New book: During first impeachment, Ted Cruz admitted all 100 senators knew Trump was guilty

Republicans love their phony bugaboos. Whether it’s graduate-level courses being taught in kindergarten, migrant caravans shoving old women out of the way at the A&P to score the last marble rye, or foreign drug cartels handing out fentanyl to trick-or-treaters for Squad-knows-what reason, the GOP is great at distracting you from the hell demons feasting on your viscera all day, every day, like so much Laffy Taffy.

But if there’s a suspected Russian agent in the White House doing things only a Russian agent would do—well, never mind. We’ll just see how it plays out. How about that, patriots?

In yet another tardy tell-all on the bag of moldering mystery dicks that was the Trump administration—this one titled Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump—POLITICO’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian detail the mental gymnastics congressional Republicans went through during Trump’s first impeachment, all in order to make him seem vaguely not-guilty. Yet according to no less an authority on evil than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, every single Republican senator actually thought Trump was corrupt to the core. (Or to whatever passes as a Trump “core.” Truth is, all you’re likely to find in there is nougat. Or maybe an old, glitchy CPU from a Furby.)

If you think back to 2,137 hair-on-fire Donald Trump scandals ago, you’ll recall that Trump withheld vital military aid to Ukraine during a shooting war in order to blackmail its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden—who, if you’ll recall from 1,311 hair-on-fire Trump scandals ago, forced Trump to either go on a feral crusade against our democracy or retreat inside his own neck wattle in abject shame. (As you may recall, Trump opted for the former.)

The question at the time was whether Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo to force favors from his Ukrainian counterpart. It was obvious he had, of course, but Republicans weren’t going to give up on their fantasies that easily. After all, they had a country to ruin, and very little time in which to ruin it.

RELATED: Once again, New York Times reporters betray the public interest for the sake of a book deal

According to Bade and Demirjian, Republicans were so unimpressed with Trump’s lawyers—who included legendary law professor and Jeff Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz, who’d argued that Trump could do anything he wanted if he thought it would get him elected—they felt the need, as putative “jurors,” to help out Trump’s defense team.

HuffPost:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.

“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.

In fact, after that fumble, Graham reportedly opined, “We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” as he walked into the GOP cloakroom.

According to the book, even as Republican senators balked at publicly discussing the hearings, telling the media that they needed to remain neutral as “jurors,” Trump’s incompetent legal team forced them to act in private. So then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell twisted arms, ultimately convincing Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander to vote against hearing further witnesses. Particularly at issue was likely testimony from former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who’d claimed in a book of his own that Trump had told him his scheme to withhold military aid from Ukraine was definitely part of a quid pro quo.

So why the reluctance to convict a guy whom they all knew was guilty? Because Republicans weren’t quite done handing out goodies to wealthy donors, stealing Supreme Court seats, or generally terrorizing anyone with a working womb.

“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell reportedly told his charges. “It has always been about Nov. 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

GOP Senate leaders weren’t just involved in fixing the vote, of course. They were also forced to coach the Trump team in the fine art of not looking like overt criminals. 

RELATED: Maggie Haberman: Just another person 'willing to let democracy die on the altar of a book deal'

The book recounts an episode in which McConnell’s top legal counsel, Andrew Ferguson, wrote out an answer to a question Republicans wanted to ask the Trump team during the trial. It was meant to establish a B.S. line of argument that Bolton’s testimony would be moot.

The group gathered around a laptop to weigh in as Ferguson typed. “Assuming for argument’s sake that John Bolton were to testify in the light most favorable to the allegations…isn’t it true that the allegations still would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense? They agreed to ask. “And that therefore…his testimony would add nothing to this case?”

But the senators were worried. Trump’s lawyers had already proven themselves unreliable, even when lobbed the easiest softball questions. “Is Trump’s team going to answer this the right way?” Graham asked.

“I will go down there and tell them to answer it the right way,” Ferguson vowed.

Way to go, “jury”! You saved this monster from himself! Good thing he didn’t go on to incite any insurrections or steal any top secret nuclear documents or anything. Crisis averted! The republic is saved!

When the history of this era is written, Cruz’s quote needs to be italicized, underlined and, ideally, tattooed on every congressional Republican’s forehead. Because it’s the only quote you need to understand the modern GOP.

In fact, their motto might as well be “Yes, we know better—but fuck you anyway, America!” It would be the first honest sentence we’ve heard out of them in years. We’re so close to Nov. 8, and our chance to expand our razor-thin Senate majority. Can you help us keep McConnell, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk in the minority with a donation of just $3 or more to our Senate slate?

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

We have to save the world from Kevin McCarthy. No, really

Since Jan. 20, 2021, House Republicans have been plotting what they would do after the 2022 midterms, with historical precedent favoring them to retake the House. Their fever dreams are full of impeaching President Joe Biden and anyone and everyone in the cabinet for anything or everything, bogus investigations, and even defunding the FBI.

That’s all ridiculous and time-consuming and really detrimental to the nation, because while they’re doing all that, stuff that needs to be done is being ignored. But a few things they could do—and are already plotting—are downright dangerous. Like potentially refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Biden unilaterally surrenders to them.

That’s the thing that’s got “GOP leaders, congressional aides and business groups” in a lather, according to Axios, fearing the “nightmare scenario” of a Speaker Kevin McCarthy who has absolutely no control over his caucus of conspiracy theorists. One former GOP House member told Axios that former Republican Speaker John Boehner “was convinced of the necessity [of raising the debt limit] and was willing to twist arms. I just don’t know about a Speaker McCarthy.”

Everything is too important to let Kevin McCarthy get anywhere near making decisions about. Help us keep the House out of his hands, to save the world.

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Part of the problem is that McCarthy is weak; he’s just not up to standing against the dangerous extremists in the GOP caucus. The other problem is that he’s pretty damned dim. It is entirely possible that McCarthy has absolutely no grasp of how things like global financial systems work, and what happens when the biggest player steps out and refuses to pay its debts. Maybe he thinks the catastrophic outcomes have been overstated.

Maybe he thinks it’s just Democratic propaganda, even when it’s explained in very simple, short words. Here’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen spelling it out when Republicans were making threats in November 2021:

“In a matter of days, millions of Americans could be strapped for cash. We could see indefinite delays in critical payments. Nearly 50 million seniors could stop receiving Social Security checks for a time. Troops could go unpaid. Millions of families who rely on the monthly child tax credit could see delays. America, in short, would default on its obligations.”

As of now, the next time we bump up against that ceiling looks to be about a year from now, in the fall of 2023. The man who decided back in 2011 that taking the debt ceiling hostage was a good idea is playing coy now, having unleashed that monster on the world. Asked about it by Axios, whether it “will indeed be among the first orders of business he’d raise with a Speaker McCarthy, McConnell smirked.”

The thing about McConnell, though, even then, was that it’s a hostage you can take, one “that’s worth ransoming,” but not one to actually shoot. That’s a distinction that the new order of Republicans, in the thrall of Trump, won’t necessarily make. Or understand. Or care about. But McConnell unleashed this on the nation, and here we are. Even though team McConnell is frantically trying to revise the history.

Rohit Kumar, McConnell’s former deputy chief of staff during the 2011 debt limit fight and now PwC’s national tax services co-leader, countered: “Thinking that you can credibly threaten the full faith and credit of the federal government in exchange for some collateral demand is just wish casting.”

Collateral damage was precisely what McConnell was going for, up to a point. Now that he’s unleashed this thing, he doesn’t have the power to rein it back in. He can talk to McCarthy all he wants about not actually shooting the hostage, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take. Particularly when McConnell’s on the losing side of the GOP civil war, with you-know-who poised to be running for the White House again and agitating against him.

All of which means Democrats have to hold the House. For all sorts of very good reasons, Democrats need to keep the House and Senate both.

It sucks that we have to be the ones to save Kevin McCarthy and the world from Kevin McCarthy, but that’s the way it is.

We have an even shot at keeping our House majority, but only if enough Democrats turn out to vote. Click to start writing Postcards to Democratic-leaning voters in targeted House districts today.

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This week on The Downballot we check in on Pennsylvania, where Republican Doug Mastriano has called for "40 days of fasting and prayer" to save his ailing campaign for governor; dig into ad spending numbers that show Democrats airing far more spots because they aren't relying on super PACs; and recap the dispiriting results of Italy's general election, which saw the far-right win for the first time since Mussolini.

‘Thanks for stopping by’: Biden fires back after Rick Scott flaunts toxic ‘Plan to Rescue America’

Our Illustrious Overlord Dark Brandon of House Biden—Vanquisher of Jabronis, Doter of Grandchildren, and Dread Scourge of Dandelions—has been a right saucy rogue lately.

Whereas in the past he’s appeared content to seek common ground with uncommonly gross Republicans, something has lit a fire under Joe Biden lately, and he’s come out swinging. And sometimes—even when he’s not speaking—you can detect a rakish glint in his eye.

The latest? Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Medicare fraudster extraordinaire, is sarcastically urging President Biden to spread the word about his 12-point “Rescue America Plan”—and Uncle Joe is sarcastically (and wisely) doing just that.

RELATED: Going into the midterms, Democrats can be seriously grateful that Rick Scott is on the other side

 Shot:

.@JoeBiden said he wished he had enough copies of my Rescue America plan, so I stopped by the White House today to make sure he did. Thanks for spreading the word, Joe! Check it out at: https://t.co/7ZLQG7dZy3 pic.twitter.com/XcoHKktDNm

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) September 13, 2022

Chaser:

Couldn’t agree more, Rick. And if anyone else wants to read your plan to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, they should go to https://t.co/xDudwYX85v. Thanks for stopping by. https://t.co/9YXhMisGf5

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 14, 2022

Wait, why would both these guys—one who loves America and one who loves stealing Medicare funds from America—want you to read a Republican plan to “rescue” America? Well, because the plan is arboreal ape shit. And not the top-shelf variety.

And while the plan isn’t nearly as noxious as it used to be—when pretty much everyone from across the political spectrum panned it—it’s still pretty bad.

RELATED: Rick Scott made the mistake of telling voters what Republicans stand for. It's a polling disaster

The major revision Sen. Scott made to his plan involved removing a policy plank insisting that everyone—including people who make little to no money—should be forced to pay income tax. (Guess that’s more important than requiring that all corporations pay a little something in taxes, huh?)

But the plan is still problematic, particularly if voters figure out that it’s an existential threat to Social Security and Medicare, which Sen. Scott probably sees as a corrupt boondoggle because it’s so comically easy to defraud.

Of course, Moscow Mitch McConnell, who understands better than most how to gaslight the plebes, did not like Scott’s plan one bit. Scott rolled it out in February, and fled a GOP press conference on March 1, moments before McConnell addressed what are arguably its two most worrying proposals: 

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor,” McConnell said.

[...]

McConnell continued: “Let me tell you what will not be on our agenda. We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate majority agenda.”

RELATED: Rick Scott kicks off final push to midterms by escalating his war with Mitch McConnell

Yet six months later, the part about sunsetting the vital programs millions of seniors and others depend on to keep eating and breathing? That’s still in there.

As Democratic political analyst and columnist Ed Kilgore noted in in New York magazine:

In any event, Scott was so worried about the stink of the tax-hike idea that his revised plan has 12 points rather than 11; the new one loudly advertises hatred of all taxes and includes the very dumb idea of making it even harder than it already is to avoid an economy-crushing debt default. But what interests me is the fact that he did not take the time to get rid of some of the other howlers in the original plan while he was at it. The five-year sunset on all federal laws that McConnell considered as bad as the minimum tax is still there. So is the truly stupid idea of a 12-year “term limit” on all federal nonmilitary employment, which would impose costs and inefficiencies nearly as severe as Scott’s other proposal to force the relocations of federal agencies outside Washington.

Also, while Lindsey Graham and friends are doing their best to keep the toxic (for Republicans) abortion issue front and center, vaporizing long-held reproductive rights remains an integral part of Scott’s plan:

  • Abortion kills human children. To deny that is to deny science.
  • Whether you believe in God or not, as a civilized people who accept science, we must protect babies, born and unborn, from all acts of violence.
  • All government policies will favor having more babies adopted, not aborted.

This reminds me of the good old days during Trump’s first impeachment, when Neck-Wattle Nero kept telling his followers to read the transcript, and we were all, “Yes, by all means, read the transcript! It shows Trump blackmailing a foreign head of state in order to manufacture dirt on a political opponent!”

Meanwhile, even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now getting in on the act, effusively thanking Republicans for punching themselves in their own arrogant faces. 

Schumer: What are Democrats doing? Talking about new jobs.. What are the MAGA Republicans doing? A nationwide abortion ban. pic.twitter.com/Johu6hyHn1

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 13, 2022

(Partial) transcript!

SCHUMER: “… Americans from every walk of life are seeing the contrast: What are Democrats doing? Talking about new jobs, cheaper costs. What are the MAGA Republicans doing? A nationwide abortion ban.

“That’s the contrast between the two parties, plain and simple. … Republicans are twisting themselves in a pretzel trying to explain their position on abortion. Let me be clear: Again, what Sen. Graham is introducing is a MAGA Republican nationwide abortion ban. If it walks like a nationwide abortion ban and talks like a nationwide abortion ban, it is a nationwide abortion ban.

“So, that’s the contrast. The split screen is unmistakable for all Americans to see for themselves. We’re focused on job creating, inflation fighting. They’re focused on an extreme agenda that hurts women.”

Sen Schumer is right. There are clear and striking differences between the two parties right now, and Democrats seem keen to highlight them. For some reason, Republicans do, too. And that may finally be their downfall. 

Donate now to help expand Democrats’ Senate majority in November!

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Intelligence agencies fear that Trump has been leaking information on U.S. spies overseas

In what may be the most shocking story to emerge from the entire Mar-a-Lago document scandal, The New York Times is reporting that officials at intelligence agencies fear that among the classified information Donald Trump stole was details on U.S. assets embedded in foreign countries. The names, locations, and even the existence of such assets is among the most guarded secrets of the nation. But something mysterious has been happening over the last few years, with an unusual number of foreign sources being killed or arrested.

In the past, officials have worried that documents leaked by outlets like WikiLeaks might, either purposely or intentionally, reveal the identity of U.S. sources, putting their lives at risk. But now, intelligence agencies have a greater concern: A man who has a horde of stolen documents, connections to numerous hostile governments, and a frequently expressed disdain for both sources and the intelligence community. Put it all together, and you get one of the most amazing front pages in recent years.

New York Times, Saturday Late Edition, Aug. 27, 2022
Saturday, Aug 27, 2022 · 6:11:20 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Known Timeline: 1. 7/31/2019: Trump spoke with Putin (NYT) 2. 8/3/2019: Trump issued a request for a list of top US spies (The Daily Beast) 3. 10/5/2021: "CIA Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants". (NYT) 4. 8/26/2022: Documents at MAL Could Compromise Human Intel (NYT) 1/5 pic.twitter.com/rqNqRZUQL2

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) August 27, 2022

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In the days leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one fact stood out: The United States had uncannily accurate information about Russia’s plans. It was crystal clear that, not only did the U.S. have a fleet of high resolution satellites and other resources observing Russian movements on the ground, they also had sources inside the Kremlin that were giving the White House a direct pipeline into Vladimir Putin’s every thought.

It’s hard to put a value on that kind of intelligence. In this one case, it’s even possible that Ukraine would not have survived, had it not received early, accurate warnings of both Russian troop build-ups and Putin’s intentions. Thanks to U.S. intelligence sources.

It can take years to establish a reliable source. It can take moments for that point of light to go dark.

Even before he took up residence in the White House, Trump frequently expressed disdain for the intelligence services. Just as he bragged that he was “smarter than all the generals” and declared that his natural instincts allowed him to declare the climate crisis a fraud, Trump has celebrated his “gut” over the combined efforts of agents and analysts. Stories of Trump’s refusal to engage with intelligence briefings have been all too common over the last five years. Trump sneered that his own intelligence chiefs were “naïve” in their assessments of international events, mocked their findings, and insisted they should “go back to school.”

Even more than intelligence agencies, Trump hates whistleblowers. At every instance, he had ridiculed the idea of an anonymous source, insisted that whistleblowers be revealed, then attacked and endangered them once they were known. In his first impeachment, Trump constantly attacked the whistleblower who revealed his attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He didn’t just ridicule the whistleblower continuously, but insisted that the whistleblower testify in public—Republicans in Congress took up that call.

Most tellingly, when Trump learned an alleged name for the whistleblower, he tweeted it over and over.

Pair Trump’s attitude toward the intelligence services, whistleblowers, and witnesses of all kinds, with his incredible disdain for protecting classified information, and it’s a recipe for utter catastrophe. The revelation of a “NOC list,” giving away dozens of undercover operatives in vital roles, may be the subject of adventure fiction, but it seems like an all-too-real possibility for Trump.

And if the nation needed another reminder of just how lax Trump’s actual security at Mar-a-Lago really is, there was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story this week in which a 33-year-old Russian-speaking Ukrainian immigrant convinced Trump that she was actually an heiress of the Rothschild banking family. 

In addition to the FBI, law enforcement agents in Canada have confirmed that she has been the subject of a major crimes unit investigation in Quebec since February.

But there she was at Mar-a-Lago, playing golf with Trump and Lindsay Graham. She was there. So  were all those documents suspected to hold key information about U.S. sources in some of the most sensitive areas of the world. 

Even the hint that one of these sources might have been revealed can result in an immediate, emergency exfiltration to bring them to safety in the U.S. That means that it doesn’t even take the death or arrest of a U.S. source to cripple intelligence gathering. All it takes is concern that a source might have been compromised.

Donald Trump has provided plenty of cause for concern.

GOP disarray: Trump blasts Mitch, Bowers calls out GOP ‘fascism,’ Colorado senator switches to Dems

While Joe Biden and fellow Democrats are getting things done, the GOP is increasingly in disarray as it embraces the MAGAverse and the cult of Trump. In fact, so much is going on that it might be time for periodic roundups of the internal fissures within the GOP.

Democrats still face an uphill battle in the November midterms, but the tide is turning in our favor. So let’s start with the dust-up between Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Last week, McConnell conceded that the House has a better chance of flipping than the Senate. During a stop in Kentucky, McConnell told reporters:

“I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate,” McConnell said. “Senate races are just different — they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” he added, without mentioning any names.

But it was clear that he was referring to Trump-backed candidates in key swing states who are all trailing their Democratic opponents in recent polls—Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Blake Masters in Arizona. McConnell is backing pro-impeachment incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, while Trump is supporting her 2020 election denier rival, Kelly Tshibaka, in Alaska’s Senate race.  

That didn’t sit well with the master of the MAGAverse. Over the weekend, Trump posted this on his Truth Social platform:

Why do Republican Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate. This is such an affront to honor and to leadership. He should spend more time (and money!) helping them get elected, and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!

Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife, served as secretary of Transportation during Trump’s four-year term, but resigned shortly after the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. 

Immediately after the insurrection, McConnell took to the Senate floor to say that Tump is “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6. However, he spinelessly voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment trial a few weeks later.

As for Chao, whose family emigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan when she was a child, there have been questions raised as to whether she aided her father’s shipping company through her government positions. The U.S. Transportation Department's Inspector General's office investigated Chao for potential violations of ethics rules and misuse of her position, and published its findings in March. Chao's father, James S.C. Chao, founded a shipping company, now called the Foremost Group, which her sister Angela now heads. The firm does significant business in China.

McConnell’s criticism of Trump was relatively mild compared with what Arizona’s ousted House Speaker Rusty Bowers had to say about Trump and his party in an extraordinary interview with The Guardian. Bowers, a staunch conservative, testified in a public hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection about the pressure he faced to overturn Arizona’s presidential election result that gave Joe Biden a narrow win.

Earlier this month, Trump got his revenge when Bowers lost a Republican primary race to challenger David Farnsworth, who claimed that the 2020 election had been satanically snatched from Trump by the “devil himself.”

Bowers detailed to The Guardian how Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman pressured him to have the state legislature use an arcane Arizona law to switch the election outcome to Trump. He resisted the bullying. ”The thought that if you don’t do what we like, then we will just get rid of you and march on and do it ourselves—that to me is fascism,” Bowers said.

With the primary loss behind him, Bowers, who is a Mormon, felt unhindered in letting loose on Trump and the GOP. “The constitution is hanging by a thread,” he told The Guardian. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”

Bowers said he remains optimistic that the GOP will one day find its way back on to the rails, but said that things are likely to get much worse before they get better. He said the Arizona GOP seems to be lost at the moment. “They’ve invented a new way. It’s a party that doesn’t have any thought. It’s all emotional, it’s all revenge. It’s all anger. That’s all it is,” Bowers said.

And in Colorado, one GOP state senator went even further when he announced Monday that he couldn’t remain a Republican any longer and was defecting to the Democrats. State Sen. Kevin Priola wrote in a two-page letter that there is “too much at stake right now for Republicans to be in charge.” He added: “Simply put, we need Democrats in charge.”

Priola cited two main reasons for switching parties: Many Republicans peddling false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the party’s efforts to block legislation that would fight climate change even as Coloradans endure worsening wildfires and drought.

Priola has served in the Colorado legislature as a Republican since 2009, first as a representative and then, starting in 2017, as a senator. Term limits bar him from seeking reelection in 2024. His defection increases the Democratic state Senate majority ahead of the November elections.

“I haven’t changed much in 30 years; but my party has,” Priola wrote. “Coloradans cannot afford for their leaders to give credence to election conspiracies and climate denialism,” he wrote, adding: “Our planet and our democracy depend on it.”

Rudy says Trump didn’t actually steal top secret docs, he was simply ‘preserving’ them

So if you or I had worked for the government and, upon leaving, squirreled away a few top secret nuclear documents in a Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox that we kept under a basement foosball table, we’d be sitting in brightly lit rooms asking if we could please get some unscented udder cream for our serially brutalized nipples. It’s unlikely we’d be able to trot out numerous contradictory excuses for our crimes and have roughly a third of the nation believe them. But Donald Trump is special.

And since his followers are 100% convinced he’s the bestest prezident since George Jefferson, anything he does must be holy, pure, and in the interest of all Americans. And when you have a stable of reliable sycophants like Tickle Me Nosferatu (the bullshit artist formerly known as Rudy Giuliani) at your beck and call, “creative” (read: terrible) rationalizations will flow like black-tar brain effluent down the withering cheeks of a weary nation.

So, yeah—this is the kind of excuse you come up with when you’re completely out of excuses:

Rudy Giuliani tells Newsmax that Trump was just trying to preserve documents by putting them in a safe place. pic.twitter.com/tDJag4loW4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2022

GIULIANI: “And now they want to make him responsible for having taken classified documents and preserved them. Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents, it’s about destroying them, or hiding them, or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.”

Yup, securing top secret nuclear documents in restricted, heavily guarded government facilities is exactly the same as leaving them in the hands of a guy well known for blurting out highly classified secrets in front of the Russian foreign minister, making calls on an unsecured cell phone, and tweeting sensitive satellite photos against the advice of every member of the intelligence community. Just like most of us prefer to store our life savings in a Folgers can instead of depositing it in a bank. Makes total sense.

Okay, so clearly, we’re not on the same page as Rudy. For one thing, we don’t hang out with pages. They’re minors, Rudy, and the musky melange of English Leather and Sanka breath is not the aphrodisiac you think it is. But—surprise!—what Rudy is blabbering here is simply not what the Espionage Act says. 

As Vox explained in the wake of this kerfuffle, “The Espionage Act is actually a series of statutes under 18 U.S. Code Chapter 37 related to the collection, retention, or dissemination of national defense or classified information. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant referred to Section 793—‘Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,’ which doesn’t just cover ‘spying’ in the sense that many think of when they hear the term. Section 793 specifically states that people legally granted access to national defense documents—people like the former president—are subject to punishment should they improperly retain that information.”

Trump “retained” this information and refused to give it back, and in June, his lawyers told the government that he no longer held any classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—even though he clearly did

So how many excuses does this make now? At first, Trump wanted us to believe the FBI planted these documents. Then he claimed he’d declassified them—which only makes sense if he knew which documents the FBI had decided to plant. For a hot minute, Trump also tried to claim some of the documents fell under attorney-client privilege, and like the feckless fucknut he is, he demanded their return

Then there was the “standing order” excuse, wherein Trump tried to claim that anything he took home with him automatically alchemized from a closely held government secret into a public domain document every American has a right to see—unlike, say, the former pr*sident’s tax returns.

CNN made short work of that one:

And now—according to Rudy—it’s all good since Trump didn’t destroy the documents or, as far as we know, give them to Russia or Saudi Arabia. Though I assume if we find out he did give them to Saudi Arabia, they’ll move the goalposts again—most likely next to a Krispy Kreme for our ex-POTUS’ convenience.

Of course, if all of this weren’t so horrifying, it would be endlessly amusing. But this is the safety and security of our planet we’re talking about now.

We are not amused.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE

John Eastman worried he wasn’t going to get paid for his work instigating a seditious coup

The New York Times has another mini-scoop from Trumpland, but the headline news is probably less interesting (and much less funny) than the details. The headline is that coup architect John Eastman, the lawyer who attached himself to an idea that Vice President Mike Pence could simply throw out electors on his personal say-so, was still at it even on Biden's inauguration day two weeks later.

That’s when Eastman sent an email to Trump's personal conspiracy promoter Rudy Giuliani proposing that the Trump team responsible for that violent coup turn their focus to challenging the Georgia runoff elections that had resulted in two new Democratic senators on Jan. 5.

Was it because Eastman had some evidence of supposed "fraud," you might ask? Not even close. Eastman wrote that "a lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud," and after the Trump team got their asses handed to them in every courtroom in the land when they presented their hoaxes about supposed fraud in the presidential election, challenging the Georgia results would give them a new opportunity to hunt for "fraud" in the Senate races.

"If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5," wrote coup plotter Eastman, "it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating [Golfboy's] claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial."

Yet another fishing expedition, then. There was no non-ridiculous evidence that there was anything wrong with the Jan. 5 elections in Georgia, but Eastman and team had just inspired a violent coup, Eastman himself thought he might need to be pardoned for doing it, and since they had come up completely dry on every "fraud" claim in the November elections, this was a last-ditch attempt to hunt for fraud in a different election, which by the mathematical properties of transience would prove they were right all along or, you know, whatever.

But it's that "bulwark against Senate impeachment trial" bit that leads us to the more important motive for Eastman's email to Rudy Giuliani. The guy was still trying to get paid.

You know, for the coup.

The Times reports that the Eastman email also "asked for Mr. Giuliani's help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day," and that among the invoiced charges was a $10,000-per-day fee for Eastman's work for Trump during eight days in January. Yes, John Eastman billed for each of the days he attempted to goad the vice president and his staff into supporting a seditious act to nullify the U.S. election. It was supposed to cost the Trump campaign $10,000 per day, and even after people died at the U.S. Capitol because an armed and violent crowd actually believed the erase-the-election bullshit Eastman was selling, Eastman was still trying to collect his fee for proposing it.

But Eastman wasn't done yet. He was also trying to get the Trump campaign to pay him similarly steep fees for a barely-related Georgia fishing expedition, and the way Eastman was attempting to sell the new project is to claim that it would be a "bulwark" against Trump's upcoming (second) impeachment trial. Not only was he billing for instigating violence at the Capitol, but he was also still pushing his services as a guy who could help Trump evade responsibility for the violence—and with the exact same invisible "fraud" that caused all of it the first time around!

That is extremely f--king galling, or would be if anyone still thought anyone within a mile of Donald Trump still had a human soul. This guy wanted to get paid for a seditious conspiracy. Here's a guy whose legal advice was so spectacularly terrible that it lead to multiple people's deaths, and he's getting anxious that maybe he's not going to be getting his invoices paid.

He wasn't attempting to overthrow the United States government and install Donald Trump as at least a temporary god-king out of patriotism, you say? He expected to be paid for instigating a violent coup? Oh, and also a pardon, pretty please?

Dude.

The Times indicates that their own sources say Eastman never did get paid, and that John Eastman was looking to Rudy Giuliani, of all people, to pry money out of Trump shows a naivete that seems out of place for the architect of a failed fascist coup. Giuliani, who was charging Trump $20,000 for his own hair-dye melting performances, wasn't any likelier to get paid than Eastman was.

As for the implications of Eastman sending a bill for his attempts to coerce the vice president and his staff into staging a coup, there are probably lots, and I couldn't tell you what they are because, gotta be honest with you here, at the moment I don't even care. Eastman has long claimed he was working as Trump's lawyer, and that's why he doesn't have to testify about anything, But apparently he thought he was working as the Trump campaign's lawyer, not Trump's, and if Eastman ever succeeded in squeezing a dime or two out of the campaign then that would be another direct link between Trump's political team and the plotted coup attempt. The Department of Justice already has Eastman's phone communications, however, so we know whatever thin veneer of "I was just the lawyer" Eastman might be insisting on, it's not working.

For the moment, though, let's just revel in the sheer gall of this blazingly arrogant, irredeemably evil national seditionist being antsy about whether the violent coup's failure means he might not get paid. Just an A+ effort at villainy, Claremont Institute guy. Couldn't do it any better without a costume.

RELATED STORIES:

The net is tightening around John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark as DOJ closes in on heart of Jan. 6 plot

Garland says the DOJ will go after 'everyone, anyone' as new warrant goes out to John Eastman

Trump's direct role in attempted overturn under increasing scrutiny by DOJ prosecutors, sources say

New emails expose Trump advisers planning 'surprise' at Jan. 6 count

For DOJ to complete investigation into Jan. 6, it needs to destroy Trump’s privilege claims

As Kerry Eleveld reported last Friday, Steve Bannon has been found guilty on two charges of contempt of Congress and can now expect to spend some time in federal prison for his refusal to cooperate with the House select committee on Jan. 6. However, Bannon is far from the only member of Donald Trump’s White House team who has failed to show up before the committee or provide requested documents. Most of those who have so far refused are likely to avoid paying any price for hiding information behind claims of “executive privilege.”

The Department of Justice may not be all that anxious to take up these contempt cases in the name of a House committee, but that doesn’t mean the department doesn’t want those Trump officials to testify. Those same figures are critical to the Department of Justice’s own investigation into the conspiracy behind events on Jan. 6, 2021. 

To clear the way for testimony from everyone up to and including Trump, the Department of Justice first has to clear the privilege issue off the board. Trump has made extensive use of the privilege card ever since entering the White House, and that certainly didn’t stop when he left. So far, the Justice Department has been careful to navigate around privilege issues in its interviews with former members of Team Trump, but for the investigation to get serious, that has to end.

As CNN reports, the Department of Justice is “confronting the privilege issue with care.” Attorney General Merrick Garland made a very welcome statement last week in which he finally made it clear that no one, including Trump, was clear of potential charges related to the attempted coup. But so far the department doesn’t seem to have pressed witnesses to provide what they consider to be privileged information, which in this case appears to be any direct communication with Trump. 

This is not how executive privilege is supposed to work. In past cases, claims of privilege have required just that: a claim from the White House asserting privilege over specific written or spoken communications. But throughout his time in Washington, Trump made extensive and expansive claims of privilege, not only refusing to cooperate in matters related to his two impeachments, but instructing officials to refuse to release even routine information. In almost all cases, White House officials refused to say that Trump was officially asserting privilege, and Trump refused to comment. There was just a broad claim of undefined privilege, which in some cases was extended to junior officials who never came close to talking with Trump. 

Such blanket claims of privilege leave the Department of Justice facing a dilemma when it comes to investigating the events of Jan. 6 and the other ways in which Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

There’s no doubt now that the Department of Justice is deep into an investigation of actions by many members of the White House, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, attorney John Eastman, and attorney Rudy Giuliani. In recent days, a federal grand jury has heard testimony from false electors who were encouraged to take part in Trump’s scheme, as well as Marc Short and Greg Jacob who were, respectively, chief of staff and lead counsel to Mike Pence. 

Trump’s efforts to extend privilege to new levels have already met with some defeats in court, most notably when he was forced to hand over a large tranche of documents that he had sought to protect at Mar-a-Lago and was required to release other documents held by the National Archives. But the broader case of exactly how much right Trump has to protect his conversations after he has left office remains unsettled law. 

There are good reasons to believe that the answer to how much privilege Trump now enjoys is none, and that practically every conversation that Trump had regarding Jan. 6, even those with his personal attorneys, would fail any reasonable test of privilege because these statements were directly related to a conspiracy to commit a serious crime. That would be completely in line with how courts ruled during Ken Starr’s prolonged investigation into the Clinton White House. 

But if the Department of Justice plans to cut through Trump’s privilege claims, it had better get cracking. A Department of Justice inquiry into a member of Clinton’s Cabinet took two years to obtain a final ruling. 

History 101: Parallels between Putin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, plus U.S. reaction then and now

Battlefield developments regarding the brutal, unprovoked, imperialistic Russian invasion of Ukraine appear multiple times on this site’s front page every day—with good reason. For starters, Moscow has the world’s second largest military, and more nuclear weapons than any other country. Truly understanding the conflict means looking beyond what’s happened since hostilities began and examining history.

For example, although many of us have a vague sense that Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler share some similarities as aggressive warmongers, it’s important to provide substance to supplement that vague sense—and to connect the history to the present both in terms of events in Europe and the reaction of our own country to the two dictators’ bloodthirsty acts.

The First World War officially ended at the stroke of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—an appalling six hours after the countries involved had signed the armistice agreement. How many soldiers died in combat during those final six hours? Almost three thousand, and the last one was an American.

The conflict decisively altered the map of Central and Eastern Europe.

Before:

After:

Four states that had ruled over large swathes of territory were defeated, and their dynasties overthrown: the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires. The Ottoman Empire dissolved, and the Turkish Republic that emerged in its place was limited to the Turkish heartland of Anatolia and, in Europe, a tiny bit of land surrounding Istanbul (they had lost much of their territory in Europe in the Balkan Wars that immediately preceded WWI).

The war led to fundamental change in Russia. The country became a democracy for a few months in 1917, and then, thanks to the Bolsheviks, transformed into the Soviet Union near the end of that year. By losing the war, it lost control over Finland, as well as the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which all became independent, while the territory known now as Moldova went from being Russian to Romanian. However, during the Second World War, the USSR reacquired all of these, except Finland—of which it did get a small slice—and added a large block of eastern Poland as well.

Austria-Hungary, the patrimony of the Habsburg dynasty, split apart completely. Most importantly for our purposes, its dissolution left millions who identified as ethnic Germans as either minorities in newly created states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, or in the rump-Austrian Republic. The Treaty of Versailles barred the newly created Austria from joining their territory to that of Germany, a step—known in German as Anschluss—that its leaders and most citizens wanted to take, rather than remain an independent state.

As for Germany, the Hohenzollern family abdicated the throne and democracy became its form of government. Elected leaders drew up a new constitution in the city of Weimar, which gave its name to the era running from the end of the war until Hitler’s takeover in 1933. The Versailles Treaty mandated that Germany hand over Alsace-Lorraine to France, a small piece of land to Belgium, a province to Denmark, and, in the East, one city (Memel) to Lithuania, as well as a large chunk of territory to Poland—which was reconstituted 123 years after having been forcibly partitioned by neighboring states. Large numbers of people who identified as Germans were now citizens of the new Poland, living in what became known as the “Polish Corridor.”

Germany had been the predominant military power on the European continent since its unification in 1871—accomplished in the wake of its crushing defeat of France, which had held that title for over two centuries. The country had a long tradition of militarism, and most Germans held martial values in high regard. They were proud of the nation’s military strength and battlefield victories. On the whole, Germany felt humiliated and was left wanting revenge after their defeat in WWI. Some Germans, in particular on the right, wanted nothing more than to undo the war’s outcome.

These revisionist desires were a major factor fueling Hitler's ability to win support—he was going to make Germany great again—and, ultimately, provided the basis for his aggressive foreign policy in the 1930s. As noted on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website:

Revision of the Versailles Treaty represented one of the platforms that gave radical right wing parties in Germany, including Hitler's Nazi Party, such appeal to mainstream voters in the 1920s and early 1930s. Promises to rearm, to reclaim German territory, particularly in the East, and to regain prominence again among European and world powers after a humiliating defeat, stoked ultranationalist sentiment and helped average Germans to overlook the more radical tenets of Nazi ideology.

During the Weimar era, Germany’s relations with its neighbors were not exactly placid, but at least war was avoided. After 1923, when the conflict over reparations payments was resolved, Germany had a “productive working relationship” with the two large West European democracies, Britain and France, and officially accepted the territorial losses along its western borders. German relations with its eastern neighbors were less settled, to be sure. However, In 1928, Germany signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which officially outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy.”

Five years later, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Through the violence and deceit he employed in the initial weeks of his rule, he became absolute dictator—the Fuehrer. Hitler’s military and foreign policy contains strong parallels to what we are seeing from Putin’s Russia today.

not carbon copies

The two are not carbon copies, to be sure. Nazi Germany’s commitment to murderous antisemitism and genocide—its meticulously developed and executed plan to kill every Jew, along with Roma and other groups deemed racially or otherwise inferior—is not something we are seeing from present-day Russia, although their war crimes against Ukrainian civilians are certainly despicable. Nevertheless, virtually from the time Hitler took power, he began his quest to reverse the results of WWI and alter his country's borders, a quest that brought Europe into war.

One of Hitler’s guiding principles was that ethnic Germans—those with, in his terms, German blood—needed to be “regathered" into the German state after being left outside it. The most egregious injustice, in the eyes of the Nazis, were those people whose territories were part of non-German states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, where they were being supposedly "mistreated."

Among his earliest steps, in 1936 Hitler took full control of the Rhineland—the demilitarized zone west of the Rhine River, on the border with France. Then, in 1938 he sent German troops into Austria and achieved the long-sought Anschluss. Later that year, he used the threat of force to acquire the Sudetenland—a part of western Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany, where German-speakers lived—although he promised that he’d then leave the rest of the country alone. In March 1939, he broke that promise. German forces marched in and took the rest of the Czech part of the country, and set up a Nazi-puppet regime in the Slovak half.

Hitler then turned his focus to Poland. After enacting a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union—which included a “secret protocol” by which the two countries agreed to divide Poland between them—Nazi Germany invaded its eastern neighbor on Sept. 1, 1939, and plunged Europe into the Second World War.

the many similarities

Russia's story over the past three-plus decades contains many similarities. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet empire—which, in Putin's words from 2005, constitute "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century"—stand as the equivalent of Germany’s defeat in WWI.

Within Russia, one generation after the end of the USSR, the autocratic Putin had dismantled the Yeltsin-era democracy that followed Soviet communism. Although the post-Soviet democracy did look shaky right from the start—people were talking about "Weimar Russia" as early as 1995—Putin is the person who delivered the death blow. Timothy Snyder, the preeminent historian of totalitarianism, has characterized Putin’s Russia as a fascist government, and contended that it is currently waging “a fascist war of destruction” in Ukraine. In this insightful New York Times op-ed piece, Snyder explores significant commonalities in the nature of the Putin and Hitler regimes.

Since first taking power in 2000, Putin has also ushered in an abrupt close to a period of relatively good relations with Russia's neighbors, which culminated in the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997. The document states that “NATO and Russia do not consider one another adversaries and cites the sweeping transformations in NATO and Russia that make possible this new relationship.” After Putin became president, he cast aside those sentiments as easily as he takes off his shirt for photo-ops.

It’s also worth noting that in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Russia made a guarantee to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” in return for Kyiv turning its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal over to Moscow. Putin has made clear that agreement isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written.

The Russian president’s overarching goal has long been to reverse previous territorial losses born by his country. Much like Hitler, his revisionism focuses on recovering lands populated by his people’s ethnic kin (or those, like Ukrainians, he claims are kin, even if they reject such an identity). An estimated 25 million people who identified as ethnically Russian suddenly found themselves living outside the Russian Federation when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Some moved back to Russia, while others went elsewhere, but approximately 20 million or more remain living in Russia’s near abroad.

but our people ...

Exactly as Hitler did regarding ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland and Poland in the 1930s, Putin has been employing rhetoric decrying how Russian-speakers in the former USSR were supposedly being mistreated. Putin used this to justify military action against Georgia in 2008—where South Ossetia and Abkhazia have large ethnic Russian populations—and Ukraine, both in 2014, when it outright annexed Crimea and put troops into eastern Ukraine, as well as now.

Thinking beyond places where Moscow currently has armed forces or otherwise exercises control today (i.e., Belarus)—which also includes Transnistria, a breakaway, Russian-speaking part of Moldova bordering on Ukraine that has de facto sovereignty—significant numbers of people identifying as Russian live in every post-Soviet state. The largest in raw numbers reside in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Most ominously for European security, Russian-speakers also constitute large percentages of the population in Lithuania (15%), Estonia (30%) and Latvia (34%). These last three are members of NATO, but Russia has attempted to sow “disruption and discontent” in those countries nonetheless.

To take the long view, one can characterize European history from German unification in 1871 through 1945 as being centered around that country’s push to expand its borders and dominate the continent, and the period from 1945 to the present as being dominated by a similar push from Russia. Many once thought the latter push ended in 1991, but, as with Germany, a second phase began fewer than twenty years after the first one met defeat. The apocryphal Mark Twain quote applies here: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

the difference in U.S. responses

We can also explore parallels, as well as differences, between the U.S. response to the outbreak of the Second World War and to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Concerning the former, Franklin Roosevelt faced significant isolationist sentiment in the U.S. These were embodied by the strong restrictions contained in the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, which imposed a U.S. embargo on the sale of all arms and military supplies to any party involved in a war. However, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, FDR overcame the opposition of isolationists and began aiding the enemies of Nazi Germany.

First, President Roosevelt convinced Congress to allow him to sell military equipment on a “cash and carry” basis—as long as Britain and France could pay up front and get what they had bought home on their own, such sales were allowed. France fell to Hitler in June 1940, and Britain needed much more help, so FDR and newly minted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill got creative.

Next, the U.S. sent 50 outdated but still useful destroyers to help the British protect against a naval invasion of their island in return for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and off the Canadian coast. By the end of 1940, it was clear that far more was needed, so FDR introduced legislation, the Lend-Lease Act, that would authorize the necessary assistance without requiring any payment from those receiving it. It passed in March 1941. Here’s more on the act’s impact:

Roosevelt soon took advantage of his authority under the new law, ordering large quantities of U.S. food and war materials to be shipped to Britain from U.S. ports through the new Office of Lend-Lease Administration. The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food.

By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy was extended to include other U.S. allies, including China and the Soviet Union. By the end of World War II the United States would use it to provide a total of some $50 billion in aid to more than 30 nations around the globe, from the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile of Poland, the Netherlands and Norway to Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

Let’s compare FDR to our two most recent presidents: Donald Trump and Joe Biden. First, we have The Man Who Lost An Election And Tried Steal It. Sticking just to what became public, we know that he not only sucked up to Putin, but he also engaged in a long-running extortion campaign aimed at getting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to smear Biden in hopes of weakening the Democrat for the 2020 campaign. You might remember that when Zelenskyy sought to buy Javelin missiles in 2019, to protect against the Russian invasion he rightly feared, Fuck a L’Orange replied “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to announce that his government was going to investigate Biden for argle-bargle. That’s what brought about his first impeachment. It wasn’t exactly a Rooseveltian response to a request for help made by a country facing attack.

President Biden, on the other hand, responded to the Russian invasion by strongly supporting Ukraine, with a robust diplomatic effort and billions of dollars in military assistance. His echoing of FDR even includes a revival of the historic Lend-Lease Act in the form of the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022. Just one more way Biden is the polar opposite of Trump.

The response of the U.S. and its NATO allies to Putin’s attack on Ukraine demonstrates a key difference between now and the events of Hitler’s day. Despite unleashing the greatest evil humanity has yet seen—and hopefully ever will see—the Nazi leader actually found military allies. The Nazi-led Axis included Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania in Europe, as well as Japan, because other countries not only had fascist governments too, but also shared Hitler’s aggressive desire to remake the map in their favor (democratic Finland, which was attacked by the USSR in 1939 and again in 1941, fought with the Axis as well after the second attack before reaching an armistice and switching sides in 1944).

Thus far, Putin’s Russia fights alone (except for tiny Belarus) against a country whose military efforts—and even its overall government functions—are being funded to a significant degree by the rest of Europe plus the U.S. The European Union in late June even made Ukraine an official candidate to join. NATO is working together more successfully than it has done in decades, coordinating their efforts to help Kyiv and punish Moscow. Furthermore, with the forthcoming accession of Sweden and Finland—the latter of which shares an 830-mile border with Russia—NATO will have more resources and strength than ever with which to contain Putin’s aggression.

Hitler’s war divided Europe (please note that, in addition to the countries fighting with Germany, the USSR was his “de facto ally,” as seen in the simultaneous Nazi/Soviet 1939 invasion of Poland, an alliance that lasted until he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941) whereas Putin’s war has united Europe against him. This is the great success of the institutions—NATO and the EU—created in the post-WWII years to incentivize democracy and peace on the continent. Hitler succeeded to the degree that he did because pre-WWII Europe lacked such institutions.

However, having the institutions exist on paper isn’t enough. Joe Biden deserves much credit for the NATO response to Ukraine, in particular given how much his disgraced predecessor weakened the U.S. relationship with NATO. Of course, Trump is now trying to “rewrite history” on this. Why not, I guess? He’s lied about literally everything else.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Alan Dershowitz whines that he’s now a pariah on Martha’s Vineyard just because he enabled Trump

You defend one wannabe fascist dictator by saying his boundless lust for power means he should be able to do anything he wants, and all of a sudden progressives don’t like you anymore. It’s brutally unfair, and we shouldn't stand for it. Every American has an inalienable right to be invited to exclusive dress-formal cotillions on Martha’s Vineyard, no matter how many absurd arguments they’ve trotted out on behalf of lawless autocrats.

What has the world come to?

Alan Dershowitz—who, according to Alan Dershowitz, definitely did not rape any underage girls with connections to Jeffrey Epstein—defended disgraced former Pr*sident Donald Trump during the latter’s first impeachment by saying Trump was allowed to use any corrupt methods he chose in order to stay in office, including pressuring a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political opponent, because he thought he was a great president.

No, really, that was his argument. It’s sort of like saying it’s okay for me to steal a suit from Macy’s because I look so much cooler in it than the peasant who was going to buy it. 

Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." https://t.co/jKErQcS1Iy pic.twitter.com/zo4rL6Zbla

— ABC News (@ABC) January 29, 2020

DERSHOWITZ: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and mostly you’re right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Okay, first of all, Donald Trump has never done anything in the public interest—unless that public interest happens to align with his own pubic—or similarly id-related—interest. Trump wanted to be president again because Attorney General Bill Barr kept telling him it made him untouchable. And maybe because he didn’t want future presidents to beat his high score on video golf. Serving the public interest is way, way down the list of Trump’s motivations, well behind “free four-year maintenance warranty on the Resolute Desk Diet Coke button.”

Also, really? This is really his argument? What if that president is so emboldened by nonsense like this that he launches a full-blown coup attempt and gets people killed—you know, because he cares so much about America and the public interest?

Well, apparently Dershowitz’s fellow liberals were a bit peeved at his efforts to lay the groundwork for Adderall Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich, so like the dedicated progressive he is, Dershowitz scurried over to the far-right bullshit confectionery Newsmax to whine about his “lost” party invitations.

The following clip is from Newsmax. I won’t link to it because I don't want to give them the page views. I also don’t want to give your computer any excuse to kill itself. I know you’ve been Googling “Chuck Grassley baby oil massage” + “rhinestone Speedo” all morning and your computer is already at the end of its rope, so I’m doing you a solid.

Dershowitz, via Newsmax:

“I have essentially been excluded from the Democratic Party. There was recently an event on Martha's Vineyard for Jewish Democrats – who would be the first person you would think of as a Jewish Democrat on Martha’s Vineyard – me, but I wasn't invited because I'm now cancelled essentially from the Democratic Party.

“The library won't allow me to speak on Martha's Vineyard, the Community Center, the major synagogue, all of them have canceled me because I had the chutzpah to defend the constitution on behalf of a president of the United States that they all voted against – the fact that I voted against him, too, and then I remain — in my mind a Liberal Democrat doesn't much matter. If I don't follow the party line down to the extreme, I am cancelled. People refuse to attend events if they know I'm gonna be there and that's why several friends of mine have who have invited me for years to events in their home or concerts that they've sponsored have apologetically said, ‘We're sorry we can't invite you because if you come everybody will leave,’” he added.

“If people don't think there's a cancel culture, I welcome them to Martha's Vineyard and I welcome them to see it with their own eyes.”

Yeah, that’s not cancel culture. It’s “we don’t invite assholes to our parties because they’re assholes and everyone hates them” culture.

You know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin. And it's playing the Benny Hill theme song as you're running around Jeffrey Epstein's island in your underwear. https://t.co/x7e6jLr6Fp

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) July 17, 2022

I guess helping democracy-hating autocrats desperately cling to power is lonely work on Martha’s Vineyard.

Who knew?

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.