Quotes Of The Day -- Justifying And Succumbing

 

Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine about the need for some Republicans to blame (wait for it) Democrats for the Malignant Loser:

... That this theory is totally deranged hardly requires saying. There is no evidence any, let alone all, of the prosecutors investigating Trump have coordinated with the Biden administration or have any interest in affecting the Republican nomination. Trump’s legal woes are easily and parsimoniously explained by the fact he has habitually flouted the law throughout his career, beginning at least 50 years ago, when he and his father refused to allow Black people to rent apartments, and continuing through decades of assorted schemes and swindles.

More to the point, the Republican electorate’s attachment to Trump is explained even more easily. The party’s voters thrill to his bullying style; they believe his stream of lies and exist in an information ecosystem in which every fresh piece of evidence of Trump’s misconduct merely affirms the scope of the conspiracy against him. The fact that they wish to renominate a man whom they consider one of the greatest presidents in history, and who most of them believe legitimately won the 2020 election, follows naturally from their own beliefs. The choice was not imposed on them by the Democrats, the liberal media, or Jack Smith.  [snip]

...The Republican voters may be misguided in their adoration of Trump, the anti-anti-Trumpers would concede, but they had been driven to that point by any number of Democratic crimes: the smearing of Mitt Romney, the Russia investigation, Bill Clinton’s sexcapades, or any of an endless list of grievances.

The anti-anti-Trump right’s need to explain Trump as a Democratic plot serves one additional psychological function: It excuses their own apologias on his behalf. After all, if the Democrats are to blame for Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, then the anti-anti-Trumpers are justified in refusing to defect from a Trump-controlled party. By focusing their opposition on Trump’s left-wing opponents, they are directing their main energies against the very people who are responsible for Trump’s rise in the first place...

They'll fall in line, and they'll justify it by blaming Democrats, just like the common anti- democracy hypocrites that they are.

____________________

Jon Allsop writes in Columbia Journalism Review about media coverage of the Malignant Loser, especially after his latest indictment:

... With Trump’s prior indictments, my top initial takeaway from the coverage was its sheer breathlessness, which, while instinctively justified by the stakes, often felt uncomfortably like it was playing into Trump’s broader rigging of our attention economy: he played assignment editor with his social media posts; cameras followed him to court like he was O.J. in the white Bronco; punditry often focused on the strength of the cases against him, but also fussed over optics and his mood. Roughly the same things have been true this time—and yet my top takeaway has been how tired and rote a lot of the coverage has felt, despite its persistent wall-to-wall extent. At this point, there is both everything and nothing to say about Trump; the indictment is both unprecedented and precedented, astonishing and unsurprising. Many of the words written and spoken about his subversion campaign have stressed its enormity—and yet I increasingly can’t shake the conclusion that too many reporters and editors have normalized it, at least implicitly, by covering Trump as in any sense a normal candidate for 2024. In recent days, my thoughts have returned to an observation that the media reporter Brian Stelter made in Vanity Fair last month (prior to the latest indictment): that “many news executives and political analysts appear to have succumbed to revisionist history, downplaying Trump’s destruction of a shared reality and his shredding of democratic norms”; that “it’s hard to even recall that sliver of time after January 6 when it seemed like Trump was being excommunicated from American politics.”

It's not hyperbolic to say that the Malignant Loser is the greatest threat to our country since the Civil War. He's a deranged, would-be dictator with a large following of American Christofascists who care nothing for democracy.  It's not "partisan" to observe that;  it's objective reality.

Monday Reading

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

The Center for Public Integrity has received 146 pages of documents under court order that bolster and underscore the testimony by impeachment witnesses as to the effort by the Trump regime to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for announcement of a bogus investigation into the Bidens. Following the infamous July 25 "I need you to do us a favor" call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelinsky, this is what Department of Defense officials were doing:

They specifically undertook an unusual maneuver, stopping the disbursements by adding a rare footnote to spending documents for Pentagon operations and maintenance efforts, which declared the Ukraine funding in particular was being held up for a week at a time. Then, over a period of about seven weeks, they tacked the footnote again and again onto eight such documents, each time as a temporary measure.

An unnamed lawyer at OMB, not wanting to participate in what appeared to be an illegal funding policy, decided to quit, as did another OMB official, according to congressional testimony by Mark Sandy, the office’s deputy associate director for national security and a 12-year veteran at the agency. OMB spokespeople have disputed the account, saying the resignations were not over the policy.

The documents, though heavily redacted by Trump consigliere William "Low" Barr, still manage to reveal the concern of staff at the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon that the action violated the Impoundment Control Act.  No wonder Republicans are so fearful of more documents and witness testimony coming out in a Senate impeachment trial.  Here's one of the smoking (or as Trump would spell it, "smocking") guns in the release of documents (click to enlarge):

And here is your bureaucracy version of a literally smoking gun:

Newly released #UkraineDocs show that a mere 90 minutes after Trump's phone call, the White House ordered the military aid to be put on hold, but to be "closely held" infohttps://t.co/IqT70JkWBH
HT @Zeddary pic.twitter.com/H9eeHuOlo4

— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) December 21, 2019

The Washington Post has a special section of articles written by 13 writers from around the world on "How Trump Changed My Country."  As you might imagine, none of the changes in any of the 13 countries was for the better.  Here's one snippet from a Russian writer, but please go check out the rest because the cumulative effect is sobering:

One evening in August, Russia’s most popular TV anchor, Vladimir Solovyov, indulged in mocking adoration of Donald Trump. The American president had hinted that he wanted to buy Greenland, and Solovyov said he loved Trump for destroying liberal cliches. This particular cliche appeared to be the belief that in the modern world, strong powers will not engage in land grabs — a topical issue in Russia, which had recently snatched Crimea away from Ukraine. “Strong states will get more lands, weak states will lose them, and Trump is showing that in a crude and vivid manner,” said Solovyov, prompting long applause from the studio audience.

When Russia ditched the communists back in the early 1990s, the triumphant West, led by the United States, beckoned, a shiny role model to pursue. Today, visionless and rudderless, the United States is a laughingstock to Kremlin mouthpieces like Solovyov — and a source of bewilderment, if not disgust, to the country’s liberal critics of President Vladimir Putin. Embodying that disillusionment is Trump, who seems intent on proving decades of Kremlin propaganda about America’s cynicism and lack of scruples. (See: Ukraine.)

The damage Trump has done to our country at home and abroad is already likely irreversible, because it's reasoned that if a debacle like Trump happened here once, it can always happen again.
 
As we noted yesterday, Jon Allsop at the Columbia Journalism Review has consistently pertinent analyses of the intersection of politics and media in our information- diffuse, dystopian times. Here's a segment of a piece he wrote on December 16 on the cult of "bothsideism:"

When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship. In parts of the press, a set of party-oriented impeachment narratives has taken hold that contains some truth, but also rests on a selective interpretation of available evidence. Entrenched partisanship—in Congress and the country—is real, and newsworthy, as is the role that our fragmented information ecosystem has played in stoking and reinforcing division. And yet it does not follow, as some journalists and pundits seem to have surmised, that impeachment has been a waste of time. At the beginning of his show yesterday, Todd said the “national response” to impeachment has been “whatever.” And yet, as I wrote earlier this month, support for impeaching Trump, while recently static, is historically high. (A Fox News poll out yesterday reinforced that finding.) Six Republicans in Michigan are not the country.

The media’s job, done properly, is multidirectional: it holds power to account, and communicates matters of public interest to news consumers. On impeachment, too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop: we’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of “both sides” is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly. Now, more than ever, our top duty should be to fight for the truth.

Perhaps some of our media need to begin with a refresher course like this:



The glitter and sequins are for when you achieve media elite status.

Following the editorial in Christianity Today calling for Trump's removal from office, a conservative newspaper in a deep red state editorializes in much the same vein.  From the Sunday Fargo Forum (ND):

Regardless of one’s faith tradition, Trump stands as a leader who has shredded norms and values and morals. He has undeniably used his office for personal gain — and for the benefit of his sons, daughter and son-in-law — yet the far-right refuses to hold him accountable.

We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not of men. Our Constitution spells out separation of powers as well as checks and balances between equal branches of government.

However we deal with Trump’s misconduct, there will be consequences, for the country and for conservative causes. We want a viable, upright conservative party to shape policy.

The Forum has about a 47,000 circulation on Sundays, and is the primary daily paper in southeast North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota.

Luckily for us (and you), Infidel 753 is back providing us with thought- provoking posts as well as his link round- up, which is the best collection of links to interesting posts on the Internet (in our humble opinion).  As we've said before, if you haven't bookmarked his blog, you're missing out.

Sunday Reflection

"... Since those early days, an unusually clear story about Trump seems to have become murkier by the day. That’s not because the central facts have been undercut, but because of the present, hellish nature of our information ecosystem. Since the impeachment process began, Trump’s defenders have deflected and lied to muddy the fact pattern around his conduct. Pundits on Fox News and throughout the online right-wing mediasphere have boosted their signal to millions of Americans. Conservative talking heads and Republican operatives (including, shamefully, sitting United States senators) have sown conspiratorial propaganda right across network and cable TV. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer who is at the heart of the Ukraine mess, has acted, at times, as a one-man discombobulation machine, spewing streams of consciouslessness and waving weird documents at bewildered anchors." --  Jon Allsop, writing in Columbia Journalism Review on the day malignant moron Donald "Rump" Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives.  Allsop has consistently astute analyses of the media and politics, of which this is a fairly straightforward, inarguable take.  We'll share more of his insights in Monday's Reading.