QOTD -- Horror Show

 

"... Everything we worried about, every worst-case scenario, is happening right before our eyes. But perhaps the worst part of this post-Roe political landscape is that the antiabortion right hasn’t been satiated and appears emboldened despite a string of electoral defeats in 2022 and 2023, including in red states. Now Republicans are trying desperately to keep abortion off the ballot in 2024 because they know it’s a losing issue for them. As Politico reported Monday, 'in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and other states, several antiabortion groups are buying TV and digital ads, knocking on doors and holding events to persuade people against signing petitions to put the issue before voters in November.'

"Republicans long argued that abortion should be left to the states. But since the conservative majority struck down Roe, effectively doing just that, you have Republicans not only looking to prevent states from voting on abortion rights, but also calling for a federal abortion ban. Even scarier, Republicans are even trying to ban abortion pills using the Comstock Act, a 1873 federal law. 'The next Republican president,' Axios notes, 'could stop most abortions without Congress.' Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is taking up an abortion pills case, setting up, according to the Times, a 'high-stakes fight over the drug that could sharply curtail access to the medication, even in states where abortion remains legal.'

"For years I was told I was being a Cassandra about the danger to women of a post-Roe America but if anything, the reality is even bleaker than I imagined." -- Molly Jong-Fast, concluding an article in Vanity Fair, "Overturning Roe Has Been A Horror Show."  Forced birthers, led in the Republican Catholic Supreme Court by the execrable Sam Alito, have brought this horror show to America.  Election- by- election, we must exercise the same patience and resolve as the forced birthers until we return the legislatures and the courts, especially the Republican Supreme Court, to institutions that value the Constitutional rights of women to control their reproductive freedom. 

 

Explaining Trump's Rage Toward Lisa Page

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer, has been living rent free in demagogue and misogynist Donald "P*ssygrabber" Trump's sick mind for a couple of years. She, along with FBI official Peter Strzok, exchanged some bland political comments via text messages while participating in the FBI's investigation of the Clinton e-mail issue and Russia's interference in the 2016 elections. But Trump's rage has been particularly intense for Page, and writing in the Washington Post, Molly Jong-Fast has an explanation for that:

"Page’s decision to come forward — 'I decided to take my power back,' she told me — raises the question of why she has served as such an intense and constant subject of presidential abuse. I suspect the explanation is twofold: Page embodies two groups that most incite Trump’s wrath when threatened: she is a public servant — a member of the so-called deep state, as Trump sees it — and, perhaps even more inciting to Trump, she is a woman who has dared to stand up to him. 

Trump’s obsession with the “deep state” is well documented. If anything, it is growing, as members of the Foreign Service and other career civil servants provide evidence against him in the impeachment proceedings. [snip]

The president’s hostility toward powerful women has also long been evident; they seem to particularly outrage him. Trump’s favorite female targets include the Squad, Christine Blasey Ford, E. Jean Carroll and Elizabeth Warren. The president’s verbal assaults on women run the gamut from attacking Megyn Kelly’s physiology ('blood coming out of her wherever') to attacking Carly Fiorina’s appearance ('Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?')."  (our emphasis)

Jong-Fast notes that the hostility toward Page is different in tone and substance from that directed at Strzok:

"He has not held back from attacking Strzok, but the way he talks about Page is markedly different. While the president never comments on Strzok’s physical appearance, his descriptions of Page drip sexism and misogyny. It is always Strzok 'and his FBI lover, Lisa Page,' 'the lovely Lisa Page,' 'FBI Lover/Agent Lisa Page.' The president’s use of the word 'lovely' has a particularly patronizing undertone, as though Page’s value is completely a result of her appearance. The use of the word 'lover' serves a similar function. as though Page, an experienced lawyer who rose through the ranks of the Justice Department and FBI, is valued and relevant only for her sexuality." (our emphasis)

Because Trump values a woman's "appearance" over everything and views them as useful in only a sexual sense, he directs his anger at a woman who dared to break that mold and criticize him, albeit in private text messages. Lisa Page's story, which she is now telling, should come as a warning to women who delude themselves in thinking that Trump has anything but a sick, pathological  contempt for them.

On The Trump-Ukraine Scandal

Beginning with a caveat:  we're under no illusion that the gutless, treason- abetting careerist Republicans in the Senate would ever take up articles of impeachment that the House might forward.  That being said, allowing an unstable, law- breaking buffoon to set precedents for future presidents, without accountability, is perhaps the worst possible outcome for our democracy.  It must be the duty of Democrats to memorialize the many ways this existential threat has abused his power and committed acts that deserve removal from office -- even though that removal may not take place until voters cast their ballots in November 2020.

In the meantime, here's what others are saying today.

George Conway and Neal Katyal:

So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. [snip]

The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump’s actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information.

It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

It’s important to note the context here.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation of four automakers after they reached agreement with the state of California to maintain higher fuel-efficiency standards than the federal government requires. It can be no coincidence that Trump has long been at war with that state.

At roughly the same time, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reportedly were threatened with termination for contradicting Trump’s claim — he tried to prove it by marking a map with a Sharpie — that Alabama was menaced by a killer storm.

Now here’s the acting DNI throwing his body between Trump and accountability. We are seeing the credibility of the federal government mangled in service to this guy’s fragile ego. How weak the guardrails of democracy turn out to be. Even this one — a government of, by and for the people is looking suspiciously like a government of, by and for Trump.

But where guardrails fail, things crash and fall apart. Something to remember as we wait out the long years until next November.

We were told our institutions would save us. They’ll be lucky if they can save themselves.

Molly Jong -Fast on the enablers of Trump rising to the defense:

Like with any crisis in Trumpworld, the Trump Mobius strip of propaganda rolled out a rapid and slightly insane response. Trump’s propagandists met yet another allegation of presidential malfeasance with a smorgasbord of obfuscation, confession, deflection, confusion, and unbridled hostility.

The morning after the whistleblower’s allegations came to light, the president’s favorite breakfast show cheerfully explained to its viewers that what looked like potential treason was in fact merely “the art of the deal.” Yes, possible corruption was actually just deal-making! Geraldo Rivera chimed in to call out the whistleblower for being “annoying, this is a punk, a punk who's snitching out the president's phone calls to a foreign leader”. Newt Gingrich volunteered an “executive powers” defense. Gingrich has himself been plagued by ethics scandals, so perhaps he’s the perfect person to defend such an ethically challenged president.  [snip]

But no one shills for the president quite like the members of his own party, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is always happy to go on Fox News and blame “another deep state attack” on whatever’s got the president into trouble this time. Likewise, Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn blamed the Democrats for the whistleblower, saying, "You will never see the attacks stopped. The left will not give up because they cannot even accept the fact that they lost." All of this is made sillier by the fact that none of these people know who the whistleblower is.

Finally, Oliver Bullough on the Biden non- scandal at the heart of the real scandal:

... [W]hen journalists seek the fire behind the smoke in the Biden-Ukraine tale, they often call to ask my opinion. Many are eager to flesh out what seems a satisfyingly simple conspiracy, but I have to tell them: It isn’t true. The timeline doesn’t work. The investigation into Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, had ground to a halt long before the prosecutor was sacked. A subsequent probe into the company’s owner was opened because of a request from Ukrainian legislators, not because of prosecutorial initiative. There is, in short, no there there; the bloggers are putting two and two together — and coming up with 22.

Jon Chait also debunks the Biden non- scandal story here.

(One of those "journalists" seeking the fire behind the smoke is the New York Effing Times' Rudy Giuliani whisperer Ken Vogel -- remember the timeline and take anything he has to report on this with a metric f*ckton of salt.  More on Vogel here. And, more so, here.)