Diane Feinstein, born in 1933, is roughly the same age as my father, which means she’s getting up in years. But she’s still working hard and seemingly as sharp as ever. The California senator recently took over as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and with Supreme Court nomination hearings beginning tomorrow, that’s not a job for someone who is slowing down. Her prior top responsibility was on the Senate Intelligence Committee which she chaired for the first six years of the Obama presidency before serving as the Ranking Member for the last two. In that role, she famously sparred furiously with the CIA and their director John Brennan. She still serves on the Intelligence Committee, but Mark Warner of Virginia has taken over there as the top Democrat.
Last week, she and Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa met with FBI Director James Comey.
After closed door meetings with FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday, top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee looked grim and rattled and refused to divulge the contents of the meeting to reporters.
At around 5 p.m. E.T. on Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) faced reporters but revealed little about their meetings with Comey.
“This briefing was all on sensitive matters,” Feinstein said, “and highly classified and it’s really not anything we can answer any questions about.”
We don’t know the particulars of what was discussed, but we know that at least some of it dealt with the Russian connection to Donald Trump, his campaign, and his surrogates.
I've seen Feinstein have the worried look on her face. This is more than that. She just met with FBI chief Comey.
— Phil Elliott (@Philip_Elliott) March 15, 2017
We know that this meeting only occurred because Chuck Grassley, a Republican, threw something pretty close to an epic fit about what he described as a lack of cooperation from the FBI.
“It doesn’t matter whether you have a Republican or Democrat president, every time they come up here for their nomination hearing . . . I ask them, ‘Are you going to answer phone calls and our letters, and are you going to give us the documents we want?’ And every time we get a real positive ‘yes’! And then they end up being liars!” Grassley said, screaming into the phone during an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s not if they’re treating us differently than another committee. It’s if they’re responding at all.”
Grassley spoke as he awaited a meeting with FBI Director James B. Comey to determine whether the bureau is investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s elections. Grassley has threatened to block the nomination of Rod J. Rosenstein as deputy attorney general until his committee receives an FBI briefing.
So, even after Comey had agreed to meet with Grassley and Feinstein, Grassley was still so angry that he was screaming into the phone about Comey being a liar to reporters at the Washington Post. That was the setup to the meeting, and they must not have been comforted by what they learned. Some said they looked “grim and rattled,” others that they were visibly shaken.
That was Wednesday. On Friday, Sen. Feinstein was back in her home state meeting with constituents in Los Angeles. She remained grim.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein seemed to indicate Friday that she expects President Donald Trump may disqualify himself from office over potential constitutional breaches and conflicts of interest.
Surrounded by a group of mostly liberal protesters outside a Los Angeles fundraiser, Feinstein fielded a slew of questions on her feelings about what the left has alleged are Trump’s constitutional breaches, including one activist’s recitation of Trump’s potential conflicts of interest — from profiting off of his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to winning trademarks in China.
“How are we going to get him out?” the questioner asked.
“I think he’s gonna get himself out,” the California Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee replied.
Admittedly, the questions weren’t directed to Russia’s role in the election, but her briefing with Comey could not have been far from her mind. Asked whether Trump had committed an impeachable offense, she stated that “I can’t answer that right now,” echoing her post-Comey remarks where she apologized for not being able to discuss what she and Grassley had learned.
Now, Feinstein may be right that Trump will be the author of his own undoing, but there will have to be a mechanism for that. Congressional leaders or members of Trump’s cabinet will have to step up and insist that he step down. So, in that sense, it would be delusional if Feinstein intended to be taken literally when she said that Trump would get himself out.
On some level, she must still have faith that our leaders are capable of protecting the Constitution and the country. And I’m glad that she has that faith even if she is ultimately proven wrong. Without that faith, there is simple no hope and our country will continue to suffer under an unacceptable level of risk that will almost assuredly translate into disaster.
I share her faith, but I am not so sure that we’re not too far gone to save ourselves. All I know is that we must act as if we still have a chance even if we don’t.
I suppose Trump doesn’t want to go to Brennan’s CIA intelligence school …
Yes…it appears Trump doesn’t need anyone selling him on the morality of war, drones, etc as we can see in increased drone strikes in Yemen and recent offensives in Syria, as well as reports that he’s not particularly concerned with civilian casualties.
I don’t think that absolute final moment of reckoning for our leaders is quite here yet. But their actions up to this point give me almost no cause to hope that they will act in time or with the decisiveness that is necessary to avoid a catastrophic event.
Yet I still have hope, but not faith. Faith requires some level of demonstration on the part of our leaders that they will act in a manner that will save us. And I just don’t see that in them. That’s not to say that some will not do everything that is in their power to avoid disaster, it’s just that those who hold the power to make the ultimate decisions appear to be hellbent on carrying out a disastrous agenda and following a path toward destruction.
We don’t know the ultimate consequences of the decisions and actions which are yet to come. Some here seem to think that our democracy is resilient enough to withstand it and don’t seem tremendously alarmed at what is transpiring. But I am not so sure. We are dealing with a worldview which we have seen before. And now this worldview is firmly ensconced within the power structure of our nation. They have access to all the information and all the power that is necessary to destroy humanity. And at a minimum, make this country unrecognizable from what it has stood for and represented, in general, for the last 240 years.
I am not so sure either. I don’t really understand an all knowing and acting permagov. And I don’t know how the 25 th amendment or a real impeachment gets going with a party as corrupt and as all powerful as the republicans. Dissenters will be taken to the tool shed and admonished to shut up.
I think that…if Grassley and Feinstein were as “rattled” as they appear to have been and continue to refuse to answer questions because the answers would necessarily include classified information…we are about to reach the crunch point regarding the efforts of the Permanent Government to get rid of Donald Trump.
Around Easter is my guess. Possibly sooner. Most certainly before summer. The faster the better, because if the Trumpists manage to foment some sort of “war”…probably with N. Korea although the NATO buildup along the Russian borders doesn’t look too promising either…all bets are off.
I hope that instead of just walking around looking worried, these senators are actually lining up votes for impeachment or worse.
I can see the headlines now:
Watch.
AG
Gilroy, what’s happened? You’re actually making sense.
Priscianus jr,…what’s happened?
You’re actually understanding what I am saying?
Congrats.
AG
Et tu, Marduke?
Of course he’s still describing it as a shadowy Permagov plot to unseat Trump and not a predictable response to actual behavior Trump got caught doing but baby steps I guess.
No, he’s right, it is a shadowy Permagov. Well, not that shadowy.
Using overdetermined nebulous brain fart terms like “permagov” and “neoliberal” instead of describing what you actually mean leads to making constant category errors, misattribution of events and behaviors, incoherent causal chains, and makes for opaque word-salad communication. In the best case these utterances conceal the unstated assumptions and flaws in your analysis. In the worst case they straight-up damage your ability to analyze and reason about events.
You see this in the post above- replace the “permagov” term with the various disparate people involved in investigating the election hacking and Trump’s involvement and you realize ascribing some unified plan or motivation to depose Trump to them all is just bonkers.
Following up on this
Actually, if you read what I just said below (or wherever it is?) we’re not disagreeing very much, if at all.
There is a permagov, but that’s not the whole story, and it’s not completely monolithic, no.
As for neoliberalism, actually, the more you learn about it, it’s extremely monolithic, not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense of a simplistic one-size-fits-all ideology that has a stranglehold over funding of what used to be the true public sector. It’s kind of the ideology used by the West to dismantle communism, but they had so much fun doing that they are now using it to dismantle the entire nonprofit sector in the rest of the world.
As Henry Mintzberg, wrote in “Managing Government, Governing Management” (1996): [Unlike] the countries under communism [in which] the state controlled an enormous proportion of all organized activity, we in the West have been living in balanced societies with strong private sectors, strong public sectors, and great strength in the sectors in between. The belief that capitalism has triumphed is now throwing the societies of the West out of balance … When the enterprises are really free, the people are not. Indeed, there is a role in our society for different kinds of organizations and the contributions they make.”
The ongoing trashing of nonprofits, forcing them to adopt the management procedures of for-profit organizations (such as school privatization, ongoing privatization of state universities, “venture philanthropy”, etc.) and the accompanying cutoff of public (tax) funding, is the essence of neoliberalism, and it is destroying what’s left of Western society.
Neoliberalism, narrowly defined, can be a useful descriptor. And the next time I see it used that way on a political blog will be a first.
To be accurate, that’s not the whole of neoliberalism, but it’s a very important part of its effects, one that should concern all of us and which we see the results of every single day in many, many different ways.
And that’s precisely the problem. It won’t get properly defined. I’ll say it again – oaguabonita did a wonderful job a few weeks back providing a nice definition and even better noticed that there was a distinct difference between the Democratic and Republican parties when it came to which one’s politicians advocated and put into practice neoliberal policies (narrowly defined). Hint: it ain’t the Dems (though the Dems do need to do a better job of making clear who is really transferring wealth from the public sphere to the already rich few). If I have a moment, I’ll find the link. It may not matter to those who like to abuse this particular terminology, but maybe to those who haven’t formed an opinion, don’t follow theoretical minutia, and who care about the well-being of real people it will matter.
There is a distinction. The Republicans screw the public sector because they hate it and want to destroy it, while the Democrats screw the public sector because they love it and want to make it better. The Republicans will not raise taxes on the rich, and the Democrats (with rare exceptions) won’t either.
Both screw the public sector, but at least the Republicans are honest about it.
So we’ll just conveniently forget that income tax increase on the wealthy during the Obama administration, the expansion of Medicaid and so on. Gotcha. Please proceed.
I said “with rare exceptions”. I haven’t exactly noticed the dawning of a second New Deal yet.
We would need huge majorities to manage to pull that off. Sort of like a certain FDR had available. Obama had majorities the first half of his first term, but nowhere nearly as impressive. That meant whatever reforms came about were inevitably going to be more incremental than perhaps he, and undoubtedly I would have liked. If somewhere during the life of this blog, we are both still posting and Dems have the White House and FDR sized majorities in both chambers of Congress and they fail to come up with a New Deal 2.0. I will gladly concede your point. Until then, all we have are counterfactuals to go on.
The first two years of the Obama administration represented the greatest downward redistribution of wealth via policy since Johnson’s Great Society.
No way! Not a single kulak paid the blood price for their despoliation of the people.
On what planet?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
Taibbi’s article is not responsive to my claim (and it’s full of transparently wrong predictions- he never really understood monetary policy).
Check it out:
You’re quite within your rights not to care for Taibbi’s article. But it is one of thousands making the point in various ways.
Please be more specific because no, it’s not making “the point”.
When I say that the first 2 years of the Obama administration were the high water mark for redistribution via policy since the Great Society expansion of the welfare state I mean it literally. Look at the CBO numbers 2008 vs 2016. Or the projected numbers circa 2010 if you prefer theoretical to result. It was easy to handwave at Obama’s efforts until Obamacare hit in 2014. And it’s all despite Robert’s rewriting of the law to let states avoid spending money on non-wealthy constituents.
Fuck, man, do you still not know what neoliberal means? This is getting serious.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
Georges Monbiot is not exactly a conspiracy theorist. I challenge you to read that and tell me you still don’t know what neoliberalism means.
As for “Permagov”, seriously? I mean, you don’t have to use that term, there re many others, but it’s the conglomeration of financiers, intelligence, politicians with intelligence ties, media with intelligence ties, and the military-industrial complex (term made famous by that famous conspiracy theorist Dwight D. Eisenhower) that sets the direction of most national and international policy regardless of who heads the government. They don’t decide everything, of course, but there isn’t much that can be done without being fit within the general parameters they set. That’s not to say the Republicans are exactly the same as the Democrats. It’s not even to say that the PTB (powers that be) cannot change their policies. It’s just damn hard to get them to do it, because they are not responsive to ordinary politics.
Also, not EVERYTHING they do is by definition wrong. Intelligence and the military have legitimate functions, namely, to keep our country safe from foreign aggression and interference. And we have an administration now in power that is running counter to them, but actually as a puppet of foreign interference, and completely out of its league — which is creating havoc here and elsewhere in the world.
Your last sentence reads like something out of the John Birch Society:
Although otherwise Trump is right out of JBS.
You’ve got to be kidding. What resemblance is there between what I said and what Robert Welch said? You mean because the two statements have a structural resemblance? Er … what about the content?
Talking of resemblance, your method of interpretation bears some resemblance to that of Claude Levi-Strauss:
“Critics also saw weaknesses in Lévi-Strauss’ methods, in the fact that he looked for ideal structures, thereby neglecting the reality and complexity of actual practices. His model explained practices that were not observed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Put it like this, it’s a predictable response by the no-longer-so-shadowy Permagov to actual behavior that they caught Trump doing.
But that Trump is doing it largely as a puppet of the Russian Permagov accounts for a lot of the drivel Gilroy (and some others here) have previously written. He thought our Permagov was lying about the other Permagov, but they’re not. This is too serious to be lying. This is the real deal.
And it is true that a liar is not believed even when he tells the truth. But for God’s sake don’t ADVISE people to not believe a liar even when he’s telling the truth. Because yeah, American intelligence are professional liars (you really think we don’t know that, AG?), but they happen to be telling the truth right now.
If things have deteriorated under Trump — and there’s no doubt they have — I’ll take the old Permagov (as sucky as it is) over the new one. Besides, if anyone can get rid of these assholes, it’s our Permagov — so let’s just hope they can. At least for once they’ll be doing what they’re actually supposed to do.
As long as we’re quoting articles, I have to refer to (the always excellent) Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books last week, who did the best job of summarizing this particular point, which is the most important point:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/what-trump-could-do/
He goes on to adopt a Naomi Klein argument about how some unspecified scary event could push us over the line into a total abandonment of civil rights etc. (which I don’t see happening — but of course I didn’t see any of this happening, not being blessed with Arthur Gilroy’s stunning foresight). Anyway, the central point, that (despite the famous Gerald Ford quote) laws only constrain power when people actively use them for this purpose, is probably the most crucial idea of this age.
>>Ours is famously said to be a government of laws, not of men
which has always been a better slogan than description. to paraphrase Andrew Jackson, laws don’t enforce themselves and never have.
without a prosecutor to bring charges and a court to bring them to, a law is words.
It was most “famously said” by Gerald Ford, the day Nixon resigned and he took office:
In that context, it’s very powerful indeed: it’s the template for pretty much all the battles we’ve fought since (with, of course, the Republicans pretty much consistently on the wrong side). The fact that Ford immediately pardoned Nixon doesn’t quite diminish the power of the statement.
i think we disagree. it’s a good slogan, but IMO the fact that Ford immediately pardoned Nixon very greatly diminishes its power.
Gerald Ford said that, but he was quoting John Adams, who had written it into the 1780 Massachusetts state constitution.
A few exchanges of fraternal expressions of peace and friendship with the political leadership, and and a few cooperative enterprises with the business leadership, of another world power and everyone loses their shit.
You’d think that that would be a thing people would want in a presidential candidate, and even more in a President.
Мир и дружба!
Peace and friendship. And racism.
I’m back in the USSA!
“tell” or not?
the definition of “impeachable offense” is something the House majority will investigate and bring charges about.
right now, that is an empty set. I’m not going to predict how quickly that could change.
Give them credit for thinking about it, though. That’s the “tell” here.
Yeah, Feinstein “looking grim” has in the past meant: 1) the USG or a high USG official has done something terrible that she won’t talk publicly about and nothing can or will be done to hold anyone accountable but some new weak tea legislation (or a strongly worded letter) will be offered as a salve 2) the USG is about to and must do something terrible and nothing and nobody can stop it 3) not good for Diane Feinstein and/or the Democratic Party. Of course, the prospect of ousting Trump to be replaced with Pence/Ryan isn’t something she’d be dancing in the streets about. And “Trump taking himself out” (if it’s related to what Comey revealed to her) would be a relief for Grassley because that would mean that the matter is illegal/criminal and therefore, the GOP doesn’t have to act on it and lose all those Trump voters.
Context, Marie, context. Be Here Now.
Wishful thinking isn’t context. Nor does recognizing who Feinstein is abstract from context right now.
Isn’t it a bit head spinning to shift from Comey is the devil that elected Trump to now he’s the good guy that’s going to save us from Trump?
Comey is going to be back on the Hill tomorrow; so, maybe we should wait a day before getting high on hope.
Comey never was the devil that elected Trump. You may not know that, but I’m sure Feinstein does.
Even if you think that’s what elected Trump (which I don’t), Comey was snookered into it by a cabal in the FBI led by Giuliani and Kallstrom, who are no friends of Comey. If you check Comey’s career, he really has conducted himself pretty decently for a f-ng Republican.
Quote: “Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html
Fuck that noise. Comey was a Whitewater ratfucker back in the day and he’s a ratfuker now. His kids are probably ratfuckers too. He’s ratfucking Trump now to save his own ass.
If indeed there are ongoing investigations, it’s not unreasonable to think that various benchmarks have been met along the way to justify continuing analysis. Comey could be perceived as buying his agency time in the last several weeks to bring circumstantial evidence into the realm of proof. At this point, goals are too far fetched, it’s still a system of following the leads. I doubt the bow has been tied on this package.
Now, in the weeks leading up to the election, word on the street was that the FBI was riddled with Trump enthusiasts out to sink Clinton. So, if Comey had evidence linking Trump to shady stuff, how likely is it that it would be secure? Who would have acquired said evidence?
The most important thing to know is that Giuliani and Kallstrom were on an anti-Comey kick all summer and into the Fall 2016. And after the second Clinton e-mail affair, Comey was defended by President Obama. And now Comey’s got the goods on them. Fill in the dots.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-obama-says-he-would-fear-
for-country-1478304750-htmlstory.html
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/18/opinions/comey-finally-speaks-about-russia-zelizer/
“…we must act as if we still have a chance even if we don’t.”
We have reached a point where that prescription is simply a failure of situational awareness. The 1787 Constitution has been abrogated and is no longer in force. The successor regime cannot be foreseen. Whatever happens next will be outside the frame of reference of the 1787 Constitution. Congress (even assuming any notional change in its partisan makeup) is not capable of asserting its prerogatives. No institution, no situation, no course of action, and no epistemology is today capable of mustering more than 50% support, and that only “through a glass, darkly”. This rules out any approach based upon an ideal of self-determination.
The constitution in effect is perhaps the one held by the Museum of the Confederacy.
Isn’t it entirely possible that Comey called Feinstein and Grassley in and told them to STFU if they didn’t want to be found floating in the Potomac?
That would put me in a real bad mood.
Comey might have threatened that if he found out that Grassley and Feinstein had not renewed their membership in the Deep State.
There’s a grace period. You can still rig elections and have people disappeared and stuff on an expired membership provided you renew within 90 days of the expiry.
It’s not widely known. The permagov has an interest in timely renewals. But it’s right there in the rules.