Category Archives: Short & Sweet … Short & Sour

Off the Rails, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Profound ignorance: why Fox News and the conservative media bubble are critical to the GOP

NBC News reported on Congressman Justin Amash’s first town hall meeting back in his district after coming out in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump: “Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Amash and the president said she was upset about Amash’s position but wanted to hear his reasoning. She said that she will definitely support Trump in 2020 but that Tuesday night was the first time she had heard that the Mueller report didn’t completely exonerate the president.”

“I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before,” she said. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”

Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Congressman Justin Amash – the exception that proves the rule

Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) has read and recognized the significance of the Mueller Report. Then he has spoken truthfully about it. Because of the ‘R’ next to his name, this is remarkable: an impressive exception, though it seems unlikely to change much of anything.*

Here are my principal conclusions:

  1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.

  2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.

  3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.

  4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

*Update: Mitt Romney, the Republican Senator (from a Red state that is not all-in with Trump) who has been most critical of Trump, has weighed in on Amash’s comments:

“My own view is that Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have. I respect him. I think it’s a courageous statement, but …” . . .

“As I read the report, I was troubled by it, was very disappointed for a number of reasons. But it did not suggest to me that it was time to call for impeachment. . . .

… I think a number of things that were done were really, really troubling and unfortunate and distressing. Clearly the number of times that there were items of dishonesty, misleading the American public and the media – those are things that really you would not want to see from the highest office in the land. . . .

I don’t think impeachment is the right way to go.”

(Image from the Congressman’s Twitter page.)

Off the Rails, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Attorney General continues his coverup by dictating Terms of oversight to Congress

Quote of the day from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler:

“The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period.”

That was in response to the latest from the A.G., who is scheduled to appear before the Judiciary Committee this week. Barr says he’ll refuse to appear if a staff member is allowed to question him.

“Nadler, wants to allow all members of his panel at Thursday’s hearing to have one round of questioning of five minutes each, according to the source. He also wants to allow for a subsequent round of questioning of 30 minutes for each side, allowing both parties’ committee counsels to also engage in questioning during their respective turns — which has turned into a key sticking point for the Justice Department.”

“This is part of this massive resistance by the Trump administration,” Norman J. Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, said Sunday. “It’s basically a middle finger to Congress and its powers, and we’re going to see what Congress does about it.”

Off the Rails, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham averts his gaze from the Mueller Report

“I’m all good, I’m done with the Mueller report,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham in an interview with CNN in South Carolina. “We will have (Attorney General William) Barr come in and tell us about what he found. I made sure that Mueller was able to do his job without interference. The Mueller report is over for me. Done.”

Move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here.

Fun fact: Graham served as a House manager (aka prosecutor) during the Clinton impeachment. His point of view toward presidential wrongdoing was different than it is today:

“So the point I’m trying to make is, you don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic, if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. … Because impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office.”

Quotation from this video on Twitter:

April 27 update – Graham again as House manager:

“Article 3 of the impeachment against Richard Nixon … was based on the idea that Richard Nixon as president failed to comply with subpoenas of Congress. Congress was going through its oversight function …. When asked for information, Richard Nixon chose not to comply and the Congress back in that time said: You’re … becoming the judge and jury. It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with what we need to apply oversight to you. The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment, because he took the power … away from Congress. And he became the judge and jury.”

Quotation from this Twitter video:

(Image from wikipedia.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Income Inequality, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

“Democrats should court the economically anxious Trump voters who don’t exist”

While the headline, from an Eric Levitz post at New York magazine, expresses the point ironically, I am in complete agreement with the argument. Politics – and winning elections – is a pragmatic endeavor. Taking back the White House in 2020 is a crucial goal; disparaging voters who opted for Trump 2016 is not. A couple of key quotes:

“The politician and the public intellectual have two very different jobs. The latter is tasked with telling the best approximation of the truth they can muster — especially when said truth is uncomfortable or unpopular. We need political scientists willing to overturn our most cherished presumptions about actually existing democracy, historians eager to recover our republic’s most violently suppressed memories, and commentators who illuminate our collective complicity in contemporary injustice.
In certain contexts, on certain subjects, we need elected officials to do the same. But the politician’s primary vocation isn’t to speak truth to power — it is to win power, and then exercise it in a manner that advances the greater good. In a representative democracy, that typically means rallying the largest possible coalition behind you, your party, and its governing priorities. Depending on one’s definition of the greater good, that task may well involve a great deal of uncomfortable truth telling. But any politician who cares more about expressing (what she perceives in a given moment to be) the unvarnished truth than about using state power to improve people’s lives has chosen the wrong line of work.”

And:

“Many progressive policies and value propositions enjoy majoritarian support. But the percentage of Americans who hold the liberal position on each and every political question is tiny (as is the percentage that espouses uniformly conservative views). For progressives, there is no alternative to finding ways to make common cause with the unenlightened.”

(Image: Wage Inequality, Economic Policy Institute, from inequality.org)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Front page review: News of the Mueller report in American newspapers the morning after

Talking Points Memo displays an array of front pages from this morning’s newspapers, via Newseum, which has hundreds of examples (but requires a search and registration). As a quick look demonstrates, Bill Barr’s shilling for Donald Trump hasn’t found much success outside the conservative media bubble – but, in my view, Trump’s A.G. is savvy enough to have expected this. He achieved his purpose.


Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Are Trump’s lies Strategic? Does he believe his own lies?

Benjamin Hart at New York magazine interviewed Daniel Dale, the Toronto Star reporter who has made a career of documenting Donald Trump’s lies (sometimes live on Twitter). Here are a couple of questions and answers that I found interesting:

After observing him so closely, do you think that’s true of most his lying —  that it’s strategic? Or is just a reflex because he’s been doing this his whole life?

I think most of it is nonstrategic. He says things like, “My father was born in Germany,” and you’re just like, “Why? What is the point of that?” I think something that distinguishes Trump from other political liars or dissemblers is how trivial and needless many of the lies are. These are not lies about him being caught in a scandal and trying to spin his way out, or where he’s trying to win some policy debate. A lot of it is just like Trump being Trump in ridiculous ways. To the extent that there’s a strategy, I think it’s often him just trying to escape a given ten seconds. Maggie Haberman has noted that he tries to escape or win a particular transactional exchange with no regard to what he said in the past, no regard to what he might have to say ten seconds or ten minutes in the future. He’s just trying to get out of the moment. It’s pretty remarkable to witness.

This is a question that comes up whenever we deal with someone who consistently doesn’t tell the truth: Do you think Trump believes most of his lies in the moment he tells them, or do you think he’s consciously aware that he’s not telling the truth?

A: There are a lot of cases where I feel like I can tell that he knows he’s making it up. And there’s some where he clearly knows. One example that comes to mind: At campaign rallies, for a while he’d be bashing the media and he would look to the cameras in the back of the room and point and be like, “Look at that, CNN just turned its camera off. You see, the red light just went on …”

Of course, that didn’t happen. That has never happened, to my knowledge. CNN has never angrily turned off its camera when he was criticizing CNN or the media. And so he’s literally looking his supporters in the eye and pointing at something in the room that is not happening and telling them that it’s happening. And so for people who say, “Oh, he believes all these, he’s just delusional,” I think there are cases like that where he’s clearly deliberately making it up.

(July 2015 photo via wikipedia.)

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Yes, Democrats have their strong favorites among the contenders for 2020 nomination

Quote of the day:

‘But anyone that paints 2020 as a “my candidate or bust” situation really has no perspective or understanding of the myriad great choices we have. If I ranked the current field by order of preference, I’m at candidate 9 or 10 before I think “ugh.” We Democrats are in a good place.’ – Markos Moulitsas

Agreed. And I don’t expect an ‘ugh’ to win.

(Image from the 11th Hour during the last half of March.)

Democrats, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Doubts about Joe Biden go back decades and haven’t disappeared

Quote of the day:

“Here’s the truth: If Joe Biden had ever done two minutes of actual thinking about the harm he’d helped to inflict on Hill, on women, and on the nation in handling of those hearings, he wouldn’t still be doing this kind of thing. ” – Rebecca Traister, NYMag, “Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer.“

My view: I was angry in 1991 about Biden’s handling of the Clarence Thomas hearings. I am angry still, especially because as Traister describes, “Biden was reluctant even to let Anita Hill testify as to how Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her, since — as he would explain afterward — he had given his word to a Republican colleague, in the Senate gym, that he’d make sure Thomas’s confirmation was speedy.” And he still says of his decision (and of his refusal to call three women, who were willing to testify as corroborating witnesses), “I wish I could have done something.” He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

(Image: screen grab of the Thomas hearings from YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Why a loss to Trump in 2020 would be an existential crisis for Democrats

Quote of the day:

“All in all, Democrats should approach 2020 with the mind-set that this is an election with such high substantive and political stakes that history will never forgive them for blowing it. “

– Ed Kilgore,”Hellscape 2021: Why a Second Loss to Trump Could Produce an Existential Crisis for Democrats,” March 24, 2019

(Image: Hell – detail from a fresco in the medieval church of St Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria, wikipedia)