What Kind Of Congress Member Do YOU Want? We Already Know What Kinds The DCCC Wants

Even though congressional party leaders are blocking it from becoming part of the official Democratic agenda and even though both the DCCC and the DSCC screened candidates to find ones who didn't back it, 84.5% of Americans (and 70.1% of all Americans) support Medicare-For-All. Friday in Illinois, President Obama explicitly expressed-- for the first time, at least in public-- his support for Medicare-for-All.

Democrats and independents are about to turn out in droves to defeat Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress. The media is calling this a "blue wave." But that's utter bullshit. This is an anti-red wave. Pelosi and her PAY-GO, that is meant to prevent programs like Medicare-For-All from moving forward-- are hardly what voters are embracing. Pelosi is doing exactly what she did in 2006. Then she and her numbscull allies set up a catastrophic 2010. Today they are setting up what will be, inevitably, a catastrophic 2022. The Democratic establishment does not learn. I used to oppose term limits. I was wrong. Term limits is the only thing that will stop grotesquely out-of-touch yesteryear politicians like Pelosi from growing roots their positions while the world moves along without them.

Her DCCC is working hard to perpetuate establishment and donor class power, while violently assaulting the progressive ideas that power the enthusiasm that is turning the anti-red wave into reality. Pelosi, Hoyer, Lujan, Schumer... the whole Democratic clown parade are picking out their outfits for the victory parade and practicing their talking points for MSNBC, CNN, Meet The Press, etc al right after the elections. What a great job they did, they will claim and their TV hosts will agree. Without the DCCC, without Pelosi and her leadership team, without the Blue Dogs, New Dems, ex-Republicans and the whole Republican wing of the Democratic Party, how many more seats would the GOP be ceding in November.

Imagine a party actually running on what Americans want-- instead of failed austerity programs like PAY-GO that Pelosi and the DCCC are going to use to turn Democratic victory into shit in our mouths!

Maybe the DCCC should have been screening out conservative candidates who didn't support Medicare-For-All. Instead they were busy this cycle looking for all kinds of ridiculous candidates with spurious "qualifications" that have nothing to do with what Democratic voters want from Congress. Early Saturday morning, NBC News reported on one of the ones we've been looking at (askance) all cycle: ex-intelligence officials. That's a recruitment qualification? For the DCCC it has been. Adam Edelman is as enthusiastic about them as the DCCC recruitment committee wanted him to be: "They put their lives on the line in foreign war zones, conducted secret missions to collect valuable intelligence and made enormous sacrifices for their country — only to see their former colleagues disrespected by President Donald Trump. Now, driven by the president's conduct, they're taking matters into their own hands and gearing up for a different challenge: Running for Congress as Democrats."

How are they on Medicare-For-All? Job Guarantee? Free state colleges? Anything?

Nah... they're just "fed up with what they see as Trump's disdain and distrust of the intelligence community." Oh, well, by all means, let's get them into Congress as members voting on (see above). Oh and, by the way, they all seem to be part of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, of course. Abigail Spanberger (VA) and Elissa Slotkin (MI), both New Dems (the corrupt, Wall Street-owned conservative caucus) seem to think that running for Congress is "a matter of restoring respect for the agencies they gave so much of themselves to."

And there are more: Gina Ortiz Jones (TX) is running against a Republican incumbent, Will Hurd, who was also a CIA operative. Fun.

Two who lost their primaries in NY-19 were Jeff Beals and Patrick Ryan. But another one the DCCC managed to get through the primary against a progressive-- Tom Malinowski, who's running against Leonard Lance in New Jersey's 7th district-- wasn't mentioned in the NBC report. I wonder why (not really). The DCCC is trying to sell Malinowski 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.

So where is he on Medicare-For-All? Did the DCCC ask him? Why bother? He's better than Leonard Lance... certainly the lesser evil. Isn't he? Anyone know? Of course, he's a New Dem, so not an actual Democrat. Someone wrote him a good  persuasive issues page on his campaign website and he does sound good. Let's see what happens when he gets into Congress. We'll watch and report back.

Malinowski's campaign ad sounds... well, also persuasive. That's what TV ad makers get paid to do. And he says he "worked with both parties to ban torture." Somewhat different from the record but, hey, everyone tells stories from their own perspective, right?