The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed Covid-relief legislation in May and again in October, but the Republican-controlled Senate blocked both. However, according to Trump, it was the Democrats who “cruelly blocked Covid-relief legislation,” implying that it’s the Democrats who came up with the “ridiculously low” $600 figure, when that amount was forced upon the bill by the Republicans in order to minimize costs. Combined with assertions by Trump that he won the election in a “magnificent landslide,” the President really is living in his own world. 

German Lopez: ‘Everyone Failed on Covid-19’

 

From Vox:

America’s Covid-19 epidemic is truly national. Every region has far too many coronavirus cases and deaths, with cases increasing in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for at least some time over the past couple months.

In June, just three states reported daily new coronavirus cases higher than 12 per 100,000 people. Today, every state except Hawaii exceeds that threshold. Some of that is due to greater testing capacity, but the climbing toll of hospitalizations and deaths, which have reached record highs nationally in the last month, show this is not merely a “casedemic” of sick people who might have gone undetected earlier in the year, but a rising tide of Covid-19 across the U.S.

So how did America get here?

The primary answer lies in President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, who have collectively abdicated the federal government’s role in addressing the outbreak or even acknowledging its severity. From Trump’s borderline-denialist messaging on Covid-19 to Congress’s inability to pass more economic relief, the country has been left in a place where states, local governments, and the public have to fend for themselves — and none of them have the resources to deal with the coronavirus on their own....

When a failure in the U.S. is nationwide, chances are the problem is rooted in a common variable — a systemic factor that’s influencing the behavior of leaders across the country.

Particularly with an infectious disease, a big failure in one part of the country is typically going to result in some level of spread to others. It’s just too difficult, if not impossible, to restrict travel among states, due to the social, legal, and political issues involved. That’s what made a federal strategy so important for every single state — but such a federal plan never came, and the Trump administration and Congress actually pulled back from offering aid to states, counties, and cities as the pandemic progressed.

At the top of the list of problems is the failure to pass a second economic relief bill. Democrats have pushed for a bill in Congress, passing multiple versions of one in the House. But Trump made clear the bill was less of a priority than getting his Supreme Court nominee through the Senate. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has continuously resisted a stimulus package on both fiscal grounds and to push for legal protections for employers so they’re not held legally liable for Covid-19 spread in their workplace.

 

 

Read the full article.

Craig Sterling: ‘Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says’

 

Cartoon by Clay Bennett for the Chattanooga Times Free Press

From Bloomberg:

Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.

The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.

“Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview....

Their findings published Wednesday [December 9, 2020] counter arguments, often made in the U.S., that policies which appear to disproportionately aid richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. The timespan of the paper ends in 2015, but Hope says such an analysis would also apply to President Donald Trump’s tax cut enacted in 2017.

“Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.

Read the full article.

Robert Freeman: ‘The Economy Isn’t Working. That’s Exactly the Plan.’

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  

From Common Dreams:

For the four decades between 1940 and 1980, the share of national income that went to the top 10% of income earners was remarkably stable, around 34%. This included those decades that are generally regarded as “the golden age of capitalism” 

But in the four decades since 1980, the share of the same top 10% has skyrocketed to 47%, a breathtaking upward shift in national income to those who are already the richest.  The upward distribution of wealth over the same period is actually even greater. 

It’s a cliché, but like so many clichés, it is grounded in reality. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan, and the plan is working exactly as intended. In fact, it is accelerating, as every new crisis becomes a new pretext for ladling more and more and more of the nation’s wealth into the coffers of the already wealthy....

Donald Trump has been stunningly successful for the very wealthy which is part of the reason they have backed him. He passed massive tax cuts that accelerated the upward transfer of wealth. But that is actually the lesser part of what makes him so valuable to the wealthy. 

The far greater part is that he has re-directed the rage of the dispossessed, downwardly-mobile working class from the economic system that has caused their distress ... to the altogether bogus factor of race. This has shielded the wealthy from being held accountable for having engineered and built an economy that has intentionally shafted the vast majority of its own citizens.

 

 Read the full article.

Fareed Zakaria: ‘Trump's Plutocratic Populism Marches On’

From three years ago: What if Donald Trump’s supporters are motivated more by racial and cultural issues — such as white supremacism — than they are by their own economic self-interests?

Seth Meyers: ‘Trump Joins New Election Lawsuit as U.S. Hits Record COVID Deaths’

 

 Some mistakes take four years to be corrected.

Chris Hayes: ‘America Nearly Failed the Trump Stress Test for Democracy’

Rebecca Solnit: ‘On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway’

Cartoon by Tom Tomorrow

 

From Literary Hub:

When Trump won the 2016 election — while losing the popular vote — the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we — urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America — need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. 

The demands do not go the other way. 

Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Read the full article.

Fareed Zakaria: ‘The conspiracy theory of the 2020 election is here to stay’

 

Ezra Klein: ‘The crisis isn’t too much polarization. It’s too little democracy.’

 

From Vox:

To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the party’s more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories. 

Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored electability above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable.... 

For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.

And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldn’t keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

 

 Read the full article.

 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

Vox: ‘What Joe Biden Won — and What He Didn’t’

It Shouldn’t Be This Close

 

Jay Michaelson: ‘While You’ve Been Watching the Election, the Supreme Court Is Set to Transform “Religious Freedom” and America’

 

From The Daily Beast:

The Supreme Court is not accountable to public opinion. But to give you a sense of how out of step this conservative-packed, minority-party-packed, and religious-extremist-packed institution really is, consider this week’s major case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, about whether taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies should be able to discriminate against would-be parents.

A poll released last week says 70 percent of Americans say no. Of course, taxpayer money shouldn’t be given to organizations that discriminate, regardless of those organizations’ religious affiliations. If you take government money, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

And yet I’ll eat a bug if the Supreme Court agrees.

Why? Because a majority of the court’s members have now been vetted by religious fundamentalists with a pipeline to the White House. And while the public’s focus is understandably on abortion rights, that battle is just one skirmish in a much larger Kulturkampf (culture war, a 19th century German term invoked by Justice Scalia back in 1996) about the relationship between church and state.

Here’s how Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas and Barrett (and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts) see the Fulton case, based on their past votes and writings: this is about religious freedom. Never mind the prospective parents — Catholic, gay, Jewish, interracially married — turned away by an agency for religious reasons. The real victim is the agency.

 

Read the full article.

 

Tom Nichols: ‘A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath’

 

From The Atlantic:

[N]o matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor — his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms — and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.

To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona. But I expected the margins in all of those states — and especially in Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania — to be higher. I suspected that Biden had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.

Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative — and I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.

 

 

Read the full article.

Nicholas Goldberg: ‘Even If He Loses, Trump Has Won’

 

Cartoon by Shadi Gahnim for The National

From the Los Angeles Times:

Even if Joe Biden ultimately becomes president — and he appears, as I write this, to have a pretty strong path to 270 electoral votes — millions and millions of people will have again pulled the lever for Trump.

For the United States to have elected Donald Trump once can perhaps be written off as an aberration, a dreadful mistake. Maybe voters in 2016 — a more innocent time! — thought he wouldn’t really follow through with his irresponsible campaign promises, or that he’d be sobered by the awesome responsibilities of the office or held in check by others.

But for tens of millions of people to double down and vote for him again in 2020 is entirely different. It is an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.

That does not bode well for the months and years ahead. Even if Trump is gone, Trumpism, I’m afraid, is not going away.

Read the full article.

Frida Ghitis: ‘Justice Barrett Could Now Be Part of Trump’s Firewall’

 

From CNN.com:

...Trump made it clear he wanted to fill the empty [Supreme Court] seat before Election Day, presumably because he expects his nominee to side with him if the election ends up being decided by the court. If that was not enough to place [Amy Coney] Barrett in an awkward position from the start, the [confirmation] ceremony [at the White House] on Monday night went a long way toward politicizing the one institution that is meant to remain above politics. 

The Supreme Court derives much of its power from the perception that it is largely independent of politics. The over-the-top event had the look of a Trumpian campaign stunt more than a Supreme Court swearing in. Barrett, Trump and their spouses waved from the balcony, evoking the image of Trump's dramatic face mask removal on a White House balcony upon returning from the hospital. 

That resonance to Trump's campaign grandiosity, the partisanship that marked Barrett's appointment and Trump's own statements about the role of the court in the upcoming election, are evidence of the blatant politicization of the Barrett nomination, undercutting the court's credibility. America stands on a knife's edge; the President is sharpening that knife. 

 

Read the full article.

Ezra Klein: ‘The Fight Is for Democracy’

Cartoon by Bruce Plante for the Tulsa World

 From Vox:

In American politics in 2020, both sides doubt that abiding by loss is the surest path back to power. This is an election — and more than an election, it is a politics — increasingly defined by a fight over what the rules of the game should be.

Democrats see a political system increasingly rigged against them and the voters they represent, and they are right. They are facing an Electoral College where a 2- to 3-point win in the popular vote still means Republicans are favored to take the presidency. They are vying to win back control of a Senate where Republicans have a 6- to 7-point advantage. The simple truth of American politics right now is this: Republicans can lose voters, sometimes badly, and still win power. Democrats need landslides to win power.

It gets worse. Democrats fear a doom loop. They are faced with the reality that when they lose power, Republicans will draw districts and change rules and hand down Supreme Court decisions that further weaken their voters, that pull America further from anything resembling democracy. Democrats have watched it happen in recent years again and again.... Losing begets losing, because in the American political system, electoral winners have the power to rewrite electoral rules.

But Republicans also see their position as desperate. They know their coalition is shrinking. They know that they are winning power but losing voters. They see a younger, more diverse, and more liberal generation building against them. They fear that Democratic efforts to expand the franchise and make voting an easily exercised right rather than a politically metered privilege will spell their long-term demise. They believe that mass democracy is inimical to their interests, and they state that fact baldly....

America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats want to make it one, or at least more of one. 

 

Read the full article.

 

 

 

It’s International Lesbian Day!

  

It’s International Lesbian Day (no, really)! As an observance, it’s worth noting that until very, very recently, being a fictional sapphic (non-100%-heterosexually identified) woman on a TV series brought with it an extremely short life expectancy. If a character on a TV show was a sapphic woman, the chances of her being ultimately killed off — by sometimes offhanded means — were enormous. Among cultural critics, this came to be known as “the dead-lesbian trope.” The frequency of this stereotype reached a tipping point a few years ago, and after LGBT+ viewer outrage, TV creators (some of whom are sapphic women themselves) are now making a more concerted effort to see that their lesbian/bisexual/trans characters survive beyond the series finale. 

Still, it’s worth looking back on the U-Haul load of fictional sapphic characters who met untimely ends and brought public dissatisfaction with the dead-lesbian trope to a head.  Starting in 2016 and expanded over the years, the website Autostraddle came up with a list of 212 such sapphic characters who shuffled off their cathode-ray coils too soon.  The article is worth a browse. 

 

Why Win the Race When You Can Just Game the Rules?

 

Hannah Beech: ‘“I Feel Sorry for Americans”: A Baffled World Watches the U.S.’

Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

From the New York Times:

Amid the pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election, much of the world is watching the United States with a mix of shock, chagrin and, most of all, bafflement.

How did a superpower allow itself to be felled by a virus? And after nearly four years during which President Trump has praised authoritarian leaders and obscenely dismissed some other countries as insignificant and crime-ridden, is the United States in danger of exhibiting some of the same traits he has disparaged?

“The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.

Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.

 

Read the full article.

Barton Gellman: ‘The Election That Could Break America’

  

From The Atlantic:

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.

The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count” — millions of mail-in and provisional ballots — could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks....

[I]n this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. 

 

Read the full article. 

Michael Harriot: ‘Why the Democratic Party Needs Thugs’

 

From The Root:

[A]s a reasonable man with a Democratic Party averse to tearing da club up, when it came time for Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice in 2016, instead of engaging in a political knife-fight with the Republican Party, he instead nominated Merrick Garland, a reasonable, affable white man with a mouth and toes and a judicial record that was as moderate as it was unremarkable.

As soon as Machiavellian Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell obstructed Garland’s nomination, outraged progressives begged Obama to pull out the chopper and make a recess appointment. But Obama responded with reason, avoiding a heated court battle in the federal courts that weren’t packed with Obama appointees even though the Democratic Party controlled the Senate six of Obama’s eight years in office (Harry Reid, finally invoked the nuclear option in late 2013, giving Obama one year to appoint federal judges).

The Democratic Not-So-Ruff Ryders also refused to use the debt-ceiling fight as leverage a month after Garland’s appointment was tossed into political purgatory. It wasn’t that the Democratic Party was afraid to go toe-to-toe with Republican obstructionists. Democrats pride themselves on governing with a sense of compassionate practicality. And, like most practical, compassionate Americans, they avoid conflict, as opposed to the conservative Killmongers on the other side of the aisle who long for the opportunity to take the throne on Challenge Day.

But that challenge shit is over. Trump’s the king now.

And now, in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely passing, Democratic historical revisionists are pointing to the hypocrisy of the GOP after it burgled Garland’s Supreme Court seat. What the GOP did to Merrick Garland is shameful. It was wrong. Anyone who purports to believe in the Constitution should regret doing it (as if the GOP is capable of feeling shame, regret or...well, anything). But progressives have conveniently left out one part in their recounting of the Democratic fight for Garland’s nomination:

They didn’t fight!

Read the full article.

But Her E-Mails

 

David Siders & Holly Otterbein: ‘“Everyone sees the train wreck coming”: Trump reveals his November endgame’

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 
From Politico:

Following his defeat in the 2016 Iowa caucus, Donald Trump accused Ted Cruz of cheating and said the results should be nullified.

After winning the presidency that fall, Trump insisted, without evidence, that there was “serious voter fraud” in three states he lost to Hillary Clinton. Now, running behind Joe Biden in the polls, the president complains the outcome will be “rigged.”

After more than four years of nonstop voter-fraud claims, insinuations that he might not accept the presidential election results and at least one float about delaying the November election, it’s no secret. Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power this week — and his choice not to walk back his remarks Thursday in the face of widespread unease — merely broadcasts his strategic intent in terms both parties can understand.

As a result, Republicans can no longer truthfully deny that Trump may be unwilling to leave office in the event he is defeated. And Democrats must now confront the possibility they may not have the power to stop him.

It’s an unprecedented backdrop for a modern presidential race, one that could stretch the electoral process to its limits, almost guaranteeing a chaotic, divisive finish to the campaign.

 

Read the full article.

Zack Beauchamp: ‘The Republican Party Is an Authoritarian Outlier’

 

 

From Vox:

[T]here is a consensus among comparative-politics scholars that the Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world. It is one of a handful of once-centrist parties that has, in recent years, taken a turn toward the extreme....

Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government....

The GOP views the Democrats as so illegitimate and dangerous that they are willing to employ virtually any tactic that they can think of in order to entrench their own advantage. This is perhaps the party’s core animating ideology, at every level: we must win because the Democrats cannot be given power.

 

Read the full article.

Seth Meyers: ‘Trump and GOP Rush to Fill Ginsburg’s Seat Despite 2016 Hypocrisy’

 

 “It’s almost like the lying and the hypocrisy are the point, like they’re trying to rub our noses in just how shameless and unaccountable they are, that they don’t care about democracy, that they can do whatever they want....

“Democrats have to internalize the fact that this is not about principle; this is about raw political power.  And they need to use every tool at their disposal to stop it.  A Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Senate minority wants to help a corrupt autocrat install an unprecedented conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, appointed largely by presidents who lost the popular vote, including of course the current president....”

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt: ‘Why Republicans Play Dirty’

 

There is no doubt in my mind that — whatever any past statements by individual Republican senators may have been — the Republican-controlled Senate will steamroll full speed ahead in trying to confirm a third Trump nominee to the Supreme Court.  Why?  Here is a New York Times article by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt from 2019 that mirrors my reasoning: 

The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.

The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.

Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit....

Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.

But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.

 

Read the full article.

 

The True Lesson of 9/11

 

Remember how united we were after 9/11?

 

And remember how George W. Bush manipulated that unity and weaponized it into an excuse to wage a needless war against Iraq? Remember how we were told that the war would be quick, easy, and pay for itself? And remember how the war killed over 4,400 Americans, wounding almost 32,000 others, costing the treasury almost $2 billion and dragging on for almost two decades? And for what? For stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. Boy, what a bunch of suckers we were. 

 

One president misled us into war. And now, 19 years later, another president misleads us about virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. Why wouldn't he? Why wouldn't he lie to us when he saw how gullible we were to march off to war after a predecessor played on and preyed on our sense of nationhood and our desire for justice? Our impulses for patriotism and for righting wrongs, among others, are merely frailties to be twisted for the selfish benefit of those in power. This might be the true legacy and the true lesson of 9/11.

Seth Meyers: ‘Trump Lashes Out over Report That He Insulted Fallen Soldiers’

Amanda Marcotte: ‘Trump has a plan to steal the election — in fact, he has at least 5 of them’

Cartoon by Tom Tomorrow

From Alternet:

[T]he sheer number of [election-stealing] schemes in play is all the more reason to worry, because it shows Trump’s team is flexible and capable of adapting to changing circumstances. Worse yet, it shows they have a number of fallback plans. If one effort fails, then another effort might just work. Attacking our democracy on multiple fronts depletes the resources (time, money, energy) of their opponents, making it likelier that one effort will break through and be successful.

There is good news, however. A combination of Trump’s big mouth, the continued courage of whistleblowers and the fact that Republicans have to conduct a lot of their scheming through the media means that, with two months to go, Trump’s plans to distort, subvert or flat-out steal the election have come into view. Democrats, and anyone else who still believes in democracy, can avoid being caught flat-footed. What’s required is to take all this seriously, instead of hiding behind increasingly foolish hopes that it can’t happen here.

Because folks inevitably object to any proposal that Trump is scheming, on the grounds that he’s too dumb to pull any such thing off, let’s just get this out of the way: Trump doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to surround himself with smart but immoral people. There’s significant evidence he has done just that.


Read the full article.

Eric Levitz: ‘Many GOP Voters Value America’s Whiteness More Than Its Democracy’

From New York magazine:

In Donald Trump’s America, democracy dies in broad daylight.

Previous presidents have flouted the rule of law and sought to restrict access to the ballot, but none of Trump’s modern predecessors have treated these endeavors like photo ops. Trump has not subverted the independence of federal law enforcement through the quiet appointments of hacks but by openly declaring that he expects the U.S. attorney general to protect him from legal accountability and by warning his allies not to cooperate with FBI investigations. He has not subtly exploited official powers for partisan gain but, rather, has formally strong-armed a foreign government into investigating his chief domestic rival and hosted a Republican National Convention on the White House lawn. He has not evinced a desire to disenfranchise his opposition merely through the orchestration of probes into (nonexistent) voter fraud but by explaining on cable television that he is blocking federal aid to the Postal Service because, if it does not receive such aid, “that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

Trump’s refusal to keep his assaults on democracy constrained within limits (and/or shrouded in pretense) has scandalized a significant minority of Republican elites. But his high crimes and misdemeanors have made little impression on the party faithful. None of the president’s affronts to liberal democracy — not his praise for “very fine” white vigilantes or his proposed postponement of November’s election — have shaken his grip on a little over 40 percent of the electorate.

Read the full article.

Ezra Klein: ‘Can anything change Americans’ minds about Donald Trump?’

From Vox:

If you had told me, a year ago, that a pandemic virus would overrun the country, that 200,000 Americans would die and case numbers would dwarf Europe, that the economy would go into deep freeze and the federal government prove utterly feckless, I would’ve thought that’s the kind of systemic shock that could crack into public opinion. I’m not saying I would’ve predicted Trump[’s approval rating] falling to 20 percent, but I would’ve predicted movement. 

The stability unnerves me because it undermines the basic theory of responsive democracy. If our political divisions cut so deep that even 200,000 deaths and 10.2 percent unemployment and a president musing about bleach injections can’t shake us, then what can? And if the answer is nothing, then that means the crucial form of accountability in American politics has collapsed. Yes, many of us are partisans, with a hard lean one way or the other. But the assumption has long been that beneath that, we are Americans, and we want the country governed with some bare level of competence, that we care more for our safety and our paychecks than our parties.

But how do we know if we’re being governed with a bare level of competence?

Read the full article.

Zack Beauchamp: ‘The R.N.C. Weaponized Exhaustion’

From Vox:

The most consistent theme of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention wasn’t that Joe Biden was a puppet for radicals. It wasn’t even that rioters and looters are coming to your home and only Trump can protect you from the radical left.

The clear theme of the RNC was a flagrant and brutal disregard for the truth.

The first night of the RNC featured more false and misleading claims than all four nights of the DNC put together, according to a CNN fact-check. The second night starred an anti-abortion activist whose tale about the horrors of Planned Parenthood had been exposed as a fraud more than 10 years ago. On the third night, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that the murder of a police officer by a far-right extremist was a crime committed by left-wing rioters. It was all capped off by President Trump’s Thursday night speech, a farrago of falsehoods that even veteran Trump fact-checkers found stunning.

Read the full article.

Ezra Klein: ‘A loyalty test for the GOP, a reality test for the country’

Facebook photo of White House advisor Kimberly Guilfoyle speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention

From Vox:

What is there to say upon hearing Trump described [at the 2020 Republican National Convention] as “the bodyguard of Western civilization”? It’s not an argument so much as a loyalty oath, an offering cut from the speaker’s dignity and burnt for the pleasure of the Dear Leader himself. But the outrageousness is the point. Protest and you’re triggered — just another oversensitive lib who can’t take a joke. Ignore it and you’re complicit. To care is to lose.

Read the full article.

Nicolle Wallace: Trump Hasn’t Yet Secured His Base

Jonathan Chait: ‘GOP Will Not Write a 2020 Platform, Pledges Undying Trump Support Instead’

From New York magazine:

Modern presidential conventions are inherently propagandistic affairs, usually devoted to a mix of glitzy patches for the presidential nominee, the vice-president, and the party as a whole. The 2020 Republican National Convention has altered the traditional emphasis, which is now devoted almost entirely to glorifying its presidential nominee....

And perhaps most remarkably of all, the party has announced it will forego a platform altogether. In lieu of a document attempting to define the party’s beliefs and priorities, the RNC simply states that it agrees with everything Trump has done and will do....

The official excuse is that the coronavirus has made it impossible for the party to get together and write a platform: “The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts.” Yet somehow the Democrats managed to come up with a platform without killing anybody.


Read the full article.

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.