Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

A consequence of cucumbers

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

No Justins, No Peace

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Attempted Autogolpe by Idiots

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Attempted Autogolpe by Idiots

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Somewhere, the ghost of Richard Nixon grins mirthlessly.

But despite the ‘Stupid Watergate’ memes, the current WH mess reminds me more of the last days of the Reagan (mis)Administration. While the television pitchman promoted beyond his talents grows increasingly distant from reality, the Oval Office is in the hands of swashbuckling grifters (Oliver North, back in the day), xenophobic sadists (Elliot Abrams), and grey-faced men in nicely tailored suits just hoping they can escape scrutiny for their own behavior (James Baker, George H.W. Bush). How seldom reboots do justice to the original sagas…

… Members of the group assembled­ in the Oval Office on Friday for a marathon meeting that lasted more than four hours and included discussion of tactics ranging from imposing martial law in swing states to seizing voting machines through executive fiat. The meeting exploded into shouting matches as outside advisers and White House aides clashed over the lack of a cohesive strategy and disagreed about the constitutionality of some of the proposed solutions…

Aides said Trump has been searching frantically for pathways to reverse his loss — sidelining officials who try to level with him about it and embracing those claiming to have a solution.

They dropped hundreds of thousands of ballots in each state. It’s all documented,” the president claimed falsely in a call Monday to a gathering of the pro-Trump youth organization Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Fla. “The problem is that we need a party that’s going to fight. And we have some great congressmen and women that are doing it. And we have others, some great fighters. But we won this in a landslide. They know it, and we need backing from — like the Justice Department and other people have to finally step up.”…

“He is grasping at straws,” one senior administration official said. “If you come in and tell him he lost, and that it’s over, he doesn’t want to hear from you. He is looking for people to tell him what he wants to hear.”…

Monday’s meeting at the White House followed an Oval Office gathering Friday that was one of the most contentious yet of Trump’s seven-week post-election push to reverse his fate.

Gathered around the Resolute Desk on Friday were: Sidney Powell, the lawyer who has promoted a baseless allegation that hostile nations manipulated voting machines to flip votes for Biden; Michael Flynn, the recently pardoned former national security adviser who has publicly suggested invoking martial law to “basically rerun an election”; former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne, who now promotes election conspiracy theories; and White House officials including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Staff Secretary Derek Lyons and Counsel Pat Cipollone. Giuliani joined the meeting by phone.

Over several hours, the Oval Office erupted into raucous acrimony as the outside advisers proposed a number of extreme measures for reversing the results while the White House officials pointed out that such actions would be unconstitutional or otherwise unworkable…

Reader Interactions

115Comments

  1. 1.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Ah, so that is why Trump, who has been damned parsimonious with pardons, went for Flynn.  Flynn is good at sucking up to him and making him feel good.  How very Trump.

  2. 2.

    dr. bloor

    Somewhere, the ghost of Richard Nixon grins mirthlessly.

    Ruing the cruel fate of having been born forty years too early.

  3. 3.

    craigie

    Twitter needs to get off the fence and start writing “This claim about election fraud is bullshit”

  5. 5.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Dr. Deborah Birx tells Newsy she plans to retire. She announces intentions after the @AP reported that Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, bucked CDC guidance and traveled over Thanksgiving.

    Biden wasn’t going to have her back, anyways.

  7. 7.

    Zzyzx

    The latest theory in the right wing insanity pool is that all that has to happen is for a group of people to randomly show up at the state house, call themselves electors, and have someone give their votes to the VP and then those can be counted instead if the Vice President would prefer them.

  8. 8.

    Ken

    “The Friday meeting was further complicated when Trump, wearing a toga and covered in gold body paint, danced into the room and proclaimed himself the god Apollo. Speaking on condition of anonymity, aides said they had doubts about the claim, but felt they had to support the President during the meeting.”

    (BTW in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius, Derek Jacobi and John Hurt are brilliant in that scene.)

  9. 9.

    Yutsano

    @WaterGirl: Birx was a Pence toady. She had her fingers in making the Indiana HIV outbreak even worse as much as he did. She didn’t belong anywhere near the wheels of power and only got there because someone talked Dolt45 into Dense.

  10. 10.

    randy khan

    @Zzyzx: 

    Leaving aside the obvious points that this approach requires several miracles to occur and that there is an actual law that says which electoral votes are to be announced at the joint session of Congress, the people who are thinking this is a good idea do not seem to understand that if somehow there were a dispute about the electoral votes that Congress decided to consider, if it weren’t resolved by January 20 we’d get President Pelosi.

  11. 11.

    natem

    @Ken: 

    “Cautioning against alarm, several GOP operatives compare former Vice President Al Gore’s actions during the 2000 recount…”

  13. 13.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Check out this photo I took of Jupiter and it’s 4 largest moons (550 million miles away) next to Saturn (1 billion miles away) (photo)

  15. 15.

    randy khan

    @Yutsano:

    And yet, in a demonstration of how over-the-top insane this Administration is, there is credible reporting that she was part of the group that went to Meadows to warn about what is now the current spike in cases and he didn’t believe any of them.  (In that context, I almost can understand why she traveled over Thanksgiving, although I still wouldn’t have done it myself in a million years.)

    I feel that when the history of the pandemic in the U.S. is written, the chapter on Birx is going to be kind of a mess.  She had a very good reputation for her international AIDS work, but she clearly failed here, and I wonder how much of it was trying to thread the needle between what she knew needed to be done what she though the Administration would be willing to do.  She’s always felt to me like she was trying to be the good cop, to gain Team Trump’s confidence in hopes of getting better results, but in the end she was ineffective more or less across the board.

  18. 18.

    glory b

    @Ken: I LOVED “I , Claudius!” Read the books after seeing the series.

    Of course, some reviewer kind of ruined it for me by pointing out that all of the Roman peasants had cockney accents while the upper class Romans didn’t.

  19. 19.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Ken:

    There are many, many contenders, but Derek Jacobi almost always tops my lists of favourite British actors. I’ve never seen him in anything in which he was less than brilliant.

  30. 30.

    Geoboy

    “…a marathon meeting that lasted more than four hours.”  Oh, Donnie, you poor dear, that must have felt interminable, even if you did use most of it for the unending Festivus airing of greviences that occupies your waking hours.

    Good thing we didn’t have “weak” Hillary in the White House!  Why, in her Bengazi testimony she only lasted (checks notes) eleven hours.  Hmph, that can’t be right!  (it is).

  31. 31.

    Jeffro

    Just one well-placed grenade would wrap this all up.

    That, or the 25th Amendment.

    That, or a rocket-docket impeachment.

    I’m not picky here, folks…

  36. 36.

    Elizabelle

    @randy khan:   WRT Birx:

    There was a really interesting op ed in the NY Times a day or two ago.  Justice Department lawyer, who wrote that she stayed on in hopes of mitigating the worst of Trump’s excesses, but she has come to realize that the professionals who remained actually tailored some of Trump’s executive orders well enough to pass judicial review.  And thus, her staying on helped to foment actual evil.  Because she realizes that the clown car of lawyers Trump surrounds himself with were NOT as skilled — Trump is now dragging the bottom of the barrel — and so their efforts might not have gotten through in the end.

    I will find you the article and some pull quotes.  She, of course, made her case more elegantly than I did.  And she slammed Trump’s legal team hard.

  41. 41.

    Jeffro

    @randy khan:Leaving aside the obvious points that this approach requires several miracles to occur and that there is an actual law that says which electoral votes are to be announced at the joint session of Congress, the people who are thinking this is a good idea do not seem to understand that if somehow there were a dispute about the electoral votes that Congress decided to consider, if it weren’t resolved by January 20 we’d get President Pelosi.

    Equally important thing that they don’t seem to understand: wingnuts are not the only people who get mad and take action.

    I’m tired of this country being held hostage by crazy people.  Knock it off, GOP enablers…let this clown get the ‘reward’ he so richly deserves or go down with him.

  42. 42.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @glory b:

    You’re right. I think they were on a ski trip when the Muslim Ban was blowing up, and yachting around the Black Sea or something in the immediate aftermath of the Coney firing. And those were just in the first few months of this interminable maladministration.

  44. 44.

    CaseyL

    @Jeffro: The folks threatening a coup/martial law don’t seem to realize how many of us are keeping murderous rage in check only because we’re looking forward to Biden being inaugurated and taking office and the Trumpsters getting flushed out of the White House.

    Call for martial law?  Announce a coup?  Those motherf*ckers have no idea what they’ll be igniting.

  45. 45.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @Ken:

    BTW in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius, Derek Jacobi and John Hurt are brilliant in that scene.

    I saw I, Claudius when it aired on WNET around 1974 or 1975 and was blown away by it.  In addition to Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, there was Patrick Stewart in his pre- Star Trek Days and Siân Phillips and Brian Blessed, a truly stellar cast of actors and actresses from top to bottom.

    One of the more nauseating aspects of this situation is that scumbag Giuliani trying to distance himself from Sidney Powell.  He’s every bit as vile and reprehensible as she is and hopefully Rudy will get the comeuppance that he richly deserves.

  46. 46.

    narya

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: wow! I remembered to look tonight, and found it just before the building across the street obscured it. I don’t have a scope or anything, but totally cool to find it w/ naked eye. (Hoping friend w a scope gets outside tonight in time to see it.)

  47. 47.

    Elizabelle

    NY Times: Erica Newland op ed: I’m Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

    No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.

    [Ms. Newland joined the DOJ during the Obama administration, as a career attorney. And this one is really worth a read, for the reader comments too.]

    …. Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.

    Unlike the Trump Justice Department, the Trump campaign has relied on second-rate lawyers who lack the skills to maintain the president’s charade. After a recent oral argument from Rudy Giuliani, Judge Matthew Brann (a Republican) wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.” Even judges appointed by Mr. Trump have refused to throw their lots in with lawyers who can’t master the basic mechanics of lawyering.

    After four years of bulldozing through one institution after another on the backs of skilled lawyers, the Trump agenda hit a brick wall.

    The story of the Trump campaign’s attack on our elections could have been the story of the Trump administration’s four-year-long attack on our institutions. If, early on, the Justice Department lawyers charged with selling the administration’s lies had emptied the ranks — withholding our talents and reputations and demanding the same of our professional peers — the work of defending President Trump’s policies would have been left to the types of attorneys now representing his campaign. Lawyers like Mr. Giuliani would have had to defend the Muslim ban in court.

    Had that happened, judges would have likely dismantled the Trump facade from the beginning, stopping the momentum of his ugliest and most destructive efforts and bringing much-needed accountability early in his presidency.

    Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

    …. No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

    We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

    And we owe our best efforts to restore our democracy and to share what we learned to help mobilize and enact reforms — to remind future government lawyers that when asked to undermine our democracy, the right course is to refuse and hold your peers to the same standard.

  48. 48.

    germy

    @Wyatt Salamanca:

    A lot of great programming on that station back in the day.  I remember the play “Steambath” and also lots of stuff like “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”

  52. 52.

    germy

    @Geoboy:

    She looks like a woman in the 1920s who falsely accuses a Black man of theft and then watches the lynching.  That’s the vibe I get from her looks and her voice.

  54. 54.

    Spanky

    Well, if Pence ever employs GHWB’s defense of “I wasn’t in the loop”, who could dispute that?

  55. 55.

    Catherine D.

    John Hodgman and Elliott Kalan did a hilarious episode by episode podcast on I, Claudius called I, Podius.

  56. 56.

    Miss Bianca

    @glory b: Pretty sure it wouldn’t surprise me in the last to learn that upper-class Roman accents differed from working-class Roman accents.

  57. 57.

    Mary G

    PardonPalooza is on, ex-Representaties, Duncan Hunter who flew the bunny across the country and the guy who did his inside trading from the WH driveway.

  58. 58.

    germy

    I’m fucking sick of seeing Skylar Mack on the news every night.

    They’re really making a big story out of this brat.

  60. 60.

    Spanky

    @CaseyL: I’ve lived in the DC area for over 40 years and I know many ways to get to PA Avenue. Only some involve roads. There are many like me around here.

  64. 64.

    Elizabelle

    The pardons are starting.

    Blackwater guards.  Former GOP congressmen.  20 in this batch, and more likely to come.

  65. 65.

    germy

    NEW: The Village Voice has been bought by Brian Calle, LA Weekly’s owner. He plans to relaunch the iconic publication’s website in January and run quarterly print editions https://t.co/wTI3EcPBs7

    — Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) December 22, 2020

    Nothing like the most vaunted counter-cultural publication in America bought by the former head of the Claremont Institute, the West Coast’s preeminent right wing ghoul factory.

    Brian Calle makes Jared Kushner look like George Plimpton. This is a laughable disgrace. https://t.co/hSGRlxU1jD

    — Otto Von Biz Markie (@Passionweiss) December 22, 2020

  68. 68.

    NotMax

    @germy

    Also too Brideshead Revisited.

    I played the janitor/God onstage in Steambath way back when. Bruce Jay Friedman’s dialogue is a so casually dense it takes deep focus to grant it worthy exposition.

  70. 70.

    Elizabelle

    NY Times story by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt.

    And right away, they are using FTF NYTimes codespeak:  First words are:

    In an audacious pre-Christmas round of pardons….

    ETA: Hey wait — they actually redeemed themselves at the end of the first paragraph:

    two people convicted in the special counsel’s Russia inquiry, four Blackwater guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians and three corrupt former Republican members of Congress.

  71. 71.

    Brachiator

    “Trump’s unofficial election advisory council now includes a pardoned felon, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a White House trade adviser and a Russian agent’s former lover.”

    Might as well queue up that partridge in a pear tree.

  72. 72.

    germy

    @NotMax:

    And I remember another teleplay, I can’t remember the name.  Judd Hirsch (?) played the concerned brother of a mentally ill man.

    And there was another one about a woman slowly having a nervous breakdown in her home.

  74. 74.

    oatler.

    Like Gene Wolf wrote in The Urth of the New Sun, “Let them come with their sweet-arsed soldier boys. They’ll find no virgins.”

  75. 75.

    germy

    @NotMax:  Bruce Jay Friedman’s dialogue is a so casually dense it takes deep focus to grant it worthy exposition.

    I remember the one character explaining his generation.

  76. 76.

    Elizabelle

    Duncan Hunter will not be seeing the inside of a prison.  Yet.  The corrupt former GOP congressmen:

    The three former members of Congress pardoned by Mr. Trump were Duncan Hunter of California, Chris Collins of New York and Steve Stockman of Texas.
    Mr. Hunter was set to begin serving an 11-month sentence next month. He pleaded guilty in 2019 to one charge of misusing campaign funds.

    Mr. Collins, an early endorser of Mr. Trump, is serving a 26-month sentence after pleading guilty in 2019 to charges of making false statements to the F.B.I. and to conspiring to commit securities fraud.
    Mr. Stockman was convicted in 2018 on charges of fraud and money laundering and was serving a 10-year sentence.

  78. 78.

    Elizabelle

    More about the Fuck the Fucking Trump pardons.  It is, however, a lesson to future Robert Muellers to be way more aggressive about getting information about their investigation’s results out there.

    The pardons are not likely to be the last before Mr. Trump leaves office on Jan. 20, and they will no doubt feed the notion that Mr. Trump has used his pardon power aggressively for personal and political purposes. The founders gave the president the power to serve as the ultimate emergency break on the criminal justice system to right the wrongs of those deserving of grace in mercy.
    A tabulation by the Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith found that of the 45 pardons or commutations Mr. Trump had granted up until Tuesday, 88 percent aided someone with a personal tie to the president or furthered his political aims.
    And by nullifying the legal consequences of convictions in the Russia inquiry, Mr. Trump escalated a long campaign, aided by his outgoing attorney general, William P. Barr, to effectively undo the investigation by Mr. Mueller, discredit the resulting prosecutions and punish those who instigated it in the first place.
    The White House continued to chip away at the legacy of the Mueller investigation in a statements released on Tuesday night. The statement made a point of saying that the Mueller investigation “found no evidence of collusion in connection with Russia’s attempts to interfere in the election,” and dismissively referred to Mr. Papadopoulos’s crime as “process related.”

  80. 80.

    CaseyL

    @germy: It was a golden age for public TV.  Besides the literary historical series like I Claudius, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and Elizabeth R, there was stunning non-fiction programming. Connections, Cosmos, The Body in Question…

    … To be fair, many if not most of PBS’ best programming were BBC imports.  So it was a golden age for BBC, too!

  82. 82.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Amazing!

    I’m always missing these astronomical events but actually saw this one tonight. With not-great binoculars so I couldn’t make out Saturn’s rings and certainly not the moons of Jupiter.

    Beautiful shot.

  84. 84.

    CaseyL

    @germy: I don’t remember watching that one.  But I will see your Poldark and raise you The First Churchills (about the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and their friendship with Queen Anne).

    I think watching all those series at an impressionable age is what turned me into a history nut.

  88. 88.

    Mike in NC

    The first time I saw Trump on TV was the absurd “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” about 35-40 years ago and I knew right away he was a fucking loon.

  89. 89.

    glory b

    @Elizabelle: Process crimes should not be treated dismissively, they are criminal because they undermine the foundations of the system.

    Gunning down unarmed Iraqi citizens (if this refers to the incident I recall) is another matter,

  93. 93.

    Elizabelle

    @glory b: 

    It is an audacious egregious set of pardons.

    He is pardoning criminals who aided and abetted himself.

    To the Iraqis: your citizens’ lives mean nothing. Look at our power.

  94. 94.

    Elizabelle

    @NotMax:  I think I have watched two seasons.

    Cadfael is very good.  I don’t like, though, that the murderer is likely executed rather quickly after discovery.  A few have been sympathetic ones.

  96. 96.

    TS (the original)

    @CaseyL:

    I remember watching the very British “Upstairs Downstairs” and also the original TV version of The Forsyth Saga by John Galsworthy – which I think was late 1960s. ( google tells me 1967 with Eric Porter, Kenneth More and Nyree Dawn Porter).

  100. 100.

    Steeplejack

    @randy khan:

    My (completely subjective) take on Birx is that she was surprised by, and hypnotized by, the sudden celebrity that the pandemic brought her, and it got in the way of her doing her job, to a degree. A bit like Lance Ito during the O.J. Simpson trial.

  102. 102.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @germy:  @NotMax: @CaseyL:  

     It was a golden age for public TV.

    A few years, WNET aired this wonderful multi-part documentary that looked back at the programming that aired on WNET from the 1960’s through the early 2000’s.

    It absolutely was a golden age, especially the 1960’s – 1970’s.  Not just arts programming, but also great public affairs programs and science programs (ie NET Journal, The Ascent of Man).  I remember great adaptations Kurt Vonnegut’s Between Time and Timbuktu and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.  There was even a series that aired concerts from the Fillmore East.

    https://www.pbs.org/show/pioneers-thirteen/#:~:text=Pioneers%20of%20Thirteen%20is%20our,its%20success%20over%20the%20years.

  105. 105.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @germy:

    I used to read the Village Voice religiously.  From the 1970’s – 1980’s, it reminded me of a baseball team with a Hall of Famer at every position:

    film critics Andrew Sarris, J. Hoberman, and David Edelstein

    theater critic Michael Feingold

    jazz critics Gary Giddins and Ira Gitler

    media critic Geoffrey Stokes

    columnists Jack Newfield and Nat Hentoff

    and investigative reporter Wayne Barrett who died on January 19, 2017

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    @Wyatt Salamanca:

    I used to read the Village Voice religiously. From the 1970’s – 1980’s, it reminded me of a baseball team with a Hall of Famer at every position

    Yep. Right there with you.  They had some great writers.

    There is probably still a lot of good work being done, but not for any single publication or media entity.

  110. 110.

    Spinoza Is My Co-pilot

    @Ken: Loved I, Claudius. Favorite TV series from the 70s, even more than the great Fawlty Towers. The acting was top-notch by everyone, Derek Jacobi and John Hurt included.

  111. 111.

    different-church-lady

    Somewhere, the ghost of Richard Nixon grins mirthlessly.

    Nah, he’s more like, “Mistakes were made, but you people are ridiculous!” [facepalm]

  112. 112.

    Barbara

    @Another Scott: Birx is a career civil servant working at various U.S. health related agencies, some in the military, but mostly NIH, where she was mentored by Fauci.  Redfield has a background in religiously motivated organizations.  Seema Verma, head of CMS, is a Pence toadie.  She was head of Indiana’s Medicaid program.

  114. 114.

    Misterpuff

    @Wyatt Salamanca: Wayne Barrett had a bead on the fatuous Young Don, sometimes it seemed if DJT was his whole beat (but luckily NY RE developing has many flavors of Rogue ).

  115. 115.

    Heywood J.

    If Trump isn’t prosecuted on every single possible statute violation, and hounded right up to his final day, it will be an absolute dereliction of duty, as well as an open invitation to the next round of corrupt bastards.

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