Seth Meyers: ‘Trump’s Plan to Sabotage the Post Office Before the Election’

Jonathan Chait: ‘U.S. Intelligence Says Republicans Are Working with Russia to Re-elect Trump’

Image from BosGuy.com

From New York magazine:

The Russians have given Republicans stolen tapes of secret conversations [Joe] Biden held with Ukrainians during his tenure as vice-president, and pro-Trump media outlets have hyped up the material, but nothing they have is inconsistent with the narrative that mainstream news organizations found. Biden was working to clean up Ukraine. 

Senate Republicans tried to be cagey about their activities. After pro-Russian Ukrainians said they’d passed materials on to Republican officials, a [Ron] Johnson staffer told NBC News in July that it was “‘false’ the committee has received any ‘oppo,’ or opposition research, without responding directly to whether that covers any materials from foreign sources.”

The Washington Post reported that Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson received secret documents from Ukrainians. And former [Rudolph] Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has confessed to putting Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and perhaps Trump’s most energetic defender on all things Russia, in touch with one of the Ukrainians releasing documents in the United States.

There is hardly any secret to what they’re up to. Johnson says he plans to release his report on Biden in September. It hardly matters if the information Russia gives him actually substantiates his allegations, or even whether it is authentic. The obvious plan is to splash some headlines into news screens in the heat of the campaign that seem to connect Biden to some kind of wrongdoing.

In reality, it is not a scandal about Biden at all. It’s a scandal about Republican co-operation with a Russian propaganda campaign.

Read the full article.
 

Amanda Marcotte: ‘Trump’s base loved that he was a liar and a cheat — but now it’s coming back to bite them’

Trump with Axios National Political Correspondent Jonathan Swan

 From Salon:


[I]t’s not so much that Trump thought he would directly profit from people dying. It was more that he convinced himself that any measures taken to mitigate the pandemic — whether that meant a rigorous lockdown, mask mandates or a serious nationwide testing regimen — would hurt his chances of re-election, and he’d much rather see people die in large numbers than let that happen. 

But perhaps this is splitting hairs: However you slice it, millions of people have gotten sick and more than 155,000 are dead because Trump thought he could cheat on the coronavirus numbers the same way he cheated on his taxes, cheated his customers, cheated charities and cheated the so-called students at his so-called university. His voters elected him because they admired his sleaziness, and thought they would benefit from his cheating ways. But now they’re just as likely to get sick or die as the liberals they were so eager to enrage and humiliate.

We can’t expect some mass exodus back to reality among Trump supporters, of course. It’s very common for people who have been defrauded to refuse to admit it, and to defend the con man who targeted them, rather than admit that they were wrong in the first place. This is visible in cults like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, where members may be willing to die before conceding they should never have followed their cult leader. Trump’s approval rating remains stuck at a stubborn 40%, so now we know: That’s the proportion of Americans who would rather risk death from a pandemic than admit that maybe the liberals were right all along. 


Read the full article.

Paul Rosenberg: ‘On the de-Trumpification of America: It definitely won’t be easy, but it must be done’

From Salon:

Despite the deep hole he’s in, Donald Trump could still win re-election, as we are constantly reminded. If he loses, some observers warn, there could be considerable trouble, even violent resistance. But perhaps the biggest problem facing us in the medium-to-long term is what happens if Trump loses. In particular, what do we do to undo Trumpism? Not just to counter the destruction Trump has wrought, but the decades-long preconditions that made his election possible, if not almost inevitable.
 
This question was raised recently by Foreign Policy in Focus editor John Feffer....  Feffer’s recent column cited several historical signposts to illuminate the challenge we face — the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All those efforts to rebuild were “flawed in various ways,” he wrote — the first and last most dramatically. But learning from them “might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history.”

The thrust of Feffer’s argument is twofold: First, that Trump is backed by an amalgam of forces, including “the bulk of conservative civil society,” and even if he's defeated, Trumpism — the particular articulation he's given to those forces — will survive the election and continue to be an existential threat. It “could succeed in finishing what Trump started — disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment — unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.” In fact, he notes that “a post-election insurrection is not out of the question.”

Read the full article.

That might not be such a bad thing.

Umair Haque: ‘How the American Idiot Made America Unlivable’

From  Eudaimonia & Co.:

The American Idiot has turned American culture into the one of the world’s regressive, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and, well…idiotic. Literally the tiniest shreds of decency and sanity come under a murderous, withering barrage of denial and false “debate” — from things as simple as wearing masks to ones as large as educating Americans about how the rest of the rich world and even the poor one now has vastly better functioning societies.

Huge chunks of American culture are so hateful, foolish, or bizarre that they’d be either illegal, laughable, or bewildering in much of the rest of the world, from Canada, Europe, or Asia. “Debating” whether the answer to school shootings — which happen nowhere else — is to arm teachers? The idea that billionaires are somehow good for society, or that things like healthcare, retirement, pensions, income, and safety aren’t human rights? That money is all that should matter? Nearly everyone else in the world finds such notions jaw-droppingly foolish by now, which is how the American Idiot made his country a laughingstock the world over.

The point of a Culture of Idiocy, of course, is to create idiots, and American Culture is the cradle and mothers’ milk of the American Idiot. From Tucker Carlson to Bill O’Reilly to Ancient Aliens, an impoverished culture keeps Americans ignorant, pliable, submissive, and frightened.

Read the full article.