Considering the fact that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson vociferously opposed the president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel and to announce that we’ll be moving our embassy there, it’s not surprising that the State Department issued a new worldwide travel alert for any Americans dumb or reckless enough to think they’re still welcome in most of the globe’s countries. As you might expect, Trump would not listen to anyone who told him this would be a very bad idea, and went ahead with it anyway because he wanted to fulfill a campaign promise.
Several advisers said he did not seem to have a full understanding of the issue and instead appeared to be focused on “seeming pro-Israel,” in the words of one, and “making a deal,” in the words of another…
…The debate came to a head at a White House meeting Nov. 27 to hash out the waiver issue. According to people briefed on the meeting, Trump repeated his earlier assertions that he had to follow through on his campaign pledge, seemingly irritated by objections over security and the break with previous policy.
“The decision wasn’t driven by the peace process,” one senior official said. “The decision was driven by his campaign promise.”
Naturally, Trump did not heed warnings that he might endanger our diplomatic corp and produce more Benghazis.
Tillerson, mindful of the death of four Americans in militant attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, “pushed back vocally,” one White House official said. Already at odds with Trump over other aspects of the president’s approach to the Middle East, Tillerson argued that the move could unleash a dangerous chain reaction across the region.
R.C. Hammond, a Tillerson adviser, said Tillerson and [Defense Secretary James] Mattis requested time to evaluate U.S. outposts and fortify them if necessary…
“It’s insane. We’re all resistant,” said one Trump confidant who recently spoke to the president about it. “He doesn’t realize what all he could trigger by doing this.”
If this wasn’t bad enough, the Democrats can’t even present another face to the world because they’re divided and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer actually encouraged and approved the move.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing headlines like this– Hamas calls for Palestinian uprising in response to Trump’s Jerusalem plan— which were as predictable as spring showers.
Or maybe you prefer this headline: North Korea says war is inevitable as allies continue war games.
The so-called adults in the room utterly failed on the Jerusalem issue, so are we supposed to put our trust in them to steer a sane course on the Korean peninsula?
And don’t ask the Republicans to do anything about this because they’re too busy covering Trump’s ass: Republicans Hammer Mueller as Investigation Intensifies.
Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, one of the president’s informal advisers as well as one of his most vociferous defenders, on Tuesday night called Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system’’ and said his team is “corrupt, abusively biased and political.’’
I hear a lot of political debate and commentary that I consider stupid, but the suggestion that we can just ride this out is actually beyond stupid. It’s dangerous.
No, removing Trump from power won’t magically fix what’s wrong with the Republican Party. That’s the thing about magic; it’s based on sleight of hand and deception. What you think you see doesn’t actually exist. We need to prioritize and triage this situation, otherwise we’ll bleed out while people are debating the post-operative protocols.
We are the patient, and if the patient cannot be saved we shouldn’t let it be because we decided it would be bad to get called “impeachment enthusiasts” or “giddy frenzied liberals” with an “fetish” for Trump’s removal.
It’s his confidants and members of Trump’s own cabinet and White House team who are calling him a moron and an idiot, and saying “It’s insane. We’re all resistant. He doesn’t realize what all he could trigger by doing this.” They’re the ones saying “he doesn’t seem to have a full understanding of the issues.” It’s the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is telling us that Trump needs day care.
And, still, we’re supposed to apologize and ask permission to talk about Trump’s fitness to continue in office?
We’ve been warned. We’ve all been warned. And if we want to whistle past the graveyard because it seems impractical or too hard to save ourselves, we’ll earn the condemnation of anyone who survives.
So we now have a two-fer leading the US. Trump and Netanyahu with a cheering section of apocalyptic evangelicals. Yet another huge Democratic failure. For the Congressional Democrats, #metoo still means what it did for the Blue Dogs. Purging progressives.
Is that a reflex?
I write something, you respond by saying it’s a failure of Democrats?
Calvin seems to have this same reflex only more pronounced, as if all data must be processed first through a “how does this reflect badly on the left?” lens before it can be understood.
Thankfully, the intra-party fratricide is far worse in left leaning blog communities than it is in the Democratic community writ large. It is atrocious that any Democrat supports this move, let alone the Senate minority leader. We do need to face our problems and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong narrative is among them. But there’s a time and place (called the primaries). This isn’t it. Now is the time to band together in opposition to Trump’s stupidity.
Booman…you write above:
Of course that “Majority” word is just a typo…you should probably fix it…but you castigate Tarheel with one hand and simultaneously put down Schumer…who we all know is the Senator From AIPAC…and the “divided” Democrats.
Sorry, Booman…you can’t have it both ways.
AG
If you didn’t have the same reflex, you’d realize the Schumer stuff is in there because I don’t need the first comment to be, “yeah, but the Democrats are almost as bad.”
And, yet, it is anyway.
So you are essentially scolding us for agreeing with you?
Hmmmmm…
You used to be so straightforward.
AG
No. It’s like this.
A good piece will address obvious rebuttals. These are called “to be sure” clauses and they’re intended to acknowledge things like “Schumer is as reckless as Trump.”
But only an illiterate focuses on the “to be sure” clauses because by definition they’re NOT THE POINT of the article.
Booman, I appreciate your writing. I appreciate many of the commenters here. But if there were a “block” button, I surely would have blocked some of them. Ah, well.
They’ve picked their side and decided on their consistent course of action, a course of action which consistently works against the goals they claim to have. At a certain point we have to consider the possibility that they’re just rankly dishonest about their goals. As the reporting of what the Trump campaign, the Russian Federation, and their allies were up to in 2016, their adherents are slowly but surely falling away from this community.
Arthur has provided ample evidence on this blog that he is an extreme right wing reactionary, but we have to sort through massive pixels of bad faith “advice” to keep our attention on those revelations of his.
Always suspected that was a pseudonym (“did you eat here?”).
Trump’s idiotic move saddens, angers and frightens me completely irrespective of the fact that my 26 year old son is about to embark on his birthright-Israel trip.
My son is a very intelligent and thoughtful young man. He knows that Birthright Israel is intent on providing a narrow narrative on the nature of the Jewish state. In better times, I’ve no doubt he’d depart from the prescribed trail and make side trips of his own with an openness to Palestinians. Unfortunately, now is not the time for those side-trips. I’m really sorry to say that because the world needs young people like my son to have the chance to educate themselves. But right now being American and being Jewish make one a target more so than ever, thanks to our great and fearless leader.
Not a great time for the Jews.
(And my family is traveling to Israel in a few weeks. I’ll say hi to your son when I see him. I’ll be the Jewy-looking guy arguing with the haredim.)
Reality check: The Republicans are scared shitless by the way Mueller’s Flynn investigation is going, and the spinners are working overtime. But it’s not really going to have much effect. Little more than 1/3 of the country is listening to them, and that’s not going to change. The investigatory process is not responsive to politics or spin, and clearly its getting somewhere or the Republicans would not be in panic mode.
The Jerusalem affair has nothing to do with the Mueller investigation and will not affect it. The only thing they have in common is that the Israeli right is spinning Jerusalem as fast as the American right is spinning Mueller, but the real consequences of both are beyond their control.
As for the various likely consequences of the Jerusalem move, there are many ironies, as detailed in a fascinating article from yesterday’s Haaretz:
https:/www.haaretz.com/opinion.premium-1.826988
Infamy indeed. Great post.
unless you’re advocating a coup, there is no way to fix this except at the ballot box. I can’t imagine a Republican House impeaching Trump, or a Republican Senate convicting him.
They never would. The GOP isn’t going to go to war with itself anytime soon. The only way they might is if they were in the position of the Democrats(meaning control of very few states and such). Besides, Trump ingratiates himself further to the evangelicals with this move. People do realize that John Hagee and that ilk love this move, right?
Coup by media-driven popular opinion.
A first.
Unless of course you consider the Nixon resignation just that.
I do.
And…the media is so much stronger now. Sneakier too, considering bot-driven so-called “social” media
Could happen.
So could the old-fashioned kind.
Bet on it.
AG
Nah, I’ll pass. I just love it when people claim the media drove Nixon’s impeachment.
Maybe you weren’t there for that. I was. And you are so wrong, you’re not even wrong.
i was there, jsrtheta. When Nixon was elected, I seriously considered leaving the country. I didn’t. I stayed and watched, stayed and pursued my craft. My American craft.
The same media that clamored for the Vietnam War…I was there, too, narrowly avoiding a criminal draft by the use of my wits…the same media that cooperated (no matter how passively) in covering up the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK Jr., the same that got Reagan elected, the same that clamored for Bush II’s war…drummed up the Watergate thing for all it was worth. It was good practice for this ongoing Trump debacle, the media’s greatest ever non-personing effort.
t matters little to me how objectively “bad” Trump is. If HRC had been elected and then immediately tore off her neo-centrist mask and started to effectively pursue real progressive goals…not that I think she would have done that, but if she did…she would have been hounded just as is Trump today.
Cross the controllers while in a position of some real power and they will fight you. It’s not about any sort of morality; it’s simply about power.
Later…
AG
Arthur is a silly and evasive man:
“Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated–sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech–it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals–her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks–accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”
Arthur is a radical right wing reactionary who shares Ron Paul’s view that we should stop enforcing Federal civil and voting rights laws. Like Ron Paul, he also believes Federal social welfare programs should be eliminated or sharply cut.
At the danger of provoking our host while he appears to be in a feisty mood: How can we expect Republicans to impeach Trump when our own Senate leader is chastising us that it’s “not appropriate”?
The Other Guys don’t have a monopoly on cowardice.
It’s not appropriate now. Any attempt now would fail miserably.
We await Mueller’s conclusions.
Maybe not appropriate for elected Dems to be spending a lot of time on it, but the rest of us should be saying exactly what needs to be said.
Oh, I agree. Trump should be removed from office.
It’s just that we’re going to need more ammunition to have a chance of making it stick in congress and with a big enough percentage of the country. A premature impeachment attempt could easily make Trump’s removal less likely.
They wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on it now. All they’d be saying is that it’s on the table for the future. I think a lot of us remember Pelosi pre-emptively taking it off the table re: C- Augustus.
Yeah, and we remember what a total fucking disaster the 2008 election was for Democratic Party candidates. Nancy’s failure to campaign on a certain-to-fail impeachment prosecution really had electoral consequences, eh?
/s
That was the last election that WASN’T a disaster.
Yeah, the electoral results when President Obama was re-elected were a real disaster for our nation.
/s
The rest of the election downballot was pretty meh. In any case the soundbite wrote itself.
She took it off the table before the 2006 election, if you remember. The one where the Democrats retook the House and barely retook the Senate. But we know the real reason she took it off the table. Plenty of Democrats voted for C- Augustus’ wars, and impeaching him would mean they were complicit.
Phil, there was no way the votes would have been there in the Senate to remove the President from office. I’d suggest to you that this is closer to “the real reason she took it off the table”.
The election results in 2006 and 2008 were outstanding. The voters didn’t punish Democrats for not running on impeachment. The voters didn’t want impeachment. It would have been an electoral loser.
We’ve got work to do in 2017 and beyond. There are now only three seated Senate Democrats who voted for the Iraq war authorization. They made a very bad vote over 14 years ago. They’re not the enemies of the progressive movement. They’re not belligerent military hawks. Maybe we could move on.
We are less than a year into the endless reign of the American Madman and the storm clouds are already gathering, not that the CEOs of corporate America are too concerned. Unfortunately, it looks like “we” (in the sense of sane Americans) can’t fix this by any means.
At every turn the CEO of FailedNation, Inc. is objectively making us less safe; but to be fair, the Jerusalem Gambit is simply Der Trumper doing what he promised he would do, and the incompetent white electorate blessed the deranged idea with the help of a failed constitution. The laws of unintended consequences and of expected probabilities will now play out over this obviously counterproductive and risky maneuver. The gambit had the added benefit (if Rexxon had any dignity) of smearing so much shit in Rexxon’s face that he would have to resign—which appears to be another of Trumper’s goals. He wants nothing but craven toadies in the room: that’s his natural environment, after all!
As to the American Madman’s dick measuring contest with “Rocket Man”, the loosing of America’s nuclear and non-nuclear armory on the peninsula of course ends up killing mostly Koreans and obliterating their countries, although the US Army corps stationed there also likely gets annihilated—probably the only thing holding Trumper back. That North Korea is an insoluble military problem only makes a deranged Trumpian “solution” borne of childish frustration all the more likely. A bigger, more bloody, version of the Jerusalem Gambit!
How does the incompetent white electorate process that result? Impossible to say, they elected the American Madman and can no longer be described as sentient. On balance, likely another Great Patriotic War in which the only acceptable stance is Support the Troops! (whatever that may mean).
The stock market is in the stratosphere, the consumers hypnotically click on the Amazon Marketplace “place order”, and the tax cuts trickle down to the rubes while the plutocrats die of laughter. The rubes don’t appear to be feeling too endangered yet, and in any event have long ago decided that Muslims are always to blame and Israelis are the most suffering Oppressed People. Can they be made to care about anything by Mueller? It certainly seems a long shot.
Anyway, the idea that the heroic CEOs will be “investing” in the fiscal calamity and day-to-day uncertainty of FailedNation, Inc when the long embargoed off-shore profits finally, finally, make it into their coffers is comic. They will take the money, and run!
Great post but I respectively disagree with “The rubes don’t appear to be feeling too endangered yet”
They feel threatened on college campuses, big cities and silicon valley. 78 percent of Americans say they’re living from paycheck to paycheck. And enough of them blame the people they hate to boost Trump into the White House. I’d venture to say that most of us think these people earn all of the derision, scorn, snark, insults and condescension that we inflict on them on these pages. Oh they feel endangered all right…but not by the plutocrats.
I learned a good lesson when I was trying cases: Always be one step behind the jury with your outrage. Meaning, if you have a witness you’re examining who is obviously lying, obfuscating, fighting with you, whatever, let the jury get pissed at him before you show your displeasure. Let them wonder “What took him so long to get pissed?” instead of “Why is he so pissed to this witness?”
The same rule applies to impeachment. The Republicans didn’t understand this with Clinton, and they paid for it. But with Nixon, the public was in favor of impeachment once they saw how rotten Nixon was, and this spurred his resignation.
It’s not particularly harmful when outlier Democrats introduce doomed-to-failure impeachment resolutions, because everyone knows they are symbolic. But if impeachment becomes a desired result to the electorate, it’ll go through easily.
This is actually a very brilliant tactic, and I’m already thinking of ways to implement that strategy into my professional life. You are 100% correct that, as we’ve seen lately, the court of public opinion moves much much faster than the actual court process; for good and bad (depending on your perspective) and that in some cases it requires a lot of patience.
My guess is that if an election were held tomorrow, Trump would lose head-to-head to just about any singular Democrat.
If I’m reading Martin’s post correctly, though, the problem isn’t that the public won’t be motivated to vote for a change of party in 2018, the problem is what state will the world be in by then, what kind of irreparable damage will Trump & Co. do, and will there be a US left to save through impeachment? And to a lesser extent, what kind of damage will Ryan/McConnell have done to our economy as well as our judicial system.
Fortunately, I think the GOP leadership knows that Trump is a complete fucking moron and that Mueller is a consumate professional that is multiple steps ahead of Trump, and they recognize that Trump’s days are numbered. Honestly, I think the Trump administration sees the same. I believe Trump when they say that the Mueller investigation will be over by Christmas, but not because Mueller will exonerate Trump. Instead I think the evidence is all there to indict Trump Jr. and Jared next, which is checkmate for Mueller. To paraphrase a certain Access Hollywood tape, Mueller will, “Move on (him) like a bitch”. That partially explains why the House/Senate are trying so desperately to ram-through a tax reform bill for Trump to sign through the holidays (while everyone is distracted).
Also, curiously, the White House said that Trump will be undergoing a complete physical in January 2018 (by an actual doctor). If Mueller’s team is close and/or makes a move, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a dementia diagnosis in hopes that they can find a reason for Trump to resign with dignity and hopefully avoid prosecution (with Pence pardoning the whole lot of them if needed).
I’ll guess I’ll just say I’m from Toronto when I travel abroad. I work in Chicago a lot that’s why I have “their” accent.
. . . on their backpacks for travel in Europe so as not to be mistaken for Ugly Americans.
And that was decades ago, now.
No, we can’t fix the GOP at the ballot box. And we’re stuck with Trump for now. But we don’t need to “fix” them as much as we need to get them them out of power.
And we’ll have the opportunity starting in 2018 and then 2020 to vote them out.
My advice to democrats is, forget impeachment and focus like never before on motivating democratic and independent voters and getting them to the polls.
After some reflection I think this might be an overreaction.
No one believes America is an honest broker, we mostly haven’t been.
There is no peace process to sabotage.
Israel is not interested in either a Palestinian State or having Palestinian Israelis.
Israel has no intention of stopping unless they get beat in a war which the Arabs cannot do.
Israel is their quiet ally against Iran.
If anything this forces the Arab states to be a bit more open about the real state of affairs instead of feeding delusions to their populace about what can and cannot be done about Israel.