Lesser Of Two Evils? Sometimes The Call Is Just Too Close

In the lesser of 2 evils argument, morons on Twitter (and the DWT comments section) rarely-- rarely like in never-- take hard votes and congressional actions into account. Chad Pergram is Fox News' chief DC correspondent. He has great connections and nothing to do with the lunatics like Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.

Saturday he was tweeting away about how enough Republicans had signed the DACA discharge petition to force a floor debate and vote... but that 3 ultra-right wing Democrats-- Texas Blue Dogs Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez and Filemon Vela-- refused to sign, the only Democrats who did, killing the chances, at least for now, of a DACA debate. Pergram's tweets explain all the mechanics of the problem. Let me talk a little about the mechanics of it.

In the middle of the 2006 wave, Rahm Emanuel insisted on sneaking dozens of Blue Dogs into Congress. In a wave cycle many low-info voters don't understand or care if a candidate is a Blue Dog or a progressive. They just want to strike out against Republicans. So Emanuel loaded up on them. By 2010 Democratic voters realized they'd been duped and they stayed away from the polls rather than reelect the Blue Dogs and New Dems. Every one of Rahm's Blue Dog recruits was defeated.

The current DCCC chair, Ben Ray Lujan, is far stupider than Rahm so he asked Rahm for advice. Rahm advised him to load up on Blue Dogs and New Dems again and that's exactly what the DCCC has been doing. But voters aren't always going along with it. Some of the worst of that lot, like Jay Hulings in Texas, JD Huffstetler in Virginia and Brad Ashford in Nebraska were all ignominiously defeated despite the DCCC's slimy tactics.

When Blue Dogs and New Dems get into Congress, you can always expect behavior like Cuellar, Gonzalez and Vela just exhibited, shitting all over the Democratic brand and confusing voters about a difference between Democrats and Republicans. Tomorrow is primary day in several states including states where progressives are battling against DCCC crap candidates-- like in California, Iowa and New Jersey. The worst candidate the DCCC has overtly endorsed this cycle is Gil Cisneros (CA-49), an "ex"-Republican, a carpetbagger from another district, a lottery winning self funder and a complete joke. Sam Jammal is a far better candidate on every level. The other candidates progressives should avoid in California are Mike Levin (CA-49), New Dem Dave Min (CA-45), and DCCC recruits who worked out so badly that even the DCCC had abandoned them-- Hans Keirstead (CA-48) and Mai-Khanh Tran (CA-39). Even worse than Keirstead and Tran, but in Santa Clarita, not Orange County, is Bryan Caforio. Saturday's Santa Clarita Signal:

Character counts.

There are a few people left who think how you play the game matters as much as whether you win or lose.

Sports teach us this, and so should elections.

How one competes is more important than how big of a scene someone can make, or how many Twitter followers someone has garnered.

And rooting for the person willing to win by any means necessary will only yield you a candidate who’s willing to do whatever it takes to win, which can include lying, cheating and stealing-- not traits you want in the person you elect to govern.

...Negative politicking is toxic. It reflects especially poorly upon the person slinging the mud more so than whatever negative pabulum is being spewed... [W]e’ve seen the mailers from Bryan Caforio that again show his negative streak. While he is putting his name to it, the ad hominem attacks in that campaign have drowned out any substantive talk on the issues.

As for the other states, the DCCC has endorsed Abby Finkenaurer in Iowa but she's a weak, pointless politician with no heartfelt values besides winning and her own career. Friends of mine in the Iowa legislature where she serves told me she's a complete waste of a seat. Progressive Thomas Heckroth would make a far better member of Congress.

The DCCC has 4 candidates in New Jersey, one of whom seems pretty good, Andy Kim, although I haven't spoken with him long enough to leave out the word "seems." Blue Dog and NRA ally Jeff Van Drew is widely considered the worst Democrat in the New Jersey state legislature and the DCCC picked him for the very reasons Democrats will eventually abandon him and his seat will revert to the Republicans. Mikie Sherrill is being sold as some kind of a military heroine but she never flew a single coat mission and the DCCC and her campaign are just gaslighting about she's all about-- which is just someone looking for a career and who is a typical status quo nothing. She's someone who talks about tweaking the Affordable Care Act a little bit instead of moving forward with Medicare-For-All the way progressives do. And Tom Malinowski is being sold to voters as the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor who "earned national acclaim for standing up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un." Is that so?

TOM MALINOWSKI AND THE TORTURE LOOPHOLE

The campaign messaging circulated by Malinowski for Congress highlights their candidate’s background as having fought against the sanctioning of torture during the Bush administration. The particulars of this language should not be overlooked. Why? Because once Tom Malinowski became a part of the Obama Administration as an Assistant Secretary of State, his function was not to end practices that were regarded by international legal and human rights organizations as torture. Instead, he facilitated the continuation of protocols by United States that created a “torture loophole,” a framework by which interrogators could initiate tactics and practices that when used in correlation, their aggregate effects result in the torture of a prisoner. This was accomplished through his defense of the interrogation protocols sanctioned by Appendix M of the US Army Field Manual.

This troubling history was recently brought to light during the confirmation hearing for CIA Director Gina Haspel. Around that context, the wider implications of the shameful legacy of US-sanctioned torture was discussed in a recent podcast by The Intercept (Intercepted, Episode 57, 5/23/18), in which Tom Malinowski’s role in the continuation of torture by the United States was discussed by author and anti-torture activist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye and host Jeremy Scahill:

Dr. Jeffrey Kaye: And the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M is quite clear that its import is to prolong trauma, to prolong what they call “the shock of capture,” and to induce compliance and take away the will of individuals.

And the United Nations Committee against Torture, in 2014, did its investigations on various countries’ compliance with the treaty against torture and when it came around last to the United States, it pointed out and said: You know, Appendix M is inducing psychosis in people. We have real questions about what you’re doing with isolation, and sleep deprivation is actually amounting to torture.

The former member of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski, who at that point was an Obama administration State Department official, responded to the U.N. Committee against Torture and defended the use of Appendix M and said that it had, you know, plenty of safeguards against misuse and torture.

Jeremy Scahill: You’re saying that a former staffer or official at Human Rights Watch, who then goes on to work in the Obama administration, was the official who was put forward to defend the techniques that you’re describing, as they exist in Appendix M, under the Obama administration.

Dr. Jeffrey Kaye: Yes. He was one of four or five officials who were put forward and went to New York to formally respond to what the U.N. officials were criticizing about U.S. interrogation. Yes.

Amnesty International railed against the Obama administration's Malinowski-led effort to deflect criticism for a wide assembly of international human rights advocates at the hearing of the UN Committee Against Torture, stating:

"The USA merely reiterated what the Committee found inadequate during the review, namely that an investigation into CIA interrogations had been conducted and closed, with no charges referred. It also repeated its focus on the future by seeking to consign to history and impunity what had happened in the program...Accountability and remedy for undoubted crimes under international law have fallen by the wayside in this self- congratulatory analysis... So the story on these issues is one of double standards, impunity for crimes under international law, indefinite detentions, secrecy serving to block truth, remedy, and accountability, and rejection after rejection of the recommendations of UN treaty bodies and other human rights experts."

So even though the evasive answers put forward by Malinowski and his team at the 2014 hearing of the UN Committee Against Torture gave the Obama administration the breathing room to allow US interrogation practices to continue, the facts are undeniable: allowing interrogation to operate under the guidelines of US Army Field Manual Appendix M opened up a "torture loophole" by which the human rights of prisoners could continue to be violated within a framework where the United States government could claim plausible deniability. Tom Malinowski had the opportunity to take a principled stance against this inhumane policy. Unfortunately, Malinowski instead chose to be an advocate and apologist for the torture loophole.

I've always said that the DCCC's underpining-- our candidates are the lesser of two evils-- was a very slippery slope... at best. Luckily there's a much better candidate for NJ-07 voters tomorrow: Peter Jacob.