QOTD: Grifting As Diplomacy

 

A key graph from Anne Applebaum's article in The Atlantic "Empire of Grift," on how American diplomacy has been taken over by hustlers and self-interested businessmen, to our profound national detriment:

"Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can."

The entire article is excellent and well-researched. 

 

QOTD: Putin's War Comes Home

 

The great Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic, describes the fear that the Russian elites have of Ukraine's increasing military prowess and reach into Russia's heartland.  The Putin-managed May 9 "Victory Day" celebration was a shadow of previous years, reflecting his paranoia and Russia's faltering position in their war of aggression against Ukraine:

"Last week, the whining noise of unmanned flying objects could be heard in the city of Moscow once again. On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. Two days later, Moscow was due to host Russia’s annual May 9 military parade, a celebration linked very intimately with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who had revived this Soviet-era celebration of Stalin’s victory over Nazi Germany and his conquest of Europe.

Suddenly, and very publicly, Russian officials appeared nervous, afraid that their parade would be spoiled. The Russian foreign minister issued a threat, promising 'no mercy,' whatever that means, if Ukrainians struck the parade. The Kremlin’s spokesperson reassured Muscovites that security was tight because the 'threat from the Kyiv regime' had already been taken into account. The Russian president even persuaded the American president to ask the Ukrainian president for a one-day cease-fire. Volodymyr Zelensky granted Putin’s wish, after Trump offered to broker an exchange of 1,000 prisoners of war. Zelensky then issued a magnanimous, droll decree, formally granting Putin permission to hold the parade." (our emphasis}

Zelensky's mock decree was the cherry on top of the sundae, demonstrating that there's been a not-so-subtle shift in the dynamic of Russia's war on Ukraine, now in its fourth and very deadly war for the Russian aggressors.  Ukraine is showing that it has some potent, lethal cards to play, too.

(photo: Pavel Bednyakov / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

 

QOTD: Regime Change

 

From the always excellent Anne Applebaum writing in The Atlantic an analysis of what the Malignant Fascist and his co-President, South African fascist Elon "Kaboom" Musk are doing with their reckless destruction of the Federal civil service:

"Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing. [snip]

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. [snip]

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection." (our emphasis)

As always, please read the entire article for insights into what this means for all of us, and what we can expect in the months ahead.

 

QOTD -- A Fascist To The Core

 

As Anne Applebaum reminds us, if it looks like a fascist, walks like a fascist, and talks like a fascist, then it probably is a fascist:

... Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”  [snip]

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right...

Gen. Mark Milley had it right, too:  Trump's "a fascist to the core."  

You are who you vote for.

Ask yourself, with 15 days until the election and with voting already underway in many States, "what am I doing to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and every down ballot Democrat, and save America from this monster?"  Then double that.

QOTD -- The Movement To Discredit Democracy

 

"... Because the American extreme right and (more rarely) the extreme left benefit from the spread of antidemocratic narratives, they have an interest in silencing or hobbling any group that wants to stop, or even identify, foreign campaigns. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that 'we are actually less prepared today than we were four years ago' for foreign attempts to influence the 2024 election. This is not only because authoritarian propaganda campaigns have become more sophisticated as they begin to use AI, or because 'you obviously have a political environment here where there’s a lot more Americans who are more distrustful of all institutions.' It’s also because the lawsuits, threats, and smear tactics have chilled government, academic, and tech-company responses.

"One could call this a secret authoritarian 'plot' to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further." -- Anne Applebaum, concluding a detailed essay in The Atlantic on the common cause fascist authoritarians in Russia, China and elsewhere are making with the Malignant Loser and his MAGA cult to undercut freedom and democracy in American and worldwide.  It's an important read for anyone looking for the best description of the forces at work to turn American democracy into a Russian- style autocracy.  

 

Quotes Of The Day -- The Damage Done

"PRESIDENT TRUMP has dropped the pretense of respecting democracy. Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

"The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters. [snip]

"This is beyond political norm-breaking. This is a direct assault on democracy itself. That an American president would even contemplate scheming to overturn a free and fair election is astonishing. That he is actively trying to do so should shock Americans to the core." --  Editorial in this morning's Washington Post, on the coup neo- fascist Donald "Mango  Mussolini" Trump is attempting in concert with some of his dead- enders.

 _______________________________

 

"After Trump has provided the world with this theatrical coup-that-is-not-a-coup, it is naive to imagine that the U.S. can promote democracy or the rule of law with the confidence that it did in the past. For four years, our president has openly defied many of the values we used to put at the center of our foreign-policy rhetoric. And yes, everybody has noticed. Americans may have found the spectacle of Trump trying to blackmail the Ukrainian president into launching a fake political investigation of his opponents exotic. Ukrainians found it … familiar. The next time a senior American official comes to town and tells the Ukrainian government that its International Monetary Fund loan depends on enforcing laws against corruption, why shouldn’t the Ukrainians laugh?" -- Anne Applebaum, in "The World is Never Going Back to Normal," discussing some of the damage done to American foreign policy and standing in the world by the soon- to- be ex-president.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the full article at the link.

The Washington Post has a good read about the fate of Roberto Beristain. Remember him? Seems a lot of people in the small town of Granger, IN, where he lived for decades, are having a problem remembering him, too:

The goofy red sign off State Road 23 still says “Eddie’s Steak Shed,” just as it always has. The thank-you plaques for sponsoring the county Little League are still in the front entrance, alongside 15 years’ worth of stickers honoring the steaks as the area’s best. 

But farther inside, most everything has changed in the year since the old owner was detained, then deported, as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants by a tough-talking new president. 

Roberto Beristain, a former dishwasher who worked until he could afford to buy the place, was gone. In his place were refurbished wood-paneled walls, a bar with a granite counter and a new pork chop entree. Even the name had been changed with something snappier, sleeker — Eddie’s was now simply, “The Shed.” 

“I love what you did to the place!” Heather Pepper, 47, exclaimed to the bartender on a recent night. “It looks so updated, and it still feels local.”

The town's original outrage that was felt at the cruelty of Beristain's deportation was superficial and fleeting; the ugliness underlying Americans' acceptance of the white supremacist Republican regime's treatment of innocent people remains strong.

Anne Applebaum discusses the corruption of the regime of kleptocrat Donald "Rump" Trump in the context of other so- called "populists," and why its effects are so pernicious:

Corruption and nepotism have both reached new levels in this White House, as everyone who knew Trump predicted, and as many who voted for him will ignore. Every time one of these stories breaks, there is a routine response: Is this what working-class Americans really wanted when they voted for an “anti-elitist”? Is this what the Midwest meant when it cheered calls to “drain the swamp”? But if history and precedent are any guide, then these abuses of power won’t matter to them at all. 

But the spectacular corruption of so-called anti-elitist elites has another effect in the longer term: It makes people cynical about politics altogether. I recently asked one of Orban’s opponents why the endless revelations of crooked contracts don’t create an overwhelming majority for the opposition. “Because voters now think everyone is corrupt,” he told me. “They’ve got used to it.” As the nepotism and the cronyism of this White House begin to sink in, Americans may not turn against Trump. They may turn against politics, or even democracy, altogether.

The Rump regime is rolling out its NRA- approved plans for school safety (more on that in a separate post), including that age- old method for deflecting and delaying -- a "commission to study the problem." This is the dangerous ninny who'll be in charge:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night and stumbled in answering questions that journalist Lesley Stahl asked during a pointed interview. 

These are just some of the things that DeVos said — or couldn’t answer — during the interview: 

    - She couldn’t say whether the number of false accusations of sexual assault on school campuses is lower than the number of actual rapes or assaults. 

    - Arming teachers “should be an option” for states and communities, she said, even though she couldn’t “ever imagine” her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Zorhoff, having had a gun. 

    -“We have invested billions and billions and billions of dollars from the federal level, and we have seen zero results,” DeVos said — a statement Stahl challenged. 

    -“I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.”

DeVos' main mission is to wreck public education in this country just as she did in Michigan. She's a soulless monster who is exposed every time she opens her lie- hole.*

Last but never least, Infidel has another strong link round- up that will introduce you to topics from anime to the composition of sand to speculation about Rump after 2018 (and much more). Always worth time to discover.

*BONUS: Speaking of DeVos, Andy Borowitz has the perfect headline:

Betsy DeVos Calls “60 Minutes” a Waste of a Half Hour