If You Don't Call It A "Brokered Convention," Maybe No One Will Notice You're Stealing Trump's Nomination

Friday the Washington Post cobbled together a mini-National Review Against Trump OpEd featuring American right-wing luminaries-- overwhelmingly proven crackpots-- like Haley Barbour, William Kristol, the Newtster and Eric Cantor. It was a wide array of establishment GOP positioning on what to do about the existential threat a Trump nomination poses to their party, if not their nation.

Barbour, an RNC chair in the mid-90's and then governor of the Great State of some secessionist hell hole from 2004-2012. He got the OpEd off the ground by spouting the official GOP establishment party line on how to steal the election from Trump and hand the nomination over to Ryan. Utter bullshit: "As one who intends to support the Republican nominee, I recognize that this choice is in the hands of millions of GOP primary voters, as it should be. I expect a candidate to go to Cleveland with the necessary 1,237 delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. If not, we will have a contested convention, a rarity in modern U.S. politics. But it won’t be a 'brokered' convention. There is nobody who can 'broker' it. In the unlikely case of a contested convention, the delegates will have to work through the process; no wise men exist who can control or broker such a convention." There are no brokers; there is no one pulling the strings from behind the curtain. We is a democracy!

Before being kicked out of Congress and politics, Newt Gingrich rose from crackpot backwoods/backbench Georgia bomb-thrower to a spectacularly failed House Speaker, a miserable 2-decade sojourn. He pointed out faux-sagely that the two most likely nominees of the GOP lumpen-proletariat, Trump and Cruz, "represent a widespread rebuke to party elites" and posits that for those hated elites (who banished him from Washington to a career of book peddling and hucksterism) "it is time to accept that ordinary Republicans-- their own voters-- want an insurgent outsider." Predictably, he's perfectly content with Trump and the silly-historian inside warns them not to mess with him. "In the event of a Trump nomination, the question will be whether the party elites suicidally do to their nominee what they did to Barry Goldwater in 1964 or come around to supporting him, as they did with Ronald Reagan in 1980. It’s easy to forget that the establishment similarly disliked Reagan, whom they viewed as an outsider, before he became a Republican hero. In 1964, the anti-Goldwater elites at the top of the party not only caused the defeat of their own party’s nominee for president because they despised him so intensely; they also crushed House and Senate Republicans in the process. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) should hope that today’s elites consider how much better it was to work with Reagan than it was to destroy Goldwater." He demands the nasty, vitriolic Mitt walk back his unwarranted personal attack on poor Donald.

Irving Kristol's kid, Bill, who runs a website called the Weekly Standard, doesn't agree with Newt at all and doesn't share Barbour's greasy subtlety. "How should Republicans respond to having Donald Trump as our front-runner? With the determination to defeat him... [E]even if Trump were to be the official nominee, there would be no reason not to mount an independent Republican candidacy in the general election. Either way, we can prevail-- or go down fighting, with flags flying and guns blazing."

Jim Leach was an Iowa congressman for 3 decades, sandwiched between 2 exceptionally mediocre Democrats, Ed Mezvinsky, the bribe-taking, prison-bird father of Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, and the current disappointing nonentity, Dave Loebsack. Leach's unimaginably silly solution-- let Trump win but put in a military dictator as VP to control him.

The political establishment must begin by recognizing that it is responsible for the public cry for change. Americans are reaching out for new approaches to governance because we are still engaged in the two longest and most debilitating wars in our history and are still coping with a job-eroding recession. The lessons of these man-made events are self-evident. The case for going to war with a country that did not attack us and attempting to “finance” it with tax cuts was frail. Likewise, the case for allowing large financial institutions to overleverage and play Russian roulette with the economy was nonexistent. The point is that multitrillion-dollar misjudgments were made by a political-ideological complex that misunderstood the national interest and ignored the common good.

That doesn’t mean that all is wrong with the United States or that radical change is the answer. What is needed is better judgment: tax policy that emphasizes fairness rather than social splintering; foreign policy that highlights negotiation rather than military adventurism; politics that is based on shared convictions and mutual respect.

Dysfunctional governance is an American embarrassment. Donald Trump is a flawed candidate, but the establishment must look long and hard in the mirror as it attempts to carve out an alternative path. If Trump’s greatest strength is that he is not thee, perhaps the party would be wise to coalesce around balancing whoever is nominated at the convention with an element of non-political gravitas: a vice presidential choice from the outside, such as Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Cantor has nothing to say worth commenting on and Ari Fleisher, Bush's gay press secretary for most of his first term warns about the end of the GOP, which leased Trump it's name "so that he can temporarily affix it to the campaign he is building. He’s a wrecking ball, swinging through the Republican Party, destroying the GOP positions on entitlement reform, free trade and Planned Parenthood. But if he’s the nominee, his wrecking ball will swing through the Democratic Party, too. Republicans have long dreamed of growing the party with blue-collar, working-class Americans, and especially against Clinton, Trump has a chance to gain these new voters. Many low- and middle-income workers who know this economy isn’t working for them are Trump voters-in-waiting."

Thanks, Ari, for making our case:

"The People Who Broke Iraq Have A Lot of Ideas About Fixing It Now" (Hayes Brown)

Ari Ferchrissakes Fleischer? Shouldn't he be out somewhere on a roadside trash-pickup crew?

by Ken

Howie wrote at length about the mess in Iraq on Saturday "Who Will Save Iraq Now -- Obama? Rouhani? The Anunnaki? A Negotiated Rational Partition?," and on the whole I would prefer not to touch the subject. But it's so much another case of the chickens coming home to roost and, American-discourse-style, not being recognized as either the old chickens or the old roost, that I have to jump in.

And always hanging over any possible discussion of the subject is not just this habit of amnesia but the living and standing byproducts of it: attention being paid to people who, on the basis of their earlier performace regarding Iraq, should have earned lifetime "Shut Your Friggin' Piehole" clamps. So how could I not gravitate to a piece with a title like ThinkProgress's Hayes Brown's "The People Who Broke Iraq Have A Lot of Ideas About Fixing It Now"?

The crisis in Iraq has reached a critical point, as the Obama administration debates how to stop the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) — also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — in its conquest of Iraqi cities and villages. All U.S. forces left Iraq in late 2011, the result of the Iraqis not wanting to extend the terms of the status of forces agreement that dictated how American troops could operate. That marked the end of a war that lasted nearly a decade in which a well-documented campaign to push for war against Saddam Hussein drowned out any criticism ahead of the launch of combat operations.

Now, those same architects are invited to write op-eds, speak on television panels, and generally give their opinion on today’s Iraq with little to no pushback on just how wrong they got it a decade ago. The situation as it stands in Iraq is not the same as in 2003 and the administration is now considering air strikes to slow the progress of ISIS. But so as to not allow the ones who broke Iraq in the first place to go entirely unchallenged, here are some of the top advocates for launching the war in 2003 — along with their misleading statements and incorrect predictions — and what they have to say about Iraq now.

Some of what some of these folks have to say isn't entirely what you would expect, in that some of them have learned to hem and haw a little better than they were doing back in 2003. (For each of his subjects Hayes begins with a little "Role in 2003" quick shot.) For the record, his rogues' gallery today consists of Paul Bremer, Tony Blair, Paul Wolfshit, Douglas Feith, and Ari Fleischer. These gentlemen are not currently employed, as you might think, as circus clowns, and are still being listened to as if they were, you know, serious people.


SURE, THERE ARE MORE CONSEQUENTIAL PEOPLE
IN THE GAGGLE, BUT REALLY, ARI FLEISCHER?



As Hayes Brown recalls:

Role in 2003: As Press Secretary in the Bush administration, Fleischer had the job of selling the media on the war’s benefits and ease. Among the quotes he gave from the podium in the White House Press Briefing Room include: “[G]iven the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice,” and “there’s no question that if force is used, it will achieve the objective of preserving the peace far faster than the current path that we’re on.” In 2011, he praised the decision to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Iraq as President Bush had negotiated.

You'll note that our Ari now doesn't want to talk about what happened in 2002. In real-world terms, of course, he doesn't know anything about what happened in 2002. The one thing he knows about what happened back then is that, for stooge-apologists of the neocons, it's probably something that's better left un-talked-about in 2014. And of course he knows if anything less about the great Surge of 2007. Again, the one thing he knows is that this is much safer to talk about, even though in the long term it not only didn't solve any of Iraq's problems but probably made most of them worse. Today? Well, I still think that clown career might be open to him if he was prepared to really go after it.

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Can Pelosi Outmaneuver Boehner On ENDA?

Thursday there were 3 roll calls in the Senate on ending employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. Short version: it passed and now faces a hostile reception from House Republican leadership. The slightly longer version:

The first bill up was an amendment by Pennsylvania conservative Pat Toomey allowing employers to use "religion" as an excuse to discriminate. It was defeated 55-43, two reflexively backward and homophobic Democrats-- Pryor (AR) and Donnelly (IN)-- joining most of the Republicans. The only Republicans who voted no on the amendment were Susan Collins (ME), Mark Kirk (IL), and Lisa Murkowski (AK).

Then came the cloture vote to break the Republican Party filibuster. This needed 50 and passed 64-34 with every Democrat voting to end the filibuster, as well as 10 non-Confederate Republicans: Kelly Ayotte (NH), Susan Collins (ME), Jeff Flake (AZ), Orrin Hatch (UT), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rob Portman (OH), and Pat Toomey (PA).

The historic bill then passed 64-32. All the Democrats voted for passage. And the same 10 non-Confederate Republicans joined them. The Senate's two most hypocritical closet cases, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted NO. Another switch-hitter, John Barrasso (R-WY), walked out of the chamber to avoid voting. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-AL) also refused to vote. The bigots have been doing badly in recent years.

Now for the problem… the bill has to pass the House and both Boehner and Cantor are adamantly opposed... and extremely homophobic. They are threatening to refuse a vote. Right after the Senate passed the bill, President Obama issued a statement meant to pressure them:

For more than two centuries, the story of our nation has been the story of more citizens realizing the rights and freedoms that are our birthright as Americans. Today, a bipartisan majority in the Senate took another important step in this journey by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would help end the injustice of our fellow Americans being denied a job or fired just because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Just as no one in the United States can lose their job simply because of their race, gender, religion or a disability, no one should ever lose their job simply because of who they are or who they love.

Today’s victory is a tribute to all those who fought for this progress ever since a similar bill was introduced after the Stonewall riots more than three decades ago. In particular, I thank Majority Leader Reid, Chairman Harkin, Senators Merkley and Collins for their leadership, and Senator Kirk for speaking so eloquently in support of this legislation. Now it’s up to the House of Representatives. This bill has the overwhelming support of the American people, including a majority of Republican voters, as well as many corporations, small businesses and faith communities. They recognize that our country will be more just and more prosperous when we harness the God-given talents of every individual.

One party in one house of Congress should not stand in the way of millions of Americans who want to go to work each day and simply be judged by the job they do. Now is the time to end this kind of discrimination in the workplace, not enable it. I urge the House Republican leadership to bring this bill to the floor for a vote and send it to my desk so I can sign it into law. On that day, our nation will take another historic step toward fulfilling the founding ideals that define us as Americans.

Bush's former press secretary, Ari Fleischer agrees with President Obama and the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Allowing people to be successful in their workplaces is an essential piece of individual opportunity and liberty. Working for a living is one of America’s freedoms. It’s a virtue to be encouraged-- and supporting it is important to the future of the Republican Party. In an era in which the government often punishes hard work and individual success, this bill encourages it.

At its core, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is about individual liberty. All employees should be treated the same and be judged on their job performance. No one should receive special treatment, and no one should be fired because of their sexual orientation.

…Politically, it’s about time for the GOP to do the right thing while acting in a more inclusive and welcoming manner. Republicans need to expand our appeal and earn the support of millennials. The younger generation of Americans views gay rights differently than our parents’ generation, and as was noted in an assessment of the Republican Party I co-authored following the 2012 elections, issues like this are gateways into whether young people see the GOP as a party worthy of support.

Pelosi and progressives are signaling that if Boehner refuses to allow a vote, they will circulate a discharge petition forcing a vote. It will be interesting to see if the few Democrats who oppose gay equality-- like Mike McIntyre (NC), Dan Lipinski (IL), John Barrow (GA) and Pete Gallego (TX)-- refuse to sign it. And it will be just as interesting to see if Republicans who profess to favor ENDA, like Paul Ryan, for example, are willing to break with their party leadership when it really counts. Today I asked all the Blue America House candidates if they would sign such a discharge petition. They all said they would. To be precise, Paul Ryan's opponent, Rob Zerban said, "Absolutely-- without hesitation or reservation." (Something like Pennsylvania state Senator Daylin Leach's "With an unbounded enthusiasm.")

Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) released this statement on behalf of their 73 members: 

“We applaud the Senate for voting to protect millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender working Americans from discrimination. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has done the right thing by putting ENDA before the Senate for the first time since 1996. We urge Speaker John Boehner to hold a vote on the bill in the House of Representatives as soon as possible.

“Workplace discrimination has no place in the United States. When 17 percent of LGBT workers and 26 percent of transgender Americans report being fired or not hired for a job due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, there’s a serious problem that Congress needs to address.

“Seventeen states, more than 160 cities and counties, and nearly 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies have sexual orientation and gender identity workplace protections. Harassment and judgment don’t build a successful work environment, and they certainly don’t build stronger communities. Job assessments should be based on results, not who you love.

“The five Republicans who already cosponsor ENDA in the House are on the right side of history. We hope that others will join them. It’s clear the public supports workplace equality. That’s why the House should hold a vote on ENDA as soon as possible. Americans value hard work and equal opportunity. That should be what matters on the job.”

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent didn't seem optimistic that Boehner and Cantor will allow the bill to pass the House. His sources tell him a discharge petition is a non-starter. That however, is up to Nancy Pelosi. If Republicans like Paul Ryan, Mario Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Jeff Denham and David Valadao refuse to sign it, it just shows them up for the hypocrites they are. Meanwhile, it should be remembered, that Steve Israel is actively out recruiting viciously anti-gay politicians to run with DCCC money as Democrats. That should be taken seriously and stopped.

As poor Scotty talks to Keith, Richard Clarke reminds us that poor Scotty used to merrily dish out the abuse that's being heaped on him now

It was interesting last night seeing poor Scotty McClellan spend most of the Countdown hour with Keith Olbermann. (There's a complete transcript on the Countdown website.) The rest of the hour was filled out with an instructively complementary interview with onetime Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.

It was also interesting, later in the evening, to see counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke (flogging his new book, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters) with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show recalling how when he published his 2004 book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, which accused the Bush administration of screwing up the anti-terrorism effort, he had been attacked with almost exactly the same talking points that McClellan is hearing now: disaffected former official, was totally out of the loop, never said those things while he was here, is just trying to sell books in an election year.

Of course back then Clarke heard the talking points from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

I still don't hear much news in the "revelations" in poor Scotty's book, or for that matter in the interview. I think I got the circumstances pretty much right yesterday. The discovery that both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had just plain lied to him when they told him unequivocally that they had not leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity seems to have gotten the poor boy's attention like being thwacked over the head with a two-by-four. After that wake-up call, he began to see the people around him rather differently.

The poor sap had entered the service of George W. Bush believing him to be what he had pretended to be as governor of Texas: a bipartisan uniter who could bring people together. Of course he wasn't really that in Texas either, but it was still possible for simple souls -- or complex ones with devious agendas -- to believe it. That's who he thought he was following to Washington, and even after 9/11, he really believed in, and was inspired by, Chimpy the Prez's supposed plan to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East, and any other damned place that got in his way.

I just don't think poor Scotty has much more to tell us about the Bush regime. Is he really telling us anything we didn't know about the regime's singleminded and ruthless pursuit of its vicious partisan agenda? The significance of his witness is that it comes from someone that close to the center of power.

John Dean also suspects that poor Scotty doesn't have much more to tell us, for the obvious reason that press secretaries really don't know very much about policy-making or the inner workings of an administration. In fact, the nature of the job dictates that the less they know, the more effectively they can sell what they do know to the media they service. The press secretary is briefed to know exactly what the administration wants him/her to pass on, and nothing more. This way he/she isn't put in the position of having to hide or lie about things he/she isn't supposed to talk about. (Conspicuously, when Keith tried to press the discussion beyond the few matters that have already been discussed, it usuallly turned out that it was an area poor Scotty had never been briefed on.)

Nevertheless, Dean agreed with Keith's suggestion that with the passage of time, Scotty may find that he has more to tell us. In his own case, once he had absorbed the beating he took from his former colleagues and friends over his congressional testimony laying bare some of the Nixon administration's grubbier secrets, he began to realize that other things he had witnessed and taken for granted might actually have larger significance.

The difference, of course, is that Dean as White House counsel really was often part of the policy-making (or at least policy-enforcing) apparatus. Poor Scotty was thought of and used as a tool. In that capacity he had the misfortune, as I suggested yesterday, of having a shred of decency that was both (a) absent from his regime predecessor and successors and (b) unsuspected by his regime overlords.


A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE BUSH REGIME PRESS FLACKS

Just to be clear on this matter of White House press secretaries being basically out of the policy-making loop, it seems reasonable to assume that while this model applied to poor Scotty's dismal predecessor, Ari Fleischer, and to the incumbent, Dana Perino, it was probably not the case with poor Scotty's immediate successor, the unspeakable Tony Snow. I doubt that he would have taken the job under those conditions.

Snow brought conservative movement cred of his own to the job, and I suspect was permitted rare access and input for a press secretary. After all, since he had already established himself as one of the most accomplished liars and propagandists in the modern communications business, he could be trusted to bamboozle the docile White House press corps.

Even so, I doubt that our Tony would have lasted much longer in the job even without his health considerations. I suspect that the regime policy-makers were coming to find him a bad fit for the job. The last thing they needed or wanted was more opinions. They had all the opinions they needed, thank you very much.

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