Month: August 2023

I have to give credit to Aaron Blake of the Washington Post for taking on the task of contextualizing the most startling statistic of the past week. Namely, the finding from a new CBS News-YouGov survey that Trump supporters trust him more than their friends, the conservative media or their religious leaders.

Trump: 71 percent
Friends and family: 63 percent
Conservative media figures: 56 percent
Religious leaders: 42 percent

As Blake points out, if what you’re interested in is how trusted Trump is overall, the poll results are not very impressive. Yes, his supporters believe him, albeit at lower numbers than when the same question was asked in 2018. Overall, Republican voters do not, and he’s especially mistrusted by non-Republicans.

Yet, I’m not sure I believe Blake’s reassurances. Let’s consider likely Iowa caucus goers. According to the latest NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll , 51 percent of them believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Meanwhile, 42 percent of them have a “very favorable” and 23 percent have a “favorable” opinion of the disgraced ex-president, and 42 percent list him as their first choice compared to 19 percent for second place Ron DeSantis. A full 63 percent of Iowa Republicans say that Trump is their first or second choice or at least that they’re considering him. That last metric is called his “footprint,” and it’s designed to show his upside potential.

Maybe it’s not a great result that a former president can muster only a 63 percent footprint and 65 percent favorability among members of his own party in the first in the nation nominating state, but more than half of them think his coup attempt was largely justified since he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. Somehow a significant number of Republicans who don’t believe the coup attempt was justified still have a favorable opinion of him, which just seems impossible to me.

I think these results are tragic. I don’t have a better word for it. You might like Trump and you might like the job he did as president, but you definitely should have learned by now that lying is central to both his personality and his governing style. You can’t trust him to tell you the truth about anything. I can kind of understand someone not caring about his constant lying because it’s effective. But I cannot fathom actually placing your trust in his word, let alone over your friends and family members.

And you can’t explain this as a cult, because whatever the size if his true cultish devotees, it’s smaller than the number who seem to trust and like him. This isn’t a matter of ideological differences. It’s like half the country’s reasoning abilities just broke.

I really don’t know how much clearer it could be that the 2020 election was decided correctly, and if people just won’t listen to judges, juries, members of Trump’s own administration, or any reputable or even semi-reputable news source, then how can they be reached on any other issue?

These folks have convinced themselves that Trump has been falsely arrested four times over the last several months. In fact, they’re probably going to nominate him as their leader again despite the obvious warning signs that he’s no longer a viable general election candidate.

It’s possible to see why various institutions are not trusted by Republicans, but that still can’t explain why Trump has this lasting appeal. It’s sad beyond measure to see brain rot like this. This is our country, and its morals have been thrown in the compost pile.

It might be a low bar but the maverick 2000 version of John McCain was the best version of John McCain and Mike Murphy was his chief strategist. Eight years later, Murphy was on the outside looking in (and often dropping bombs) when McCain adopted Sarah Palin as his sidekick and went down in flames. Now Murphy is offering advice through his substack to Tim Scott. In fact, he’s offering his overview of the entire Republican race for the 2024 presidential nomination.

He has a fun writing style and a good sense of humor which makes for easy reading. More importantly, he isn’t deluded or living in some right-wing cocoon and yet he still has a good grasp of what works and doesn’t work with the GOP electorate. His basic take is that Tim Scott has a better chance to win the nomination than many people believe, but he’s in danger of throwing his chance away by making two major mistakes.

To understand Scott’s potential errors, you have to understand his current strategy.

Scott is running with a plan; I’ve heard it played back several times from pols and big donors he’s pitched. First, unite the social conservative right and win Iowa, wounding Trump. Second, let somebody else win New Hampshire. Third, come home to South Carolina and win big there. Surge to a nomination victory.

As Murphy ably explains, in Republican politics, it’s extremely hard to win both Iowa and New Hampshire because the voters are so different. In election cycles without an incumbent Republican president going all the way back to 1988, the winner of the Hawkeye State has been an also-ran in the Granite State. Scott knows this and he’s not banking on bucking the trend. He is all-in on winning the Iowa caucuses, and he assumes that means he won’t be well positioned to follow it up until the contest moves to his home state of South Carolina. This is primarily because winning Iowa is all about winning the vote of conservative Christians, and that doesn’t sell well in the Boston suburbs.

Yet, conceding New Hampshire is likely a fatal mistake, according to Murphy, and he believes Scott should try a novel strategy in an effort to compete in both states. Instead of racing to the farthest fringes of the religious right, Scott should set some kind of limit in that respect to retain his viability both in New Hampshire and in a general election against Biden. Instead, he should try to take advantage of the fact that the Democrats won’t be voting in Iowa in January, and yet countless Democrats are in the habit of caucusing and can be persuaded to show up for the Republicans’ competition. How will he attract these Democrats?

Scott’s biggest advantage is his optimistic/Reaganesque vibe. Use it. Unlike the hard social conservative tact, it has appeal across the board, including NH and beyond…

…The caucus is culturally very important in civic-minded Iowa and it’s very easy to be a “Republican for a night”, showing up and participating. If even just 15-20% of the these [traditionally Democratic] voters opt do that, it will be a mathematically material change to the GOP caucus electorate. And hint: these are not conservative Christians, but an optimistic Republican who is not Donald J. Trump will really stand out.

Murphy understands this is a long shot strategy, but considers it better than Scott’s current strategy which isn’t good enough.

Speaking of which, the second mistake Murphy identifies is Scott’s unwillingness, so far, to play the role of an Alpha Dog. If he wants to lead the Republican Party, he has to act like the toughest hombre in the field, which is no easy task when going up against Trump. I really enjoyed how he incorporated a bear to make his point.

You have to be top Alpha, and right now Tim Scott is running as a hopeless beta vis a vis Trump. There is an old Russian proverb about “how does one wash the bear without getting his fur wet”, a sensible problem since who wants a really pissed off wet bear looking right at you and your empty water pail? That has been Chris Christie’s problem: his frontal water pail attacks, while useful in a catalytic way and completely entertaining, will do nothing to actually get him the nomination. Stepping up to Trump as an Alpha is tricky business, he is the tribal kingpin for a huge chunk of the party after all, so doing it right requires a perfect storm of standing, spotlight and timing.

At the debate this week, Tim Scott will have all three.

Obviously, Scott will have to go after Trump in the debate, which should be a little easier to do since Trump won’t be attending. Murphy offers the following suggestion:

Scott will be asked the big Trump question Wednesday night and he needs an answer that is honest and direct; neither hedgy, nor complicated. Donald Trump has all the right enemies. I know because I have most of them too. As a black conservative, they think I should not even exist. That I, and our ideas, are illegitimate. I applaud President Trump’s policy accomplishments, I helped many pass the Senate. Our party is strong, because we hold moral weight. We are trying to make America better and reverse our moral and economic decline. For us, character counts. It must. We now know, and it is painful, that Donald Trump lacks the character to lead us and our movement, or to lead our county, as President of the United States. That is the truth we must face together, and it must be said. For our party, and our cause and our county. We need a new leader, to beat Joe Biden and move America forward.

(By the way, after saying that you don’t have to say much more on the Trump topic. Just refer back to it. No need to play detail games with the media. Switch forward and stay there.)

This all seems like pretty good advice but I see some obvious problems. To begin with, it’s weird that Murphy simply doesn’t mention that Tim Scott is a black man running for the nomination from a White Nationalist party. Considering that Scott has been successful in South Carolina, his race might not be a fatal obstacle to success, but we shouldn’t act like it’s a non-factor. Beyond that, it’s not as if a nicely crafted debate response in August 2023 is going satisfy questions people have about Scott’s position on Trump as the campaign unfolds and the ex-president starts spending some time in court. If he wants to be the Alpha Dog, Scott will need to do more than sorrowfully point to Trump’s lack of character. At some point, he’ll have to take him by the throat, and that’s tricky for anyone running as a sunny optimist.

And I don’t know if sunny optimism will sell with the GOP base. A new New York Times/Siena College poll finds that “fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents” think we’re at risk of failing as a nation. CNN polling from the spring described the GOP base as having “a malaise moment,” and argued “the Make America Great Again movement isn’t so sure that’s possible anymore.”

They’re angry and pessimistic, and maybe Scott is the perfect person to pull them out of their despondency and bitterness, but it’s easier to feed that beast than to fight it.

Still, Murphy is right about this: “If you are crazy enough to run against a (supposedly) cannot-be-politically-killed Rasputin like Trump, you should be crazy enough to try a more inventive strategy.”

I’d say that applies to all the other Republican candidates facing Trump, too. You’re almost definitely going to lose, so don’t play scared. Do something that defies expectations, and try leading your base back to the light.

I don’t know if Steve M. is correct when he argues that Donald Trump has avoided an early death, despite his weight, poor diet and inadequate exercise regimen because he gets off on humiliating people and it keeps him hale and healthy. But I do know that Steve’s two main examples are pretty good.

Steve details the spectacle of Fox News personalities traveling to Bedminster, New Jersey, to lobby Trump to participate in the network’s hosting of the first Republican presidential debate of the 2023-24 season. First, Fox News president Jay Wallace and chief executive Suzanne Scott were dispatched on this errand, and then Fox News contributor and columnist Charlie Hurt. While Hurt was there, the debate’s moderator Bret Baier telephoned.

Trump humored them, but he never had any intention of participating in the debate. Instead, he will give an exclusive interview to the man Fox News recently fired, Tucker Carlsen.

For his second example, Steve goes with the same thing I wrote about on Thursday, which is Trump’s decision to stiff Rudy Giuliani on his legal bills, with the exception of a onetime payment of $340,000 to a vendor that is hosting the ex-mayor’s electronic records.

And I’m sure Trump also draws spiritual nourishment from how easy it is now to swindle Rudy Giuliani, a guy who used to be the racist, angry alpha dog of New York…

…And the $340K wasn’t even paid to Giuliani — it went to a vendor Giuliani hired to do record searches.

It still pains Trump that he was never accepted as a great man in Manhattan society during his youth. But he compensates by screwing other people over, especially the powerful or formerly powerful.

I think that’s what’s keeping him alive.

It’s actually plausible that Trump gets a thrill out of seeing Giuliani destitute and headed for prison. Maybe it’s such a thrill that it’s worth it even if Giuliani turns against him and helps Jack Smith and Fani Willis secure convictions in their cases against him. If so, it shows what loyalty is really worth to Trump.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the northern Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have made several adjustments To the far rear I have started to paint the distant hills. I have also started to add highlights to the bushes in the distance. Finally, I have added additional paint to the sky.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I went down a crazy rabbit hole yesterday and I’m not even sure anymore how I got there. I think it started out with me reading an editorial piece at the Washington Examiner that argued that Fani Willis’s indictments are “the biggest threat to democracy yet.” The editorial board was particularly incensed that former Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer was charged, and that caused me to go back to the Brookings Institute’s excellent November 2002 report on the Willis investigation. While I was there, I was sidetracked by their account of the “ItalyGate” conspiracy theory.

…the basic premise of this conspiracy theory promoted by Trump’s team is that “people connected to the Italian defense firm Leonardo used satellites to change the votes cast in the 2020 election from Trump to Biden.” An individual named Bradley Johnson, claiming to be a retired CIA officer, recorded and posted a video in December 2020 advancing a version of the claim.

That led me to Mr. Johnson’s LinkedIn page where I learned that he’s set up a think tank called Americans for Intelligence Reform. I quickly discovered that this organization has basically no money and doesn’t exist in any true sense of the term. But I found at least one other person who claimed to have a connection to it. That was man named Christopher Hull who works at the Institute of World Politics, an extremely dubious right-wing graduate program in Washington, DC set up by hardline anti-Soviet Republicans during the late stages of the Cold War. The following is from a May 23, 2022 IWP press release.

This spring, Dr. Christopher C. Hull is joining IWP as a public affairs consultant. In this role, Dr. Hull will lead IWP’s branding and marketing campaign. Dr. Hull had already been serving on the IWP faculty to teach International Relations, Statecraft, and Integrated Strategy (IWP 627). He has also taught a directed study on Europe and International Institutions for IWP’s doctoral program.
Dr. Hull brings more than 25 years of experience in politics, public policy, and government relations to IWP. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Americans for Intelligence Reform.

So now I was off on a mission to understand the IWP. Why are they employing a person who has a strange and tight connection to Bradley Johnson? I soon learned at Wikipedia that Sebastian Gorka is listed as former faculty. Confirmation of that is tricky, but I have some Instagram evidence and IWP does host a bio page for him. Like I said, this became a rabbit hole.

I began looking into John Lenczowski, the founder of the IWP and Ronald Reagan’s Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States National Security Council. From there, I discovered an extraordinary June 2012 paper from the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University (where Gorka definitely taught classes). The paper explores the role and history of a little known interagency organization from the Reagan years called the Active Measures Working Group. It was set up to track and counter Soviet disinformation, and was originally inspired by the Soviet’s campaign to convince the world that America created AIDS and released it as a bioweapon.

In 1983, the Patriot, a pro-Soviet Indian paper that often published pieces provided by KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) agents, released a story claiming that the U.S. military created the AIDS virus and released it as a weapon. For a couple of years, the story appeared in minor publications that were mostly KGB controlled or sympathetic to the Soviets. After this incubation period, the slander was picked up in 1985 by the official Soviet cultural weekly newspaper, the Literaturnaya Gazeta. After that, the story began to spread rapidly. In 1987 alone, it appeared over 40 times in the Soviet-controlled press and was reprinted or rebroadcast in over 80 countries in 30 languages.1 The AIDS virus was ter- rifying and not well understood at the time, so this piece of Soviet disinformation was especially damaging to the U.S. image.

I was struck by the Indian source of the AIDS story because a shady outlet called GreatGameIndia was responsible for promoting the ItalyGate story, including this piece from January 4, 2021. While I was chasing that down I encountered other disturbing misinformation outlets like Stillness in the Storm. Seriously, read their About Us page and consider that they’re in the Top 10 Google results for the ItalyGate story. I began to see how one can get sucked into something like QAnon. Did I mention that The Institute of World Politics awarded QAnon-linked Michael Flynn an “honorary doctorate of laws”?

And, of course, Michael Flynn used to head the Defense Intelligence Agency before Obama fired him and he went running to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s dinner table.

My digressions have digressions at this point, but that’s kind of my point. It can be very hard to get to the truth of the matter. Why are so many Americans seemingly immune to truthful reporting about Donald Trump’s character and crimes? I know the answer is in here somewhere, involving as it does veterans of the Cold War misinformation wars who have turned from hardline anti-Soviets into Putinphiles and Neo-fascists.

But it’s all a hall of mirrors. In the end, it results in things like the Washington Examiner writing that holding Trump accountable for an undemocratic coup attempt is the biggest threat to democracy yet. But the process by which this happened and the organizers behind it are networked in opaque and dizzying ways.

I apologize for the light posting last week. I was on vacation when the Fani Willis indictments came down on Donald Trump and 18 of his confederates.  Congratulations to them, by the way. I had been waiting for someone other than our disgraced ex-president to be indicted for trying to carry out a coup d’etat in our country. It’s not like the orange shitgibbon made the effort alone.

The big prize, of course, was former Mayor of America and All Things 9/11, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, hallowed be thy name. Suddenly, dozens of articles have sprouted about Rudy almost as if people were preparing for his downfall. The signs were everywhere. Reports of his excessive drinking have been coming in regularly ever since Election Night in 2020. His former assistant Noelle Dunphy accuses of him “abuses of power, wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment, wage theft and other misconduct” including “alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist, racist and antisemitic remarks.” She has some of the choicest offensive remarks on tape.

The truth is, Giuliani has lost his law licenses and is facing disbarment. He is being sued to within six inches of his life and it has already broken him. In addition to the troubling Dunphy case, he’s a defamation defendant in suits by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. He’s a defendant for an incident on Staten Island where he caused the arrest of a man name Daniel Gill by falsely accusing him of battery in a grocery store. He’s a defamation defendant is a case brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss who he falsely accused of committing fraud.

In that last case, he’s basically conceded the case for the simple reason that he cannot afford to defend himself. His legal bills are so great that he and his lawyer Robert Costello made a special trip to Mar-a-Lago in April to beg for help. Predictably, Trump wasn’t very generous.

…Trump only agreed to cover a small fee from a data vendor hosting Giuliani’s records. And months later, Trump’s Save America PAC paid $340,000 to that vendor, Trustpoint, federal campaign filings show. CNN has now confirmed the payment was intended to settle Giuliani’s outstanding bill with the company.

Another attorney for Giuliani referenced that payment in court Wednesday, telling a New York state judge at a hearing that the former New York mayor does not have the money to pay additional legal costs to produce the records in a defamation lawsuit brought by voting technology company Smartmatic, claiming financial hardship.

In the end, even this “small fee” of $340,000 did nothing to help Giuliani out, as he’s still in arrears to Trustpoint and faces sanctions in the Smartmatic case for failure to turn over evidence.

His attorneys have said in court that these legal quagmires have left him effectively out of cash and that he “cannot afford” a potentially $15,000 to $23,000 bill to pay for more discovery-related document searches. He even appears to have responded to some of the money crunch by listing for sale a three-bedroom Manhattan apartment he owns for $6.5 million.

At the Wednesday court hearing in the Smartmatic case, Giuliani attorney Adam Katz said, “These are a lot of bills that he’s not paying. I think this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani.”

Many people in the know wondered why Trump would risk alienating Giuliani by hanging him out to dry. He did that with his former fixer Michael Cohen in the Mueller probe, and it didn’t work out well for him.

And sure enough, the New York Times reported on June 28 that Giuliani had gone hat in hand the week before to special counsel Jack Smith and made a proffer.

A proffer agreement is an understanding between prosecutors and people who are subjects of criminal investigations that can precede a formal cooperation deal. The subjects agree to provide useful information to the government, sometimes to tell their side of events, to stave off potential charges or to avoid testifying under subpoena before a grand jury. In exchange, prosecutors agree not to use those statements against them in future criminal proceedings unless it is determined they were lying.

Almost immediately after this meeting, on August 1, Smith brought the hammer down on Trump, charging him with “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Giuliani was listed as an unindicted coconspirator even though he was clearly the guiltiest party outside of the ex-president himself.

But Giuliani could not avoid being indicted in Atlanta. He’s now a defendant in a sprawling racketeering case, which is delighting the mobsters he put away on RICO charges in the 1980’s.

Veteran mob lawyer Murray Richman told The Messenger that he’s “spoken to several of my clients” since Giuliani, former President Donald Trump and 17 co-defendants were charged with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

“You can quote me to say, ‘They’re f—— thrilled,'” Richman said Wednesday.

“I don’t want to say the language, but they really ripped Rudy a new a——.”

…Meanwhile, defense lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, who scored a 2005 hung jury for Gambino crime family scion John “Junior” Gotti, told The Messenger, “All of my clients who had the misfortune of being prosecuted by him are laughing now. As am I.”

“I’m thrilled that Rudy will now experience what it feels like to be on the wrong end of a RICO prosecution — with a mandatory five years in prison facing him,” Lichtman said.

“It’s not just an ironic result but it’s a just result. He was a horribly dishonest prosecutor and the wheel of karma is about to crush him,” Lichtman opined.

They must also take some satisfaction in the prospect that Giuliani has become a rat who will testify against his former boss.

I can’t leave off here without mentioning that Rudy can justifiably be blamed for getting Trump impeached twice. The first time it was for Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine where he was trying to extort a governmental smearing of Joe and Hunter Biden, and the second time it was for the insurrection at the Capitol that Giuliani inspired with his trial by combat speech at the White House ellipse.

My feeling is that he only avoided charges in the Ukraine affair because the Justice Department had bigger fish to fry with January 6-related matters. He will turn 80 in May, and his reputation and savings are in ruins. He faces the real prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, and if he does indeed testify against Trump he’ll struggle to find a single person anywhere, of any political persuasion, who will have a positive thing to say about him.

Some see this as a tragic arc, as if something went suddenly wrong. I do think his alcoholism has progressed to a point that it has caused him to lose any measure of good judgment, but overall I believe this is just who he was from the start. His sexual abuse may be a revelation to some but he’s always been a terrible husband and womanizer. His racist and anti-Semitic remarks may seem shocking, but probably reveal how he’s felt all along. The incessant lies he told about the 2020 election may appear out of character, but he’s always been a dishonest politician.

If the wheel of karma has come for him, it’s only the fate he deserves.

Happy midweek! This time I will leave you with an audio track of a band I really enjoyed a lot right around the mid-1980s:

Regrettably, the band would split up not long after this album was released. It’s a shame. They seemed to be nearing their peak, rather than fizzling out creatively. Plus, Dif Juz were one of a handful of bands that were the forerunners for post-rock bands that would come after (e.g., Tortoise). Anyway, enjoy some chillout music.

Cheers.

Although he’s best known for writing Common Sense—exhorting the American colonies to declare independence from Britain and establish their own republic—in my opinion Thomas Paine’s greatest work is The Age of Reason. This short book provides a philosophical argument for deism, highlights the problems with organized religion, and takes a sledgehammer to the Bible. It’s an easy read, and doesn’t sound like it was written more than 225 years ago. One of my favorite quotes of all time can be found within the first few paragraphs.

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Paine and that quote lately, especially as I watch the Republicans react to Trump’s latest indictment.

Vanity Fair:

enator Lindsey Graham responded to Donald Trump’s fourth and latest indictment Monday with a radical, extrajudicial demand: that voters—not prosecutors or juries—should decide the former president’s legal fate. “The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not,” Graham said on Fox News after Trump was charged in a sprawling racketeering case stemming from his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in Georgia. “This should be decided at the ballot box, not a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail.”
[…]

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, was similarly apoplectic. “I’m pissed at these over and over and over again, if they’re indictments tonight, it’ll be the fourth indictment of Donald Trump,” the conservative lawmaker told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night. “This is disgraceful. Our country’s over 200 years old. We’ve never once indicted a former president, or a candidate, or a leading candidate for president and this is Joe Biden and this is the Democrats weaponizing the justice system because they’re afraid of the voters.”

In the lower chamber, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, claimed in a social media post that the Biden administration “has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election” before accusing Willis—“a radical DA in Georgia”—of following suit in the hopes of advancing her political career.

Jim Jordan, on ShXitter:

Today’s indictment is just the latest political attack in the Democrats’ WITCH HUNT against President Trump.

He did nothing wrong!

And so on and so forth. Each and every one of these people—with the possible exception of Jordan, who really isn’t all that bright—knows they are lying.

Lindsey Graham knows very well that the reason Trump is under indictment in Georgia is because he refused to let the election “be decided at the ballot box.” Heck, Lindsey was involved with the plot! Likewise, Cruz and McCarthy know that Biden isn’t behind the Trump investigations. He doesn’t have that authority:

Legal experts said President Joe Biden does not have the authority to bring criminal charges against anyone. That authority lies with federal prosecutors. In the classified documents probe, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith made the decision to indict Trump, not Biden.
[…]
The president does not have the power under the Constitution to charge anyone with a crime, according to Marc Scholl, who served as a criminal prosecutor in New York. Under federal statute, that authority is reserved for federal prosecutors, who must present evidence and convince a grand jury to move forward with an indictment.

This isn’t your standard “politician stretching the truth” stuff. For example, everyone expects politicians to take credit for things they didn’t do. This is straight-up lying to the American people or to paraphrase Paine, “prostituting the chastity of one’s mind, as to subscribe one’s professional belief to things one does not believe.”

Every single one of these outspoken Republicans know that Trump is guilty of what he’s accused of. Many of them had a ringside seat—yet they ask Americans “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.” For that matter, many of our media personalities are also engaged in mental lying, and I’m not just talking about the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” we call the right-wing media universe. The Post’s Ruth Marcus, for example, came under sustained fire for arguing that the Georgia investigation might be “one case too many.” That probably shouldn’t be surprising from someone who proudly defended convicted child molester Dennis Hastert on the pages of the Washington Post, asking “What, precisely, is the federal government’s interest — the public interest — at this point in prosecution and humiliation?” However, it remains shocking—and I don’t think anyone reading this believes for a moment that if was one of Ruth Marcus’s children or grandchildren that were raped, that she would have any interest in mercy for the offender.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, serial liar and man-who-left-his-wife-for-a-younger-model David Brooks wonders “Why America Got Mean”. I suppose a man who left his wife (and children) for a younger model would know a thing or two about that topic.

I have very little hope for our country, but it is heartening to see some consequences—at last—for the mental liars among us, who have so convinced themselves of their own morality and rectitude that they’ve decided the rules that apply to everyone else somehow don’t apply to them.

I’m grateful to Alexander Bolton of The Hill for writing a piece about how Republican strategists view a hypothetical immediate future without Donald Trump. If you’re not motivated to read the article for yourself, the headline will suffice: GOP sees turnout disaster without Trump.

There’s really two parts to this analysis. The first is a look at the more cult-like aspects of Trumpism. For example, among Republican voters who have already made up their mind, about 40 percent are choosing Trump as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, tells Bolton “The Trump voters, even from our polling, have pretty much said: ‘It’s Trump or bust.’ There’s a percentage of voters who won’t even vote Republican if he doesn’t get the nomination.”

The second part looks at the fallout from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision that stripped American women of their reproductive freedom and rights. Most recently, Republicans failed in a August special election in Ohio to turn out their base for an anti-abortion ballot proposition. That has the GOP analysts concerned about their prospects of beating Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in 2024.

Given the shift of college-educated women and suburban voters to Democrats since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Republicans are counting on big turnout in rural areas and from the so-called “Trump coalition” to win the presidential and congressional races next year.

“With controversial issues like abortion in the suburbs, Republicans have to make up for it in rural parts of the state, and without Trump on the ballot, rural parts of the state just didn’t turn out at the same rate,” the strategist said of the election result in Ohio.

“For Republicans, the only hope is that when Trump is on the ballot in 2024 … he will turn out rural voters at a rate that overwhelms that phenomenon. It’s certainly possible,” the source said.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is a classic dog-caught-car situation. After the GOP strategists spent decades of organizing around abortion, the anti-choicers finally got what they wanted. Naturally they are in a mood to relax for a change which puts the Republican Party at risk of getting run over by the backlash. It’s now the pro-choicers who are highly motivated and so Trump’s ability to turn out rural America as a counterbalance becomes critically important.

One way of approaching this line of thinking is to consider that the Republican Party can theoretically do much better in the suburbs without Trump on the ballot. The problem is that the Dobbs decision created a more permanent suburban weakness for the GOP.

Relatedly, the Republican Party’s drift into white nationalism can be seen as a response to suburban weakness, the solution to which is to push rural white Republican support to seventy, eighty or even ninety percent. Using this logic, I predicted the GOP would move in this direction back in 2013, before I knew that Trump would be a candidate.

What Mr. [Benjy] Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what [Mitt Romney’s] 47% speech was all about…

…The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

This is precisely the strategy Trump used in 2015 and 2016, at it was clearly effective at producing the desired result. Yet, it appears that many of Trump’s voters are not transferrable to other candidates.

So, one problem is that Trumpism-without-Trump doesn’t look viable. Candidates who try to appeal to Trump’s white nationalist base basically forfeit the ability to make up needed ground in the suburbs without retaining Trump’s baseline rural support and turnout.

Another problem is that abortion politics have flipped post-Dobbs, meaning that the issue gives the Democrats rather than the Republicans a natural turnout advantage. Additionally, the Dobbs decision has exacerbated the Republicans’ weakness in the suburbs, so they’re more dependent than ever on rural voters.

In theory, we could design a Republican presidential candidate in a lab that would reset the parameters in a way that would make the GOP competitive. This candidate would probably be pro-choice at least on the state level. They wouldn’t appeal to white nationalism. They’d focus on traditional Republican themes that have always worked well in the suburbs, like crime, taxes, education, love of country and a strong military.

But that kind of candidate can’t win in a Republican primary.

The GOP is stuck with either Trump or Trumpism-without-Trump. Given that choice, the strategists think Trump is less disastrous.

They could be right, but Trump has a lot of legal issues to work through between now and November 2024. He could be a convicted felon by Election Day. It’s hard to believe he’s really the best the GOP can do.

First things first. Brendan and I changed the name of our podcast from Progress Podcast to Progress Pondcast. We just went live with Episode 2 which focuses on decisions made last week by the Washington Post. In particular, we examine their choice of our old friend Joe Klein, aka Joke Line, to write an opinion piece on President Joe Biden’s unforgivable compassion for his son Hunter who Klein compares to Timothy McVeigh and Dylann Roof.

I’m not kidding.

I went through the archives here and found some typical stories I wrote about Klein back in the early days of the liberal blogosphere, which included:

Joe Klein Wanks

Joe Klein Explains the Art of the Wank

How to Wank: by Joe Klein

Joe Klein: The Anatomy of a Wank

Joe Klein Wanks Again

Amanda Resigns, Joe Klein Wanks

Joe Klein: A Corporate Shill Villager

Joe Klein, Paris Hilton, and Scooter Libby

A Letter to Joe Klein

Open Letter to Joe Klein

The Madness of King Klein

Klein and Terrabytes of Florid Concern

And, you get the picture. Looking back, Klein can really take credit for one thing and that’s identifying Glenn Greenwald as a terrible person before that was widely known and accepted. Otherwise, he deserved everything he got. But I also noticed that I have only made reference to Joke Line one time since 2008, and that was a piece I wrote in 2016 called Joe Klein Says the Strangest Things. In that article, I wrote that Klein  “sounds like a…McGovern Baby battered spouse,” who “seems to have an aversion to the left [that] leads him to say the dumbest things.”

Anyway, he wants Biden to set his lone surviving son Hunter on fire and launch him into space, and Brendan and I disagree with that approach and with the Washington Post‘s decision to dig Klein up out of the political punditry graveyard and promote his point of view.

We also wonder why the Washington Post did a hard reporting piece on all the reasons why maybe we might not want to put Donald Trump in prison even if he’s convicted of some of the most serious crimes ever committed by an American in the country’s entire history. They are basically advocating that Trump be confined to one of his luxurious resorts and maybe do some highway trash cleanup as penance. Brendan and I don’t understand how this sort of punishment fits the crime, nor why the Washington Post is putting the horse so far before the cart.

So, give it a listen, like, subscribe and the normal things that people do when they enjoy a podcast.