Mark Penn Is No Democrat-- And The Democratic Party Is WAY Better Off Without Him

In 2018, Chicagoland Blue Dog Dan Lipinski-- who is virulently anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-healthcare-- and who has a solid voting record for a moderate Republican-- was on the verge of defeat in the primary. One poll had the 2 candidates within the margin of error and the other showed progressive challenger Marie Newman beating Lipinski by 5 points. At that point, the Republican version of EMILY's List (the Susan B. Anthony List) started spending big to support Lipinski and the web of dark money super-PACS run by Mark Penn and his wife, Nancy Jacobson, through No Labels let loose a $975,894 direct mail and television campaign smearing Newman with baseless charges. The result was a swing towards Lipinski the week before election day and a narrow 51.1% win for Lipinski. (Last night Newman told me that "We now know that No Labels’ extreme lies were tightly tied to the Lipinski campaign and if Congressman Lipinski wants to continue his very close relationship with them, it will simply continue to eliminate what is left of his credibility.")

In every part of the country, Penn and Jacobson jumped in to back Republican-lite Blue Dog and New Dem candidates against progressives, spending immense amounts of money-- almost all of it coming from Republican plutocrats, like the Murdoch family, and Wall Street Democrats. You've heard the term "Fox Democrat," right? Mark Penn is the prototype. Politically he's another Bill and Hillary Clinton-Tony Blair fox in the henhouse, always working to pull the Democratic Party rightward-- for which he gets paid-- and handsomely so-- by wealthy conservatives. They are the couple from hell behind the corporately-funded No Labels cabals and SuperPACs that finance the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. And they make their living by taking a cut from every penny that comes in.

Penn spreads his poisonous corrupt conservatism all over the world-- supporting right-wing candidates from Menachem Begin in Israel, Carlos Andrés Pérez (El Gocho) in Venezuela and Belisario Betancur in Colombia to Tony Blair, Ed Koch and, of course, the Clintons. Here in the U.S. their sewer money-- from charter school fanatics, hedge fund managers and GOP financiers-- that flooded into Democrat primaries against Marie Newman, Alan Grayson in Orlando, Deb Haaland in Albuquerque, Matt Heinz in Tucson and Susan Wild in the Philly suburbs was spent through shady conservative PACs like United for Progress, United Together, Forward Not Back, Progress Tomorrow, Patriotic Americans PAC, Citizens for a Strong America, etc, entirely funded by contributions from 5 and 6-figure right wing donors, sleaze bags trying to turn the Democratic Party into another corporately-owned arm of Wall Street, just like the GOP. Most recently, Penn's and Jaconson's No Labels operation was behind the failed Seth Moulton coup plot against Pelosi.

Please consider contributing to progressive Democrats battling Penn's Blue Dogs and New Dems by clicking on the 2020 primaries thermometer on the right. And pushing the Republican wing of the Democratic Party isn't the only thing Penn is up to these days. He's a regular contributor to the influential right-of-center Beltway rag, The Hill, This weekend's OpEd was the all-to-predictable, Mueller's done, and Dems should be too-- because Trump is no Nixon. This is what the right-wing of the Democratic Party has to say in defense of Trump, voiced by the venal Penn: "There was, at the end of the day, no evidence whatsoever of any collusion-- and there was nothing but a president frustrated at being wrongly accused and wrongly investigated over a very effective hoax." Before going any further with his bullshit, I just want to list the members of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, which Penn and Jacobson control. They once had Trump address the group. Most of the GOP problem-makers were defeated in November, so the group, which prides itself on having an even number of Dems and Republicans is now way over-balanced with Dems, but since they're virtually all from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, many on their way to the same inevitable "metamorphosis" Penn is in the midst of, it doesn't really matter anyway; does it? These are the ones who call themselves Democrats:

• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Julia Brownley (New Dem-CA)
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)
• Tony Cardenas (D-CA)
• André Carson (New Dem-IN)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Debbie Dingell (D-MI)
• Vicente González (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer, chairman (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Eleanor Norton (D-DC)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Jimmy Panetta (D-CA)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Brad Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Darren Soto (New Dem-FL)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Tom Suozzi (New Dem-NY)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Peter Welch (D-VT)

Yesterday, Digby, writing for Salon, explained Mueller's purpose-- a roadmap Democrats now need to pick up, real Democrats,not the Mark Penn variety. "No matter how many times," she wrote, "Trump and his minion Barr say the words 'no collusion, no obstruction' over and over again like a couple of malfunctioning robots, the report shows something very different. The Trump campaign clearly 'colluded.' Its officials clearly knew a hostile power was helping them by sabotaging their rival and they never reported it to the authorities. Indeed, they welcomed it and eagerly encouraged more of it. There is apparently no law against doing that, largely because, I suspect, no one ever anticipated that a presidential nominee for a major political party could possibly do such a thing. But it was an ethical lapse of epic proportions, and the belated recognition of that fact partially explains the president's frenzied denials that the interference and sabotage ever happened. He has shown in dozens of different ways that he believes that he can manipulate reality by repeatedly denying that it exists... Mueller concluded that his investigation didn't establish that Trump and company conspired and coordinated with the Russians. But the detail he provided shows that Trump's dishonesty and unfitness for the office he holds is indisputable. And the second section shows that despite Barr's contention that Trump was just frustrated (as if that were a valid excuse) and couldn't have committed obstruction of justice because he had committed no underlying crime, he had ample, serious motivation to try to cover it up." Penn has an entirely different persopective. I wonder how many of his Problem Solvers agree. Here's more of his defense of the Trumpist interpretation of the Mueller report:

Most people don’t understand what it is to not only to be personally investigated for something you didn’t do but to have your friends, family members and associates placed in legal jeopardy over it. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team systematically targeted the people around the president, squeezing them like lemons, indicting them on mostly process crimes created by the investigation itself. They reviewed everyone’s emails, text messages, phone calls, bank statements-- and yet, their conclusion on collusion was clear and definitive. It has to be believed.

I was there working with President Clinton in 1998 when he pondered whether to send missiles against Osama bin Laden but was concerned it would be viewed as “wagging the dog.” We missed bin Laden that day. It was symbolic of how everything in the White House was affected by the Monica Lewinsky investigation; it changed everything we did. And, yes, there was a good bit of cursing then, too.

The big difference between today and what happened in 1998 or during the Nixon era is that, at the end of the day, the Mueller investigators found no stained dress, no break-in, no hush money, no enemies list. There never was a crime, and what seemed far-fetched was simply that-- this time, a duly elected president was investigated for a crime that never even existed. In fact, evidence is mounting that the investigation itself was launched on phony grounds.

And so, the screaming partisan antics of Democrats in the House are likely to set the Democratic Party back a decade if they do not get a grip on themselves. In partisan unison, with scripted talking points, they keep calling everyone else “partisan.” It simply does not pass the laugh test at this point.

But the problem is that Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) are congressmen from safe districts who are nobodies if they have no investigations to launch. It’s in the interest of their egos to keep it all going so that they can have daily press availabilities. And they are whipping up their political bases. It will take some Democrats of courage to turn this off and stop the abuse of going after the president’s financial records. These are the kinds of things Nixon was doing, and there is no justification for those in Congress to be doing exactly those things for which Nixon resigned from office-- going after his political enemies.

...It’s time for Democrats and the country to move past the Russia collusion narrative, and for the media to ’fess up. If we are not going to respect the outcome of the Mueller report, then what was the point of the whole exercise? They found no collusion and they did not charge obstruction.

The cloud under which the president and his associates have lived for more than two years deserves to be lifted. The officials who launched this aborted investigation should be held accountable for their actions. And the country deserves a Congress focused, not on investigations, but on issues like health care, infrastructure and immigration.

The hell with Mark Penn. That's not a Democrat-- and hasn't been for a very long time. Are his "Problem Solvers?" Go over that list above again. Let's face it-- that's largely where the opposition to impeachment is coming from. Any of them yours?