First of all, to answer Dave’s question, yes, it’s worth engaging with journalists, especially those who clearly take the time to seek out good, non-establishment sources.
Now, onto what may destroy this country. K-Thug today quite rightly calls out the Republican moral midgets in Congress for bowing down before Dear Leader. I’ve been wondering for a while: what would reasonable Republican Congressional criticism of Trump even sound like? I take it for granted that they’re all crazy assholes, but even crazy assholes might have some respect for reality and truth. Yes, McCain and Huckleberry Hound like to get off the occasional anti-Trump one-liner before voting for whatever hack Russian double agent Trump has nominated for the cabinet, but they never attempt to give an honest account of just what’s so fucked up about Trump. So I was surprised to see this from Mark Sanford, of all people:
I ask Sanford, in our early February interview, whether it’s fair to say Trump doesn’t impress him. “Yeah, that’s accurate,” he tells me. “Because at some level he represents the antithesis, or the undoing, of everything I thought I knew about politics, preparation and life.”
[….]Sanford swears he has nothing personal against the new president; in fact, he’s heard good things about him personally from several mutual acquaintances. But, he says, he can’t “look the other way” as Trump peddles false information to suit his political aims.
“I believe in a war of ideas … and I tell the staff all the time: Look, we’re in the business of crafting and refining our arguments that are hopefully based on the truth,” he adds. “Truth matters. Not hyperbole, not wild suggestion, but actual truth.”
I hate the whole hunt for a reasonable Republican game people like to play, so I don’t want to make it sound like Mark Sanford is a great guy, but he’s saying what every non-brain dead Republican in Congress (I think there’s at least a few dozen in this category) should be saying, that Trump’s detachment from reality is simply not acceptable. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s probably the politically smart thing to do for the medium-to-long term.
But so far no one’s doing it besides Sanford. He must have done a lot of good thinking out there on the Appalachian Trail.
Omnes Omnibus
People on the right do the medium-to-long term thinking? Who knew?
Lit3Bolt
True character in America apparently now means not selling military secrets to Russia in exchange for a small vial of liberal tears.
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: They do thinking? Who knew?
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’re just using a different frame of reference. “Medium-to-long term” for them means one to 24 hours. The “updated daily” part of Cleek’s Law is part of their core.
gvg
I was going to ask, that Sanford. I didn’t have the impression he thought before. Still I will admit, Trump is bad enough that other republicans should be scared. What is Sanford now? did he get elected to something else? Is he actually standing up to Trump?
LAO
@gvg: Sanford is now a congressman. The piece is really interesting because Sanford is self-aware enough to know that he’s not the right guy to make the argument against Trump, but still he is.
ruemara
Just read a breaking that Toupee Fiasco is thinking of unleashing the National Guard to round up undocumented immigrants. Sanford needs to not be the only one but I fear most republicans would be even more thrilled if Trump was also going to round up browns and Democrats.
rikyrah
The thought..there mere thought…that the State Department calls up anyplace in the world, and is told..’we’re booked’….
BWA HA HA HA HAHA H AH AH AH HA HA HA
You know people from the Kerry State Department ‘unbooked’ those rooms before they left…yeah, I’d be petty like that too…going from Kerry to the Secretary of Exxon….
………….
Secretary of State stayed at sanitarium in Germany after G-20 hotels are all booked https://t.co/xQTTuYGdHx pic.twitter.com/kKXdr9v7Ss
— The Hill (@thehill) February 17, 2017
XTPD
At this rate WaPo is going to refer to Donald solely as “Area Douche” by mid-June.
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh
Imagine if Barack Obama had taken three vacations in three weeks and then held a vanity rally at the one month marker. @realDonaldTrumpfraud
— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) February 16, 2017
rikyrah
DA HAIL?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration considers mobilizing as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants.
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 17, 2017
A military force walking the streets of America asking brown people for papers? https://t.co/offaBMfFFu
— meta (@metaquest) February 17, 2017
Cermet
Unless and until “Trump’s detachment from reality ” starts to cost them control of congress, these spineless granny starver’s will continue to look the other way and pretend that they are doing their jobs
Barbara
Well, Sanford has already lived through the release of scandalous and compromising information and is no longer a married man as a result. Thus, it might be that the Russians are having a hard time figuring out what would actually compromise him in the eyes of his constituents. So he isn’t being blackmailed. And you know, that’s the charitable assumption for the rest of the Republicans in Congress — that they are afraid of being personally compromised through blackmail. The reality is that they are cowards who have waited so long for the opportunity to pass more tax cuts that they are willing to overlook evidence of treason. The question is, how much and for how long?
Barbara
@rikyrah: Not sure he actually has authority to do that. Don’t have time to figure it out right now.
liberal
Only if the voters really beat the living shit out of them at the polls if they do it.
What makes me sad isn’t the voters; you can’t really control them. What makes me sad is the prospect of wimpy Democrats not going for the jugular. Yeah, I know, many aren’t like that, but way too many are.
Lapassionara
@gvg: Sanford is not a bright person, but he would, if left to his own inclinations, tend toward the libertarian instead of authoritarian. Trouble is, he can be manipulated, as he has no spine.
Humboldtblue
CANCEL RIKYRAH ALREADY HAD IT
AP just put up breaking news — Trump to mobilize 100k Natl Guardsmen to round up immigrants.
This is beyond the pale (literally beyond the fucking pale because it’s a fucking pogrom) and this shit has got to be stopped. This ceased being funny about mid-June and it has slowly degenerated into a fucking nightmare at an ever-increasing rate. These fucking white supremacists have to be purged.
scav
To be a bit brutal, for a team R player already this damaged in the existing hierarchy, holding out for a complete reversal of the current team hierarchy may be the only card left to play. He’s not switching teams, so the hail mary is his former colleagues jumping off a cliff after eating ergot and leaving him standing as the knight in shining armor with (please GSD) all of its parts where they should be. Untainted Savior with the proper logo! I’m not sure it reflects thinking, beyond enough thought to recognize the terrain and his only path to the eternal shiny political spotlight.
Humboldtblue
@rikyrah: Just saw you had it
Humboldtblue
@Barbara: He’s got enough Governors who will go along with it and that’s all he needs.
mai naem mobile
@Barbara: I am beginning to genuinely believe that a good third of Republican congresscritters are being blackmailed by the Russians. I also think they’re probably more easily blackmailed on the personal stuff because they’re the loudest ones out there talking about abortion,personal morality, the gheys etc.
rikyrah
He interviewed RFK and MLK months before their deaths. Fifteen of 25 guests were African American.
By Joan Walsh
……………………….
When the old folks say television used to be different from the profit-driven, ratings-obsessed, news-as-entertainment industry of today, they don’t always have good counterexamples. But a few years back, I came across a perfect one: the week in February 1968 when, at the height of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive, as riots were wracking major American cities and the Democratic Party was coming apart, Johnny Carson handed The Tonight Show over to the legendary Harry Belafonte, who proceeded to use the platform to introduce white America to his world of art and activism.
The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated. Even before their deaths, America had begun to unravel. Big, bold changes like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts still left black Americans behind economically, while whites were convinced they’d done enough. The most innovative efforts in the War on Poverty were already winding down, a casualty of white backlash and ballooning spending on the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon loomed ominously on the horizon. In conversation with Belafonte, King and Kennedy come across as thoughtful, admirable, heroic—but also battered and shaken. They don’t have the answers.
But the show wasn’t all politics. The well-connected entertainer gave his audience an amazing high-low pop-culture-and-politics mix. The night Kennedy appeared, so did Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, and the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the 25 guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost 50 years later. “He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.”
Belafonte’s Tonight Show stint certainly thrilled black viewers everywhere. The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalls being a high-school junior in Piedmont, West Virginia, transfixed by seeing the entertainer on Carson’s throne. “Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot—history in the making,” Gates wrote in a 1996 New Yorker profile of Belafonte.
prob50
OT, but is anyone else having trouble with Google Chrome this morning? It’s working now, but the responses still seem very slow.
Boatboy_srq
@Lit3Bolt: So, a large bucket of liebral tears is enough to corrupt any Teahadi?
Tokyokie
@LAO: So what was it that distinguished Obama from Clinton during the 2008 primaries? The most significant factor, in my view, is that Clinton considered it politically prudent to support Shrub’s Iraq war resolution, whereas Obama thought it was a load of balls and voted against it. I mention this because taking the principled stand is not only the morally correct action, it often turns out to be the politically astute calculus as well.
The first significant Republican (and I doubt it’s Mark Sanford) to come out and say that Republican President Trump is a treasonous, corrupt lunatic who should be removed from office as soon as possible will be the party’s presidential nominee in 2020. And there doesn’t appear to be a single one of them with the savvy and courage to do so.
indycat32
@Barbara: They don’t need Trump to pass tax cuts. Pence would gladly sign anything they put in front of him. They do need Trump’s base to get re-elected. Angering his base is what’s keeping them in line.
Thoroughly Pizzled
I’m curious as to what Trump could do to finally get the Republicans to investigate him.
Sing the Russian National Anthem on live television?
Order a drone strike on Langley?
Kiss Putin on the lips?
Suggest raising taxes?
Chris
Well, going after him on the whole Russia thing is something they could do, and for once, unlike the vast majority of Trump’s sins – supporting torture, supporting granny-starving economics, promoting racism and other forms of prejudice – condemning him wouldn’t be inconsistent with their own record. Calling for hard lines on Russia is kind of what they do, and especially what they did throughout the Obama administration.
Of course, they can’t even do that much, which is a phenomenal demonstration of moral bankruptcy.
MattF
I’ve seen videos of teevee journalists using words like ‘unhinged’– which is (relatively) impressive. And the conservative commentariat has a few honest people. It’s the ones who are simultaneously craven and bloodthirsty who worry me.
pamelabrown53
@rikyrah:
While troops in the streets is a terrifying scenario, I thought governors controlled the National Guard in their states?
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
He says something along the same general lines in the article. He wasn’t focusing on the Russians blackmailing him, but says roughly that he’s already come back from the dead politically, so he’s no longer afraid of political death. It seems like a reasonable point.
Frankensteinbeck
@mai naem mobile:
There’s no need to blackmail them. They represent their constituents, both in the sense of doing what their constituents want and sharing their constituents’ values. They’re mean, racist shits who give no fucks about facts because facts say whites aren’t better than everyone else. They hate Democrats with a seething passion and will give us no victories after we committed the unthinkable act of electing a black man president. They see only Republicans as their constituents and everyone else as un-Americans who need to get the fuck out or be crushed into a non-voting underclass. Granted that getting elected means most of them had to master basic communications skills, so Trump is a little embarrassing. Did I mention they’re mean, racist shits?
@rikyrah:
Okay, that’s scary, but like the Muslim ban it’s within reach of people to protest. White people the national guard will be reluctant to shoot. And it will certainly go to the courts, although Hell if I know what the law says on this.
Iowa Old Lady
I just heard that about the National Guard on the radio as I drove home from the dentist. For what it’s worth, the WH is denying it.
prob50
@rikyrah: Thanks for the historical review. The only thing even remotely comparable was the fine, but lamentably short-lived Nat King Cole variety show. I don’t recall the exact year(s?) it ran, and it was non-political in nature. Somewhere in my somewhat large DVD collection I have one that I think contained many of his shows. He had great guests (many of whom worked for free to help keep the show on the air), but the network gave up due to lack of sponsorship, since many of the network’s southern affiliates refused to carry the show.
Taylor
@Tokyokie:
Lucky for Obama, he wasn’t in Congress at the time of the vote, and could claim afterwards he would have voted against.
In reality, anyone with presidential ambitions in Congress at the time would remember Sam Nunn, his presidential ambitions doomed by his vote against the first Gulf War while in the Senate.
No-one expected that the Bush administration would make such a clusterfuck of the aftermath of the
warinvasion.MattF
@pamelabrown53: The State Governors are the nominal commanders-in-chief of the National Guard troops in their states, but in other respects, NG troops are ordinary Department of Defense soldiers. I don’t think there’s anything to stop a President from taking command of them.
montanareddog
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Agree to do the flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding?
Boatboy_srq
@rikyrah: Because of course “all enemies, foreign and domestic” is carte blanche to deploy the US military against ITS OWN CITIZENRY, and because there are enough Guardsmen who would get off on rounding up Those People©.
Never mind the delayed USNG reaction when a REAL emergency strikes.
I’m starting to miss Heckuva-Job Brownie.
Boatboy_srq
@montanareddog: While performing multiple abortions.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Given what we know about the Trumpistas, it could well have been sheer incompetence — they were supposed to make the reservations but didn’t pay attention to the instructions that Kerry’s people had left. Or, even more likely, summarily fired the person in charge of making the reservations without bothering to ask what their job was.
ThresherK
@Tokyokie: Well, there are a bunch of Labor Day-era “NeverTrumpers” on the right who got their shoes run over by a lawnmower and are now counting their toes. I expect nothing better of them, and I give none of them credit should they do it now.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
Most of them have, at some point, said something critical of Trump (if only during the primary). If Trump’s administration ever implodes to the point that the rats feel the need to leave the ship, expect them to drag those talking points back out and trumpet that they were Never A Member Of The Trumpist Party.
And the mainstream media will let slide the fact that that rhetorical opposition in the primaries never translated to actual opposition once he was in the White House.
The Moar You Know
@Frankensteinbeck: He’d have to get individual governors to sign off on it and do it, I think. Posse Comitatus would – I THINK – rule out using them as DoD troops under presidential command. But it could be done, at least in red states, in theory.
I am not sure there’s a governor out there who would dare invoke the wrath of their state’s Chamber of Commerce in such a fashion, though.
And not that Trump or his slavish followers give a shit, but doing such a thing would destroy any international standing we have on human rights or any other moral issue, and rightfully so.
pamelabrown53
@MattF: #36
Thanks for the clarification. Still, I imagine an order like that could get pretty dicey especially if governors tried to fight it.
Barbara
@pamelabrown53: They do. In theory, Republican governors in states like Arizona and Texas and Illinois could agree to call up their national guard, but I am guessing that all three would think about that for 30 seconds before realizing the political repercussions. Even the Republican governors in the red states would face serious blow back. Think about a state like Nebraska, where a huge industry (meatpacking) is more or less made possible by the influx of immigrant labor, some documented, some not. There are other governors who would not care, but why would Scott Walker or John Kasich bother — there are not enough undocumented workers in their states and it does cause a fair amount of hardship to just start calling people up pretty much indefinitely for what amounts to coercive police duty. My brother in law was called up as a member of the Marine Reserves in 1991 and he had to shut down his business for six months, and lay off all of his employees.
tobie
Here’s a little bit of good news…just got a call from the campaign for the special election for state senator in Delaware. (The district is next to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.) The organizer told me that a bus of volunteers is coming from Brooklyn this weekend. That is so neat. This isn’t even an election for the US House, just a state legislature. Dems are fired up!
gvg
The libertarian VP candidate Evan something has been pretty on target. He was a republican who ran as libertarian after Trump was the candidate for sure. Towards the end when polling got close he was very blunt that his potential voters in swing states should vote Hillary, not him, too risky etc. the Presidential candidate was not so clear and on topic. Came across as dim but I think even he said Hillary was better than Trump. They are both not democratic party at all and wouldn’t be running 3rd party if not for Trump.
Jennifer Rubin is not a politician and is a real conservative whom I disagree with but she also has been very clear about the problem with Trump and I expect it will cost her some readers too. Too many of the opinions have been its JUST trump not the GOP but some people are waking up and pointing out that it isn’t. He is more extreme, but not completely different. Especially the believing stuff with no evidence. that’s the problem with that tribe.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Just a question…
Would it be good for a Democratic Congress person to insist all those rounded up by ICE and the National Guard force be reviewed to determine who their illegal employers were? Wouldn’t it terrify those who employed these fellow human beings and perhaps make Trump’s efforts more unpalatable to a whole lot more people? Just asking. Maybe it’s a stupid idea.
Chris
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Honestly, if they go ahead with mass deportation, then hell yes. If nothing else, make the bastards own it. If illegal immigration really is such a horrific crime, somebody should have to explain why it’s apparently the only crime in America for which the phrase “accomplice” seems to have no meaning. If it’s a clear and present danger to national security to have immigrants crossing the border illegally, then somebody should have to explain why the businesses that invite them are given a pass.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@prob50:
Working normally for me on my Android tablet.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@tobie: Apart from the Arc, isn’t all of Delaware next to the Eastern Shore?
Tokyokie
@Taylor: My bad.
Ryan
Problem is that Republican leaders, who should know better, have peddled and profited off of detachment from reality and continue to do so. I am not saying a Democratic pol will fact check every time it’s inconvenient to do so, but the right explicitly relies on the ignorance of evidence directly contradictory to some of their most cherished policy objectives. That Sanford can say what he says with a straight face tells me he’s capable of living with cognitive dissonance, or that he’s found a way to rationalize the simultaneous existence of Trump and his party’s reliance on, say, supply side economics, for example.
SiubhanDuinne
@Iowa Old Lady:
So almost certainly true, then.
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
@pamelabrown53:
I’m old enough to remember when President Eisenhower “federalized” the Arkansas National Guard during the Little Rock school integration crisis in 1957. The ANG had previously been deployed to the school (Central HS?) to keep black students out, by order of the AR governor. When Ike federalized them, the very same soldiers stood guard to ensure that the black students could get in.
Wearing my IANAL hat, I would assume that a president could override/overrule recalcitrant governors on a state-by-state basis. But I would also expect the courts to have something to say about it.
FlipYrWhig
@gvg:
I think you’re merging independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin (essentially a thoughtful conservative) with Libertarian Party VP William Weld.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yeah, I never understood what the basis for that was. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy it happened. But what was the legal mechanism that allowed him to overrule the governor? (And for that matter, why did Posse Commitatus not apply?) Insights from any persons of the lawyerly conviction would be welcome.
Timurid
@SiubhanDuinne: Or it’s just more of the Gaslighter in Chief routine… leak something utterly monstrous, then get praised for actually implementing something that’s merely dreadful. “She’ll be happy when I only blacken one of her eyes.”
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: Not just this – I heard from a FB friend in Chicago that Homeland Security was doing random bag checks on the red line:
http://chicagoist.com/2017/02/14/cta_riders_confused_concerned_as_ho.php
One of the other commenters said that this was happening in other cities that had declared themselves sanctuary cities. Anyone else heard this?
SiubhanDuinne
@Timurid:
That also occurred to me after I posted my (rather snarky) comment. I do think there’s an element of that kind of “thinking,” especially with Bannon.
Chris
@Timurid:
Also very possible is that the entire thought process in the White House is run in stream-of-consciousness format, with Trump throwing out twelve different contradictory ideas most of which he’ll immediately forget to tackle a problem that he may or may not remember he wants to tackle the following morning. So a stream of weird ideas are leaked out of the White House which may or may not make it to the finished stage.
liberal
@rikyrah: Fuck him. Let’s see how serious he is about illegal immigrants and ask him when he’s going to start raiding meat packing plants.
tobie
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: True enough! I should say this Delaware district is next to the northern Eastern Shore, specifically Cecil County, which is about as red a county as you can get.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
Yes, please.
wuzzat
@Miss Bianca: I’d heard about the Chicago bag checks. Between this and Pol POTUS’s repeated characterization of Chicago as a war-torn pit of violence, locals are getting nervous. Haven’t heard about anything similar in Boston/Cambridge.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@tobie: Yeah, that’s some Klan Kountry up there.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
There’s a significant difference between what the Arkansas National Guard (ANG) was sent to do by the governor and later on by the president. Their first task, to keep black people out of the schools, was an illegal order (as well as hateful, racist and immoral); but their second task, to protect black students going to school, was legal, and advanced society.
Now, today, would Trump’s activation of the National Guard from multiple states to enforce a sweep of people being forced to show their papers, would that task be legal, or not? IANAL- but if his Executive Order stopping travel into the country was probably not legal, why would any of us suspect that they would do a better job of crafting the documents surrounding the task of the National Guard to have any cover of legality?
Governors who wanted to participate in such a sweep could pretend that they believed the orders were legal. Would NG soldiers be sent into other states to conduct sweeps deemed illegal by those states’ governors or courts? Would NG soldiers sent into Arizona from Kansas be welcomed by Arizonans? Would Arizona courts have an opinion? The people of Tucson, a pretty liberal and cosmopolitan town would not be welcoming occupying troops.
Because this would be a military occupation, even if the NG troops were from the same state, they would be faceless armored gun carrying occupying forces. I think there would eventually be attacks, IEDs, ambushes, dead young people from one town dying in another town. This would probably be the start of the civil war. The professional full time Army/Marines/Spec Ops troops and their generals might have an opinion about the legality of the NG’s orders, and it might be different from the opinion of de facto-President Bannon.
Way interesting times, too interesting even for me, an interested observer of the turning of the polity, the wars and high crimes of the World’s nations and their leaders.
Chinese curse, indeed!