Category: Hypocrisy

Watch: Republicans slammed for ‘debasing and demeaning’ the Constitution

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee met to discuss the Republican-created articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The entire enterprise against Mayorkas has been an example of one of the most transparent weaponizations of impeachment provisions in our lifetime. 

Rep. Daniel Goldman decided to use his time to give a masterclass on how hypocritical, political, and ultimately dangerous this endeavor is, describing the proceedings as “completely debasing and demeaning the impeachment clause of the United States Constitution, and it is a gross, gross injustice to the credibility of this institution.” Goldman reminded the committee that impeachment has only been used against people who have abused their power and should not be used as a way to attack what you might believe to be “bad” policy. “That is for elections and that is for legislation,” Goldman continued.

He then drilled into the political nature of these proceedings, and how they are an attempt to give Donald Trump and congressional Republicans something to run on during this election cycle: “You are sitting here right now trying to impeach a secretary of Homeland Security for neglecting his duties literally while he is trying to perform his duties and negotiate legislation.” Finally, Goldman detailed the catch-22 of nongovernance being performed by the GOP, and how corrosive it is to our country.

So your own party is sabotaging and undermining this administration's efforts to address the border while you are trying to impeach him by saying that they're not addressing the border. The hypocrisy is the least of it. Your attack on the rule of law and our democracy is the worst of it. And you better be careful about the bed that you make. I yield back.

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Mayorkas has been a publicly convenient symbol for Republican attacks on immigration policy. No matter how jaw-droppingly obvious the fallacy of their attacks may seem, it is all that they’ve got. Since the GOP continues to fail to gin up enthusiastic electoral support from its voters by way of culture wars attacking trans children and banning books on race and history, trying to impeach Mayorkas has become their substitute for doing anything substantial about our country’s immigration policies.

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Watch AOC let loose on Clarence Thomas on ‘The Daily Show’

Posted on (Updated by Walter Einenkel

This week, longtime “The Daily Show” correspondent Jordan Klepper is taking his turn in the guest host seat. He kicked the week off with a bang, scoring an interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her home turf of New York City.

And while the interview began as a conversation about violence and social services in America, it ended up touching on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ ethics failures, the fight for reproductive rights, and Donald Trump being the only person who is crying for Donald Trump.

RELATED STORY: Supreme Court Justice Thomas' Republican donor buddy also collects Nazi trinkets

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After Klepper joked about a theoretical Beyonce Knowles collecting Third Reich memorabilia, Ocasio-Cortez brought the interview back on track and succinctly drilled down to the bottom line:

“Supreme Court justices are required, if they are receiving money from people—they shouldn't even be receiving money from people. This is why we pay salaries to public servants. And if they want to live that kind of lifestyle, then they can resign from the court. They can retire.

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Before Klepper ended the interview, he brought up the orange elephant in the room. Did Ocasio-Cortez think people “were crying,” as Trump claimed, during his recent arraignment on charges of falsifying business records?

“Maybe George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene were, but not me,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She went on to say that Trump’s indictment is a symbol of the deep inequalities in our justice system, as she watches “people get treated far worse for doing far less” than Trump. “If you hurt one person, you get ten years in prison. But if you hurt millions of people, you get your name on a building.”

You can watch the whole interview below, as well as read a transcript of the interview.

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RELATED STORIES:

Witness calls ‘b-------’ on Trump’s claims people were ‘crying’ at arraignment

The Clarence Thomas scandal keeps growing

Clarence Thomas’ lavish vacation getaways are so corrupt, even Republicans think they're bogus

Justice Clarence Thomas has reported up to $750,000 in income from a company that doesn't exist

Transcript:

Jordan Klepper: I considered going into the medical profession. I thought I could play a handsome doctor on TV. Didn't pan out. While we were on the subject of national embarrassment, I had to ask the congresswoman about Clarence Thomas and his BFF Nazi, swag collector, Harlan Crow. I want to talk a little bit about Clarence Thomas. You've said you would even draft articles of impeachment for the things that he's done. Has there been any quid pro quo? And I said quid pro quo, partially because it took all that effort to learn what quid pro quo meant back in the Ukraine days, and it feels apropos of now. And I don't think I used apropos correctly.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I think that quid pro quo is this bar that doesn't even need to be met. The justice is required by law to disclose something like that. And he hasn't been.

Jordan Klepper: Can you empathize, though? If Beyoncé came through here, wanted to take you on a sweet vacation, wouldn't you say, “Yes.” And let her show you her Nazi memorabilia.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Tell someone about it. But hey, don't! Don't put Bey's name on that.

Jordan Klepper: I'm not saying she has. I'm saying if she invested in Nazi memorabilia to show that she hates Nazi memorabilia, she'd want to show it off.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And that whole thing is just, I mean, bizarre. You also don't keep the linens around …

Jordan Klepper:--All the Nazi linens?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah. Who does that?

Jordan Klepper: Don't you think if you had $1,000,000,000 and you bought everything, you'd probably eventually get to Nazi linens?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: This is the distraction of that whole issue.

Jordan Klepper: You're right. We're just focused on that as opposed to all the money that's going over to Clarence Thomas. Although if you're a billionaire, can't billionaires have friends?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: They can. Supreme Court justices are required, if they are receiving money from people—they shouldn't even be receiving money from people. This is why we pay salaries to public servants. And if they want to live that kind of lifestyle, then they can resign from the court. They can retire.

Jordan Klepper: Now I want to talk about the court. It's looking as if the Supreme Court is going to rule on some of the conflicting rulings around mifepristone. Who do you think is going to write the final decision that takes away these vital rights from women? Is it going to be the guy who cried over beer or was it going to be the buddy with the Nazi memorabilia guy?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You know, my hope is that they—we do not get to that point. But we also have to face the reality that the Supreme Court has chosen to give up huge swaths of their own legitimacy. Chief Justice Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican Party: In them giving up trying to take seriously the legitimacy, the standards, the integrity of the court, they have given up a very large degree of their authority.

Jordan Klepper: The new news in Florida this week is the six-week abortion ban. How do women approach that or fight back against something like that that's happening in Florida?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Of course, there's the standard, like, vote and mobilize. But I'm going to put that aside for a second. We do not have to accept tyranny, and this is a form of tyranny. It is a form of violence. Women will die. People will die because of this decision. And it will be, by and large, the men who signed these laws that are killing the women that will die by them.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And we have a responsibility to help one another, whether that is supporting organizations that mail mifepristone, which has significantly reduced risk, certainly safer than medications like Viagra. But ultimately, we cannot continue to accept people in power who will abuse others for their own gain.

Jordan Klepper: Indictment week was last week. It might also be a month from now, too. We could have a lot of indictment weeks. How do you think New Yorkers treated former President Donald Trump?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I think they treated him like a Florida man. He don't belong to us no mo’, okay? You're not from Queens anymore. He's a citizen of Mar-a-Lago at this point.

Jordan Klepper: And you said New Yorkers treated him as such?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah. Why wouldn't we?

Jordan Klepper: Do you think people were weeping when he was booked, as he claims?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Maybe George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene were, but not me. Take it back to LaGuardia.

Jordan Klepper: Take it back to LaGuardia, which is in your district?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Yes, it's in my district. And so is Rikers. And so we have, I have to go in every single day watching people get treated far worse for doing far less and then, you know, it's like this red carpet that gets rolled out. I mean, if you hurt one person, you get ten years in prison. But if you hurt millions of people, you get your name on a building.

Jordan Klepper: Congresswoman, thanks for talking with us.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Thanks for having me.

On today’s episode, Markos and Kerry are joined by a friend of the podcast, Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg. Rosenberg was one of the few outsiders who, like Daily Kos, kept telling the world that nothing supported the idea of a red wave. Simon and the crew break down his strategy for Democratic candidates to achieve a 55% popular vote in all elections—a number that a few years ago would have seemed unattainable, but now feels within reach.

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Registered foreign agent Pam Bondi and her large lobbying fees attacks Biden for … corruption?

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Former Florida Attorney General and corrupt government official Pam Bondi was one of the speakers on Tuesday night’s fear and terror revisionist history broadcast by the RNC. As with every single person speaking for the Trump administration, the cosmically lazy writing of their personal narrative brings to mind the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Bondi spent her convention time telling viewers that Joe Biden had only enriched his family during his many decades in public office. She said this while the chyrons below her literally promoted the next three speakers for the RNC being Tiffany Trump, Eric Trump, and Melania Trump. The irony of Pam Bondi telling anyone anything about other people being corrupt was not lost on anyone with at least three brain cells to rub together.

More specifically, Pam Bondi’s Fox News’-level expertise on the matter of corruption, according to her, makes her uniquely qualified to point fingers at Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Of course, Pam Bondi’s job for the past year or so has been to act as a lobbyist for foreign business and government interests. She gets paid to bring political power and influence into our government on behalf of people and organizations that are not citizens of our country. That’s what she does. For money. In fact, according to the Foreign Agent Registration form, filled out by the White House, Ms. Bondi has pulled in almost $1.5 million in lobbying fees from these foreign entities over the past year.

Of course, the government interest for whom she works on behalf of, Qatar, was just implicated, along with Russia, by Trump’s own Department of Justice in an enormous corruption scandal involving the 2018 World Cup.

According to the prosecutors, representatives working for Russia and Qatar bribed FIFA executive committee officials to swing votes in the crucial hosting decisions of world football’s governing body.

After coming from her work on behalf of the government of Qatar to help with the sewage plant that is the Trump White House, Bondi was somehow able to leave this past March to restart her work with that government. In an utterly unsurprising turn of events, Donald Trump’s supposed executive order banning former administration officials from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments doesn’t apply to Bondi. Pam is right when she says she’s knows all about corruption.

Here’s a list of all the times Trump’s tried to ‘cancel’ everybody in mythic ‘cancel culture’

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Deep into August, Donald Trump has found a new company/organization/concept to boycott in the name of his, and other conservatives’, mythical battle against “cancel culture.” Goodyear, calling for equity in the workplace, has brought down the MAGA monster. A company that employs more Americans than the entirety of the coal industry is under attack from the famed billionaire faux job creator. Cancel culture is the new bugaboo term for “political correctness,” which is soooooo 1990s. The misleading idea behind cancel culture is that people who are targeted for not believing in liberal social justice policies are constantly under threat of being “canceled.” Being canceled means that you lose all of your First Amendment rights! Not really, but as dozens of very free to speak and make money off of that speaking people will tell you, they are being canceled all the time. In fact, it seems that there is a lot of money to be made telling (mostly) white males that they are being oppressed and canceled and their freedom of speech is under attack.

In fact, if you just continue to talk about it enough, freely and without any chance that the government is going to throw you in jail for saying whatever hypocritical bullshit comes into your mind, you might be able to make lots of money—or at least find a right-wing piggy bank to float your boat. Or you can be the president of the United States and actually represent very real attacks on Americans’ freedom of speech. Below is a rough list of all the companies and people Trump has dismissed, fired, or tried to cancel through boycotts and the like. 

For the purposes of this list we will count all of the “resignations” in our government, like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as dismissals or firings. These are times that Donald Trump canceled the people he had ostensibly hired to help run the government for the American people. The turnover of Trump’s White House staff in the first year of his reign was considerably higher than the previous five most recent presidents, as the Brookings Institute has chronicled.

According to Wikipedia, since the end of May of 2020 “there have been 415 unique names dismissed and/or resigned” from this Trump administration. That includes all those names that seem like a billion years ago now: luminary opportunists like Reince Priebus, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Scaramucci, Omarosa, and James Mattis. That’s just a handful. And most of those people were detestable in the first place. Then there’s the list of people like former Army Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman and climate scientist Joel Clement, who seem to have been trying to work in the government under the mistaken belief that they should be proud, honorable, and have integrity in their work.

But back to Trump trying to use his position of power, both before and after becoming president, to destroy his perceived enemies for … usually demanding justice for humans. 

Trump has called for boycotts against and/or firings of:

Media sites:

CNN

Univision

Fox News

Rolling Stone magazine

HBO

New York Magazine

Vanity Fair magazine Editor Graydon Carter

The Wall Street Journal’s entire editorial board

The Dallas Morning News and seemingly all local Arizona newspapers

Organizations and businesses:

The NFL

Apple

MACY’s

Harley Davidson

Glenfiddich (the Scotch)

AT&T (with twofer that includes CNN again)

Amazon

Goodyear

People:

Bill Maher

Megyn Kelly

Charles Krauthammer

Katy Tur

Karl Rove

Any and all athletes who kneel during the playing of the National Anthem

Debra Messing

Paul Krugman

Chuck Todd

Countries:

The country of Mexico

The country of Scotland

The country of Italy

“Chinese products”

This is not the definitive list. But I think I may have developed carpal tunnel syndrome just typing it. I’m sure you can add more below.

A day after mocking self-distancing, Trump-supporting ‘evangelical’ leader closes Liberty University

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Nothing says Christian hypocrisy like evangelical figurehead Jerry Falwell Jr. His Liberty University has a large online student body but is also home to around 15,000 students on the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus. On Friday, Falwell Jr. was talking to Fox & Friends, where he downplayed the severity of the coronavirus and the need to close Liberty’s campus. His appearance on the show included Falwell’s speculation that all of the “hype” around the coronavirus was some kind of Democratic Party plot against Trump. Well, life comes at you fast, and Falwell is now closing the campus, according to HuffPo:

“We originally believed it was safest to return our students following their spring break instead of having them return following greater exposure opportunities from leaving them in different parts of the country for longer periods. But, the Governor’s recent decision to limit certain gatherings has left us no practical choice because we have so many classes of more than 100 students.” 

Falwell didn’t feel this way over the weekend, when he wasn’t acting very Christ-like toward his online detractors.

Well, not exactly, Jerry. Falwell Jr.’s appearance on Fox & Friends was something to watch, including his explanation of how landowners should have more rights than others, and his allegation that the coronavirus alerts being sent out by everyone except Fox News and Donald Trump were a lot of bunk, saying: “It’s just strange to me how people are over-reacting. The H1N1 virus of 2009 killed 17,000 people. it was the flu, also I think. And there was not the same hype. You just didn’t see it on the news 24/7. It makes you wonder if there’s a political reason for that. It’s a, you know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.” He then spouted a theory that North Korea got “together with China” and created this as a conspiracy to … destroy their own economy?

Well, conspiracy or not, hoax or not, it seems like even Falwell Jr. serves to lose a little of the very money that has been driving the unforgivable Trump and Republican response to this global emergency.

New clip of young Lindsey Graham talking about impeachment confirms his hypocrisy knows no bounds

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Republican hypocrisy knows no bounds. It is hard to write this in new ways every few minutes, but it is the job of any honest person to acknowledge it. With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial playing out in the Senate and a Republican Party now actively colluding to cover up his crimes, old videos of very visible Republicans and Trump allies contradicting their current positions have started springing up.

Sen. Lindsey Graham is one of the more obvious examples because his 180-degree turnabout on executive powers, the abuse of those powers, and the subject of impeachment is arguably the most transparent example of how craven the Republican Party has become in its amoral quest for power. 

Dating back to Jan. 23, 1999, the clip below shows a younger Sen. Graham speaking at a press conference and basking in that camera limelight he so clearly desired and now requires.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: The law allows a different disposition if the offender comes before the court: “yes I’m guilty and I’m sorry and I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”  The sentence is usually different in a case like that versus someone who takes the legal system to the bitter end, and uses every twist and turn, and every gimmick, to try and beat the charges, for lack of a better word. So I’m going to argue that proportionality is something we need to consider, but is something that the defendant usually has to earn. And when you have someone who has flouted the law at every turn, then usually the sanctions are much more severe.

This was Sen. Graham’s attempt to dismiss the fact that the Republican Party’s “high crime” against then president Bill Clinton was that he obstructed justice in order to hide and lie about an extramarital affair he was having. The “proportionality” being brought to his mouth was the fact that none of it seemed very high crime-like, and Graham wanted to angle for the idea that Clinton’s lack of remorse showed an elitism and a belief he was above the law.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has arguably committed high crimes not only every day that he has been president, but every day since he began running for president.

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