Quotes Of The Day -- Unprecedented

 

"Mainstream media continues to underestimate Trump's threat. Republicans want us to worry more about the precedent Milley set rather than the precedent Trump set, which is that Republicans can cry 'fraud' when they don't win elections (even in fucking California) and those baseless claims can justify overturning the results.  [snip]

"Trump is actively removing the guardrails that prevented him from overturning last year's presidential election. 'Winning' Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan would've guaranteed Trump a second term. When the guardrails break, what should decent people do? According to Milley's critics ... nothing. These aren't just the disingenuous claims from Republican bad actors but otherwise respectable Americans who are concerned about 'precedent.' However, we can reasonably trust that Milley would faithfully serve an honest president, but no future election could ever be honest enough to prevent Trump from stealing it. That's the active threat that most demands our attention."  -- Stephen Robinson, Wonkette, referencing revelations in the Woodward/Costas book "Peril," and expressing the frustration we feel when we see the media using Republican talking points to concern troll about "civilian control" of the military, when we know who the specific, deranged "civilian" was that Milley feared was out of control.  They're not only underestimating Trump's ongoing threat, they're actively promoting the Republican narrative that's distracting from the real scandal here -- proof of Trump's unprecedented abuse of power and coup plotting.  WTF?!?

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"For the better part of the past two days I’ve been watching people – some smart, some earnest, and a lot who are disingenuous – freak out that GEN Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has somehow single handedly destroyed over 240 years of civilian control of the US military. He hasn’t. The feeding frenzy, however, will continue because it provides the political reporters, the pundits and commenters, Republican elected officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media elites what they want the most: the opportunity to make Woodward and Costa’s reporting about anything that is not how deranged Trump might have actually been between October 2020 and January 2021; just how badly he and his political appointees had degraded, warped, and twisted the Federal government over their four years in office; and just how craven, anti-American, anti-republican, and anti-democratic the Republican Party and the conservative movement and news and media systems that sustain the party have become to allow this to happen..." -- Adam Silverman, Balloon Juice, amplifying the media's scandal deflection problem.  Excellent explainer.

Some Context On The Collapse In Afghanistan

Adam Silverman provides a reality check and some context as to the precipitous collapse of Afghan security forces, reality and context you won't get from the clickbait, Republican- wired media:

...[A] number of the commanders in the ANDSF, both military and police, were either selling everything they could to the Taliban to pay their Soldiers and police officers who were not actually being paid, were embezzling the money, and/or took a payout from the Taliban not to fight.

We have four documentable, verifiable reasons for why the Taliban were able to so quickly and easily retake Afghanistan and not a single one of them was the result of something the Biden administration did.

1. The Trump administration negotiated the US’s abject surrender to the Taliban
2. Ghani issued a stand down order to the ANDSF before fleeing Afghanistan to save his own hide
3. We paid to train, equip, and sustain a significant number of Afghan military and police personnel that didn’t exist anywhere except on the payroll
4. Because Ghani’s government wasn’t paying its soldiers or police, or because its senior military and police leadership were stealing the funding, some Afghan military and police leaders and personnel cut deals with the Taliban not to fight in exchange for money

I think it is important to stipulate that reasons 3 and 4 – the no shows on the payroll and the misappropriation of salaries – began when George W Bush was president and then continued until last week when we began the final withdrawal.

It is also important to recognize that things did not go smoothly last week through this past Monday. It is also important to recognize that things are going smoothly now.

Silverman provides more detail and documentation at the link.

In his interview with ABC News yesterday, President Biden said he didn't know how withdrawal from Afghanistan (negotiated by the Trump Assministration) could have happened without chaos ensuing.  Given the facts Silverman and others present, neither do we.  What matters now is staying put until we get the people out that need to get out, a process that, as Silverman notes, is going more smoothly now but needs the Administration's focus and top priority.

As an aside, the Administration and Democrats shouldn't stop playing the "blame game" (let's call it a "reality check," though) as long as the puerile media and their Republican talking- point- providers continue to do so without any context or memory beyond the past 30 days.  These folks are also happy to use Democrats critiquing the withdrawal chaos as their shield to attack Biden ("see, it's bipartisan!"). Rather than giving them this permission slip, maybe those Dems should just sit down and refrain from piling on until we know more facts and we finish the evacuations.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

In case you missed it, on Sunday the 29 daily McClatchy newspapers (circulation 2.4 million) published an op/ ed co- authored by Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren on broad reforms needed to flush the corruption of the Trump regime out of the political system, illustrated by the corrupt bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic:

... Trump seems to think he can direct funding for the response to this crisis based on which politicians are nice to him, which states he’s trying to win in November and which businesses he wants to enrich — all without any accountability. We have a different view.

Taxpayer relief should go to those most in need. Hospitals, essential workers, small businesses, and state and local governments should get the help they need immediately. If large corporations want help, they should agree not to turn around and fire all their workers. The relief bill’s unconscionable tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires should be repealed. But that is not enough.

During the recent presidential primary, both of us called for significant reforms to end Washington corruption and guarantee a government that works for the people. We urgently need those broader reforms now.

The op/ ed goes to to talk about reforms in the areas of conflict of interest, lobbying and oversight that a Democratic administration would pursue.

David Roth writes about how the media has become sucked into the "empire of stupidity" reigned over by Very Stable Genius Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump:

... The rhythm of every news cycle is more or less the same, just as the shape of every daily presidential press briefing is generally similar to the previous day’s. The variables have changed under the pressure of the pandemic, though, which has had the strange effect of destabilizing what had become a more or less automatic process without changing it in any meaningful way. Some very long shadows are now troubling the corners of those familiar shots, but the cameras still whir into action at the same time each day. That alone guarantees that Trump will keep showing up, because it’s simply not in the man to pass up an opportunity to talk on television. Similarly, when the reporters at these briefings see the president of the United States standing there, swaying oddly and doing accordion things with his hands while putting strange childlike questions to his team of experts, it is simply not in them to focus their attention anywhere else.

And so they ask Trump questions about what he’s saying, and he talks about what he always talks about; he never knows anything useful, cannot tell the truth about the few things he knows, and is pulled by his own preposterous vanity and insecurities back toward the only thing he really cares about, which is himself. This is what the news is made of, now—the things that a vainglorious fraud says, and then the things that other people on television say about how Dangerous and Irresponsible they are, and then what Trump says about that in his amphetamized after-dark Twitter sessions or scrambling tantrum-swept mornings. It’s not that the things Trump says aren’t actually dangerous or irresponsible: They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that the definition by which these things are considered news—basically, because the president says them—is no longer workable.

Scott Lemieux at LGM has some thoughts about how the allegations made by Tara Reade will be used by the same media that plays along with Trumpland dystopia:

One thing we should be very clear about here is that Reade’s allegations are being used as a translucent pretext. Reade has never said that her complaint included a claim of sexual assault, and is now claiming that it didn’t claim sexual harassment either. And, in addition, the Senate Papers don’t include personnel files. There’s as much chance of finding something material to Reade’s claims in Biden’s documents as there is of uncovering secret Biden connections to the Kennedy assassination. This has nothing to do with Reade and everything to do with reporters wanting some raw material to churn out months of EMAILS! stories to balance out the corrupt president completely botching his handling of a pandemic and economic depression. That’s it.

It’s also worth noting that the Times’s ridiculous “clouds raised” stories about the Clinton Foundation make clear that there’s basically no chance that reporters are going to spend weeks looking through boxes of records in Newark, DE and just conclude “nope, turns out there’s nothing there.” Biden releasing the papers will just lead to a bunch of negative stories built on decades-old minutia hyped up by reporters and editors desperate to justify an unwise investment of time and resources. And when it turns up nothing about Reade, this won’t end the requests for more records — there’s always something else you could provide, more questions to be raised, more shadows to be cast. The only winning move in Transparency Calvinball is not to play.

Over at Balloon Juice, Adam Silverman deconstructs a case in point of how the media is serving as a willing tool of right- wing propaganda, with a bogus claim about Biden that ABC News "reporter" Sasha Pezenik tweeted out:

What is really going on here, and it is going to accelerate and grow until or unless reporters, editors, and producers get their acts together, is a two pronged influence operation. The first part is to get misinformation about Vice President Biden out into the mainstream media as quickly as possible, Because once it is reported on, no matter how quick the debunking is, the misinformation will be seized on and promoted, while the debunking will, at best, get pointed to by people like me. Pezenik had a legit news story to break last night, but it wasn’t the story she broke. She even had all the pieces to break the real news, which was “failed Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is attempting to smear Vice President Biden with a false allegation, which we were able to debunk with two phone calls. We are continuing our investigation in an attempt to learn why O’Donnell is doing this.” That framing would have allowed Pezenik and ABC News to break the story last night. But that isn’t what they did. O’Donnell and whoever put O’Donnell up to this knows that reporters have a sweet tooth for this type of thing. And they also know that if they can get the allegation out there through a legitimate news source, they will have laundered the misinformation successfully because almost no one they’re trying to message to is going to pay attention to the debunking.

The second part of this influence operation is agitprop. It is to further the President’s, the Republican Party’s, the conservative movement’s, Fox News’s, prominent Republicans’, conservatives’, and their surrogates’ argument that the real and legitimate news sources in the US are actually fake. That they cannot be trusted to report accurately or fairly. It is to create cognitive dissonance where the false and debunked in real time accusations against Vice President Biden are accepted as true, while at the same time the argument that the news media is lying to everyone and can’t be trusted because they botched the story by reporting factually wrong information is reinforced. It is a have your cake and eat it too influence operation. It is also, exactly, what Putin has been trying to do within Russia, within the US, and around the world for well over a decade. It is the attempt to create the dynamic where because nothing is true anything and everything is possible.

If you hoped the media learned its lesson from the disproportionate focus in 2016 on Hillary Clinton's email management protocols while Trump was demonstrating his grotesque, monumental lack of fitness for office, it appears you would be wrong.  At least now we're forewarned how they're going to handle things.  The blowback on this media behavior needs to be ferocious this time around.

Once again, Infidel 753 has labored to provide the best link round- up on the internet, so you would be well advised to check it out (as well as his regular posts, like this one!).

QOTD

"... It isn’t really about a choice between VP Biden or Senator Warren or Senator Harris or Senator Sanders or any of the other Democratic primary candidates. The simple reality we face as Americans is that nothing positive, not a single damn thing, is possible on healthcare, immigration, the climate, the environment, the economy, foreign policy, defense policy, criminal justice, and/or trade policy if the President is reelected and if the Senate remains in Republican hands. The real issue right now isn’t whether VP Biden’s healthcare plan is too incremental or whether Senator Sanders is too idealistic and therefore unrealistic and improbable. And that either of them have the ability to deactivate Democratic voters because they’re not having their ideological pleasure centers tickled. At the Federal level, the real issue is electing a Democrat president with a Democratic majority Senate and maintaining the Democratic House. That’s it. Almost any of the Democratic primary candidates is acceptable given this reality. And even a one seat Democratic majority in the Senate is as well." -- Adam Silverman, stating what should be obvious: staying focused in the run- up to November 2020 -- and that we have the political winds behind us.  He also stresses the importance of winning governor and state legislature races prior to the 2020 census.  Nice pep talk and reality check.