Truth And Bias -- Media's Failure Risks Democracy

 

With the stipulation that Democrats often commit political malpractice in their messaging, fail to mount sustained attacks on their right- wing adversaries, and scatter like sheep at the first clap of thunder (what a party!), we have to once again point out the long- term failings of the political media through our proxies this morning.  Margaret Sullivan focuses on "what" the current failure is, while Steve M. focuses on the "why" there's such disproportional, biased coverage of the two presidential candidates.

Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian

... First truth: the president’s stumble and the political fallout that followed is a huge, consequential news story that deserves a lot of coverage.

Second truth: the media coverage is overkill – not only too much in quantity and too breathless in tone, but also taking up so much oxygen that a story even more important is shoved to the back burner.

That bigger story, of course, is the former president’s appalling unfitness for office, not only because he tried to overturn a legitimate election and is a felon, out on bail and awaiting sentencing, but because of things he has said and done in very recent weeks. As just one example, he claimed that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, the radical rightwing plan hatched by some of his closest allies to begin dismantling our democracy if he wins another term.

Trump’s disavowal is a ridiculous lie, but I doubt most members of the public know anything about it, nor do they likely know much – if anything – about Project 2025.  [snip]

Meanwhile, what of Trump’s obvious cognitive decline, his endless lies, his shocking plans to imprison his political enemies and to deport millions of people he calls “animals”, his relationship with the late accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein?

“Sure, you can say, we’ve covered those things,” commented Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime observer of media and politics. But, Ornstein pushed back: “Where? On the front page above the fold? As one-offs before moving on? In a fashion comparable to the Defcon 1 coverage of Biden’s age and acuity?”

There really is no comparison in the amount or intensity of coverage. One journalist, Jennifer Schulze, counted New York Times stories related to Biden’s age in the week following the debate; she counted a staggering 192 news and opinion pieces, compared to 92 stories on Trump – and that was in a week when the US supreme court had ruled he has immunity for official acts.

Nor is there much self-scrutiny or effort to course-correct. Only self-satisfaction and an apparent commitment to more of the same...

Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog 

... [E]ven if you believe that Trump's brain is full of failing neurons rather than right-wing disinformation, it's hard to believe that the media has a categorical bias toward portraying major-party candidates as coherent. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had months of stories in the media questioning the mental fitness of Joe Biden.

What we have instead is a bias toward normalizing Republicans, a process that's usually accompanied by an "othering" of Democrats. This has been going on for decades: Walter Mondale was a gloomy wimp, Michael Dukakis was an effete Ivy League weirdo, Al Gore was a prissy egghead, Hillary Clinton was a cackling ballbuster. Their opponents were Real Americans, fond of country music, pickup trucks, and plain-spoken common sense. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden fought against this narrative and won some victories, but the idea that Republicans are normal and Democrats are peculiar is ingrained in our politics, and allows Republicans to embrace genuinely extreme policies -- on guns, abortion, climate change, taxation, regulation, torture, and many other issues -- while Democrats are the ones branded as out-of-step extremists. It doesn't help that Democrats regularly praise at least some Republicans (a favor that's never returned), or that Democrats regularly proclaim that some fellow party members really are ideologically beyond the pale, something Republicans know will lead to instant banishment if it's attempted in their party.

It's because we're accustomed to all this that our political culture struggles to define Trump as a mentally ill person or (more accurately, I think) as a dangerous radical. But we're used to marginalizing Democrats. In Biden's case, we're marginalizing him based on perceived mental fitness, but we nearly always do this to Democrats in some way or another, unless, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, they're very good at fighting back. 

The key to this is being better at fighting back, not only at MAGAt Republicans but at their enablers in the media.  It seems every election cycle we have those same two opponents, and every proceeding election cycle the stakes get even higher.  We can't expect or rely on these conditions to change;  we can only do everything we can to win in every election until Christosfascist Republicanism in America is beaten back in our culture and politics.

BONUS:  Seconded --

The news seems to forget everything Trump says a day or so after he says them. Could the media be in cognitive decline? I am calling for them to step down.

— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) July 10, 2024

 

 

QOTD -- Mulligans

 

"... In the popular imagination, at least among right-wingers, Ronald Reagan is seen as a magisterial figure. He isn't remembered for the Marine barracks bombings in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. servicemembers and led to a withdrawal of U.S. servicemembers from Lebanon. (Reagan won a 49-state landslide when he ran for reelection a year later.) The admirers of Reagan also shrug off Iran-contra and the massive deficits created by his tax cuts.

"Pre-Trump Republicans got mulligans when things went wrong on their watch because many Americans see them as manly defenders of Right and Truth and Good. When bad things happen under a Democratic president, these voters cast blame and see weakness -- but when bad things happen under a Republican president, they see it as a sign that we need a strong, steady, Republican hand on the tiller, even if that was the hand on the tiller when the crisis happened in the first place.

"Trump failed during the pandemic, but he always acted as if he was a strong leader getting the job done. Polls consistently say that voters think he's a stronger leader than Biden -- mostly, I think, because he postures like one. So I'm not surprised that he's getting away with godawful crisis management. Republicans often do. " -- Steve M., at No More Mister Nice Blog, on the phenomenon of Republicans getting so many mulligans for their mismanagement from the American public.  If this gauzy, disastrous amnesia continues, it'll be the end of our democracy for good.

QOTD -- A Feature, Not A Bug

 

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog tells us why the dysfunctional clown show being put on by House Republicans is just fine with their MAGAt base:

... The problem with comparing the contemporary Republican Party to other fascist or fascist-leaning parties is that the Republican Party -- like much of the American public -- doesn't want the government to function efficiently. Remember Ronald Reagan's dictum: Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. If you believe that, as nearly all Republicans do (as well as many non-Republicans), you might not believe that it's imperative to throw sand in the gears of government, but you certainly don't believe it's a bad thing when the gears become inoperably sandy.

Americans who believe Reagan's simple-minded pronouncements about government are rarely consistent -- they want the government to punish street criminals and immigrants, as well as women seeking abortions and sexual minorities -- but apart from that, they assume we'd all be better off if government weren't fuctioning at all ... or at least that's what they believe until they have problem getting VA healthcare or going to a national park. But even then they cling to the principle that government is bad (and government under a Democratic president is worse), so the current leadership struggles of the House GOP won't turn them against Republicans. The fact that Republicans can't run the government is a feature, not a bug, for much of the country.

A corollary to all of this is that you don't have to be a nihilistic moron to be a Republican, but it sure helps.

Quotes Of The Day -- No Way Out

"...Believing that the Republican electorate is full of fine, upstanding citizens who love civic virtue is willful blindness. Republican voters want someone to break stuff and have fun doing it. The only reason Ron DeSantis is struggling is that when he breaks stuff -- including people -- he doesn't really seem to being having fun. So of course Trump has been leading in the polls, DeSantis is second but trailing badly, and all the candidates who still maintain a surface politeness (while largely sharing the same political beliefs as DeSantis and Trump) are in single digits..." -- Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog, on how Trump is the Republican electorate, and the Republican electorate is Trump.

____________________

"...[T]he more disturbing thing is that the country is not in fact going to come apart at all in any foreseeable future: Instead we are going to have a kind of low-level very informal civil war for many decades to come, as Red America and Blue America increasingly come to the conclusion that they don’t want to live with each other any more, but can find no way, either practically or emotionally, to break up.

We’re in an old-style Catholic marriage with the fascists, and that relationship is going to become as impossibly bitter as that kind of arrangement becomes, when neither party can stand the other any more, but there’s still no way out." --  Paul Campos at LGM on the "delusional fetishists" of the Timothy McVeigh variety that populate the Republican/ Christofascist/ Shooters Party, from top to bottom.

Monday Reading

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

We're now over 40,000 deaths from COVID-19.  Never forget that it was the incompetence and ignorance of damn narcissistic sociopath Donald "I Take No Responsibility At All" Trump that made us number one in the world for COVID-19 cases confirmed and deaths, and resulted in throwing over 22 million Americans out of work.

Japan hoped it had dodged the COVID-19 bullet. Its leaders had been engaging in the same half measures and hopeful talk about a quick return to normal as a certain damn narcissistic sociopath on the other side of the Pacific.  Instead, they might be learning a deadly lesson:

In the past few weeks, Japan's coronavirus cases have spiked -- dashing hopes that the government's initial virus response had succeeded in controlling its spread. As of Friday, Japan had 9,787 confirmed cases, including 190 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. On March 1, the country had 243 cases.

The sharp increase has prompted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to extend the state of emergency from seven prefectures to the entire country. On Friday, he also promised to provide medical equipment such as surgical masks, gowns and face shields to hospitals struggling with acute gear shortages within a week.

Earlier this week, a team of government experts warned that Japan could have more than 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths if measures such as social distancing are not taken.

Putin's bitch, the damn narcissistic sociopath, is doing everything he possibly can to kill Americans:

Whenever you start to think that the federal government under Donald Trump has hit a moral bottom, it finds a new way to shock and horrify.

Over the last few weeks, it has started to appear as though, in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War — to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need. At the very least, federal authorities have made governors and hospital executives all around the country operate in fear that shipments of necessary supplies will be seized along the way. In a time of pandemic, having evacuated federal responsibility, the White House is functionally waging a war against state leadership and the initiative of local hospitals to secure what they need to provide sufficient treatment.  (our emphasis)

The son of a bitch is doing this to get leverage over state and local leaders to "reopen" their state/ city sooner rather than later.

There are more analyses of Trump's response (comparing his actions to the W.H.O.'s by Greg Sargent) and of Trump's "plans" for dealing with the crisis by David Frum (ok, ok).

Will Bunch has a great read on the role of Fox "News" in promoting the small but loud protests against social distancing to distract from the deadly failures of the narcissistic sociopath and themselves (and the ancillary role of "mainstream media"):

In state capitals from Annapolis to Minneapolis, protesters honked horns in slow-rolling motorcades or flaunted social distancing rules on crowded sidewalks, streaming from their homes in a new movement to protest the economic lockdown by the ... dozens? That’s right, dozens, or maybe — to be fair — 100-200 at the largest of a dozen or so such right-wing protests since the middle of last week. This struck me Saturday as I read an extensive, seriously buttoned-down report in the New York Times — which often relegates large-scale left-wing protests like 2019′s Lights of Liberty to its back pages — promoting the demands of “modest demonstrations" at the Texas state capitol in Austin. [snip]

The everyday folks who were out there in Lansing or Columbus this week were largely there to serve the interests of the (mostly) rich and powerful people who used their influence to shoo them out there. Their agendas weren’t always the same. Most notably, President Trump — who promoted the rallies and even the right to carry weapons in an even-stunning-by-Trump-standards series of tweets — desperately wants to shift blame away from his multiple failures on the coronavirus and instead onto public-health-minded governors. Right-wing special interests, like the billionaire family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are terrified that the 22 million unemployed will demand a social welfare state. Fox News is eager to make folks forget its dangerous ignore-the-virus punditry.

But the endgame and the shared interests are very much the same. Distraction, and a diversion of anger in the Heartland — an anger with legitimate and understandable roots — away from them, and hopefully onto the political enemies who threaten their power. If it all sounds painfully familiar, it should. This is the Tea Party Redux, except this time with the added thrill of a seeming death wish among the participants. Maybe we should call this one the Ventilator Party, or maybe the Branch COVID-ians. (our emphasis)

The best Speaker of the House in modern times knows exactly what's going on here, too. 

So does Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

But when the press wants to take the the pulse of the populace, it believes that a representative sample of "real Americans" is overwhelmingly white, blue-collar, and rural. The press is giving saturation coverage to mostly tiny anti-lockdown demonstrations out of the same impulse that, pre-coronavirus, inspired big-city reporters to venture into rural diners every few weeks so we could be reassured that, yes, Trump supporters still support Trump.

The GOP hacks and plutocrats who are ginning up these demonstrations know that the media will fall for them, the same way Bugs Bunny knows that Elmer Fudd will fall for all his schemes, even the schemes that are just like the ones Fudd fell for in the previous cartoons. On this at least, the press never learns. The right knows that, and is taking full advantage.  (our emphasis)

What should Democrats be doing in the face of the ramping up of Trump's unhinged, authoritarian behavior?  How about being honest and calling it what it is:

For the sake of the country, millions of lives and everyone's sanity, some political figure of national prominence needs to respect the consensus of mental health professionals, and publicly declare that President Donald Trump is mentally unstable and unfit for office. This must be stated in the simplest terms possible, and while making clear that he or she is not joking or issuing the statement for dramatic effect. It is time to liberate American discourse from its self-imposed restraints, and it is essential to the future of American democracy that Trump's mental condition becomes a focal point of urgent investigation and discussion.

Shameless and dishonest operatives on the right have no reticence about making the health of a major Democratic figure part of public inquiry, even when they have to resort to baseless lies. In 2016, many Republican commentators – from Sean Hannity to Trump himself — warned that Hillary Clinton was near death, because she appeared wobbly at one public event. Four years later, she is still alive. Currently, discussions of Joe Biden's "dementia," without any clear evidence of cognitive decline, dominate right-wing chatter about the prospective Democratic nominee.  [snip]

Democrats should also get over their concerns about angering Trump supporters. Anyone who continues to applaud Trump's weird and reckless disregard for humanity at this point is beyond the limit of rational persuasion. Trump supporters live in a hallucinatory dreamscape under the authority of a maniac. Let them have their anti-social distancing rallies, and allow them to believe that Barack Obama invented COVID-19 shortly after he was born in Kenya.

Rational Americans need to stop enabling this abusive and deranged presidency. Declare Donald Trump insane and, at long last, bring an end to our era of malignant normality. (our emphasis)

It would have the backing of more than 70,000 mental health professionals. They spoke out; others in a more powerful position must too.

As usual, we strongly recommend you visit Infidel 753's link round-up (where we found the article on Japan's backsliding on COVID-19).  Cruise through his other posts, too.  A good use of social distancing time!

Trump's Character: "It's Never The Lead Story"

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog observes what the general takeaway is from coverage of Golden Turd Donald "Moron Vector" Trump's daily bullshit sessions:

... What Trump is doing every day -- it's hard to say whether he's being shrewd or has just stumbled on a routine that seeks to work for him -- is weaving his pathology into a briefing that generally has at least some real news. That news is what a lot of Americans take away from the briefings, because news organizations generally treat it as far most important than Trump's outbursts. Some news outlets seem to regard the news as the only important part of the story. [snip]

It ought to matter that, in the midst of a crisis, we have a president who's accusing desperate healthcare workers in a viral hot zone of being grifters trying to steal and sell face masks, all because he can't accept numbers predicting exponential growth of demand for health services that are extremely dangerous to provide. It ought to matter that Trump bullies and insults reporters for quoting his own words back to him. It's an election year. When it suits us, we decide that "character" is an important criterion when we're judging who's fit to serve. But the media isn't treating Trump's character as an important story.

Trump parcels out just enough news every day that the takeaway, for people who can't read the news in depth, is A serious man is leading us through a serious crisis.

We keep waiting in vain for the corporate media -- especially in the form of the nightly network newscasts -- to cover Trump's manifest moral rot and mental incompetence, mostly displayed in his unscripted remarks and tweets, but... they don't.  Instead of seeing some of his more sociopathic tweets like these highlighted --

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2020

So much of the Lamestream Media is writing and broadcasting stories with facts that are made up and knowingly wrong. They are doing it by quoting unnamed sources that simply do not exist. These are very dangerous & corrupt people, who will do anything to win. NAME YOUR SOURCES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2020

I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2020

-- we get valuable minutes wasted on "good news" pablum that infantilizes the audience and whistles past Trump's existential grave yard.

Jay Rosen has suggested the media, among other things, use a "truth sandwich" approach in covering Trump's firehose of falsehoods:

Experience has taught us that there will occasionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a news writing formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true...

This should also apply to the unhinged comments/ tweets/ etc. that the low information public needs to see.  Rather, we believe the media has largely adopted the stance that "Trump's low character is already a given" and that nothing is gained by further hammering his moral rot and mental incapacity into the public consciousness.  So, one of the lessons of 2016 is being repeated, even with three years of hindsight.

Before Trump was even sworn in as "president," Ned Resnikoff at the sadly departed Think Progress wrote some advice for the media, which has only fitfully been heeded, if at all (no link): 

Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.

They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy.

With the exception of a few stalwarts (Yamiche Alcindor, being the most recent to stand up to the bully), the media continue to gloss over what is plain to see -- a mentally unhinged, morally unfit sociopath floundering and deflecting at a time of national crisis.

Is the truth that hard to tell?

Monday Reading

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

As the Maggie Haberman tweet in the post below notes, the John Bolton draft manuscript outlining and confirming crime family boss Donald "The Dumb Don" Trump's shakedown of Ukraine for personal political advantage was sent to someone in the White (Supremacist) House a month ago, but no one gave Senate Republicans a heads- up of the bombshell(s) it contained:

As of Monday morning, Republican senators have made no direct comments yet about the bombshell New York Times report revealing former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s allegation that President Donald Trump directly told him he had tied military aid for Ukraine to a public announcement of an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

However, according to Times reporter Maggie Haberman, some Republicans are privately angry with the White House for boxing them into a political corner, with some demanding to know what they knew and when about the manuscript Bolton was going to release...

"Demanding!"  What bold spines of steel these anonymous Republicans have!  Who could possibly have predicted, after years of experience, that the serial liar and narcissist would only be looking out for Number 1?  Of course, in the end this won't matter because they'll find some excuse, some faux outrage to avoid calling witnesses and shut down the trial, as Steve M argues.  But we hope this will further cement the reality in voters' minds that these are the most cowardly, corrupt, worthless people ever to hold office in this country.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., has been looking at his email and would like us to know (again) what really motivates Trump supporters:

It’s still an article of faith for many that the Trump phenomenon was born out of fiscal insecurity, the primal scream of working people left behind by a changing economy. But I don’t think I’ve ever, not once, seen an email from a Trump supporter who explained himself in terms of the factory or the coal mine shutting down.

I have, however, heard from hundreds like “Matthew,” who worries about “immigrants” and “Gerald,” who thinks people of color have an “alliance” against him. Such people validate the verdict of a growing body of scholarship that says, in the words of a new study by University of Kansas professors David N. Smith and Eric Hanley, “The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders …”

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article211963789.html#storylink=cpy

Pitts sees no point in trying to reason with Trump supporters.  Neither do we.

We wrote last Friday about prosperity gospel grifter Paula White, "spiritual advisor to President Trump" (a title that should occasion eye rolls and hearty laughter), who apparently can pray away crime.  Well, the crackpot's in the news for some incendiary garbage she babbled out in a "sermon" earlier this month:

A Florida pastor and longtime spiritual adviser to President Trump says she was speaking in metaphor when she recently prayed in a sermon for all “satanic pregnancies” to end in miscarriage.

In video of the Jan. 5 sermon, posted by the liberal advocacy group Right Wing Watch, televangelist pastor Paula White breathlessly calls on Jesus Christ to “command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”

“We declare that anything that’s been conceived in satanic wombs, that it will miscarry, it will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm,” White said before an auditorium of congregants.

As of Sunday morning, the clip, which was just under two minutes long, had been viewed more than 2.5 million times.

Too late!  Mother Trump gave birth 73 years ago.

Jerry Brewer offers his thoughts about the untimely death yesterday of basketball legend Kobe Bryant, his 13- year- old daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash in California, and the story that will be left unfinished:

On Sunday, as the shocking news of his death turned a hopeful new year somber, the tragedy made his rush understandable, sadly. He couldn't have known he would get only 41 years as Kobe Bryant, the mesmerizing basketball superstar and enigmatic cultural icon. But he seemed to understand the fleeting nature of his fame — of his life — and he managed to accomplish more than almost anyone could.

Yet his story still feels disturbingly incomplete, and that’s why so many are taking his death so hard. Greater celebrities have left this world even younger, but there’s something especially jarring about losing Bryant. It’s the combination of three things: his exceptional and unforgettable body of work, the feeling that we were still just getting to know him and the hope that, without all the basketball superpowers and ego, he was about to become much greater in retirement than he was on the court.

If you want a definitive profile of Bryant, Brewer links to a November 2018 WaPo feature article by Kent Babb, "The Revisionist," which chillingly begins with an account of his use of his helicopter.

We close by directing you to this week's link round- up by Infidel 753, which is the most comprehensive collection of links to posts of interest around the Internet.  (The link to the post about asking follow- up questions is amusing and revealing, especially in light of the Pitts article linked to above.)  Check it out.

Monday Reading

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

As more rats jump ship, the Republican Party becomes the purest extension of the ego and whims of narcissistic moron Donald "Rump" Trump:

... Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as [Michigan Rep. Paul] Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain.  [snip]

The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.

Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year.

They preferred it when dog whistles were used and the quiet parts weren't said out loud.

Dave Leonhardt has just the facts about Trump, in 40 sentences.  Here are his last 10:

He obstructed justice by trying to influence an investigation into his presidential campaign.

He violated federal law by directing his lawyer to pay $280,000 in hush money to cover up two apparent extramarital affairs.

He made his fortune partly through wide-scale financial fraud.

He has refused to release his tax returns.

He falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping him.

He claimed that federal law-enforcement agents and prosecutors regularly fabricated evidence, thereby damaging the credibility of criminal investigations across the country.

He has ordered children to be physically separated from their parents.

He has suggested that America is no different from or better than Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

He has called America a “hellhole.”

He is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.

Conservative academic Tom Nichols focuses on the Trump-Ukraine scandal and what it should lead to:

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

Clearly.

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas. It means nothing to say that no such deal was reached; the important point is that Trump abused his position in the Oval Office.

In this matter, we need not rely on a newspaper account, nor even on the complaint, so far unseen, of a whistle-blower. Instead, we have a sweaty, panicked admission on national television by Trump’s bizarre homunculus, Rudy Giuliani, that he did in fact seek such an investigation on Trump’s behalf. Giuliani later again confirmed Trump’s role, tweeting that a “President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job.”

The blabbering buffoon has now admitted he talked about Joe Biden in his call to the Ukrainian President.  We rest our case.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog tells us the Trump-Ukraine smear is a foreshadowing that should wake Joe Biden up to reality:

What's ironic about all this is that Biden -- the only major Democratic presidential candidate who thinks he'll be able to work easily with Republicans if he's elected -- is the first candidate to be treated the way Republicans will treat any Democrat who manages to be elected president. The current thuggishness has the stylistic hallmarks of Trump, but notice that much of the party is closing ranks around Trump and trying to turn this into a smear on Biden. The GOP's propaganda arm, Fox News, is all in on the smear.

Joe, this is what your presidency will be like starting the moment you're sworn in. Every other top Democrat understands what's coming if they win. None of them expect to deal with the opposition party in good faith. They know that the fever won't break after the campaign is over.

You've gotten the first real taste of what a Democratic presidency will be like starting in 2021, if it happens. Any second thoughts about your plans to pal around with Mitch McConnell and the rest of the gang?

Finally, please check out Infidel 753's latest link round- up for the best collection of interesting items you'll see until his next round- up.  We thought we'd share a picture of the Oregon coast that he links to just for it's soul- cleansing power (click on image to enlarge):



Now, head on over there!

Monday Reading

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

Jay Bookman names some names in his op/ ed about who shouldn't be the Democratic standard bearer in 2020.  Here's his rationale:

Whatever else it will say about him, history will see Donald Trump as a marker in time that divides what came before him from what will come after him. He is a ridiculous figure, especially as president, but the fact that he was elected anyway demonstrates the bankruptcy of that previous era and the repudiation of an approach to politics that had grown stale and unresponsive. [snip] 

Today’s challenges — climate change, unsustainable economic disparity, technological disruption, the rationalization of a dysfunctional health-care system, the restraint and redirection of nationalist passions, the growing despair and addiction in those parts of America left behind by change — these are the troubles that must now be addressed. Voters will want and deserve fresh voices and insight into tackling them.

We're willing to let the year play out a bit more before we start crossing people off the list. (Speaking of lists, Vox has one on who's running, or expected to run, for President here.)

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog writes about the media's propensity for taking discrete troubles of various Democrats and blowing them up into a larger meme, and contrasts it with their treatment of the news that universe- class hypocrite Donald "Rump" Trump has been employing undocumented immigrants at his Bedminster, NJ, golf club for decades:

After every bad story involving a Democrat, the media stokes the expectation of a second-order effect: Not only is Elizabeth Warren expected to be embarrassed about a decades-old form on which she called herself a Native American, she now should expect to lose credibility when talking about the disproportionate power of the wealthy, which is a completely unrelated subject. Not only is a racist photo of Ralph Northam a mark of shame for the governor, it's expected to be toxic for everyone in the Democratic Party for the next 21 months, until Election Day 2020. 

But Trump? As far as I can determine, not even Ann Coulter has called him on the hiring at Bedminster. Hey, he's a hypocrite -- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It's okay if you're a Republican.

It's the media's broader, updated version of "but her emails!"  Steve has another piece on this general topic here that's also worth a read.

Paul Waldman picks up on the theme of the media focusing on building narratives ("stories") that distract from what's really important to know about a candidate's campaign:

...[W]e get consumed with "issues" like that one that seem to exist only within the four corners of the campaign, not because we think they're actually meaningful or revealing but because we assume they'll have an effect on voters. Meanwhile we completely forget that we're trying to figure out who would be the best president. [snip]

... Once these "issues" take hold with reporters, they use them to frame what that candidate does from that point forward. "Still reeling from controversy over her racial identity, Elizabeth Warren announced today." "Trying to refocus attention away from the allegation that she mistreated her staff, Amy Klobuchar traveled to Iowa." Nothing they say or do can change it, yet everything they say or do is described as an attempt to distract from it. 

The project of figuring out who candidates "really" are (as opposed to who they'd like us to think they are) is a perfectly worthy one, and if there's one lesson we should have learned it's that as president they're the same people they were before. Bill Clinton cheated on his wife before he was president, and while he was president. George W. Bush lied a lot about policy while he was a candidate, and did the same as president. Donald Trump was a corrupt liar his whole life, and still is. 

The key, though, is exploring the connection: Here's who the candidate has been and is now, and this is why it would be important to their presidency. That's the part so many reporters seem to forget about once politicians start trudging through Iowa. But if there's good news, it's this: It's not too late for coverage of the campaign to get better. Those of us in the media just have to decide to do something different.

We keep seeing this movie over and over, to the detriment of our democracy.  The media seems incapable of self- correction.  Sustained, assertive push back from us is the main weapon in our arsenal.

Keeping with the media, Newscorpse reports the prime time shitshows on Fox "News" are continuing to shed audience and advertisers, with implications for further, future revenue decline:

... With MSNBC taking the number one spot in most of the primetime cable news market, Fox News would have to lower their ad rates because advertisers aren’t going pay a premium for a number two network. And with that change in leadership comes an even bigger problem for Fox. Like every cable channel, Fox News makes most of its profits through licensing fees from cable system operators. They currently have a very lucrative contract that was negotiated at the height of their ratings success. Now that they are no longer the leader, those contracts will decline in value when they are up for renewal. 

All of this is due to Fox’s determination to advance a radical right-wing agenda and to serve as the State TV mouthpiece for Donald Trump. It’s an unsustainable business model as the nation wakes up from its temporary lapse in judgement and rejects Trump and the sycophantic, cult-like GOP that he commandeered.

That story was found over at Infidel 753's link round- up, one of many he regularly collects so the rest of us don't have to do the work of plumbing the internet for interesting items.  Go take a look at what else he's discovered!

Monday Reading

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

Vox's Dara Lind writes about the very specific, odd reference demagogue racist Donald "Rump" Trump has been making about women being smuggled into the US:

Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the border is built on a lie: the idea that the US-Mexico border is a lawless place where American citizens are constantly in grave danger, and where criminals are able to smuggle drugs and people without any risk of apprehension. That big picture — as Vox and the rest of the media has made clear again and again — bears very little resemblance to the truth. 

But the claim about women gagged with tape and packed into vans has attracted particular attention because it’s quickly become a centerpiece of Trump’s rhetoric — according to the Post, as of Friday he’d made 10 references to it in 22 days — without anyone knowing exactly where Trump got it from. 

Border experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard anything like what Trump’s talking about.

The Border Patrol has now been on a mission to find out what Rump is talking about, hustling to find "evidence" to back up the moron's fever dream.

(Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has a plausible explanation as to how this particular bug entered the big brain of the Very Stable Genius:  "I wonder if someone at the White House is showing Trump stock footage and insisting to Trump that it's real."  Steve provides a clip that could've been used to fool the fool.)

Michael Tomasky writes about the prospect of "Nancy and Chuck" owning Rump for the duration, and looks back briefly on the Rump manhood wall debacle:

It’s worth chortling again for a few paragraphs over how ridiculous and weak they made Trump look. Remember, this is a man who spent years, going way back before he started campaigning in 2015, saying over and over and over how easy being president would be. Bring the Chinese to heel? Very easy. Make Middle East peace? Please. Get Mexico to pay for the wall? Piece of cake. He’s been saying these things in books and television appearances for years. 

I can’t imagine who believed him—and if anyone out there was a big enough idiot to do so, that’s their problem. But the point is that he believed it. He actually thought being president would be easy (and the way he does it, watching TV for hours a day and calling Sean Hannity and ignoring 95 percent of what the government under him does, it sort of is, but that’s another matter). 

For two years, it was kind of easy. But in January, he met reality.

And as we all know, reality bites (if you're Rump).

Steve Benen wonders if Republicans have learned anything about Rump as a result of the Trump shutdown fiasco:

[W]hat’s of interest at this point is what, if anything, Republicans have learned from their recent experience. Both Senate Republicans offered specific and unambiguous predictions based on what they assumed to be true about the president, his plans, and his capacity for following through. 

Do they now know better? Shouldn’t they?

With that in mind, consider some of what Trump’s GOP should understand now, even if they were unclear before the president’s surrender on Friday afternoon.

Benen goes on to list 5 things about Rump that they should realize by now. "Should."

Meanwhile, on the keeping- Putin- happy front:

The U.S. Treasury Department on Sunday officially lifted sanctions on businesses tied to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. 

The department said in a news release that the Office of Foreign Assets Control lifted sanctions on EN+ Group Plc and EuroSibEnergo JSC, noting that each company has reduced Deripaska's "direct and indirect shareholding stake in these companies and severed his control." [snip]

Democrats in Congress attempted to block the move. But Senate Republicans were able to defeat the measure and prevent it from advancing to a floor vote earlier this month.  

The agreement the Treasury Department reached with Deripaska included having him cut his direct and indirect share ownership for each company below 50 percent.  

But The New York Times reported last week that Deripaska and his allies are set to retain majority ownership the energy company EN+. 

There is no way -- none -- that this is not a cave to Putin, fully supported by the rotted out Republican Party.

Finally, please do yourselves a favor and check out Infidel 753's link round- up for much more than we have the energy to dig up here.  It's the best round up of "interesting stuff" on the planet.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links to read the full articles.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has a contrary view to the one expressed by Adam Davidson that we're at the end stage of the Trump presidency:

Conservatives are different. They practice the politics of "what's in it for me?" and rarely game out the long-term consequences. They couldn't imagine how the Iraq War or lack of financial oversight could cause problems because the problems hadn't happened yet -- certainly not to themselves. (Similarly, they can't understand why it's a big deal that Russia interfered in our last presidential election -- their guy won, so what's the problem?) 

Conservative voters are never going to care about Trump's corruption because it has no negative impact on them. They haven't lost any money as a result of his dealings in Brazil or Azerbaijan, so why does any of it matter?  

It may not literally be true that Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, but he could certainly fleece someone there, or be fleeced, and his voters wouldn't care, because it's irrelevant to them.

The Government Accountability Office has issued its report on the $43,000 secret soundproof booth that paranoid EPA Assministrator Scott "Swamp Thang" Pruitt had installed in his office.  Here's the executive summary (PDF of the full report at the link):

Section 710 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2017 (section 710) prohibits an agency from obligating an amount in excess of $5,000 to furnish, redecorate, purchase furniture for, or make improvements for the office of a presidential appointee during the period of appointment without prior notification to the appropriations committees of Congress. The statutory language of section 710 requires notification not only for the purchase of furniture and for aesthetic changes, but also for supplying the office with other equipment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated section 710 when it failed to notify the appropriations committees prior to obligating in excess of $5,000 for the installation of a soundproof privacy booth for the office of the Administrator during the period of his appointment. Because EPA used its appropriations in a manner specifically prohibited by law, EPA violated the Antideficiency Act and should report a violation as required by 31 U.S.C. § 1351. 

Nojo at Stinque has a few words for the knuckle- draggers who've been calamitously voting for Republicans for the last 40- plus years and who now would like us to respect their actions and views:

Yeah, sorry. It’s on you. It’s all on you. 

We’re told we’re not supposed to say that. We’re told you might throw a tantrum if we dare suggest, with extensive documentation, that you have been fucking idiots for the entirety of our adult life. We’re told we must respect you and all the poor decisions you’ve made, decisions that have brought our country to the brink of predictable ruin. We’re told you’ll get all upset if we pay any mind to folks who have, and continue to be, screwed by the people you put in office. 

It can be deadly to be a journalist in Trump mentor and master Vladimir Putin's Russia:

A Russian investigative journalist who wrote about the deaths of mercenaries in Syria has died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor flat. 

Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died. 

Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature. 

However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier. [snip]

Journalists in Russia have often been harassed or attacked in recent years for their work. On the same day that Maxim Borodin was found fatally injured, the editor of an official regional newspaper was assaulted in Yekaterinburg, reports say. 

We close as always with a recommendation to check out Infidel 753's blog round- up, your one- stop shop for the curious, the humorous, the serious and much more.

Morning Reading: The Morally Bankrupt, Un-American Party & An American Hero

Paul Krugman shows us the reality of a morally bankrupt political party in service to the most venal regime and policies in American history:

Everyone understands that Mr. Comey was fired not because of his misdeeds during the campaign — misdeeds that helped put Trump in the White House — but because his probe of Russian connections with the Trump campaign was accelerating and, presumably, getting too close to home. So this looks very much like the use of presidential power to cover up possible foreign subversion of the U.S. government. 

And the two leading Republicans in Congress are apparently O.K. with that cover-up, because the Trump ascendancy is giving them the chance to do what they always wanted, namely, take health insurance away from millions of Americans while slashing taxes on the wealthy. [snip] 

So here’s where we stood as of Thursday evening: 138 Democrats and independents had called for the appointment of a special prosecutor; just one Republican had joined that call. Another 84 Democrats had called for an independent investigation, joined by only six Republicans. 

At this point, in other words, almost an entire party appears to have decided that potential treason in the cause of tax cuts for the wealthy is no vice. And that’s barely hyperbole. 

How did a whole party become so, well, un-American? For this story now goes far beyond Trump.

Read the entire op/ ed for the "how."

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog argues, rightfully, that Republican conservatism "hasn't primarily been about policy for a long time."  In doing so, he gives us a revised definition of "Cleek's Law" (i.e., "Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily."):

"Today’s conservatism is whatever conservatives think will make liberals furious, updated daily."

That sounds right. It's been about stoking anger, resentment, and bigotry in a base that's been conditioned to hate anything that could be labeled "liberal" or "left," in order to serve their real purpose of afflicting the afflicted (repealing Obamacare) and comforting the comfortable (gutting Medicaid to provide a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy).

Michael Winship at Bill Moyers.com reminds us that, in this week that displayed some of the ugliness in our political system, an American hero emerged:

Sally Yates’ steadfast grace under pressure and willingness to uphold the principles of democracy over discrimination and grandstanding especially stood out this week in the wake of the Comey dismissal. With few exceptions, Republicans ran for cover and continued to pretend that their standard bearer hasn’t spent too much time on the Tilt-a-Whirl. No Profiles in Courage there. 

Coincidentally, it was another woman — a Republican — Margaret Chase Smith, senator from Maine, who in 1950 dared speak out against the outrages of Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) as he attempted to trash the country much the way that Trump desires now. “I speak as an American,” she said. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” 

By their silence, most of today’s Republicans are trying to do just that. They will allow Trump to keep making outrageous statements and decisions, permit him to continue batting out his malicious tweets and project onto others the malevolent thoughts and deeds that really are his own. Together they will continue to malign upstanding Americans like Sally Yates.

Moral cowards and opportunists like those in the White (Supremacist) House and Republicans in Congress will be remembered by history as such as long as we continue to hold a light to their words and actions.

BONUS:  Good read at Stinque on "The Mind of the Collaborator."