Lordy, there’s tapes: vulnerable Senate Republicans squirm over Trump’s coronavirus confession

Posted on September 10, 2020 (Updated September 11, 2020) by Kerry Eleveld

Back in July, as Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst was being pressed on her previous assertion that two Ebola deaths on Obama's watch amounted to "failed leadership," Ernst told CNN that Donald Trump was really "stepping forward" on stemming the coronavirus. At the time, despite 130,000 Americans having already died, Ernst managed to squeeze out that claim with a relatively straight face.

But now that we know Trump did exactly the opposite by admittedly downplaying the pandemic, Ernst, the erstwhile self-professed hog castrator, is running scared. Thursday marked the second day in a row the GOP incumbent senator who's locked in a very tight reelection race ducked questions about Trump's taped confession that he lied to the American public about how deadly the coronavirus is.

Wanna put the Senate back in the hands of people who actually care about saving American lives? Give $3 right now to boot Senate Republicans from power.

“I haven't read it, I haven't seen it, so give me a chance to take a look,” Ernst told CNN's Manu Raju of the revelations in Bob Woodward's latest book, Rage.

Notice what Ernst didn't say, she hadn't heard it. Yep, there's tapes and that's a big part of what makes this so sticky for Ernst and all her GOP colleagues struggling to hold on to power. Remember, earlier this year they all strapped themselves irrevocably to Trump when they voted to acquit him of impeachment charges without hearing from a single witness. GOP senators didn't care that Trump was willfully corrupting U.S. elections in order to win a second term, and now that he has deliberately brought death and destruction to the American people, they're either turning a blind eye or just running for the hills, à la Ernst.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn laughably pooh-poohed the reporting from arguably the most famous journalist of a generation who backed up his account with recordings of Trump himself. “I don't have any confidence in the reporting, so I'm not going to comment,” said Cornyn, who's got a 9-point advantage over his Democratic challenger M.J. Hegar, according to Real Clear Politics. Sorry, but at the risk redundancy, there's f'ing tapes. Cornyn may as well just say he doesn't have any confidence in Trump himself, since Trump’s the one who privately told Woodward back in early February how "deadly" the coronavirus was.

And North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who's trailing his Democratic challenger, suggested that Trump's pandemic response has been right on the nose.

“When you're in a crisis you've got to strike the right balance (not to create) a panic,” Tillis told CNN’s Raju. Tillis apparently thinks 190,000 American deaths and counting is "the right balance."

All these spineless GOP lawmakers remain more concerned about their reelection bids than the toll their craven silence has taken and continues to take on the nation. Unconscionably sociopathic.

The most important accomplishment of impeaching Trump was its impact on Joe Biden

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Ian Reifowitz

Impeaching The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote was incredibly important, and not only because it was the right thing to do. Yes, he committed crimes and abused the power of his office, and yes he deserved to be impeached and removed from that office—the record of every Republican Senator other than Mitt Romney will be forever stained by their votes to acquit. History will remember their cowardice.

Beyond the morality, impeachment has had a clear, long-lasting political benefit, one that will pay dividends for Vice President Joe Biden this November. Thanks to impeachment, everyone knows that the charges Trump leveled against Joe and Hunter Biden on Ukraine—the ones he tried to blackmail that country’s president into investigating, or least announcing an intention to investigate—are utter malarkey.

Trump always feared running against Biden, and he acted corruptly in a failed bid to get enough dirt to derail the former VP’s quest to win the Democratic nomination. The impeachment process shone a bright light on Trump’s actions, and on his lies about Biden, ensuring that the smear campaign ultimately backfired.

Since the end of the impeachment trial, Trump and his minions have continued to bleat on with their completely invented and thoroughly debunked stories about the Bidens. I won’t dignify them by repeating the specifics here. Recently, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who heads the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, have been “investigating”—i.e., trying to keep the story in the media—this bullshit.

Never mind that by falsely smearing Biden over Ukraine, Johnson and his fellow Republican senators are all but doing the work of Vladimir Putin for him, as this Associated Press article explained.

But the stark warning that Russia is working to denigrate the Democratic presidential candidate adds to questions about the probe by Johnson’s Senate committee and whether it is mimicking, even indirectly, Russian efforts and amplifying its propaganda.

The investigation is unfolding as the country, months removed from an impeachment case that had centered on Ukraine, is dealing with a pandemic and confronting the issue of racial injustice. Yet allegations about Biden and Ukraine remain a popular topic in conservative circles, pushed by Russian media and addressed regularly by President Donald Trump and other Republicans as a potential path toward energizing his supporters.

[...] “Particularly as a public official and somebody who’s responsible for keeping the country safe, you should always be suspicious of narratives that are trying to sort of damage or target the electoral process in your country,” said former CIA officer Cindy Otis, a foreign disinformation expert and vice president of analysis at Alethea Group. “You should always be suspicious of narratives that foreign countries are pumping out.”

As Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld pointed out, Johnson even admitted that his so-called probe would “would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden.” It amazing; these Republicans always manage to say the quiet part out loud, which I guess is helpful. Nevertheless, to paraphrase what Otter said to his nemesis (and professional Republican, according to the character futures provided) Gregg Marmalard in Animal House, “Gee, you’re dumb.”

YouTube Video

Then the Orange Julius Caesar himself got into the act. On August 16 he retweeted material that our own intelligence agencies had previously identified as Russian disinformation—part of its effort to directly influence the presidential election by “denigrating” Biden. As CNN put it: “By retweeting material that the US government has already labeled as propaganda -- and doing so with the 2020 Democratic National Convention kicking off on Monday -- Trump demonstrated once again that he is willing to capitalize on foreign election meddling for his own political gain.” Here’s Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner:

The President of the United States should never be a willing mouthpiece for Russian propaganda. https://t.co/9y6L6uMKbM
— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) August 17, 2020

Then came the four-day marathon of lies known as the Republican National Convention. Former Florida (where else?) Attorney General Pam Bondi went before a national audience and, once again, did Putin’s bidding by lying about the Bidens and Ukraine. The truth? When Joe Biden sought the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shukin he did so, as Greg Sargent of the Washington Post noted, “because the prosecutor was corrupt.” Sargent added some more important facts: “This was U.S. policy, backed by international institutions. GOP senators had no problem with it in real time. As The Post’s fact-checking team puts it, Bondi’s story is ‘fiction,’ and in reality, Joe Biden ‘was thwarting corruption, not abetting it.’” Bondi told some other lies about Hunter Biden, which the WaPo fact-checking team also debunked.

When these latter day Marmalards now issue their breathtaking press releases or repeat Russian disinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine, the media—thus far at least—has been taking them for what they are: Utter horseshit. I won’t say the media has learned their lesson, but unlike 2016, when “but her emails” was literally the most reported story of the campaign, this year everyone who isn’t directly sucking at the Trump teat is treating these debunked charges with the (lack of) seriousness they deserve.

For that, we can thank the impeachment of Donald Trump, which exposed the lies against the Bidens for what they are. The impeachment process inoculated the media and the American public by preparing them for what Trump is now trying to pull on this matter. So thank you Nancy Pelosi, thank you Adam Schiff, thank you Val Demings, thank you Jerry Nadler, and thanks to the rest of the Democratic impeachment team. I’m sure Joe Biden is thanking you as well.

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)

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

Posted on August 26, 2020 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.

The Trump onslaught begins—4 unadulterated days of brainwashing his cultists

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Kerry Eleveld

Instead of waiting until his culminating nomination speech on Thursday to make a splash at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump showed up Monday shortly after the convention's start to deliver a lie-laden rant lasting longer than his Democratic rival's 26-minute acceptance speech last week.

By conventional standards, Trump’s timing was a strategic error. The whole point is for the nominee to build anticipation throughout the week and then deliver a triumphant address on Thursday that draws in maximum viewership. "From a purely tactical perspective doesn’t every additional, unfocused Trump speech like this one in North Carolina, cheapen what his campaign would prefer to be the BIG SPEECH night on Thursday?" wrote NBC reporter Garrett Haake Monday as Trump was chipping away at objective reality from the podium.

But that assumes Trump is running to win. In traditional U.S. presidential campaigns, major-party nominees generally start with base support of at least 40% and then they work toward winning over swing voters, independents, and perhaps a swath of disaffected members of the other party to reach 50 plus one on Election Day.

Not Donald Trump. As we have seen over and over again, Trump's campaign is much too incompetent and too disinterested to win over new voters. In reality, Trump is chiefly interested in cementing his base voters because his strategy is to lose by just a narrow enough margin to steal the election by claiming it was ridden with fraud.

Trump's strategic goals, therefore, don't rely on any buildup to Thursday. Rather, his strategy depends on saturating his cultists with propaganda that ensures they show up to vote and then automatically distrust any result that doesn't result in Trump's reelection. In other words, he's both brainwashing and preprogramming them.

On Monday, for instance, Trump fed his cultists patently false absolutism that if he lost reelection to Joe Biden, then the election was necessarily "rigged."

"The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election," Trump said. Never mind that Trump is losing in basically every reputable national poll along with most battleground state polls.

Trump also delivered a gusher of disinformation during his inaugural convention speech. "Most of the country is doing very very well," he claimed as reported U.S. deaths surpass at least 175,000 and total unemployment claims top 57 million. He told the crowd that Democratic governors were shutting down their states solely to hurt his reelection bid. He also mythologized that before the coronavirus "we were really coming together"—except for that whole impeachment proceeding over one of Trump's other attempts to steal the election.

This is a classic propaganda campaign designed to thoroughly brainwash his followers—the more they buy into his demented reality, the quicker they'll dismiss any fact-based reports that don't comport to Trump's fantasy world. In fact, that's why polling already shows that by a 3-to-1 margin Republican voters believe the battle against COVID-19 is "going well," while among all voters six in 10 say it is going "badly."

It's not the wow factor of a big speech that infects the minds of these GOP voters—it's the repetition, the bombardment, and the saturation that they succumb to, mostly because they need to believe in something. In deeply uncertain times, Trump offers them the “snake oil of certainty,” as Brené Brown calls it.

And apparently, the media is going to fully help the campaign mainline Trump's disinformation straight to the public. After restricting Democrats to two hours of coverage a day during their convention, cable news outlets mostly took Trump's speech in full.

"I’m a little confused why Trump is being granted a full-day convention to just give a steam of consciousness rant of outright lies," wondered Jesse Lee, vice president of communications for the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Meanwhile, before Trump even set foot on stage, he started dialing up his alternative reality wherein he's always being victimized and other people are always getting better treatment.

"Incredible that @CNN & MSDNC aren’t covering the Roll Call of States," Trump tweeted as both networks took part of the congressional hearing on U.S. Postal Service delays during the truly lackluster roll call. "Fake News! This is what the Republican Party is up against. Also, I’d like to hear the remarks of the Delegates from individual States, rather than @FoxNews anchors. Ridiculous!"

CNN and MSNBC ultimately both took major portions of Trump's speech, as did Fox News of course. So even as Trump complained about slighted, he actually got more than his fair share—all part of the brainwashing.

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

Posted on August 19, 2020 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)

People:

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.

Sorting machines being taken from post offices! Sabotage continues …

Posted on August 14, 2020 (Updated August 14, 2020) by SemDem

NPR's Noel King interviewed the Iowa Postal Workers Union President, Kimberly Karol. I urge you to read the entire transcript. (It’s not long.) She has been at the USPS for over 30 years, yet she has never seen anything like this. Louis DeJoy, a Trump flunky, was appointed as postmaster general. He has numerous conflicts of interests and no experience whatsoever—but he was a large Trump donor.

His changes have drawn widespread criticism. Karol admits she “is not a fan,” and she is not alone. She said "mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we're seeing equipment being removed.”

"In Iowa, we are losing machines. And they already in Waterloo were losing one of those machines. So that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past."

She said the changes made aren’t designed to save money, but to undermine public confidence in the Post Office. I would agree with that, with the added bonus for Trump of undermining confidence in the upcoming election that he is terrified of losing. She also believes DeJoy is trying to circumvent the rules that require public comment.

I would love for someone to explain to me how taking away mail sorting equipment, which stations already have, will 1) save money 2) do anything but hinder the mail going out in a timely manner. But that is the entire point, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, this is happening everywhere. Washington state officials are already complaining about mail sorting machines being removed.

DeJoy has already cut hours, cut overtime, removed trucks and jacked up the price of mail-in ballots right before the election. He is also, like Trump, opposed to the USPS getting more funding, which is as nefarious as it gets.

Vote early, in person, if you can. If you get a mail-in ballot, please take it to the elections office or a drop box. If you have to mail it, make sure you have enough postage and mail it in IMMEDIATELY. Thirty-four states won’t count it if it comes after Election Day, and Trump’s team is doing everything in their power to ensure that happens.

#TrumpKillsUSPS

🚨Trump Is Removing Mail Sorting Machines From Post Offices https://t.co/m4WrVIFhYK
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) August 12, 2020

In the meantime, it’s all hands on deck, people:

Effective Get Out the vote can change an election. With Turnout2020, you call Democratic-leaning swing state voters & help them request an absentee ballot. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this is needed now more than ever. Sign up to volunteer, and you can make these phone calls from the privacy & comfort of your own home.

Thursday, Aug 13, 2020 · 4:58:18 PM +00:00 · SemDem

Trump just admitted he is sabotaging the post office to stop vote by mail. Dem leaders need to get an injunction and even consider impeachment, since this is a criminal act. It’s the right thing to do and I don’t care if the Senate acquits him—they will each have to go on record with destroying the USPS, and this puts the issue front and center. Most people don’t know this sabotage is even going on.

‘Masterful’ McConnell’s GOP caucus now in an all-out defensive crouch clinging to seats

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Kerry Eleveld

Remember when political reporters crowed about what a masterful play Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had made when he lined up his caucus to acquit Donald Trump without hearing from a single witness? Yeah, that acquittal came on February 6 when U.S. senators were already getting briefed on the seriousness of the coronavirus' spread abroad.

But Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, fell all over themselves to make sure Trump was at the helm when the pandemic hit U.S. shores. Now, what once looked like a promising cycle for Senate Republicans has turned entirely treacherous precisely because the caucus is saddled with Trump as their standard bearer.

Let's give Mitch McConnell and his GOP majority the boot. Give $2 right now for bragging rights on election night!

Politico reports the party is directing nearly its entire $100 million war chest at saving the seats of eight incumbent senators while the few GOP candidates aiming to defeat a Democrat have been left almost entirely to their own devices. With the exception of funneling a little money into the effort to defeat Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, they simply don't have the resources to play offense.

The seat of Democratic Sen. Gary Peters from Michigan, for instance, once seemed like a flippable seat. But as Trump has tanked in the state and Joe Biden is presently positioned very well there, Senate Republicans have left Republican candidate John James to fend for himself.

Instead, GOP groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund have been trying to bolster their defenses in Georgia, Iowa, and Montana—three states that weren't even on the radar as potential Democratic pick ups when the cycle started.

Perhaps even more striking has been the GOP spending to protect seats that Democrats weren't even truly contesting yet. In Montana and Georgia, for example, Republicans went up with defensive ads before Democrats even got there.

“It's unusual when the other side goes there first and expands the map for you,” said J.B. Poersch, president of the Democratic super PAC Senate Majority PAC.

The bottom line is that Republicans have been left with little choice but to protect a growing map of incumbents who are inextricably linked to a president who has presided over 165,000 American deaths and counting while decimating a decade of economic growth. In fact, Trump is such a drag now that McConnell has reportedly given GOP senators the green light to distance themselves from him whenever necessary. Yeah, good luck with that after four years of letting Trump trash the country without raising hardly a single objection.

"They're just not making the early investments they would if the president or the party was running better in the polls," said Saul Anuzis, a former GOP state party chair in Michigan.

And a giant part of the party's downfall is due to McConnell jamming that acquittal vote down the throats of his caucus members. Masterful.

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Top GOP senators give Trump the Biden probe he got impeached for trying to force on Ukraine

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Kerry Eleveld

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is using his investigative powers as chair of a Senate panel to push forward with a thinly veiled attempt to stir up Russian disinformation about presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, says he's investigating if the hiring of Biden's son Hunter by a Ukrainian gas company posed a conflict of interest for Biden while he was serving as vice president. Hunter Biden, a trained lawyer, served on the board of Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019 as the company sought to repair its image following allegations of corruption in its ranks.

No credible news organization has found any meat to the allegation that Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine was improperly influenced in any way. In fact, Biden's work in 2015 and 2016 to help oust the corrupt Ukrainian top prosecutor had the support of U.S allies across the international spectrum.

But however thoroughly discredited this right-wing conspiracy theory is, The Washington Post reports that Johnson is intent on rehashing it along with the help of GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. And Democrats charge the probe is just a gateway into fanning the flames of a bunch of Russian disinformation about Biden and Ukraine. In other words, Johnson and Grassley are giving Trump the investigation he got impeached over—trying to force Ukraine into doing his dirty work. Ukraine officials ultimately declined to even announce such a probe, let alone conduct one.

But Johnson and Grassley? Sure, let's give legitimacy to an investigation Ukrainian officials already declared illegitimate. Apparently, there aren't more important things to do right now as Senate Republicans let a relief package flounder that's critical to keeping the country from sliding into an economic depression.

“Senator Johnson is diverting his committee from oversight of the failing response to the pandemic — even though over 4.5 million Americans have been infected — and is instead facilitating a foreign influence operation to undermine our democracy,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.

But Johnson's no neophyte when it comes to doing Trump's bidding on Ukraine. During the House impeachment probe, Johnson admitted to The Wall Street Journal that he had been alerted early to Trump's quid pro quo pressure campaign in which he withheld $400 million in U.S. aide from Ukraine. But Johnson was content to raise the issue with Trump and take his denial of the allegation at face value—because Trump's nothing if not a man of his word. Just FYI, that’s the type of interview a senator gives to a friendly outlet when they want to frame a story before it’s publicly revealed by someone else. In fact, a House impeachment probe might be just the type of incentive that makes a senator want to come clean.

Ukraine is currently a hotbed of disinformation on the topic. "Johnson’s probe is proceeding as Ukrainians with a variety of competing agendas and links to Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani have been releasing apparently pilfered official conversations that Biden conducted while vice president with Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko, aiming to tarnish the presumptive Democratic nominee and his longtime interlocutor in Kyiv," writes the Post. So there's lot of dubious fodder for Johnson to blow up.

When the Post asked Johnson if he was getting information from "pro-Russian Ukrainians," he offered only that he was receiving input from "a variety of sources," including the U.S. government. He also said that they would "verify" all information before publicizing it in a report he's promising to deliver in September.

In response to the probe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have asked the FBI to deliver a “defensive counterintelligence briefing” to all members of the House.

“Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign influence campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote in a July letter to the FBI.

Of all people, even Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former GOP intelligence chair Richard Burr of North Carolina have raised concerns about Senate staffers potentially using Russian disinformation supplied via Ukraine as the basis for a bogus investigation.

Johnson declined an interview with the Post but issued a statement saying he refused to be deterred by "despicable tactics designed to discredit a legitimate investigation."

Nothing good will come of this. Not with Johnson behind it. He already discredited himself by admitting how easily he let Trump off the hook for soliciting foreign interference in the upcoming election. But now Johnson is actually doing Trump's dirty work for him. Can't imagine why a sitting U.S. senator would do that.

The Fatigue Factor: Is America Tired Of Democrat Drama?

Posted on August 3, 2020 by LifeZette

President Biden? It’s a sobering thought. Not so much because Joe Biden is a wild-eyed loon. But because he’s using loons to get elected and they will want payment if he pulls it off.

Slim chance, you say. Really? Think again.

Yes, the polls are corrupted and contrived and the media is totally in the tank for the Democrats—as they always are. And it is true, by any logical analysis, that by comparing track records and personalities, the president wins by a wide mile. But those are sensible perspectives and politics is sadly not about sensible anything…but more likely than not about illogical and senseless perception borne of a shallow relationship between the voter and the zeitgeist.

And we can all admit, the spirit of the times is not good. Not since the late 1960s have we had this kind of constant drama of existential controversy. Granted, all of it contrived by the Democrats and the media.

Even before the president took office he was supposedly a Russian pawn. Then there was a special prosecutor. Then impeachment. Now COVID-19 and riots. Have the American people run out of patience with the consistent melodramatic brouhaha? Is there a fatigue factor setting in where a majority of voters in key battleground states are willing to tolerate a Biden presidency to end the never-ending kerfuffle?

Because you know that’s the deal. As soon as Biden would be elected, peace and tranquility would reign supreme. A new golden age, for some people. It’s almost like a tumultuous romantic relationship where you break up with someone you really like because you just can’t handle the drama anymore.

Does the president have an effective defense against this? He should, and it would be law and order. In 1968, under somewhat similar circumstances, Richard Nixon used that theme to great advantage against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and was elected president. But the country is different than it was in the late 60s.

We’ve replaced generations tempered by depression, war, and prosperity with an easily swayed significant portion of the population composed of social media-driven voyeurs and a youth programmed to respond to basic PC stimuli like the most conditioned of Pavlov’s dogs.

Whither the republic? I don’t know. Honestly, I wish that I could, as I did (pre-COVID) confidently predict a Trump victory. There are still idiots out there doing that and by their clueless complacency making a Biden victory much more possible. You know the type. The ones that, despite all evidence to the contrary, actually said “Red Tsunami” in 2018 and meant it. Their confirmation bias does not help the cause.

So we stand on the precipice of the fall campaign season and all bets are off. We can win if the American people still have a modicum of sense. The Left will win if the same people throw in the towel and surrender to the false drama of manufactured negativity Democrats and the hard left have produced —and will continue to produce— until November.

Because it’s not really a Trumpian drama. It’s Democrat drama wrapped up with insincere bows and ribbons by the press to drop on the presidential doorstep. If the American people get that, we’re okay. If not, well, say hello to the 25th Amendment.

This piece was written by David Kamioner on August 3, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

The post The Fatigue Factor: Is America Tired Of Democrat Drama? appeared first on The Political Insider.

A weakened Trump desperately tries to preserve his delusions of grandeur

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Kerry Eleveld

An enfeebled Donald Trump made a desperate bid this week to snatch victory from the jaws of electoral defeat. Baselessly impugning mail-in voting as a drag on election integrity, Trump offered, "Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"

Not only does Trump lack the constitutional authority to do anything of the sort, no one was going for it. Not the pro-Trump co-founder of the ultra conservative Federalist Society, Steven Calabresi, who called it grounds for "immediate impeachment." Not the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which suggested that perhaps Trump should scrap his reelection bid and "let someone run who isn’t looking for an excuse to blame for defeat." And even some vulnerable Senate Republicans up for reelection this cycle managed to part ways with Trump on something for basically the first time ever.

In case you missed it, Trump is now at the weakest point of his presidency. Facing electoral doom and threatening to sink the GOP with him, some Republicans smell freedom are breaking out the pitchforks early.

After Trump's 'delay' trial balloon drew a legion of arrows, he was back Thursday afternoon to assure Americans that we "must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!" No, we must not. Hopefully, we will know the result of the presidential contest that night, but there's nothing constitutionally imperative about getting immediate results.

What is true is that the longer the results are delayed, the longer Trump will have to sow the seeds of doubt in Americans’ minds about the election’s integrity. Trump voters are already predisposed to refusing to accept the results of November's election, with 55% of respondents in a Yahoo/YouGov survey saying they would not accept a close election result if Biden wins due to "an advantage in mail-in votes.” And Trump is already very actively laying the groundwork for that skepticism to take hold, with a particular focus on “mail-in voting,” which is the same as absentee voting even though Trump likes to pretend there’s some meaningful distinction.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump wrote in his deranged “delay” tweet.

As the Washington Post reported Thursday, Trump has "attacked mail voting nearly 70 times since late March in interviews, remarks and tweets, including at least 17 times this month." Naturally mail-in/absentee voting are also the safest way for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.

But pre-doubting the election results isn't just a strategy for Trump, it's also a psychological necessity for someone who's entire persona and sense of self-worth is delicately balanced on a mythical house of cards. Trump's whole adult existence has been nothing but a deceptive smoke-and-mirrors fabrication aimed at convincing others of his greatness. But along the way, Trump fell for his own delusions of grandeur, and now it's imperative to his being that he safeguard them at all costs. Losing fair and square simply isn't an option for someone who's convinced himself he's a "killer," a term he inherited from his sociopathic father, Fred Trump.

So when Trump charges that he’s been “very unfairly treated” from the get-go, the media never gives him enough credit, the "fake" polls are undercounting his voters, the "silent majority" will have its say in November, and that a “fixed” and “rigged” election has already been stolen out from under him, it's all of a piece—a function of self-preservation for a man who’s impervious to any reality that undercuts his supposed supremacy.

None of this is to say we should dismiss the strategic side of Trump's persistent "fraud" push. He is pumping the ether full of toxicity about what he’s already declared “the greatest election disaster in history.” And it's surely not beyond Republican lawmakers to survey the post-Election Day GOP ruins and decide, yeah, why not back Trump’s bid to steal the election? Without him, there's nothing left of us.

We must make certain it's perfectly clear that Americans won't stand for his betrayal of our Constitution, our democratic ideals, and our republic. Trump has made perfectly clear for years that he would like to be "president for life" and, given all the investigations awaiting him if he loses, he has more incentive than ever to barricade himself in the White House. As American-Russian journalist Masha Gessen told MSNBC's Joy Reid Friday, "the question of whether he can is really a question of how many enablers he has?" The People must provide a convincing counterbalance to those enablers.

But if Joe Biden wins, it won't matter whether it's a narrow victory or an emphatic rout, Donald Trump will go to his grave believing he was harassed as a candidate, wronged throughout his presidency, and robbed of reelection. When the truth is, he cheated his way into office and spent four years taking everything America was worth and burning it like Monopoly money, just like he did with his daddy’s fortune. Too bad Fred Trump won't be around to bail out the country.