Category: Conservatives

Trump’s demand that the election be overturned is farce—but Republican complicity is not

Posted on by Hunter

America's fascist moment has not passed, and will not pass while any of the current crop of Republican elected officials remain in office. The Republican Party continues to attempt to nullify the results of the presidential election—a longshot bid, to be sure—using conspiracy theories designed to do damage to democracy itself.

Surely it cannot be that bad, you may think to yourself. Surely Republicans are operating from a position of rank cowardice, and have only accidentally stumbled from that into strategies that accidentally undermine this nation's democratic ideals. It is that bad, and they are not cowards. They are attempting a power play—a new authority to nullify whatever elections their now thoroughly corrupt party cannot win. We are in a new era of voter manipulation and suppression characterized by party-sponsored lies intended to propagandize the public into believing not only that non-Republican governance is illegitimate, but that non-Republican election results are as well. The Republican Party is now fascist in both method and intent. Every senator and House member is, as we have seen, complicit.

It was an inevitable point, after the party witnessed impeachable crimes from the party's leader and instead voted to adopt those crimes as new valid policy. If crimes themselves are valid, if undertaken to boost Republican power, then lying to the public about the bones of democracy itself must be equally justifiable.

On the Sunday shows, multiple Republicans yet again pushed the false notion that Joe Biden may not have truly won the next presidency. To give audience to such malignant lies, whether in service to both sides-ing democracy or not, is contemptible, and the networks and hosts bear responsibility. It is not easy to simply end interviews with public figures when it is clear they are using the media to disseminate malevolent propaganda, but it is necessary. If the networks cannot do that much, their "news" programs are themselves public frauds.

Republican Sen. Mike Braun was one of those figures pushing forward false propaganda for the sake of misleading the public. Ostensibly booked to discuss COVID-19 stimulus options—itself a sham booking, since there has proven to be no possibility that Sen. Mike Braun will ever put forward a competent opinion on any subject, much less one so dire—Braun instead blustered to enabling ABC host George Stephanopoulos at length with conspiracy theories of voter fraud and other known-false, Trump-pushed claims.

On the ever-execrable Fox News, the ever-execrable Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called the election into question, saying "We'll see" if "there is a Biden administration." (Ratcliffe and the now thoroughly feral conspiracy wolverine Maria Bartiromo followed that up by puzzling over "Who got to Bill Barr?"—for the sin of not proving multiple conservative conspiracy theories that proved, even for Barr, too ephemeral to coax into faux-existence.)

It is important to note that John Ratcliffe is a frothing ex-House Republican seen as so conspiracy-minded and single-mindedly devoted to Republican power over the national good that even the Republican Senate balked, long and hard, before eventually confirming him to his current post. It is because of that past status as House propagandist and absurd Trump provocateur that he was elevated to the Republican administration to begin with. Ratcliffe is yet another fringe Republican figure elevated to higher power specifically due to his corruptions.

The Sunday show performances, of course, came on the heels of yet another week in which Donald Trump himself promoted crazed theories that the election that saw him get a shockingly high number of pro-incompetence, pro-white-nationalism votes but still millions less than challenger Biden must, by virtue of his loss, have been fraudulent. Trump is promoting those falsehoods obsessively, suspending nearly all presidential duties to instead weave nonsensical tales claiming the presidency was stolen from him. He did so at length this weekend in Georgia, during a campaign appearance ostensibly on behalf of scandal-wracked Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue.

Both of those Republican Senators have called for the state's secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to resign for his refusals to endorse the theory that massive voter fraud landed them in runoff elections. Though Raffensperger has been receiving plaudits for not furthering his party's conspiracy claims that the election was rigged against them, and for going farther still and condemning those claims, Raffensperger said on Sunday that he still supports both of their candidacies.

This, then, is an illuminating look at where even the most "heroic" and democracy-abiding Republicans now reside. He is not willing to himself endanger the republic merely to boost two Republicans seeking reelection. He is, however, still willing to endorse the candidates doing exactly that damage. Because, says Raffensperger, "I'm a Republican."

It is said as if it is obvious. It is natural to Raffensperger that he would still support the Republicans, even if they were engaged in corrosive, anti-democratic propagandizing that he himself could not stomach. However devoted to his nation Raffensperger may be, his devotion to even his party's worst actors remains higher.

Trump, in the meantime, has made the blunt request to the state's Republican governor that Georgia simply nullify the results of their presidential election. He asks that the vote counts be thrown out, and for the state's Republican-held legislature to appoint him the state's electoral winner.

It is (again) an explicitly corrupt request. Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp has no authority to nullify the election. There is no scheme by which such an attempt would not be inherently un-democratic, whether successful or not. Trump is both ignorant enough and criminal enough to request it anyway.

Surrounded by less inept aides, there is no telling how much damage a similarly corruption-minded Republican president could do.

The attempts to dismantle democracy itself, rather than abide by election losses, are the newest arrived-at spot for the Republican Party after a litany of fascistic actions and proclamations. It is Jim Crow writ even larger, a new anti-democratic theory that not only ought the votes of non-white Americans be treated as illegitimate, but those of every voter who refuses to support the party.

After years of promoting the theory that Republican lawmakers were slavishly defending and promoting each of Trump's most corrupt actions due to a party-wide and all-encompassing cowardice, pundits are still attempting to pin current lawmaker silence, in the face of these Trump-led lies and blatantly fraudulent conspiracy claims, on the same. But this is wrong.

Or, as The Washington Post's Greg Sargent puts it, it "badly undersells the bottomless bad faith and dishonorable instrumentalism that Republicans are employing here."

The Republican Party is embracing claims of massive but invisible election conspiracies for the same reason they remained stubbornly, supremely silent on Trump's proven act of extorting election favors from a foreign nation: While the actions involved are absolutely corrosive to democracy, all of them of authoritarian vintage and used here for authoritarian ends, it is possible those actions could end up working. It is not so much that the McConnells of the party are remaining silent to avoid a lame duck's impotent wrath, and more that Republican lawmakers are almost to a person not willing to close the door on the very small but still real chance that Trump's obsessive attempts to overturn an American election could succeed.

They are playing a part considerably less nuanced than Brad Raffensperger's own decision to speak out against anti-democratic conspiracy propaganda while still endorsing the party leaders most directly responsible for promoting them. They are refusing to speak out against the claims so long as Trump's team of rancid legal pretenders, his administration propagandists, and the fringe elements of their conservative base still pursues them. If there is even a 10% chance of success, Republican lawmakers will not be speaking out to thwart it.

They defended Trump's impeachable act of election extortion with a similar silence. They pretended they could not see the evidence; they demanded they not be shown the evidence. If the Rudy Giuliani-led attempts to concoct Ukraine-based propaganda against Joe Biden had borne fruit, and at the time of impeachment there were still good reasons to believe the fabricated evidence could still be sold to the public, Republican lawmakers would benefit equally from the hoax discrediting their most visible opponent.

The decision to nullify impeachment proceedings, allowing Trump and an assortment of top officials to continue pursuing corrupt means to power, was an affirmative act by Republican senators. Their calculated silence here is for identical reasons. The acts may be criminal—but judgment on that will be withheld until the spoils can be divvied.

It is not likely that Trump will succeed in his own narcissism-fueled quest to claim that he could not have failed, in anything, unless subterfuge was involved. There are too many moving parts, the figures involved are still too ridiculous, and there are simply too many states involved this time around. But the eagerness of the party's base to adopt such rhetoric, the Republican Party leadership's embrace and furtherance of the moves, Republican lawmakers' calculated wait-and-see silence and, especially, their refusal to speak out to condemn election conspiracies all have firmly established Trump's propagandistic claims as acceptable tools for the party going forward.

Whether or not individual Republican actors like Raffensperger themselves act on such claims, there will be no penalties for simply declaring, upon losing an election, that the election was somehow Invalid, and therefore Illegitimate, and therefore the winner will be whoever a state's Republican officials choose to appoint. It is in the realm of the debatable, because Republicans on the Sunday shows are debating it. It is plausible that a future president may not be seated, if his predecessor has the backing of this crop of Republican elected figures and can put forward claims that are even fractionally less ridiculous.

The attempt to delegitimize American elections en masse rather than admit defeat is not a mere product of Trump's narcissistic delusions. It has the backing of top Republicans. It has the endorsement of an increasingly fascist-minded conservative media universe. It does not come from a vacuum; Trump is not the one filing the lawsuits to overturn results, and is only one of numerous Republican elites making the same outlandish assertions of "thousands" or "millions" of faked ballots, claims that near-unanimously target cities with large non-white populations.

It is a fascist movement, one based on the theory that party power must be preserved even if it requires the production of hoaxes and propaganda to accomplish. One that shows gaudy public contempt for expertise, and which invariably declares that any factual evidence that does not comport with the party's own oft-buffoonish claims must necessarily be a hoax perpetrated against Dear Leader, launched by remnant groups in government or outside it that seek to damage Dear Leader.

The party continually tests which democratic norms can be dispensed with, and have been successful at dismantling many or most. The push to overturn the results of a presidential election, and specifically to do so by nullifying the actual votes and tasking loyalist state elected officials create new ones, has very little chance of being successful this time, based on these states and these claims.

That does not mean that the party will not lend its weight to similar calls to overturn a future election. It does not mean that, in a Republican Party that continues to aggressively purge itself of the insufficiently sycophantic, it will with certainty run afoul of local officials unwilling to lend their own names to the effort. It does not mean that every collection of party lawyers and provocateurs will be as incompetent. There will be those that analyze these fraud claims not to discredit them, but to determine how they can best be made more compelling. And the movement of out-and-out imbeciles, Americans who pride themselves on believing hoaxes while condemning expertise, only continues to grow.

America remains at the same fascist moment, and Republican lawmakers and ex-lawmakers are going on the Sunday shows pushing false claims meant to suggest that our democracy itself is unreliable or compromised, having turned in results that the party's leader does not like. They are not turning the moment back, but pushing it forward. Again. Still.

Rabid GOP base now too delusional to be useful in battling incoming Biden administration

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The dumbed down conspiracy-laden GOP base has been a drag on the country for more than a decade now, so it's only fitting that it is finally kneecapping the political calculus of the Republican party.

Alas, Donald Trump's true believers are so invested in the mirage that he won the election that conservative groups can't counter-message any of President-elect Joe Biden's incoming agenda without being attacked, according to Politico. The super-secret command came from Donald Trump himself as he urged everyone to ignore the incoming Biden administration as a way of delegitimizing his win. Smart.

Now conservative groups in Washington have had to forgo much of the work they would normally engage in during the transition period to a president from the opposing party. Along the way, they have been unable to message about the horrors that certain Cabinet picks might bring, unable to hire soon-to-be unemployed Trump administration officials for fear of reprisals, and unable to get conservative outlets obsessively writing about baseless voter fraud claims interested in covering any stories about Biden’s upcoming tenure. 

“All of conservative media is about the recounts [and] the fraud allegations,” said a high-level employee at one conservative media outlet. “Trump is basically the assignment editor for the conservative press.”

The newfound predicament of this reality-based minority of GOP operatives in Washington is born of experience. Organizations and individuals that have made the mistake of crossing Trump’s red line have been called traitors who are feeding the "liberal media" narrative. “You definitely have a grassroots conservative movement that’s completely unwilling to discuss anything related to a Biden administration,” said an employee at one conservative nonprofit.

Deliciously, the delusional groupthink has also spilled over into the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, leaving groups helpless to warn against what a Democratically controlled Senate could mean when paired with a Biden White House.

“The winning narrative in Georgia would be that Republicans need the Senate to counter Joe Biden and [Vice President-elect] Kamala Harris when they’re in office,” one prominent elected Republican told Politico. “The problem is you can’t make that case effectively when you’ve got the president telling some of his voters, ‘Don’t worry, Joe Biden is not going to be president.’”

That cognitive dissonance has made otherwise mundane but critical organizing both fruitless and effortful. “I sent out a weekly email and mentioned something about a potential Biden administration and the fallout was ridiculous,” said an employee at one conservative nonprofit.

One area where the inability to do long-term planning could really hamper the conservative response is in combatting a series of potentially aggressive executive orders that will likely flow from the Biden administration starting on Day One. Whether Democrats manage to secure a majority in the Senate or not during the Georgia runoffs, Biden will almost surely make sweeping use of executive actions right out of the gate to overturn a number of toxic Trump remnants. Typically, those actions would meet with immediate legal challenges from conservatives who had been strategizing for months about the best legal path to blocking them. Instead, the conservative response could be delayed and even scattershot in its approach. 

In fact, one of the four Senate Republicans who have actually acknowledged Biden's win is warning his colleagues that they are handicapping themselves heading into an entirely new landscape of political battles. 

“Republicans can’t afford to get stuck in the denial stage of grief,” said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse has declared he would “crawl over broken glass" to block some of the names being floated for Cabinet positions under Biden. “We’ve got some big fights ahead, and it’d be prudent for Republicans to be focused on the governance challenges facing our center-right nation,” he added.

Imagine that—a guy who voted to acquit Trump of impeachment charges without hearing from a single witness suddenly in a spin about coddling Trump being a political liability. You reap what you sow.

CNN: Conservatives Leaving Facebook And Twitter For Parler Is A ‘Threat To Democracy’

Posted on by John Hanson

In CNN’s analysis of how conservative voters are handling the presidential election results, reporter Pamela Brown said that conservatives leaving social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook over speech suppression was a “threat to democracy.” 

CNN’s Brian Stelter complained about smaller right-leaning news channels, like Newsmax, getting more viewers recently as conservatives hammer Fox News over its election coverage and what they view as anti-Trump bias.

RELATED: Meghan McCain Confronts CNN Host Brian Stelter On His Network’s Many Failings

Stelter: Conservatives Leaving Facebook And Twitter For ‘Safer Space’

Stelter said to Brown, “I think, big picture, Pamela, here is the concerning trend line here. People are going more and more into their own echo chambers, more into their own bubbles, especially Trump voters.”

“There’s this new social media app, called Parler, getting a lot of attention,” Stelter continued. 

He added, “Because conservatives are leaving, saying they’re leaving Twitter and Facebook, going off to Parler because they believe Parler is a safer space for them.”

“What we’re seeing is even more of a bunker mentality in right-wing media,” Stelter said.“Ultimately, that’s not good for the country.”

That’s when Brown associated freedom of speech and choice with undermining democratic values.

“No, it is not good,” Brown responded (emphasis added). “It is a threat to democracy that these people are in echo chambers and they’re getting fed a diet of lies essentially.”

CNN Is An Echo Chamber

That’s rich.

The freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights are not threats to democracy.

The freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom of association. None of these are threats to democracy. 

It’s the exact opposite. Suppression of these freedoms is a threat to democracy. 

And really, is there a bigger echo chamber than CNN?

For years, Americans were constantly bombarded with “new” or “breaking” “information” that all supposedly pointed to Donald Trump allegedly colluding with Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election his way.

Then the Mueller report ended up as a huge nothingburger. Did the media ever apologize for it?

Impeachment was not an issue in this election. If Joe Biden even said it once, most missed it.

RELATED: What The Media’s Not Talking About: Republican Election Victory That Will Affect The Next 10 Years

Fake News Is A Threat To Democracy

But fake claims about collusion is what animated the Democratic Party for most of Trump’s presidency.

When an entire major political party defines itself by a fantasy of their own making, that’s a bubble.

And save for (sometimes) Fox News and alternative news outlets, the mainstream media protected that bubble.

We all live in our own bubbles to some extent. CNN tries to present its bubble as truth.

Some might call that a threat to democracy.

The post CNN: Conservatives Leaving Facebook And Twitter For Parler Is A ‘Threat To Democracy’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

Donald Trump is worried about going to jail if he loses. Yeah, ya think?

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

In a piece describing Donald Trump's incessant whining to his staff about election woes and his staff's continued efforts to gaslight him into thinking he's ahead in the polls rather than face another one of his screaming fits, the Trump whisperers at The New York Times bring us this tidbit from inside Trump's team: "In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him."

Yeah. Ya think? Ya THINK?

There's all the investigations that Attorney General William Barr has personally squashed or slow-walked in an attempt to let Trump's various crime-doing loyalists off the hook. There's four years worth of press reporting on things in Trump's taxes that look, smell, and taste like fraud. There's the charges brought up in impeachment—which implicate a few of Trump's cabinet members in an international extortion scheme, and that’s not going to just go away if Trump slouches off toward Mar-a-Lago.

Unfortunately for Trump, even though he knows that keeping the presidency is the only way to hold back a tide of criminal investigations, he's still too scatterbrained and incompetent to mount a reelection bid not dependent on mass public delusion. Yeah, that stuff is going to come up just as soon as you lose presidential immunities. Golf clap for you, buddy, for figuring it out.

If Trump loses, and let us presume for a moment that he does, it seems almost certain that his close-of-office action will be blanket pardons to himself, his family, everyone he knows, and anyone who's ever cut him a check for eeeeeverything. That'll be what's on the pardon proclamation: "I pardon myself and these other people for absolutely all crimes, including all the stuff nobody found out about yet."

It might actually work, for federal crimes. The states? Not so much.

I still say there is a damn good chance Donald J. Trump becomes the first American president to flee prosecution and ask for foreign asylum. Air Force One could make it to Moscow without refueling, right? Honestly, we'd probably tell Putin to keep the plane while he's at it—we'd just be that thrilled to be rid of him.

Then again, there are other possibilities as well:

FWIW I’ve repeatedly heard a theory that Trump’s refusal to say he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost is really a ploy to negotiate no future investigations/prosecutions of him and his businesses https://t.co/OX7NBLcxCZ

— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) November 2, 2020

That seems literally too stupid a premise to believe, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. He is an accused rapist, tax cheat, pedophile, money launderer, and extortionist already; using the U.S. Army to hold the nation hostage for immunity negotiations isn’t quite out of the realm of possibilities for this fascist jackass.

Fascism: As polling turns against him, Trump lays groundwork for mass violence

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Rattled by poor polling numbers in his reelection bid, the alleged president of the United States is encouraging domestic terrorism. That's where we're at, and everyone from top national security experts to local emergency officials are all crystal clear on that. The New York Times reports from a bunch of 'em in a piece that can both contain remarkable factual phrases like "Mr. Trump has descended into rants about perceived enemies" and still somehow soft sell the underlying message:

The nation is preparing for violence on and after Election Day because Donald J. Trump, a fascist, is goading his supporters into that violence with rally claims that any loss on his part will be proof that his enemies cheated.

There is no possible chance that Trump doesn't know what he's doing. His tweeted calls to "LIBERATE" states from governors who imposed widespread pandemic measures resulted in a Michigan militia attempting to do exactly that. Trump is back at it even today, claiming their primary target, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, "wants to be a dictator." He is attaching the legitimacy of the state to calls for mob action—only to repeat those calls when it looks like the first versions are beginning to bear fruit.

The only reason he is not being treated as a radical, dangerous figure who has irreparably violated his own oath of office, necessitating removal, is because Republican Party leadership and lawmakers have themselves embraced and defended those violations. It is self-radicalizing; the farther Trump goes into overtly authoritarian behavior, the more pressure the party feels to defend and normalize their own support for him. The more Trump's circle has succeeded in isolating and excising state and local functionaries who express alarm at his grotesqueries, the more the party has become a homogenized group of anti-democracy, authoritarian-molded radicals themselves.

Trump has clearly been unfit for office in every respect; the impeachment investigation identified his corruption, the pandemic proved his apathetic incompetence, and his continued calls for mob justice against targeted enemies have proven (as have similar quotes repeated through the last five years) that he is not just indifferent to extralegal punishments of his enemies, but publicly fantasizes about them. If Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Attorney General William Barr, Treasury Sec. Steve Mnuchin, Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, Rep. Mark Meadows, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Ted Cruz, and the entire rest of the party had not all decided to ally with him for their own ideological and policy ends, he would have been removed in bipartisan fashion long ago, reduced to a historical footnote.

They didn't, and now local law enforcement officials around the country are preparing for radicals among what Trump has proudly designated his "Army" intent on disrupting Election Day, sabotaging ballot-counting measures, and committing acts of coordinated terrorism targeting his opponents. It's now expected.

Once again we're in a position where the fate of democracy rests on not just beating anti-democratic forces, but doing so in such a convincing fashion that sabotage can't alter the outcome. But now it comes with the near certainty of violence. This is Mitch McConnell's fault: Remember that. This is Lindsey Graham's fault. Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, William Barr. Trump's suggestions to "liberate" parts of America from small-d democratic governance would be intolerable if they believed them to be intolerable. Everything Trump does and will do has happened because they allowed it.

California Republican Party says it won’t take down illegal ‘ballot boxes’ despite state orders

Posted on by Hunter

On Monday, it came to light that the California Republican Party was placing what they called "official ballot drop off boxes" in locations deemed to be Republican-friendly (such as, no kidding, "gun stores") in apparent efforts to make it easier for Republican voters to vote than not-Republican voters.

There are two problems with this. First: It's not legal. California law allows voters to designate a person to drop their ballot off at an official location rather than going themselves; it does not allow the "designated person" to be an unattended cardboard box. (And yes, some of the "official ballot drop off boxes" are merely "simple cardboard boxes with no locking security mechanism.")

The second problem is, yes, ballot security. Voters may not be aware that these very much not official "drop off boxes" are managed by unknown Republican operatives, and there's no guarantee the ballots collected in such boxes won't "accidentally" be, to use a recent Trumpian example, dumped into a river. (I kid. Here in California we don't have rivers. They could be dumped into storm drains, though, which would be problematic because all the aspiring sewer actors do not need more lines to practice.) There's nothing to say the ballots the Republican Party claims to be collecting won't be sorted through, perhaps to weed out non-Republican looking names, or otherwise disposed of. That's why California ballot-harvesting laws require a designee.

California officials have now warned the state Republican Party that what they're doing is illegal and may even result in prison time. The Republican Party has responded in the expected way: They don't care, and won't be complying with state demands to remove the boxes.

More specifically, the California Republican Party intends to continue the operation while daring state officials to do anything about it. Party spokesperson Hector Barajas noted that a 2018 state law prohibits election officials from rejecting a ballot solely because it was returned without the required designee signature or relationship to the voter, signaling that the party intends to collect ballots however they want, handle and turn them in however they want, and dare election officials to throw those votes away. Election officials will almost certainly not do that, so here we are.

It's another case of the party's all-encompassing insistence that laws don't matter if bending the law would benefit the party. See also: Dinesh D'Whateverguy, and literally every member of Donald Trump's inner circles, past and present, indicted and not, and the Republican gutting of the Federal Election Commission, and the nullification of election-related impeachment charges against Dear Leader, and take your pick.

And yes, everyone involved is aware of the dichotomy of the Republican Party going to furious lengths to restrict voting access in Texas and other Republican-led states while bending restrictions that they believe are harmful to their own voters. It's not irony, it's fascism.

What California voters need to know right now, however: Do not use those boxes. Don't. California is mailing ballots to all voters; follow the instructions provided to the letter and mail them back. Do not put your ballot in a cardboard box, or a burlap sack, or into the mouth of a large wooden horse that has appeared, overnight, in the empty parking lot of an abandoned mall. Just mail them in, or turn them in where the state itself tells you to.

There's no guarantee that the local Chuckles' Gun Club and Shoebox Votin' Booth will be handling your vote, as America decides between authoritarian rule and democracy, with anything resembling care. The Republican Party is playing fast and loose with the votes of their own most loyal supporters, and that is not something you want to get involved in.

Mike Pompeo is now brazenly campaigning for Trump using his federal post

Posted on by Hunter

Prior to ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo becoming Trump's secretary of state, it was generally understood that U.S. secretaries of state were not allowed to use the tools of their office for rank partisan politicking. Using government resources to campaign is illegal; turning the top diplomatic job in the country into a tool of partisanship damages U.S. credibility abroad by signaling, to world counterparts, that the U.S. diplomat is In This For Themselves.

All of that is gone now because Donald Trump simply chose to ignore those constraints, and Republicans—with the singular exception of one Mitt Romney, exactly once—wholeheartedly adopted the same merging of party and state as the new way things are done. This was helped along immensely by Trump's surrounding of himself with hard-right ex-House Republicans contemptuous of the rules from the outset. Mike Pompeo is a poster child for this. He continues to assist Trump in the cover-up of a criminal Ukrainian extortion scheme—one timed to allow Russian incursions into that country to proceed and be solidified while much needed U.S. aid was used to pressure for Trump reelection favors. He continues to abet Trump's incompetent dismantling of U.S. foreign policy infrastructure.

And, of course, Pompeo is using his State Department role to campaign aggressively for Trump and Republicans throughout the country. The premise is that key Trump-supporting demographics and swing states just happen to need conservative foreign policy priorities explained to them by, literally, the top U.S. diplomat—one who admittedly has little else to do since all such policy decisions have been stripped from him and his government agency in favor of the new policy, Whatever Trump Last Said. The reality is that Pompeo is touring the country giving campaign speeches to, as the AP reports, a white evangelical church in Plano, Texas; the hard-right Value Voters Summit; and other appearances in Wisconsin, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and of course his home state of Kansas. Pompeo has famously been eyeing higher office himself—a plan that briefly looked scuttled when Pompeo was implicated in impeachable crimes, but one Pompeo appears to be inching back to with hopes that voters no longer remember or resent him for that now that the Trump administration has delivered at least a half-dozen other scandals and death-dealing clusterfucks for them to chew on instead.

The important thing to remember here is that Pompeo is crooked. He is crooked in the William Barr way, and fairly precisely: He has been caught directly assisting in Trump's impeached-for acts; he has been caught in a campaign to cover up those acts and his involvement for Trump's benefit and his own; he has done each of these things in service of elevating Republican power regardless of legality or institutional norms; and he makes no particular effort to hide the use of his office as explicitly partisan, to be used for shoring up allies and punishing enemies.

While Barr pressures his underlings into producing documents meant to portray Trump's detractors and investigators as the "true" criminals of Russian election hacking while undermining further investigations into Trump and all allies, Pompeo weaves through the country on a heavy campaign schedule to tell conservative audiences that they should "go to the polling place and express your preference" for his hard-right claims and declarations, as AP quoted him telling his Texas audience.

Without dwelling on it: Again, Mike Pompeo using his government perch to address the Republican National Convention—from Israel, no less—was such a grotesque insult to supposed diplomatic nonpartisanship that it would have likely ended with Pompeo's removal from his post during any of the last half-century's worth of presidencies. Republican lawmakers, however, are embracing Pompeo's acts as they are Trump's, and Barr's. There is no Republican caucus demanding Trump adhere to the rule of law, or the Hatch Act, or basic expected decencies.

The whole point of immunizing Trump during impeachment was to enable further corruption. It was the expected outcome. It clearly worked, as Trump's rapid gutting of oversight offices and inspectors showed. We are now at a point where Trump and Barr are openly crafting plans to eliminate votes if the November elections do not go his way, and continue eliminating votes for as long as it takes until the Republican Party can claim a crooked victory.

The reasons are not just to retain power, though; Trump's team and Trump's allies need a victory for more personal reasons. There has been a mountain of criminal acts, cover-ups, ethical violations, and rank corruption from Barr, from Pompeo, from Trump himself, and other Trump cabinet members past and present. The moment they lose power, there is a danger that the remaining shards of true, neutral law enforcement will come for them—and those ex-officials will no longer have means to block those investigations.

Every investigation currently being blocked and corrupted can only be blocked or corrupted so long as the corrupters remain in power. Republicans like Pompeo, still identified as having played a role in international extortion whether his Republican Senate allies are supportive or are not, has no time to worry about laws or norms as he scurries around the country to protect himself from the consequences of his own corruption.

It’s propaganda, not hypocrisy: Republicans use lying as primary governing technique

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

There is no point in accusing Republican senators of hypocrisy. Absolutely none. Only hours after the death of Supreme Court icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republicans—who had previously gnashed their teeth at the audacity of the suggestion that the nation's first nonwhite president had the constitutional power to make nominations to the court at any point during the final year of his term—began declaring that this time around, obviously that new rule no longer applies. And obviously the president of their own party, impeached and transparently corrupt, must be granted a scrambling court even as voters line up to cast early ballots.

Hypocrisy implies there’s a previous ideology being upset; there wasn't one, and isn't one, and no serious politics-watcher ever thought otherwise. The principle being upheld by Sen. Mitch McConnell and clan then and now was more simple: Retain power using all available tools, and deny the opposition power using all available tools. There is no "ideology" inside the modern conservative movement, either before Trump's arrival or afterwards, that can survive its first brush with expediency. Each argument lasts only as long as the soundbites require and will be replaced with a new one immediately, without hesitation, when required.

Expediency as ideology is not a senate-only device. Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia practiced it with aplomb, often resulting in lawyers and courts using his past words against him in new cases—a futile gesture. Of his "originalist," "textualist," or "institutionalist" allies, the same approach is used by All Of Them.

It's not hypocrisy if the principle all along was "whatever best increases power." And it is irrelevant if it is.

The relevant part is that it is accomplished by lying. The practitioners claim some bold new notion of how the world should work, and it is an absolute, baldfaced, bullshit-laden public lie. Those who watch McConnell or Sen. Lindsey Graham in their public appearances can easily identify, at this point, the schtick that makes up their entire persona.

They look the American public in the eye, and they simply lie to them.

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." pic.twitter.com/quD1K5j9pz

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) September 19, 2020

It was a lie from the moment he uttered it, and there was not a person in the room who didn’t know it from the outset. The movement is devoted to lying as governing principle. It works because there are countless channels through which those lies can be disseminated, and amplified, and praised. It will continue for as long as it works.

Over and over. About everything, all the time. The Moscow Turtle has never cried a sincere tear in his life, but according to him all Democratic actions are Devastation, all Republican actions are Sorrowfully Required Due To Democratic Existence, and the rest is puppet show. Graham is superb at being outraged in showy defense of the outrageous. Sen. Marco Rubio's usual deployed device is to respond to each act of corruption or depravity with a Bible verse, typically as non sequitur, and wiping his hands of the rest of it. Sen. Susan Collins is forever concerned by gross incompetence or criminality within her movement, and remains equally as concerned the next time around, and will make good on that "concern" exactly zero times as she votes to enable each concerning act one-by-one-by-one.

It's not hypocrisy. They're just liars. Conservatism is a movement of fictions, a series of nonsense falsehoods deployed like a squid ejects ink. Nobody asks the squid whether it stands by the cloud ejaculated in the last crisis. It would be pointless. The squid doesn't remember, and can't tell you.

It is not that the nation is run by a movement of "hypocrites." The nation is run by a collection of liars.

Propagandists.

Those who issue false statements and make false claims relentlessly in order to deceive the public, or to stir their base into new heights of feverishness, or—and this is rather more to the point in this particular year—to justify and endorse criminality in service to the movement. Incompetence, if in service to the movement. A quarter million deaths, if in service to the movement.

The lies are consequential. McConnell and his allies lied their way through the impeachment of a president, simply insisting that the evidence was not evidence and the testimony not testimony. The movement has lied its way through a pandemic, turning even the most rote of pandemic safety precautions—masks, even—into conspiracies and partisan litmus tests.

When Michael Caputo and his aides insisted that children were nearly immune to the virus and could not spread it, it was not ideology. It was a lie meant to keep more of the "economy" open even if the more pertinent metric—deaths—was multiplied.

When the movement claims "antifa"—a group that does not actually exist—is behind police reform protests, it is a lie. It is propaganda intended purely to discredit protestors, and better facilitate state and militia violence against them.

When Sen. Ron Johnson pipelines the work of known Russian operatives into his committee to declare that he has discovered very serious doings, doings that suggest his opponents are secretly corrupt in ways no American law enforcement has ever been able to find, he is fully aware of his own actions. He is not stupid.

When Attorney General William Barr releases a document that grossly undermines a report on Russian election interference that benefited his party, and follows up by launching conspiracy after conspiracy all premised on the notion that it is American law enforcement that is corrupt for going after Republican targets, he is lying to the public for the sake of the party.

The movement of Republicanism is propagandistic in nature. Lies are deployed towards political ends. All involved know they are lies. All involved spread the lies willingly. Fox News exists as propaganda factory. Donald Trump exists as propaganda factory. McConnell exists as propaganda factory. The sitting attorney general, the president's odd private lawyer—the only through line is relentless lying to the public about everything, all the time, for power.

There's no textualist in conservatism. Nonsense about precedents and institutions is barely even given lip service. There are no "deficit hawks," or "small government" idealism. None of those things have survived. The only takeaway from White House press briefings is a single, fundamental point: These are today's lies. If you don't like them, there will be others tomorrow.

There is a word for all of this. Declaring that your leaders are allowed to commit crimes while demanding the arrest of enemies on false charges; the rejection of facts and the explicit declaration that the free press is an enemy of the people for presenting information that conflicts with the state's own preferred interpretations; the altering and realtering of supposed norms so that the opposition is, invariably, declared to be out of control in their requests, so out of control that it is now necessary to alter the rules of government to properly constrain them:

It is authoritarianism. The party is a propaganda movement devoted only to self-preservation. There is not a stitch of prior ideological principle that will survive from 2016 to 2020—or from 2018 on a Monday to 2018 on a Tuesday. The rules are whatever they need to be to suppress the movement's perceived enemies. Not merely for a desperately needed Supreme Court seat, but for the now-existential election and all its myriad details.

Asked whether Trump wants election delayed, will accept foreign help, Trump team refuses to say

Posted on by Hunter

It was another typical day on the Sunday shows, the place where America's most powerful people congregate to, for the most part, brazenly lie to us. Today's version came with one thing that the Trump team Very Much wants to talk about—banning social media app TikTok—and several they very much did not.

The two things they didn't want to talk about: Whether Donald Trump has asked his staff about delaying the November elections, and whether Trump's White House and/or campaign will accept foreign "assistance" in defeating former Vice President Joe Biden.

WATCH: Trump adviser Jason Miller is asked three (3) times whether the Trump administration or campaign would accept foreign assistance in this election. Three (3) times, he refuses to say no. pic.twitter.com/Kcgm021pHP

— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) August 2, 2020

That Trump campaign creature and deadbeat dad Jason Miller was so aggressively unwilling to answer straight-up whether the Trump team would be willing to accept foreign election assistance to beat Biden, on Fox News Sunday, is probably not surprising. Miller instead called it a "silly question," which to his credit is true: Trump himself faced impeachment for extorting a foreign government to provide such help, using the tools of his office, so pretending there is some remaining doubt about whether Trump and his team of people who did such a thing would do such a thing is indeed "silly."

This one is on Fox host Chris Wallace. If you book the oozing gastropod Miller on your show, you know what you're going to get: Lying. Gaslighting. Dear Leader-isms a-plenty. And you would still talk to him ... why? The point of bringing on a spokesperson who you can be absolutely sure will lie about anything and everything pertinent is what, exactly?

Newest Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, plucked from his House seat after a campaign of vigorously defending Trump from both the thing Trump was impeached over and every last thing he wasn't, had his own moment of not-gonna-answer-that when asked on Face the Nation whether Trump, after suggesting in a tweet that the presidential election be delayed, asked "you or anybody else in the administration to look into" delaying it.

Meadows couldn't answer that one. Or rather, wouldn't answer that one, instead swerving to attacks on pandemic vote-by-mail efforts with the usual aplomb of a treasonous dirtbag man with no particular attachment to seeing those elections happen. He can't answer whether Trump administration members were specifically asked, by Trump, if there was a way to delay the elections? Really now?

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows doesn't answer John Dickerson's question about "did the president ask you or anybody else in the administration to look into the idea of delaying the election day?" pic.twitter.com/dclXhW8ZcE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 2, 2020

If you can't give an emphatic no to that one, we can all read between the lines. All right then, so it's come up.

None of this bodes very well for the elections, of course. Meadows was among the House Republicans most willing to be crooked on Trump's behalf back in Congress; presumed foreign agent Rep. Devin Nunes has been getting anti-Biden packets from pro-Russian Ukrainians while ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo, of the same vintage, uses his State Department perch to distribute anti-Biden materials to House Republicans while hiding it from Democrats.

There's a coordinated Republican strategy to manufacture foreign dirt, using pro-Russian foreign forces, to attack Biden with conspiracy theories in the final months of the election so that the best American pal foreign autocrats ever had can cling to power for another four years. From Pompeo to Barr, from Nunes to Meadows to Giuliani to Miller, they're sifting through disinformation to see what they can plausibly use before the press, the American people, intelligence services and federal investigators catch wind of it.

It'll probably be very stupid things, given what Giuliani has presented so far, but that doesn't mean they won't go all-in on the effort. If Trump and his team cannot be bothered to form even a mediocre plan for combatting the pandemic that has now killed 150,000 Americans and which may kill 250,000 before November—and they clearly can’t—then arguing that whoever Trump’s running against would be even worse is the only remaining play.

Democrats ask for FBI briefing on foreign disinformation efforts around Sen. Ron Johnson

Posted on by Hunter

Monday, top Democratic lawmakers asked FBI director Christopher Wray to provide classified briefings to Congress on an unspecified but "ongoing" "concerted foreign information campaign" targeting Congress with the aim of disrupting the 2020 presidential elections.

Reporters have now been able to get a bit more information on what those lawmakers have been getting at: Both Politico and The New York Times are reporting that the classified addendum to the letter touches on Sen. Ron Johnson's would-be investigation of Hunter Biden, which has been the pipeline through which Trump "personal lawyer" Rudy Giuliani has been funneling known-false information from his network of Ukrainian criminals and disinformation brokers. Specifically, notes the Times, Sen. Ron Johnson has been relying heavily on a Ukrainian figure thought by the FBI to be a "conduit" for Russian disinformation.

None of this information is new. Johnson's eagerness to solicit testimony from ex-Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko was the subject of public alarm and a previous intelligence community warning. Johnson has been dismissive of complaints about his reliance on known dodgy sources, though he was pressured into giving up on the idea of taking Telizhenko's testimony directly.

Reading between the lines here, then, at least one part of Democratic lawmakers’ concerns appear to be that Sen. Johnson is using his committee and "Biden" investigations to legitimize foreign disinformation operations targeting Biden in the 2020 election—or, rather, that at least one foreign disinformation campaign is targeting Johnson, using his eagerness to boost Trump's election chances to dispense election disinformation directly from the mouths of Republican senators.

There are a few things to know here. Most importantly, Johnson cannot claim gullibility in stovepiping foreign disinformation here. After a specific intelligence community warning and after mountains of public reports on the sketchiness of Giuliani's Ukrainian associates, many of whom are pro-Russian Ukrainians forced from their positions by the public and new government, and their debunked claims against their enemies. Johnson has continued to "investigate" information that has already been discredited, and it is clearly intended, like "Benghazi," as means of influencing upcoming elections. Ron Johnson knows precisely what he is doing and who he is dealing with.

So the question is not whether Russian and other foreign disinformation campaigns are targeting Johnson, but the extent to which Johnson is co-conspiring with those brokers to craft and release election-bending smears cooperatively. In his defense, Sen. Ron Johnson is widely regarded as one of the dullest senators in the institution, if not the most dull, and so there is the slightest possibility he does not see himself as coordinating with the disinformation campaign—or, more accurately, does not connect the dots as to what that coordination means, when tied to foreign disinformation sources.

Johnson has long been a puzzle, and that is putting it mildly. He was one of a collection of hard-right Republican lawmakers who inexplicably traveled to Moscow for the Fourth of July, in 2018, and who came back claiming that the Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns in the 2016 presidential elections were being blown "way out of proportion."

There's no particular reason to believe Johnson is not stovepiping foreign disinformation willingly. That was the very premise of Rudy Giuliani's "legal" help to Trump's electoral needs. Johnson was also vociferous in defending Trump when Trump extorted the Ukrainian government by withholding military aid until that government agreed to give a public announcement supporting that disinformation, leading to Trump's impeachment.

What Democrats are not publicly saying, but should, is that Johnson is not acting as target of a foreign disinformation effort, but a co-conspirator. He is a full ally of the Trump-Giuliani-Ukraine-Russia disinformation campaign.