into Biden as well.”

Comer, trapped, grasped for a lifeline. “Pardon me for not having as much confidence in this special counsel appointed by [Attorney General] Merrick Garland on Joe Biden.”

Collins checked him again: “But he appointed the special counsel into Trump as well.”

“I’m against both special counsels!” blurted out Comer, contradicting his latest rationale, expressed mere seconds earlier, for probing Biden but not Trump.

Comer is not bound by reason — even his own. Last week, he speculated on Fox News that the Chinese spy balloon might contain bioweapons from Wuhan — speculation he later admitted was based on “no evidence.” Yet he seems sensitive to the impression that he sounds nutty. He recently protested that “I’m sincere about trying to do the right thing.” His evidence: He didn’t vote to overthrow the 2020 election.

Baby steps, Mr. Chairman.

This week, after giving white nationalism a platform, he led his committee the following day into a doomed attempt to prove that the FBI and the Biden campaign colluded with Twitter “to suppress and delegitimize information contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop about the Biden family’s business schemes.” That’s how Comer put it as he sat in front of a blown-up New York Post front page screaming “BIDEN SECRET EMAILS.”

The hearing extended for six hours — including an hour-long break in the middle when the power went out in the hearing room. In the darkness, somebody on the panel (it sounded like Clay Higgins) said: “Now did Twitter do that?”

The conspiracies never end!

What’s Wrong With The Right?

Posted on by under Election 2022, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Most of the mid-term focus has centered on the Senate races, and with good reason.  The Senate is currently evenly divided at 50/50 and if Republicans can net just one new seat, they will take a majority and all bets for anything worthwhile coming out of Congress are off.  But we also shouldn’t ignore the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are up for grabs and most predictions are that the Republicans will gain a majority there.  That supposition might not be so discouraging if there were normal human beings, educated people with the best interests of the nation at heart, running for House seats, but as Dana Milbank shows us in his column today, that ain’t the case!

Think you already know crazy? Meet the House GOP Class of ’22.

By Dana Milbank

7 October 2022

Can we have order in the House?

Not if this crowd takes over.

Much of the public focus in the midterm elections has been on the, er, exotic nature of the Republic nominees in Senate and gubernatorial races, and understandably so. There’s Mehmet Oz’s crudite, Doug Mastriano’s white supremacists, and Herschel Walker’s … well, pretty much everything he says and does. But GOP nominees for the House are no less erratic — just less well known.

There’s the woman from North Carolina who was accused of hitting one husband with an alarm clock, trying to hit another with a car (and also menacing him with a frying pan) and punching her daughter. She denies that, though she also invoked a conspiracy belief that alien lizards control the government.

There’s the man from Ohio who lied about his military record, lavishly promoted QAnon themes, acknowledged bypassing police barriers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and with 120 gallons of paint turned his entire lawn into a Trump banner.

There’s the man from Michigan who claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman participated in a satanic ritual, who once disparaged women’s suffrage, and who, though Black, raised concern about Democrats “eroding the white population.”

Then there are: the Texas woman accused by her estranged husband of cruelty toward his teenage daughter; the Colorado woman who backed an effort to secede from her state; the Virginia woman who speculated that rape victims wouldn’t get pregnant; and the Wisconsin man who used campaign funds from his failed 2020 race to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where he apparently breached Capitol barricades.

What they all have in common is that they’re in competitive races, which means they could well be part of a Republican House majority in January. And that’s on top of a larger group of GOP nominees in deep-red congressional districts who are a motley assortment of election deniers, climate-change deniers, QAnon enthusiasts and Jan. 6 participants who propose to abolish the FBI and ban abortion with no exceptions, among other things. Some won nominations despite efforts by party leadership to stop them and continue without financial support from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Maybe this is why Kevin McCarthy, the man who as House speaker would have the task of leading this rogues’ gallery, calls his agenda a “Commitment to America.” Many members of his new majority might be good candidates for commitment.

J.R. Majewski, a Republican running to represent Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, at a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Sept. 17. (Tom E. Puskar/AP)

J.R. Majewski, the Trump-backed lawn painter from Ohio, has a different agenda: He wants to “abolish all unconstitutional three letter agencies,” including the CIA. He has said he’s willing to fight a civil war, and he made a campaign video in which he carried a rifle and said he would “do whatever it takes” to “bring this country back to its former glory.”

Sandy Smith, a Republican seeking to represent North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, speaks at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 23. (Chris Seward/AP)

In North Carolina, Sandy Smith is folding into her plans for the country the domestic-abuse allegations against her: “I never ran over anyone with a car and I never hit anyone in the head with a frying pan. … I am bringing a frying pan to DC, though,” she tweeted in May. (Disclosure: My wife, a pollster, is a consultant to Smith’s Democratic opponent.) Smith also wants “executions” of those who, she falsely claims, stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Republican House candidate John Gibbs speaks with reporters in Byron Township, Mich., on Aug. 2. (Sarah Rice for The Washington Post)

Maybe this is what John Gibbs, the Michigan Republican who questioned women’s suffrage, had in mind when he wrote as a Stanford student that women don’t “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern” because they rely on “emotional reasoning.”

McCarthy will surely have to put down many an uprising from what might be termed the Insurrection Caucus. Wisconsin nominee Derrick Van Orden, like Majewski and a few other GOP nominees, was outside the U.S. Capitol that day — and was photographed inside a restricted area, though he says he left when things turned violent. And Kelly Cooper, a nominee in Arizona, wants “the prisoners of January 6th … to be released on day one.”

George Santos, left, is a Republican running for New York’s 3rd Congressional District, while the GOP’s Zach Nunn is running to represent Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. (Bloomberg News; AP)

George Santos, a nominee in New York, claimed he was the victim of election fraud in his failed 2020 bid. Sam Peters, a nominee in Nevada who has used the “#QArmy” hashtag and embraced being called the “male” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, characterized those facing charges for the insurrection as “civically engaged American citizens exercising their constitutional freedoms.” And Iowa nominee Zach Nunn, who found it suspicious that Capitol Police couldn’t “stop a bunch of middle-aged individuals from walking onto the floor,” argued that “not a single one” of the defendants was charged with and convicted of insurrection. (That’s because the charge is “seditious conspiracy.”) Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, a nominee from Ohio, was precocious in her false claims of election fraud: She claimed in 2018 that a voting machine had switched her vote in the Ohio Senate race from Republican to Democrat.

GOP candidate Monica De La Cruz, left, is seeking to represent Texas’s 15th Congressional District, while Bo Hines, right, is running as a Republican in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District. (AP; Getty Images)

Overlapping with the Insurrection Caucus are those with qualifications that might, at best, be called unconventional. Monica De La Cruz, a Texas nominee and top GOP recruit, was accused in a court filing a year ago of “cruel and aggressive conduct” toward her then-husband’s 14-year-old daughter, including pinching the teen to stop her from crying; she denies the claim. In Colorado, nominee Barbara Kirkmeyer once led an attempt by 11 counties there to secede and become their own state. In North Carolina, nominee Bo Hines (who wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration) spoke of a “banana republic” as though the common term for flailing democracies was actually referring to the clothing store of the same name.

Of course, the People’s House has always attracted the eccentric, and even the shady, from both parties. But the would-be Republican Class of ’22 is extraordinary in the number of oddballs and extremists in its ranks. This is no accident: The trend in Republican primaries, accelerated by Trump, has favored those with the most eye-popping tapestry of conspiracy theories and unyielding positions. GOP primaries are dominated by a sliver of the electorate on the far right.

That’s why they produce figures such as Erik Aadland, a Colorado nominee who claims that the 2020 election was “absolutely rigged” and that the country is “on the brink of being taken over by a communist government” and who has followed various extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, on social media. In New Jersey, Frank Pallotta is again a Republican nominee, after declaring during his 2020 run for the same seat that he stands by the Oath Keepers, a group whose leaders are now on trial over Jan. 6.

Republican Karoline Leavitt, left, is seeking to represent New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, while Yesli Vega, right, is running as a Republican in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. (AP; The Washington Post)

Starting in January, a likely narrow Republican majority might have to find consensus among a freshman class that can’t agree on basic facts. Karoline Leavitt, a nominee in New Hampshire, claims that “the alleged ‘existential threat of climate change’ is a manufactured crisis by the Democrat Party.” In Virginia, nominee Yesli Vega argued that it was less likely for a rape victim to become pregnant because “it’s not something that’s happening organically.” Also in Virginia, nominee Hung Cao asserted that more “people get bludgeoned to death and stabbed to death than they get shot,” which is wrong by an order of magnitude.

Republican Robert Burns is running for Congress in New Hampshire. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

But these nominees have offered unique policy ideas! Robert Burns of New Hampshire said in 2018 that he would allow abortion only to protect the “life of the mother” — but “we would need a panel in this sort of situation” to decide whether the ailing woman can get the lifesaving procedure.

A real-life death panel! Challenged recently on this position, Burns replied last month: “In response to the death panels, I believe women of color and low economic status deserve second and third opinions before being forced into abortions.” Put another way, a woman would need a second and third opinion before she’s allowed to save her own life.

The House Republican Class of ’22 will be many things, but “boring” is not one of them.

Whatever Happened to the Constitution?

Posted on by under education, Election 2022, Election 2024, Free Press Issues, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary, voting rights

Sometimes I really don’t understand the ‘maga-movement’.  No, let me re-state that … I do not understand this maga-movement that proposes and supports an authoritarian regime, that has as its core ideology racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and every form of bigotry known to humankind.  If you listen long enough to the likes of Margie Greene, Mehmet Oz, JD Vance and others you will come to feel that you have been dropped into some alternate universe … or reading some crazy fiction where up is down, left is right, and nothing makes sense anymore.

With just 44 days remaining until election day on November 8th, I think it is more important than ever that people pay close attention to what the candidates are saying, what sort of government they are hoping to create if they are successful in their election bids.  Let’s start with a bit of insight from The Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank …

How reactionary is MAGA? Try the first century B.C.

By Dana Milbank

7 September 2022

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.

MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of “semi-fascism,” which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old. “Hail, Caesar” goes down so much easier than “Heil Hitler.”

J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)

Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”

Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.

Hail, Caesar!

Vance is far from the only emperor-curious MAGA leader. Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro called Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” because the former vice president refused to help overturn the 2020 election. Another former Trump adviser, Michael Anton, hosted a Claremont Institute podcast with Yarvin about the desirability of an “American Caesar.”

Meanwhile, various tactics that would qualify as “extra-constitutional” have been proliferating on the MAGA right.

This week, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed during the lame-duck Republican Congress after the 2020 election, turned the bedrock American principle of equal justice on its head. Cannon, granting Trump’s request for a “special master” to shield the government documents hoarded at his residence, said Trump’s need for protection from “stigma” was “in a league of its own” because of his “former position as president.” A judge granting extraordinary legal powers to the man who appointed her to spare him “reputational harm”? Hail, Caesar!

Last week, the House Jan. 6 committee wrote to Trump ally Newt Gingrich, outlining how the former House speaker encouraged Trump TV ads promoting false election-fraud claims, and how he suggested a “call-to-action” to intimidate election officials. “The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Trump advisers, at a time when election officials desperately feared violence. Hail, Caesar!

Some MAGA Republicans have a novel solution to resolve pesky constitutional restraints: Rewrite the Constitution. As Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) introduced legislation seeking to compel Congress to call a constitutional convention — the first since the framers wrote it — to overhaul the United States’ founding document. The effort likely isn’t going anywhere, but it shows the contempt MAGA Republicans have for the constitutional order. Hail, Caesar!

Others in the MAGA movement simply reinterpret the Constitution to their own liking. County law-enforcement officials self-styling as “constitutional sheriffs” have assigned themselves power to decide what the law is, according to their own politics. One such sheriff in Michigan sought warrants in July to seize vote-counting machines to try to validate Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported last week. Armed lawmen going rogue to undermine elections? Hail, Caesar!

A few weeks from now, the Supreme Court will open its new term, in which it will decide whether to use a North Carolina case to allow state legislatures to redraw election maps — and potentially to overturn the outcome of elections and to disregard state constitutions — without any review by state courts. The high court blessing a radical legal theory that mocks the will of the voters? For MAGA Republicans, all roads lead to Roman imperialism.

Hail, Caesar!

Where Does It End? Or Does It?

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Today I share with you an excerpt from an opinion column by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post earlier this month.  The article, which is adapted from Milbank’s book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party”, is too lengthy for me to repost in its entirety, but is well worth the read, so I encourage you to read ‘the rest of the story’.  Meanwhile, here is a brief excerpt …

The GOP is sick. It didn’t start with Trump — and won’t end with him.

Dana Milbank

4 August 2022

Much has been made of the ensuing polarization in our politics, and it’s true that moderates are a vanishing breed. But the problem isn’t primarily polarization. The problem is that one of our two major political parties has ceased good-faith participation in the democratic process. Of course, there are instances of violence, disinformation, racism and corruption among Democrats and the political left, but the scale isn’t at all comparable. Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Only one party promotes a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.

Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy — and there’s a perfectly logical reason for this: Democracy is working against Republicans. In the eight presidential contests since 1988, the GOP candidate has won a majority of the popular vote only once, in 2004. As the United States approaches majority-minority status (the White population, 76 percent of the country in 1990, is now 58 percent and will drop below 50 percent around 2045), Republicans have become the voice of White people, particularly those without college degrees, who fear the loss of their way of life in a multicultural America. White grievance and White fear drive Republican identity more than any other factor — and in turn drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the U.S. political system.

Other factors sped the party’s turn toward nihilism … the ascent of conservative talk radio, followed by the triumph of Fox News, followed by the advent of social media. Combined, they created a media environment that allows Republican politicians and their voters to seal themselves in an echo chamber of “alternative facts.”

But the biggest cause is race. It is crucial to understand that Donald Trump didn’t create this noxious environment. He isn’t some hideous, orange Venus emerging from the half-shell. Rather, he is a brilliant opportunist; he saw the direction the Republican Party was taking and the appetites it was stoking. The onetime pro-choice advocate of universal health care reinvented himself to give Republicans what they wanted. Because Trump is merely a reflection of the sickness in the GOP, the problem won’t go away when he does.

Revisionist History … Then And Now

Posted on by under education, Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

There are so many critical issues happening in the country, in the world today, that it should be possible to write two posts a day without ever repeating myself.  But there are a few issues that take precedence over all else:  racism, voting rights, climate change, the corruption of certain legislators, and the assault on the very foundation of our country.  So, please forgive me if I seem to repeat these topics, for they simply cannot be allowed to fade into oblivion as some would like to see happen.

The events of January 6th are being lied about, Republicans are doing everything in their power to make the country forget that but for some very dedicated police officers, we might today be living in an autocratic state, the results of our vote last November having been cast to the wind.  Columnist Dana Milbank has written of the attempts to whitewash the event, comparing this to the Civil War which southerners tried to claim was not about slavery, but about states’ rights, and that the Confederates were the true ‘patriots’, in much the same way that some are calling the terrorists who attacked the Capitol ‘patriots’.  We must never forget what happened on that day, who instigated it, and what the goal of the attack was.  Mr. Milbank explains it far better than I can …

We can’t let the terrorists rewrite the history of Jan. 6

Opinion by

Dana Milbank

Columnist

History, the adage goes, is written by the victors.

Would that it were true.

In the Civil War, the U.S. Army, at a staggering human cost, eventually crushed the traitors who took up arms against their own country. But Lost Cause mythology rewrote the rebellion as a conflict over states’ rights, portrayed Confederates as gallant heroes fighting impossible odds, romanticized plantation life and sanitized slavery. The fictions, taught to generations of southerners, fueled Jim Crow and white supremacy.

In the retelling of Jan. 6, we see an echo of Lost Cause mythology. On that terrible day, terrorists took up arms against the United States, sacking the seat of the U.S. government in a deadly rampage. White supremacists marauded through the Capitol. It was a coup attempt, aimed at overturning the will of the people with brute force, encouraged by a defeated president and his allies. The Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police, badly outnumbered, ultimately prevailed in putting down the insurrection.

But now the losers are trying to rewrite the history of that day. The terrorists were “patriots.” Theirs was a “normal tourist visit.” They weren’t armed. They were “hugging and kissing” the police. A woman, shot as she breached the last barrier keeping elected representatives from the mob, was a martyr shot in cold blood. The Capitol Police were ill-trained. It was Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

The losers, again, are trying to write the history. They must not be allowed to succeed — for if they do, they will certainly try again to attack democracy.

President Biden joined the battle against the revisionists on Thursday as he presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the police who saved democracy on Jan. 6. “We cannot allow history to be rewritten,” he said.

In a speech honoring the heroism of the police, Biden, at one point brushing a tear from his eye, called the attackers what they were. “A mob of extremists and terrorists launched a violent and deadly assault on the People’s House and the sacred ritual to certify a free and fair election,” he said. “It was insurrection … It was unconstitutional. And maybe most important, it was fundamentally un-American.”

To that list of labels, Ty Seidule adds one more: “It was a lynch mob.”

Seidule is qualified to say so. A retired U.S. Army general, he taught history for two decades at West Point. Now at Hamilton College, he’s the author of “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” a disembowelment of Lost Cause lies he learned in his own upbringing as a White southerner.

He told me of the disgust he felt when he saw a photo of an insurrectionist in the Capitol on Jan. 6 carrying the Confederate battle flag — “the Flag of Treason,” he calls it — past a portrait of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator nearly caned to death by Preston Brooks, a proslavery congressman from South Carolina. Seidule wanted to suit up in his old uniform and fight the Capitol terrorists. “The people who did that need to be in orange jumpsuits and shackles,” he said.

In his book, Seidule writes of the importance of words in defeating the Lost Cause lies. It wasn’t “Union” against “Confederate,” he argues. It was the “U.S. Army fighting … against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion.” Confederate generals didn’t fight with “honor”; they abrogated “an oath sworn to God to defend the United States” and “killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever.” It wasn’t “the War Between the States,” as Lost Cause mythology would have it; the Civil War was, properly, “The War of the Rebellion.” They weren’t “plantations” as glorified by Margaret Mitchell, but “enslaved labor farms.” Writes Seidule: “Accurate language can help us destroy the lies of the Lost Cause.”

So, too, can accurate language destroy the lies now being floated to justify Jan. 6.

These were not tourists. These were not patriots. They were terrorists, as D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges, savagely beaten on Jan. 6, labeled them in congressional testimony. They were armed — with rebar, poles, knives, bear spray, tasers and an untold number of firearms — and they were unspeakably violent in their attack on the duly elected government of the United States.

The revisionist history serves a purpose: Sanitizing sedition so the foes of democracy will be able to attack it again, but successfully. This is why those who still revere our democracy must answer the lies with the true stories of Jan. 6 — again and again. “We’re not going to let them win the narrative,” Seidule said. “History is too important.”

The Republican Party’s End Goal

Posted on by under Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

This afternoon, the Senate actually managed to pass the pandemic relief bill, with no help from the Republicans.  Not a single Republican voted in support of the bill, which passed, 50-49, after an hours-long impasse over competing partisan proposals for the massive bill’s boost to weekly unemployment benefits for those affected by the pandemic.  This, it seems, is to be the state of affairs for the foreseeable future … Democrats vs Republicans, bills taking ten times longer to pass through Congress than they should, especially those that help real people, not tailor-made to make the wealthy wealthier.  What is the end goal of the Republican Party, I’ve often asked?

Dana Milbank, writing for The Washington Post, summarized the Republican’s end goal quite well.  Take a look …

Republicans aren’t fighting Democrats. They’re fighting democracy.

Dana MilbankBy Dana Milbank

MARCH 5, 2021

On the conservative Bulwark podcast this week, two admirable never-Trumpers marveled at what has become of the Republican Party since President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.

“I am a little amazed by the willingness to go just authoritarian, to really go anti-democratic,” Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol said.

Columnist Mona Charen was likewise puzzled. “The attraction of authoritarianism, I don’t know, Bill,” she said. “I’m really at a loss.”

And I’m at a loss to understand their confusion. The Republican Party’s dalliance with authoritarianism can be explained in one word: race.

Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans — and so Republicans are working against democracy.

You don’t have to study demography to see that race is at the core of the GOP’s tilt toward the authoritarian. You need only look at what happened this week.

On Monday, the Georgia state House passed a bill brazenly attempting to deter Black voters. The bill proposed to scale back Sunday voting — taking direct aim at the longtime “Souls to the Polls” tradition in which Black voters cast their ballots after church on Sundays. The bill also would increase voter I.D. requirements — known to disenfranchise Black voters disproportionately — and even would make it illegal to serve food or drinks to voters waiting in long lines outside polling places; lines are typically longer at minority precincts.

Georgia Republicans clearly are hoping they can suppress enough Black votes to erase the Democrats’ narrow advantage that gave them both of the state’s Senate seats and Joe Biden its electoral votes. But Georgia is just one of the 43 states collectively contemplating 253 bills this year with provisions restricting voting access, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s majority signaled it would be open to more such voting restrictions. In oral arguments, the conservative justices indicated they would uphold two Arizona laws that would have the effect of disproportionately disqualifying the votes of non-White citizens. One law throws out ballots cast in the wrong precinct, a problem that affects minority voters twice as much as White voters because polling places move more frequently in minority neighborhoods. The other law bans the practice of ballot collection — derided by Republicans as ballot “harvesting” — which is disproportionately used by minority voters, in particular Arizona’s Native Americans on reservations.

Representing the Arizona Republican Party in Tuesday’s argument, lawyer Michael A. Carvin explained why the party supports laws tossing out ballots: “Politics is a zero-sum game.”

It was a stark if inadvertent admission that Republicans have abandoned the idea of appealing to new voters.

Then, on Wednesday, House Republicans mounted lockstep opposition to H.R.1, a bill by Democrats attempting to expand voting rights. The bill would, among other things, create automatic voter registration, set minimum standards for early voting and end the practice of partisan gerrymandering.

In the House debate, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), sounding like Trump, made unfounded claims of “voter fraud” and asserted that the law would mean “future voters could be dead or illegal immigrants or maybe even registered two to three times.”

“This,” McCarthy said, “is an unparalleled political power grab.”

So, in the twisted reasoning of this white-nationalist incarnation of the Republican Party, laws that make it easier for all citizens to vote are a power grab by Democrats.

The foundation of a white-nationalist GOP has been building for half a century, since Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, through Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton. But Trump took fear of non-Whites and immigrants to a whole new level.

Researchers have repeatedly documented that racial resentment is the single most important factor motivating Republicans and Republican-leaning voters. They have also shown that White evangelical Christians, a huge part of the GOP base and Trump’s most reliable supporters, are highly motivated by appeals to white supremacy. By contrast, Democratic voters — White and non-White — are primarily driven by their favorable views toward a multiracial America.

President Biden’s victory reveals the obvious political problem with the Republican move toward white nationalism: When voters turn out in large numbers, Democrats win. And the odds will only get worse for Republicans as racial minorities become the majority and the young, overwhelmingly progressive on race, replace the old.

This is why Republicans aren’t really fighting Democrats. They’re fighting democracy.

GUILTY As Charged!

Posted on by under Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

I just finished watching a clip of the scenes that were presented at the impeachment trial of the January 6th attack on the Capitol and on Congress. They were very emotional, frightening, and all too real, especially for those who were in the Capitol on that fateful day.  I do not think, after seeing just a small portion of the madness that transpired on that day, that anybody can not want to see the guilty punished to the fullest extent of the law.  And the guilty are many, but the person who inspired these terrorists, for they can be called nothing but terrorists, bears the lion’s share of the guilt, has the most blood on his hands, and he must be held accountable.

That person is Donald Trump.  This was his plan, funded in part with money from his campaign fund.  He watched police being overwhelmed and brutalized, watched our center of government being damaged, and watched members of Congress fearing for their lives, and he watched with a smile on his face, as his son’s girlfriend danced … yes danced … in the background!  When it comes time to vote on the impeachment charge of inciting violence, every single senator sitting in judgment damn well better vote to hold Trump accountable, else they must share in his guilt and for that, they will pay a heavy price.

What follows is Dana Milbank’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post, and I fully agree with everything he says …

You can’t hear that officer’s scream and acquit the man who caused it

Dana MilbankOpinion by

Dana Milbank

Columnist

Feb. 10, 2021 at 8:33 p.m. EST

For a full minute, the officer’s screams of agony pierced the Senate chamber — and then, silence.

On their screens, senators sitting in judgment of former president Donald Trump saw the raw savagery that Trump incited on Jan. 6 in his last-ditch attempt to overturn his defeat. They saw it in the pain-contorted face of Officer Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police, who had been called to the Capitol’s West Front that day to defend the people’s representatives from the terrorists Trump had dispatched to ransack the building.

In the video, Trump’s mob crushes Hodges and other officers against a door, pinning and immobilizing him with a stolen riot shield. They spray bear repellent at the police, they beat Hodges’s head against the door, they violently rip off his gas mask, revealing his bloodied mouth, they taunt him and they take his weapon as a trophy. And through it all, Hodges, unable to move, wails in pain — an excruciating sound interrupted only by the “heave ho” of Trump’s mob stampeding the officers.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the impeachment manager who forced senators to watch the video, first read from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Said Swalwell: “You will see how blessed we were that, on that hellish day, we had a peacemaker like Officer Hodges protecting our lives, our staff’s lives, this Capitol and the certification process. May we do all we can in this chamber to make sure that never happens again.”

Trump’s apologists seem willing to excuse just about anything, even though the impeachment managers are laying out in minute detail the damning evidence showing how the former president conceived, organized, fomented and refused to call off the murderous invasion of the Capitol by his supporters. Republican senators seem not to care how close the insurrectionists came to assassinating Vice President Mike Pence (who we now know was hiding in the Capitol the entire time of the attack) and killing or taking hostage senators and members of the House.

But they do not have hearts if they are not moved by the heroism of the Capitol and D.C. police departments, badly outnumbered by Trump’s armed supporters. They do not have souls if they can’t see the evil Trump inflicted on the officers protecting the seat of American government.

As the impeachment managers retold, and showed with newly released security footage, Trump’s terrorists beat police officers with Trump flagpoles, sticks and bullhorns. They dragged them down stairs. They blinded them with bear spray. They gouged their eyes. They tased one officer, triggering a heart attack. The security footage, and the insurrectionists’ own videos, show the savagery. But you can also hear it in the terrified voices on the police radios that day, replayed for senators Wednesday.

“Multiple Capitol injuries! Multiple Capitol injuries!”

“Throwing metal poles at us.”

“Multiple law enforcement injuries. DSO get up here!”

“We need some reinforcements up here.”

“They’re starting to pull the gates down.”

“They’re starting to throw explosives.”

“We’re still taking rocks, bottles.”

“The crowd is using munitions against us.”

“Bear spray in the crowd!”

“All MPD pull back!

“10-33, I repeat, 10-33! We have been flanked and we’ve lost the line!”

10-33 is the police emergency code: Need immediate assistance.

American democracy is sending a 10-33 right now. The impeachment managers, though far from done with their prosecution, have thoroughly documented Trump’s history of instigating violence, his premeditated attempts to overthrow the election, and his mob’s absolute (and accurate) belief that they were doing what he wanted.

The videos, from inside and outside the Capitol, are sickening: MAGA-festooned domestic terrorists, in riot gear, smashing windows and doors, carrying zip ties into the Senate chamber. “Imagine what they could have done with those cuffs,” Swalwell told the senators, whose wrists they were meant for.

The managers showed Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) being saved from the mob by the heroic Officer Eugene Goodman, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) retreating from the mob, Pence and his family scurrying away, lawmakers running from the advancing terrorists.

The managers replayed the terrified whisper on the phone of an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), barricaded with colleagues in a room, with pounding on the door in the background. They replayed the fatal shooting of a woman who had rallied a mob to pursue fleeing lawmakers, then jumped through a smashed door after them. They played the warnings broadcast in the House chamber: “Be prepared to don your masks. . . . Get down under your chairs.”

One-hundred forty police officers were hurt in Trump’s failed coup. Three have died. Yet even after his brutal injuries, Hodges said, “If it wasn’t my job, I would have done that for free. It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white-nationalist insurrection, and we’ll do it as many times as it takes.”

If cowardly Senate Republicans can’t bring themselves to punish Trump for what he did to them, maybe they can at least punish him for what he did to Hodges, Goodman, Brian Sicknick and all the other brave officers who saved democracy that day.

Our New Reality

Posted on by under Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I first read the following OpEd by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post last week, and didn’t give any thought to posting it here.  There were other fish to fry, and I really don’t like raising red flags any more than is necessary.  But, for nearly a week now, the article has stuck with me, pops into my mind at odd times, so this morning I re-visited it.  One big thing has happened since the article was first published that has given it even more perspective than it originally had:  the debate on Tuesday night.  And so, today I am sharing Mr. Milbank’s column for your perusal.

This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.

Dana-MilbankOpinion by

Dana Milbank

Columnist

September 25, 2020 at 2:14 p.m. EDT

America, this is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.

For five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons. It is usually hyperbolic, and counterproductive, to label the right “fascists” in the way those on the right reflexively label the left “socialists.” But this is no longer a matter of name-calling.

With his repeated refusals this week to accept the peaceful transfer of power — the bedrock principle that has sustained American democracy for 228 years — President Trump has put the United States, in some ways, where Germany was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler used the suspicious burning of the German parliament to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.

Overwrought, you say? Then ask Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism. “The Reichstag has been on a slow burn since June,” he told me. “The language Trump uses to talk about Black Lives Matter and the protests is very similar to the language Hitler used — that there’s some vague left-wing conspiracy based in the cities that is destroying the country.”

Trump, as he has done before, has made the villain a minority group. He has sought, once again, to fabricate emergencies to justify greater powers for himself. He has proposed postponing elections. He has refused to commit to honoring the results of the election. And now, he proposes to embrace violence if he doesn’t win.

“It’s important not to talk about this as just an election,” Snyder said. “It’s an election surrounded by the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat. The opposition has to win the election and it has to win the aftermath of the election.”

If not? There won’t be another “normal” election for some time, he said. But that doesn’t have to happen, and Snyder is optimistic it won’t. To avoid it, we voters must turn out in overwhelming numbers to deal Trump a lopsided defeat. The military must hold to its oath. Homeland Security police must not serve as Trump’s brownshirts. And we citizens must take to the streets, peacefully but indefinitely, until the will of the people prevails.

“It’s going to be messy,” Snyder said. “He seems pretty sure he won’t win the election, he doesn’t want to leave office,” and he appears to Snyder to have “an authoritarian’s instinct” that he must stay in power or go to prison.

It’s abundantly clear that Trump plans to fabricate an election “emergency.” First, he claimed mail-in balloting, a tried-and-true system, is fraudulent. Now his supporters are trying to harass in-person voters.

When Virginia’s early voting opened this week, Trump supporters descended on a polling station, waving Trump signs and flags, chanting and forming a gantlet through which voters had to walk. When the New York Times reported that this voter intimidation campaign began at a nearby rally featuring the Republican National Committee co-chairman, the Virginia GOP responded mockingly from its official Twitter account: “Quick! Someone call the waaaambulance!”

Let’s be clear. There is only one political party in American politics embracing violence. There is only one side refusing to denounce all political violence. There is only one side talking about bringing guns to the polls; one side attempting to turn federal law-enforcement officials into an arm of a political party. And Trump is trying to use law enforcement to revive tactics historically used to bully voters of color from voting — tactics not seen in 40 years.

Some of what Trump and his lieutenants have been doing is merely unseemly: using the machinery of government to attack previous and current political opponents, likening pandemic public health restrictions to slavery, or threatening to overrule regulators if they question the safety of vaccines.

But embracing violence to resolve democratic disagreement is another matter. Trump embraced the “very fine people” among the homicidal neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. He embraced as “very good people” armed protesters who stormed the Michigan Capitol to intimidate lawmakers. He embraced his supporter who allegedly shot and killed two people at a protest in Wisconsin. He embraced the “GREAT PATRIOTS” who drove into Portland, Ore., hurling paintballs and pepper spray at demonstrators. He embraced officers who kill unarmed African Americans, saying they simply “choke” under pressure.

Now he’s rejecting the peaceful transfer of power. Worse: Most Republican officeholders dare not contradict him. The Times reported that of all 168 Republican National Committee members and 26 Republican governors it asked to comment on Trump’s outrage, only four RNC members and one governor responded.

In Federalist 48, James Madison prophetically warned that tyranny could triumph under “some favorable emergency.” In 1933, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to do just that. Trump now, it appears, is aiming to do likewise.

America, this is our Reichstag moment. We have the power to stop it. Don’t let democracy burn to the ground.

Losing The American Mind

Posted on by under Election 2020, Environmental Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

When Donald Trump first began actively campaigning in 2015, his slogan was “make America great again”.  Now, after he’s had nearly four years in office, he has done, it would seem, just the opposite.  He has not only devalued our status in the eyes of the rest of the world, but has made our own lives worse in nearly every possible way.  I can attest to that, for I have never been so deep in the rabbit hole in all my nearly 70 years as I am today.  Take a look at Dana Milbank’s column in The Washington Post yesterday …

Trump has made Americans’ lives worse. Here’s the proof.

Opinion by

Dana-MilbankDana Milbank

Columnist

September 19, 2020 

Donald Trump’s America is one sad place.

We, as a nation, have fallen into a great depression, though not necessarily an economic one. By one highly respected gauge, self-reported levels of happiness are at their lowest since social scientists began asking such questions half a century ago.

Much of this is because of the pandemic, and the economic fallout, but the troubles predate the virus. Overall mental well-being dropped noticeably after President Trump’s election in 2016, in red and blue states alike. Happiness became decoupled from financial security, and evidence points to a “Trump Effect” — an American public depressed because of extraordinary vitriol in politics, chaos in the news and a government out of control — even before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday night, a mere 78 minutes after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death announcement, announced with rank hypocrisy he would hold a quick vote to replace her.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has conducted an annual survey of the national mood since 1972, found this summer that the proportion of people describing themselves as “very happy” had plummeted to 14 percent — compared with the survey’s previous record low of 29 percent, recorded after the 2008 financial crisis. But NORC researchers were startled to find that, despite this year’s economic shutdown, 36 percent declared themselves “satisfied” with their financial situation, the highest in the study’s history, and the fewest ever expressed dissatisfaction. (This was when generous unemployment support was in effect.)

For the first time, “there’s a disconnect between financial satisfaction and overall happiness,” says David Sterrett, senior researcher for the NORC study. “With everything going on socially and politically, those have become more of a driver.”

Other research, by Gallup, gives an idea of the cause. There’s typically a partisan effect after elections. After 2008, for example, Democrats and Democratic constituencies (minorities, women, low-income Americans) felt better about their lives, while Republicans and their constituencies felt worse. But something very different happened after 2016: Well-being measures dropped substantially for Democratic constituencies, as expected, but independents’ happiness also dropped, and there was no corresponding jump in the sense of well-being among Republicans or among Whites. Actually, they declined, though within the margin of error.

In sum, well-being among all American adults declined “substantially” with Trump’s election — even though the economy was expanding. Meanwhile, the population in 21 states (many in Trump country) had a significant decline in well-being in 2017 — a huge shift in one year — and not one state experienced an increase. More Americans complained of worry, lost pleasure in activities and less positive energy from friends, family and leaders. Those had all been stable from 2014 to 2016. After Trump’s election, they all worsened — and stayed worse.

Dan Witters, research director of Gallup’s well-being studies, tells me the nonpartisan polling group concluded it could objectively state that there’s “a rather obvious Trump effect.”

Republicans’ sense of well-being didn’t improve, Witters says, “because of the way the social fabric has been strained in the Trump era.” Elevated anxiety “disproportionately affected Democrats, but it threw enough sand in the gears of Republicans and supporters of Trump that it prevented their well-being from getting much of a lift.”

There’s abundant support for this. In 2019, pre-pandemic, University of Nebraska researchers found that 4 in 10 said politics had made them stressed, 3 in 10 said it caused them to lose their temper and 2 in 10 said it caused problems sleeping and damaged friendships.

The American Psychological Association in 2017 found two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, were stressed about the future of the nation. That jumped to 83 percent this year, with 66 percent saying government’s handling of the pandemic causes significant stress.

“Things weren’t great before the pandemic,” says Rachel Garfield, a vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. And now the national mood has fallen off a cliff. An August Kaiser poll found that 53 percent of adults say the pandemic has hurt their mental health. Many cite problems with sleeping, eating, alcohol and drugs. Those reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorders nearly quadrupled during the pandemic, to 40 percent.

All this means, sadly, that the American psyche won’t bounce back fully when the economy recovers, nor when the virus is beaten. The depression wouldn’t necessarily lift if Trump were defeated, particularly if he continued to stoke rage among supporters.

But if Trump returns to office, I fear, the national despair will deepen as we resume lurching from crisis to crisis with the same destabilizing chaos. This week alone we’ve seen Trump attacking his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Attorney General Bill Barr attacking his own Justice Department, and the administration hurling charges of “sedition” at government scientists and demonstrators, and a wildly hypocritical McConnell, after blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee because it was eight months before an election, announcing plans just six weeks before an election to rush through a Ginsburg replacement.

After delivering a paranoid rant about armed insurrection, senior Trump administration official Michael Caputo this week blamed his high “stress level” and took a leave of absence. He said “every American” fighting the pandemic “has been under enormous pressure. I am just one of them.”

He’s right about that. After four years, we are barely holding it together. Surely four more years would cause the losing of the American mind.

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