Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

You cannot shame the shameless.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

We still have time to mess this up!

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Republicans in disarray!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

This really is a full service blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

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Seriously: Donald Trump Is A Penny-Ante Swindler

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… and David Farenholdt, at the Washington Post, deserves at least one Pulitzer. I’ve been working on a post about his findings for the last couple of weeks, but he keeps churning out new information. None of which the cable-news Media Village Idiots have deigned to discuss — until now.

… The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.

For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.

Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.

In two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases — not previously reported — Trump spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself.

Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump paid a penalty this year to the Internal Revenue Service for a 2013 donation in which the foundation gave $25,000 to a campaign group affiliated with Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R).

Trump’s foundation appears to have repeatedly broken IRS rules, which require nonprofit groups to file accurate paperwork. In five cases, the Trump Foundation told the IRS that it had given a gift to a charity whose leaders told The Post that they had never received it. In two other cases, companies listed as donors to the Trump Foundation told The Post that those listings were incorrect….

This guy is Max Bialystock without the charm.

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Lest We Forget: “The Disaster of Richard Nixon”

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There are pundits already lathering themselves up about how this is the most seriously dangerous inflection point in all of American history — which is, thankfully, untrue. It’s probably not even the most dangerous time in living memory, among other reasons because things have changed in response to earlier crises. In the New York Review of Books, Robert G. Kaiser reviews a new batch of Nixon studies:

… Thanks to his gross abuses of presidential power symbolized by the Watergate scandal and to his own decision to record the details of his presidency on tape, Nixon seems destined to remain an object of fascination, amazement, scorn, and disgust for as long as historians pay attention to the American presidency. When the subject matter is their foreign policy, Nixon’s sidekick, Henry A. Kissinger, will be right there beside him…

Vietnam was the defining issue of Nixon’s presidency, as he knew it would be. Months before he became president, Nixon assured H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, his closest aide, that “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, Bob, holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.” Antiwar protesters had driven Lyndon Johnson into early retirement, which allowed Nixon to become president. Nixon played to the country’s war weariness in his 1968 campaign, implying that he had a plan to end the war.

But he had no plan. Ironically, even before he took office Nixon personally sabotaged an opportunity he might have had to avoid Johnson’s fate. The books under review suggest that this is one of the stories that will continue to stain Nixon’s reputation.

In late October 1968, when Johnson’s negotiators in Paris finally reached an agreement with North Vietnam to end American bombing and begin negotiations on a political settlement, Nixon took an enormous personal risk to derail the peace talks before they could begin. At the time, polls showed that Hubert H. Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic opponent and Johnson’s vice-president, was rising fast—so fast that Nixon feared he might lose the presidency because of the peace deal. So he performed a dirty trick that foreshadowed many more to come.

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How the Party Decides

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From TPM:

Staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are looking into whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) disclosed classified information during the debate, according to the committee chair.

From Marcy Wheeler:

Richard Burr has apparently stated publicly that he’s looking into not Marco Rubio’s serial leaking of classified information, but Ted Cruz’s alleged disclosure of classified information at least night’s debate. That’s particularly curious given that Rubio has gotten privileged access to this information on the Senate Intelligence Committee, whereas Cruz has not

Our very own Tom:

I think as an interested lay observer, that the Party Decides framework is pretty useful way at looking at presidential primaries. And if that basic thesis is true, this is a shining example of how the Party decides. One candidate gets a pass, while the other candidate gets called out and has a bad media cycle or three with minimal party support to validate their bona fides.

If this is the case, then I am trying to figure out the bet. The first part of the bet is simple. Rubio is a favored candidate for the Establishment as everyone in DC thinks Cruz is an asshole. The second part is where I am a bit lost. Is the optimal outcome Trump v Rubio instead of Cruz v. Rubio? It looks like Trump, Cruz, Carson and Fiorina are attractive to one cluster of voters while Rubio and other establishment hopes are attractive to a different set. In the initial knock-out stages, I don’t think there are too many voters in either cluster group whose next best choice is in the other cluster. Is the bet that if the nihilist cluster condenses down to Trump and Trump alone, he’ll max out at 40%?

Still trying to figure this one out.

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Open Thread: Douthat Thinks “We” Need A Man Like Herbert Hoover Richard Nixon Again

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At first I thought NYTimesman Ross Doubthat was just dressing up some standard Repub Hillary-bashing for the centrists when he went “Searching for Richard Nixon“:

… The odd truth is that the most Nixon-like candidate in 2016 — in the sense of being ideologically protean and personally ruthless, at least — might be the one waiting for Republicans in the fall. But the unfortunate reality for the country is that Hillary Clinton might offer Nixon’s weaknesses without his strengths: All the seaminess and paranoia, but none of the actual achievements…

(Everything you lie-brals claim to hate about Tricky Dick, and she doesn’t even have one!)

But, no, he actually longs for a tough Republican daddy who could (if one were predisposed) present his jingoism and xenophobia suitably disguised with “gravitas”…

… It’s a truth universally accepted that nobody ever, ever wants to be Richard Nixon. But there are times, and this might be one of them, when the country needs a little Nixon. The country and maybe especially the Republican Party, which has been trying to forget its debt to Tricky Dick ever since the helicopter carried him away…

… Nixon knew how to channel an angry, “who’s looking out for me?” populism without letting himself be imprisoned by its excesses. A similar anger has propelled Trump, but as David Frum has pointed out, for all of the Donald’s “silent majority” call-outs he’s clearly more a George Wallace than a Nixon. Some of the anxieties he’s exploited are legitimate, just as the crime wave that Wallace fixated on really was a clear and pressing problem. But like Wallace, Trump is a provocateur and bigot — or a provocateur playing a bigot — with a deserved ceiling on his support.

The problem for Republicans is that they haven’t found a candidate who can appeal to Trump’s politically-disaffected supporters — whether they’re worried about immigration, jobs, terrorism or an overreaching social liberalism — without trafficking in slurs and empty bluster. But that’s roughly what Nixon did in 1968 and 1972, when he addressed (liberal historians would say exploited, but we can have that debate another time) widespread anxieties over social change and disorder without ever repudiating racial equality or civil rights.

In this year’s Republican primary, the non-Trump candidates have struggled mightily to make that kind of nuanced case. And they’ve struggled, in part, because they lack a second Nixonian gift: An instinct for the non-ideological character of many American voters, primary voters included…

On the one hand, we have groaning entitlement programs (Obamacare now included) in desperate need of some reform; on the other, we have a stagnant economy and a hard-pressed electorate that fears any fraying of the safety net. No president can deal with that combination without a Nixonian level of ideological flexibility – which is to say, more than President Obama has shown, and more than the demands of Republican orthodoxy allow.

Then on foreign policy, too, a dose of Nixon’s cold-eyed view of world affairs would dramatically improve what Republicans are currently promising. Obama’s foreign policy is, put charitably, a stumbling mess. But the Republican pretense that all we need to do is name our enemies and crush them misses the deep complexity of America’s challenges…

Oh, for the halcyon days of yore when those people (not just people of color and women in general, but the working-class voters who knew so little about discreet marketing as to support George Wallace) knew their place! — as cannon fodder, at the voting booth as well as in the jungles of Vietnam.

Whatever terrible things happen in the Republican primaries, there is at least the minor consolation that Ross Doubthat shall be miserable with the results.

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Instant No-Win Situation

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Dave Weigel, when given the opportunity to be Dave Weigel, will in fact be Dave Weigel.

The surprise of today’s Republican press conference on Planned Parenthood came when one of the freshman class’s stars praised Hillary Clinton. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa.) described how undercover videos had found the family planning group’s executives coldly discussing the sale of fetal body parts, and said that even Democrats were recoiling.

“The American people, Republicans and Democrats alike, are horrified by the utter lack of compassion showed by Planned Parenthood for these women and their babies,” said Ernst. “In fact, now, Hillary Clinton is calling these Planned Parenthood images disturbing, and I agree.”

That line had the intended effect. It rattled abortion rights supporters, reminding them that the Democratic frontrunner for president had hedged on their issue. The fight to defund Planned Parenthood is only the latest in a series of conservative attempts to shift the conversation on abortion, from one that bedevils Republicans to one that flummoxes Democrats. Instead of speaking generically — and popularly — about “women’s health care,” the Planned Parenthood sting forced Democrats to confront the little-covered and gruesome issue of fetal tissue sales.

 

The best part is how given clear evidence in the past of the Mighty Wurlitzer disgorging absolute horseshit upon the political landscape, folks like Weigel still act like the videos are somehow an earnest attempt to expose Planned Parenthood rather than a cynical ploy to outright destroy it, and he continues to pretend that as a political reporter that he has no influence on the outcome of an orchestrated attempt to end accessibility to women’s health care across the nation.

The only thing that matters is that it’s perceived as a problem for Democrats by the people who get to tell millions of Americans how to perceive things.  Questioning the reality or veracity of the facts?  Naah, that’s hard.  Journalists don’t mess with that nonsense. Much easier to report on the perception that Democrats can’t win.

Weigel’s gotta Weigel, yo.

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The Lamborghini Of Douchebags

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Robert Tracinski over at The Federalist gives the quintessential Glibertarian Douchebag argument on the edited videos attacking Planned Parenthood: If we frame everything using my “facts” then I win.

Of course, it’s easy to use “context” as an excuse to explain anything away. But it’s also easy to view the Planned Parenthood videos through the perspective of your pre-existing animus and seize on the worst possible interpretation of their words, or focus on the one sentence that justifies your hatred while ignoring those that might undermine your justification.

I have (somewhat ironically) a very Christian attitude about this: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. God forbid anyone should pore through any of my own conversations and read them the way people are reading the Planned Parenthood transcripts. So if someone were to ask me what I’m writing today, and I were to respond, “I don’t know, the Koch Brothers haven’t told me yet” (and I’m not saying this exchange has never occurred), I would hope people would understand it as a joke. But someone who wishes me ill would inevitably come along and seize on this as final proof that I’m in the pocket of Big Oil.

If we want to keep the moral high ground when the left pulls this sort of trick on us—and they will—then we need to make sure we’re being scrupulously fair, even to people we hate.

“Let’s have a fair and reasonable debate over subject X using the criteria of fair and reasonable that I get to define in advance” really is one of the oldest tricks in the book. In fact, it’s the entire shtick of The Federalist in general.

Tracinski says the abortion debate in general and Planned Parenthood debate in particular is getting reduced to “memes” by a cartoonish and juvenile smear attempt by the right, then equates that to Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq as somehow an equivalent move by the left.

What I’m afraid of is that this whole Planned Parenthood controversy is becoming memified, i.e., turned into a self-reinforcing meme.

I’m thinking of the way the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln was used against George W. Bush.

In context, it wasn’t President Bush’s expression of triumphalism; it was for the sailors and aviators on the aircraft carrier, who had in fact accomplished their mission. But it became a stand-in for a narrative about all the reasons lefties didn’t like Bush. Its original meaning disappeared, and the accuracy of that meaning no longer mattered. It became, not a real idea, but a meme, not an argument but a symbol for a collection of biases.

It’s a ridiculous comparison on its face and yet that’s the plan: define what “fair and reasonable” is through Both Sides Do It legerdemain, and then present your carefully defined argument as the only possible and acceptable course forward for any future discussions.  He’s literally setting up an argument he can’t lose because he’s made the rules.

If that’s not Glibertarian Douchebaggery 101, I don’t know what is.

 

 

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Her New Favorite Crush

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So if there are any remaining questions about the goal of the Wingnut Perpetual Outrage Machine and the kinds of things they want to accomplish with fake videos, this USA Today op-ed should answer them rather neatly.

This is stomach-turning stuff. But the problem here is not one of tone. It’s the crushing. It’s the organ harvesting of  fetuses that abortion-rights activists want us to believe have no more moral value than a fingernail. It’s the lie that these are not human beings worthy of protection. There is no nice way to talk about this. As my friend and former Obama White House staffer Michael Wear tweeted, “It should bother us as a society that we have use for aborted human organs, but not the baby that provides them.”

Richards worked to discredit the video by complaining it was “heavily edited.” But the nearly three-hour unedited video — a nauseating journey through the inner workings of the abortion industry — was posted at the same time as the edited video. Richards intoned menacingly that the video was “secretly recorded.” So what? When Mitt Romney was caught by “secret video” making his 47% remarks, the means of attaining the information was not the focus of the story.

By the way, the Kirsten Powers piece is entitled “Crush Planned Parenthood”. Her new book is called “The Silencing: How The Left Is Killing Free Speech” which is odd, because she has a regular weekly column in the nation’s largest daily newspaper in which to espouse her views.

As a matter of fact, the right wing regularly gets to say whatever the hell they want to, as evidenced by Powers and a wide array of GOP presidential candidates all screaming about how they are being “silenced” to anyone within earshot.

But the women who want and need these clinic services that Planned Parenthood provides? We don’t get to hear their side of the story so much over the noise from the right, now do we?

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