Democrats Lose When They Try To Be Republican-Lite... That's Why Blue Dogs Kendra Horn, Max Rose, Xochitl Torres Small, Joe Cunningham Were Defeated

 

I spoke with a friend of mine who I knew before he was elected to Congress a few years ago. He's pretty conservative for a Democrat but he's a nice guy and pretty smart and he helps me wunderstand what's going on in Congress. He was reelected and called him to congratulation him and ask him why so many Democrats in his state lost while he won. He said it was because Democrats are seen as leftists and he avoids that label. "But you are part of the left and they advertised you the same way they advertised every other Democrat-- a socialist. He said it couldn't stick to him. "I’m a traditional left. I’m not Bernie. Not Democratic Socialist. Not defund police. Not abolish ICE. Not anti Israel. I am pro-environment, pro-labor, pro-civil rights, pro-police reform, pro-immigration reform-- I am not burn the mother down."

That's an exact quote. The problem is that:

a- not a single Democrat who lost in his area is anything like what he just described and
b- he's using a Republican worldview to think of "the left."

Many Democrats have that Fox News trap embedded in their minds. They come from a place that "the left" is bad. That mindset ruins the Democratic Party because every decision the leaders make flows out of it. Ted Lieu does not have that mindset. AOC does not have that mindset. Pramila Jayapal does not have that mindset. Jamie Raskin does not have that mindset. Rashida Tlaib does not have that mindset. Andy Levin does not have that mindset. Jamaal Bowman does not have that mindset. Cori Bush does not have that mindset. Mondaire Jones does not have that mindset. Ro Khanna does not have that mindset. Barbara Lee does not have that mindset. Bonnie Watson Coleman does not have that mindset. How do I know? I've talked to every one of them and tried to see if they do. They don't. They see the Democratic Party as a vehicle for the legitimate aspirations of working families and as a vehicle for having the government make things better.

That's why I was so sickened yesterday by the House Democratic leadership-- that is so totally imbued with that mindset-- warning the House caucus to not run on core Democratic issues, just to run on the tepid non-messaging that lost the Democrats so many congressional races on Tuesday. An old warhorse who should have been put out to pasture years ago, majority whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC), told them that if "we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win," referring to the Georgia Senate runoffs. Why not just play Fox News for them? I'd like to see George Lakoff have a nice straight-forward talk with this troglodyte. In Moral Politics (2002), Lakoff argued that one of the reasons liberals have sucked so bad since the '80s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the conservatives' strict father metaphor. Progressives have to stop using terms like partial birth abortion, tax relief, socialized medicine and defund the police because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. Tax relief for example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something someone would want 'relief' from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it."

To prevent an even worse catastrophe in 2022, these congressional leaders just have to go. It would be suicidal for the House Democrats to reelect Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn again. The Democrats need leadership that revels, even swims, in Democratic values, not "leaders" who want to hide those values in the attic to accommodate Republican-lite members who represent Republican-leaning districts like Anthony Brindisi and Abigail Spanberger.

The DPCC Messaging Needs To Defeat Trump-- How Will Ted Lieu, Debbie Dingell And Matt Cartwright Manage?

Liz Cheney, considerably to the right of her father, now holds his old Wyoming House seat. Recently, she leap-frogged over all her colleagues into House GOP leadership as Chair of the House Republican Conference, the 3rd highest-ranking job in the GOP caucus after McCarthy and Scalise. She bumped Cathy McMorris Rodgers out of the position. Jonah Weiner’s piece for the New York Times Magazine, Why The Director of ‘Anchorman’ Decided To Take On Dick Cheney isn’t exactly a celebration of the Cheney family.

Adam McKay, the filmmaker behind Anchorman and Talladega Nights and, more recently an Oscar-winning adaptation of Michael Lewis’s financial-crash caper The Big Short has a new film, Vice, “a grim account of the life of Dick Cheney, with Christian Bale-- smoldering beneath prosthetic jowls and the ample weight he gained for the role-- in the lead.

Far from a grateful tribute, Vice-- which co-stars Amy Adams as Cheney’s wife, Lynne-- proceeds in a spirit of frenetic and ferocious irreverence… Vice is, in tone and form, one of the wildest movies he has made-- and one of the wildest movies ever made about politics, period.

…What is unambiguous, by the end, is McKay’s conviction that the American right, in its post-Reagan consolidation of power, has set our country and our planet on a path to ruin-- and that no single figure illustrates this better than Cheney. “He was the expert safecracker who opened up the safe,” McKay said, alluding to Cheney’s deft dismantling of checks on executive power, “and now the orangutan is in there, throwing around the money and the jewels.” McKay knows that a conservative backlash to his film is very likely, and while he emphasized how diligently he grounded the film in research, he also argued that making a less confrontational movie, hewing to a measured realism would have felt not only boring but also incommensurate to the task.

“I’ve never dealt with a tone like this, and I don’t think it’s by accident,” McKay said. “We’re living in a world with a tone that none of us has ever experienced. Pipe bombs are being sent to the leaders of a political party, and the guy who made Dilbert is saying, You know the bombs were really made by left-wingers because they didn’t work.” He made an incredulous face. “So, you’re claiming the assassination attempts are a false flag operation while slamming the liberals and you’re the guy who did Dilbert?” When it came to the movie’s protean tone, he said, “All I can tell you is that we were very conscious of it, we knew it was challenging and indefinable-- and we knew it had to be.”

This was true, he added, not in spite of the material’s seriousness, but because of it. “I’m suspicious of anything that feels like an old form,” he said. “We’re discovering new styles and forms, because this era we’re in demands it. The world has gotten so cartoonishly exaggerated and over the top. Why be subtle anymore?”

…Like many self-identifying progressives, McKay-- who grew up on food stamps and was raised in suburban Pennsylvania by his waitress single mother (his father, a musician, left the family when McKay was 7)-- has grown steadily disenchanted with what he calls “the corporate left.” This summer he joined the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He thinks that capitalism must come under greater, Scandinavian-style regulatory control, “especially if we’re going to do anything about climate change.” Earlier this year he left Funny or Die, a comedy website he co-founded in 2007, after it entered into a sponsored-content agreement with Shell, a deal he called “disgusting.”

…In The Big Short, the narrator, played by Ryan Gosling, puts it this way: “Mortgage-backed securities. Subprime loans. Tranches. It’s pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or, even better, for you just to leave them the [expletive] alone.” Last year, McKay directed the pilot for and served as an executive producer on Succession, an HBO drama about a Murdoch-style media-empire patriarch and his reprobate heirs-- their nefarious business dealings and abject power moves.

In Vice, he uses Cheney’s life to tell a broader tale about what McKay describes as “the Republican revolution and how it changed our country.” He sees Cheney as a “Zelig-style” figure of the right. His career in national politics began in the Nixon administration as a congressional intern and then apprentice to Donald Rumsfeld and, from there, intersected and coincided with the rise of key conservative figures: among them the Fox News founder, Roger Ailes, who first floated the idea for a conservative news network while working for Nixon; right-wing megadonors like the Koch brothers; conservative strategy shops like the Heritage Foundation; and, finally, George W. Bush, over whose administration-- and over whose decision to invade Iraq after Sept. 11, despite paltry intelligence linking the two-- Cheney exercised unprecedented influence for a vice president.

One of McKay’s models was The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s landmark biography of Robert Moses. “He’s in the middle of all this stuff,” McKay said of Cheney, “and finally he gets his hand on the wheel.” Unlike Caro, McKay had to tell his story through a camera, and so there are compressions, elisions and metaphors in Vice that reflect both a filmmaker’s desire to enthrall the crowd and a prosecutor’s desire to nail the defendant. Reading journalistic accounts of Cheney’s move, in 2000, from the private sector back into public service, we learn that he took elaborate steps to divest from Halliburton, the oil conglomerate where he was C.E.O., to avoid the appearance of conflict; here, the relationship between Cheney and the energy sector is presented as one of clear cronyism. Or take Sept. 11. In Barton Gellman’s play-by-play of that morning in Angler, it’s strongly implied that Cheney usurped Bush’s authority, ignoring the chain of command and giving fighter jets the O.K. to shoot down commercial airliners if they appeared to be hijacked. The official White House version was that Bush gave Cheney permission to pass along this order, and Gellman, poring carefully through communications records and notes taken by administration staff members, leaves open the extremely slim possibility that this is true. In Vice there is no such equivocation. We see Cheney give the order to take out the planes himself. Compression, of course, isn’t the same as distortion: Jane Mayer, the investigative journalist, described this scene to me as “a perfect gem,” and told McKay, after he screened the movie for her, that he “got it right.”

One way McKay might have buttressed Vice against possible charges of liberal bias would be to include the sorts of political critiques he readily offers up in conversation. “When Clinton was elected, he cut welfare and deregulated banks, just like a Republican would have done,” he said, from his couch. “Obama waged a war against whistle-blowers, he let the banks off the hook and he expanded executive power.” McKay did tinker for a while with stitching points like these into Vice-- making it “the story of Dick Cheney and the rise of the Republican Party, and how they got so big they swallowed the Democrats.” To this end, he pieced in footage of Hillary Clinton supporting the Iraq war. “But it’s hard,” McKay went on. “The audience only has a certain amount of oxygen in their lungs.” As he said earlier: “I could have made the movie three and a half hours long, but you can thank me that I didn’t.” (The film runs just over 130 minutes.)

…On the subject of villainy, McKay said: “Cheney and Bush did kill, conservatively, half a million civilians in Iraq. Some estimates have it at more than a million. So he’s pretty bad.” But, he said, “I think you have to humanize him, because unless we see how a regular human being can go down these roads, it’s useless.” (McKay has heard nothing from the Cheneys, who did not participate in the making of the film, although he noted that Mary started following him on Twitter.)

Is Vice part of the story Democrats need to be telling between now and 2020, when there’s an historical imperative that Trump be sent packing in no uncertain terms and certainly no with any kind of uncertainty that will encourage fascism to rear its ugly head in our country again any time soon? Wednesday, the L.A. Times published an interview with George Lakoff on what Democrats don’t understand-- and Republicans do-- about how voters think. She kicked it off by asking him about what the story Democrats have to tell to voters for the next two years.

Thursday the Democratic caucus in the House elected Ted Lieu, Matt Cartwright and Debbie Dingell co-chairs of the DPCC-- the Democratic Policy and Communication Committee. It’s their bailiwick. This is what Lakoff would like them to know:

The story has two parts, and they have to do with progressive values. One of them comes from Abraham Lincoln, that in a democracy, you have a government that is of, by, and for the people.

“Of” means the ordinary folks are in charge, and “by” means that the people who are governing you have the same life experiences that you have and understand that, and “for” means that the role of the government is to take care of people.

The second thing is that the private depends on public resources, both private life and private enterprise. You can’t have a business without public resources like roads and bridges and airports and the electric grids. But private life is like that too. You need the same roads and bridges and airports and electric grid and much more. Without public resources, you can’t have private enterprise or private life.

And that's something that is rarely said. If you ask a Democrat if that’s true, they’ll all say yes and they’ll give examples. But if you ask them, “Have you ever said it?” the answer is, no.

And that’s the point. They haven’t said it.

…Every Democrat should deliver the same messages and repeat them over and over and over. Not only that, they should repeat them every time they have a policy, and they should point out how the policy relates to these values.



You want to say this over and over so that people understand, after a couple of years of hearing it-- maybe getting tired of it. But the point is that they would understand that’s what democratic values are, and why they are so crucial.

…It’s not just democratic values. It’s the values of living in a democracy. You can’t have a business without public resources; that affects every business. It affects Republicans as well as Democrats. When you talk about what Lincoln’s words mean-- of, by and for the people-- that affects all sorts of people, Republicans as well as Democrats.

There is a way of talking to people, to say, “Imagine that you don’t have public resources. Imagine that there were no roads, that there were no airports, that there were no air traffic controllers and so on. Here’s what a public resource is. Imagine that it wasn’t there.”

And the Republicans might just say, “Well, privatize them-- privatize roads, privatize airports.”

All very nice except that that won’t happen. If you privatize them, they become a matter of profit for people, and since you absolutely require them, [the private owners] can bilk you for as much as they want. That’s why they’re public resources.

Framing is a concept you brought to the table-- the way you tell the story, the way you make your point. Democrats don’t seem to be as good at it as [Republicans]. Democrats don’t know how people think. It’s really sad. The problem is what I call the Enlightenment reason. [Former President Barack] Obama, in his [recent] speech, talked about the importance of Enlightenment reason. And a week later, Hillary Clinton is talking at Wellesley about how it was important that Wellesley teach Enlightenment reason.

Enlightenment reason says everybody reasons the same way; that’s what makes them human. Whereas if you have different world views, you’re going to reason differently. Enlightenment reason says that all you need to do is get the facts, and everybody will reason to the right conclusion, since everybody has the same reason. No. If they have different worldviews, they’ll reason to different conclusions.

Enlightenment reason does not recognize different worldviews. Enlightenment reason doesn’t admit framing. It doesn’t admit metaphorical thought. It doesn’t admit the way people really work.

The Democrats don’t understand this. They think that if you just tell people the facts, they will all reason to the right conclusion. That’s why they keep coming up with fact after fact after fact, rather than framing things in a way so that people will understand why these things are important.

Disaster Branding: The Importance of Naming-- Guest Post By George Lakoff

Donald Trump knows the power of branding and actually make huge profits by selling the use of his name. But the power of naming and branding can be a double-edged sword: when a president creates and perpetuates real human disasters, we can truthfully attach his name to them and allow well-earned disaster branding to spread naturally.

Mr. Trump uses the word "disaster" metaphorically for policies and practices he doesn’t like. But there are real, literal disasters in the world: huge fires, devastating, floods, deadly storms, major droughts-- disasters caused systemically by the heating of the earth’s atmosphere and its effects in the global weather system.

The Paris Accords are a worldwide, scientifically-governed effort to reverse the heating of earth’s atmosphere and so to reverse its literal disastrous effects-- effects that kill, can start wars, and cost trillions.

When President Trump pulled America out of that worldwide effort, he showed that politics can have deadly systemic effects as well, like significantly slowing efforts to reverse these effects and allowing real climate disasters to get worse.

Political and corporate leaders in America-- governors, mayors, CEOs-- have pledged to act as if the United States were still part of the world community effort of the Paris Accords. There are substantive things they can do collectively, and they deserve praise for their moral courage and good sense to go on in the face of the powerful opposition of the Trump Administration.

But we need not feel powerless in the face of the Trump government. The citizens of the United States have a power beyond the ballot box: the power of naming, and of disaster branding. Acting together, we can give a brand name to all those major fires, storms, floods, and droughts perpetuated and caused by Mr. Trump’s actions against the worldwide effort to end those disasters.

Name the major disasters after the person most responsible for perpetuating and causing new ones in the future. When sea-level rise floods Florida, or when atmospheric heating produces massive evaporation over the Pacific that blows north and east resulting in huge floods throughout the Midwest, name them Trump flood disasters. When continued atmospheric heating systemically leads to massive fires in Texas, name them Trump fire disasters. When the heating of the Gulf of Mexico above historic norms leads to extra strong hurricanes, name them Trump hurricanes and name their effects Trump devastation. When the systemic effects of unusual atmospheric heating lead to a drought, with water shortages and agricultural loss, name it a Trump drought.

We are not used to using the power that millions of ordinary people have to name what is harming them and their planet and the futures of their children and grandchildren. But the time has come to use that power. Just say it.

If such Trump disaster branding becomes viral, it will illustrate the seriousness of the Trump’s Administration’s opposition to addressing the devastation caused by the heating of the earth’s atmosphere. Environmental activists have struggled to convince the public of the urgency of global warming disasters. But by withdrawing from the Paris Accords, Mr. Trump has created such a deadly situation that an unusual measure is called for. We must name the person most responsible. It’s time for disaster branding-- associating real disasters that Trump is responsible for perpetuating or creating with the Trump brand.

All that is necessary is speech-- free speech guaranteed by the Constitution. We don't have to march in protest, or engage in civil disobedience, or do anything the least bit violent. You just have to say the words. There is power in naming.

Happy Earth Day-- But Not To Señor Trumpanzee And Not To Texas Crackpot Lamar Smith

Today was the March for Science. It's kind of embarrassing we even need a march like that. But as Bill McKibben wrote in the NY Times this week, The Planet Can't Stand This Presidency. "Trump’s environmental onslaught," he wrote, "will have immediate, dangerous effects... [T]here’s an extra dimension to the environmental damage. What Mr. Trump is trying to do to the planet’s climate will play out over geologic time as well. In fact, it’s time itself that he’s stealing from us. What I mean is, we have only a short window to deal with the climate crisis or else we forever lose the chance to thwart truly catastrophic heating... [E]ven when we vote him out of office, Trumpism will persist, a dark stratum in the planet’s geological history. In some awful sense, his term could last forever."

The Intercept carried a piece today that mentions Micahel Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist, has pioneered computational models based on patterns of the past 600 years of climate changes. He said he marched today because "Science and scientists are now under attack in this country." Mann is one of the favorite targets of climate deniers, particularly the witch-hunter Ryan placed at the head of the House Science Committee, Texas dangerous crackpot Lamar Smith. "When congressional Republicans are denying basic science,” Mann said, “and the Trump administration-- run largely by polluting interests-- is trying to revoke policies to protect our health and our environment, more than ever we need to hear the voices of scientists, loudly and clearly."

That lunatic freak and earth-wide villain Grand Inquisitor Lamar Smith issued a statement today-- dripping in irony: "I support the right of science supporters to gather and march this weekend. Opening new frontiers of scientific knowledge, on Earth and beyond, will pave the way to a better, more secure future for the next generation. I will continue to support scientific research that furthers our national interest and is of the highest intellectual merit. In the last few months, the Science Committee has enacted three bills that highlight this commitment: the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act of 2017, and the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017. The Committee also has worked to help ensure new opportunities for the next generation of scientists and engineers by enacting the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act and the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act. I look forward to continuing to promote scientific integrity and a healthy, transparent and vibrant research and technology environment in the United States." Smith is ceratinly among the most dangerous and harmful dozen members of Congress. Please help Tom Wakely replace him as the representative for TX-21.

After we saw Smith's statement we called Tom and asked him what he could make of it. He told us that Smith "never ceases to amaze and astound" him. "The press release he sent out today in response to the March for Science, is nothing more than a meager attempt to portray himself as 'pro-women.' By supporting the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act and the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act he is hoping his constituents will forget how he really feels about women. His support of these two bills  belie the fact that he has consistently, over his thirty year career in Congress, voted against women. He voted NO on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood. As far as his anti-science schtick goes, his policy positions and statements are not only wrong-headed but extremely dangerous. Lamar seems to relish in the thought that by turning back the clock we will somehow be the better for it. Maybe he thinks if we all smoked a little from the Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science pipe we would see the world as he does. This man represents the Texas we all want to forget, the Texas that has consistently been found by the federal courts to discriminate against minorities. I truly believe that Smith wants to return to the days of 'no dogs, no Mexicans allowed' and to days where teaching evolution in our schools was a crime."

This morning cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff explained to his followers that "the enormous role played by science-- especially government-sponsored science-- in our everyday lives is barely appreciated." Trump and Trumpists are at war with Science. They have to be stopped.

Start with modern medicine. We, the public, paid for it through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and research universities where the medical researchers, surgeons, doctors and nurses were trained, and where tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) developed. Modern drugs were also developed through basic research sponsored by NIH. Modern medicine is the dividend of our investment over decades in medical science.

Next, computers. Computer science didn’t just appear. It was developed through grants from National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARP). The Internet was developed by the Defense Department. It was originally called the Arpanet. Satellites were developed through NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Defense Department, with vast amount of new science: rocket fuels, physics, new materials for rocket shells, advances in radio communication, and aerial photography.

Cell phones and GPS systems depend on a system of satellites run by the Defense Department, with four satellites accessible from any point on earth, electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light and requiring the physics of relativity, and switching equipment able to receive and pass on signals within nanoseconds-- billionths of a second. A millionth of a second off and your cellphone call is hundreds of miles off. Cellphones are required by business all over the world. American science is supporting not just personal communication but the economy of the world!

And then there is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): No more ozone hole. No more acid rain. The air in Los Angeles is very much cleaner than it used to be. The EPA’s information is valuable beyond measure.

It has scientifically measured and tracked lead in the water -- not just in Flint, but in many cities. It has measured mercury levels in the oceans and in fish. It has alerted us to the effects of global heating, effects that arise from the systemic complexities of the global ecology. Effects like droughts, floods, monster storms, and extreme temperatures. It has monitored poisons in our air and water put there by corporations that have been irresponsible, greedy, and just plain inefficient and careless. Those poisons threaten our food supply because they kill bees that are responsible for 1/3 of our food supply. Mercury in our oceans makes many fish dangerous to eat.

EPA regulations issued and, until recently, enforced, are all that affords us protections from man-made poisons. Every regulation eliminated is a major loss of protections for the public. The administration’s plan for eliminating regulations would wipe out most protections from poisons and other threats.

The Defense Department has issued a report that cites global heating via the use of oil, gas, and coal as a major national security threat. Why? Droughts, and oil, and rising seas start wars. Global heating is matter of life and death in all sorts of ways. It is the moral crisis of our age. Reversing it requires science more than ever!

The positive effects of science on our lives are everywhere. And the needs for more and more responsible science are also everywhere.

Notice science!

And how it has made possible so much of contemporary American life.

Then march for science-- because it is under political threat like never before.

Does Trumpanzee Psycho-Babble Actually Mean Something?

Trump can't call a gaggle of press people to the White House and say, "Look, I snorted up a little too much Adderall when I woke up on Saturday and got carried away. I know Obama never wire-tapped me. Sorry, let's just forget the whole thing." No, that's not Trump. He's just going to keep digging. As George Lakoff famously pronounced ages ago, "Being a minority president drives Trump crazy. Never stop reminding him that he lost the popular vote big league." In January Lakoff was on NPR with Brooke Gladstone looking a the patterns in Trumpish tweeting. First let me suggest you look at this relatively calm one from yesterday-- along with my own photographic response:

The picture on the right is the sparsely attended Spirit of America Rally Trump rally in front of the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines on Saturday. At its peak, there were maybe two hundred sad, pathetic Trump supporters. The picture on the left is the anti-Trump Sister Rally at the same location where thousands of Iowans showed up to express their opposition to Trumpism. There was also a Trumpist rally Saturday in Council Bluffs, in the reddest part of Iowa. You want to see sad?

In mid-January, Gladstone and Lakoff explored how understanding Trump's uses language in his tweets is essentially for understanding how to deal with them. Lakoff offered his first premise: "[T]he idea of preemptive framing is to frame an issue before other people get a chance to, to put the idea out there first, for example, quote, 'The only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC is discussed is that the loss by the Dems was so big, they were totally embarrassed.' [T]he idea is that the hacking of the DNC was the fault of the DNC... You have to understand what the framing is and what the framing is he’s trying to avoid. You know, he said, 'In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote, if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' Right? No reason to think anybody voted illegally, but what he's doing is trying to reframe the popular vote."

Lakoff then explored the concept of the diversion tweet which "occurs when there's some major issue that's come up, and what he'll do is do things like attack Meryl Streep, you know, Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. The idea is to get people on TV talking about Meryl Streep, not talking about the real issues, in this case, conflict of interest and the Russian hacking. Before that, he had done the attack on Hamilton, you know, 'The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior.' So that all the people on New York radio and TV and so on are going to talk about Hamilton, instead of talking about the [$25 million settlement in] the Trump University [scandal]."

The third category is the trial balloon tweet. Lakoff: "He says, 'The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capacity until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.' He’s going to see how people react to this, and then he'll know what to do in the future. People were confused, they talked about, you know, nuclear proliferation a little bit and then it went away. And then the fourth category is deflection, where you attack the messenger, so he attacked BuzzFeed, CNN, the BBC for putting out the discussion of the Russian leaks."

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Obviously, you don't think the media are handling these utterances very well. What do you suggest that we do?

GEORGE LAKOFF:  The media is addicted to breaking news, so we have to give the tweet first. That’s the breaking news. Wrong, because that allows him to manipulate you as a reporter and manipulate the truth.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So you're saying don't report on the tweet?

GEORGE LAKOFF:  You begin by telling the truth and giving the evidence for that truth, then mention his tweet, point out that that contradicts the truth and then talk about what kind of tweet this is. You know, you say, this is a case of diversion. Here’s what he is diverting, quickly. Don't have a panel discussion about it, you know, [LAUGHS] just do it and go on. Keep going back to substance and the truth.

Also, what is the effect of his tweeting on the truth? He’s trying to say, usually, that this truth is a general truth. And that’s another thing that I should add to this list of the things he does, is to take a specific case and say that it's the general case... There is a rape or a murder, a shooting by a Mexican, he says, they’re rapists and killers. He does that all the time.

Former White House press secretary Josh Earnest has a slightly different way of looking at Trump's tweeting. He told This Week viewers yesterday that Trump tweets to distract from scandals: "There is one page in the Trump White House crisis management playbook. And that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal. And the bigger the scandal, the more outrageous the tweet."

Writing for The Nation a few days ago, William Greider lured in readers with the provocative title, Is our President Bonkers? but pivoted immediately: "Maybe, but this screwball won because he saw something about the American condition that neither Democrats nor Republicans have the nerve to acknowledge." Greider acknowledges that "Trump has chosen some scary right-wing goofballs as his intimate advisers" but says we've "survived a lot worse than Donald Trump."

Trump’s freakish behavior and obsessive lying (not to mention the foul racist slurs) have captured the public’s fascination, like watching a scary picture show. Every day the news is Trump, Trump, Trump. People argue endlessly over how it’s going to end. Some on the hysterical left insist the country is on the brink of fascism, but I know some old hands in Washington’s permanent governing class who have a calmer perspective. They assume that Trump’s people can do a lot of damage but will ultimately fail on the big stuff, because they don’t understand the intimate politics of governing, and every day they do one thing or another to undercut their own power and influence with Congress and lobbyists. Watching the Trump presidency stumble is like slowing down on the highway to get a better look at the wreck on the roadside.

But this begs an obvious question: How did this screwball get to the White House in the first place? Put aside his odious traits and egomaniacal vanity. What explains the extraordinary success of this neophyte politician?

I have a theory: Trump baffled and defeated his conventional opponents because he expressed an emotional truth about the American condition that people feel in their guts. But neither Democrats nor Republicans have the nerve to acknowledge it. The “American Century” is over, Trump declared in so many words (“We never win anymore!”). The long and mostly successful saga of US triumphalism, in which Washington essentially ran the world, is finally stumbling toward a confused and chaotic conclusion. Governing elites, though, refuse to accept that reality. It would sound cowardly, unpatriotic.

Never mind the endless succession of losing wars, never mind the gargantuan US debt, meant to keep the world economy from sinking into the full catastrophe of global depression. We are still the “indispensable nation” celebrated by New York Times columnists and certain learned professors.

Only, Americans at large aren’t buying it any more. Odd as it sounds, ordinary people came to a clear understanding of our national predicament long before the power elites and most of the economics profession, and especially before the data wizards of our major political parties. Trump saw an opportunity, and now his victory has generated a kind of nervous breakdown among the elites. Hard-shell conservatives are trying to talk like working-class champions. They are not so afraid of Democrats, but what if Trump puts the plug on them in the next election?

Yes, Trump sold a magical package of solutions when he promised to restore America’s “greatness.” He even revved up a fearsome echo of 1930s/early ’40s isolationism, when Americans in general really didn’t want to get involved in Hitler’s war in Europe. But “America First” sounds reassuring to many Americans (many of whom are unaware of the historical echoes), and Trump’s criticisms of trade treaties sound right to them too.

The United States is still fabulously wealthy and inventive, still largely a beacon of hope and freedom for other parts of the world, but our singular preeminence and power base have been matched, even eclipsed in some respects. The governing class doesn’t want to give up dominant influence-- that’s understandable-- but Trump is right when he says other countries are often free riders on our willingness to pick up the tab. On the other hand, the United States spends way too much on its own military, and its arms industry is always looking for customers among our allies.

Trump’s popular appeal is mainly driven by sentimental nostalgia for the American past-- a longing for the glory years when the United States liberated the world and created a new global order, when prosperity was shared more widely and rising opportunities were more plentiful at home and abroad.

That saga ended in America a generation ago, and it’s nowhere more evident than in the diverging path of wage and income distribution. The rich have gotten richer and working people are struggling to maintain their status and losing. Many are now competing with $2-a-day child labor in Asian sweatshops. Families tried to keep up for a time by working two jobs while borrowing more and more, to no avail. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made her name by attacking the vicious bankruptcy laws that tightened the squeeze on working people (lots of banker-friendly Democrats voted for those laws).

My point is this: Trump (along with Bernie Sanders) deserves credit for forcing this new working-class consciousness into the brain-dead political debate of Washington. If Sanders had won, we could reasonably hope for the dawn of a new reform era. But don’t count on Donald Trump. We already know he is unreliable with facts. More to the point, he looks back nostalgically at lost glory and imagines that certain familiar economic measures-- mainly, pro-business tax cuts-- will restore the good times. As technologist Joe Costello says, Trump’s program is “reactionary nostalgia.”

In fact, Trump’s proposals (with the possible exception of trade reform) are sure to increase economic inequality. His ideas are patterned after Ronald Reagan’s regressive tax reductions — a massive looting of the Treasury in behalf big business and big wealth holders. Despite warnings from budget analysts, the Gipper’s early 1980s giveaway launched the modern era of swollen federal deficits. Only now, instead of billions, US indebtedness is counted in trillions.

Most Democrats are looking backward too. Like Trump, their new ideas are mostly retreads. If rank-and-file Dems want to get real influence, they should copy a successful Republican device. Ask every Democrat running for office-- from the US House and Senate to state legislatures and governorships-- to take the following pledge: They must promise that they will not vote for any tax measure that favors the billionaires and big corporations, thereby increasing the income inequality that is already a national scandal. If the Democratic candidates refuse to sign the pledge, put them on the hit list.

Hit list? OK, these are the dozen worst garbage Democrats in the House who have earned spot on the hit list... and primary opponents (the order is adjusted by the partisan makeup of their districts, giving a slight break to the ones in redder seats):

• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Tom Suozzi (NY)
• Lou Correa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Charlie Crist (FL)
• Vicente González (TX)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog- MN)
• Jacky Rosen (NV)

By the way, there's only one Democrat in the House today with a PERFECT 100% lifetime ProgressivePunch crucial vote score: Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Credit where credit is due. You can help make sure Pramila is reelected by contributing to her campaign here. In fact, everyone of that list at the link is nothing short of essential. These are the most effective and persistent congressional voices of The Resistance against Trumpism.

Will Trump And The Republicans Drown In Their Own Swamp-- What We Can Do To Help

Congress is back in town— and the very first thing the crooks in the undrained swamp hope to accomplish is to make the swamp safer— for the predators, in this case, themselves. Virginia hack Bob Goodlatte proposed a very popular amendment to the rules package that takes away the independence of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics by putting it under the authority of one of Congress’ most corrupted and partisan operations, the ironically-named Ethics Committee. Although Ryan warned them it could backfire in their faces, it passed in the Republican caucus 119-74. Tomorrow we see if any Democrats are stupid and corrupt enough to vote for it. Pelosi: "Republicans claim they want to 'drain the swamp,' but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions. Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress… The amendment Republicans approved tonight would functionally destroy this office.” Everybody wants in on the Golden Age of Trump.

Soon after the election, George Lakoff wrote about how the majority of Americans— the decent Americans who did not vote for fascism in November— can cope with this Trumpian era starting up in just days from now. It goes beyond urging us to keep reminding everyone that Trump is a minority president and “a loser… Constant repetition,” he wrote, “with discussion in the media and over social media, questions the legitimacy of the minority president to ignore the values of the majority. The majority, at the very least, needs to keep its values in the public eye and view the minority president’s action through majority American values.”

Democrats and most of the media looked upon Trump as a clown, a dimwit, a mere jerk, a reality show star, who did not understand the issues and who could not possibly win when he was insulting so many demographic groups. I am anything but a Trump fan, but I estimated that he would get about 47% of the vote. Although I was sure he wouldn’t quite win, I kept warning people that he could, especially given the Democrats’ failure to understand the role of values.

Nine months before the election I wrote about how Trump used the brains of people listening to him to his advantage. Here is a recap of how Trump does it, with examples taken from his campaign.

Unconscious thought works by certain basic mechanisms. Trump uses them instinctively to turn people’s brains toward what he wants: Absolute authority, money, power, and celebrity.

The mechanisms are:

1. Words are neurally linked to the circuits that determine their meaning. The more a word is heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again. Trump repeats. Win. Win, Win. We’re gonna win so much you’ll get tired of winning.

2. Framing: Crooked Hillary. Framing Hillary as purposely and knowingly committing crimes for her own benefit, which is what a crook does. Repeating makes many people unconsciously think of her that way, even though she has always been found to have been honest and legal by thorough studies by the right-wing Bengazi committee (which found nothing) and the FBI (which found nothing to charge her with.) Yet the framing worked.

There is a common metaphor that Immorality Is Illegality, and that acting against Strict Father Morality (the only kind off morality recognized) is being immoral. Since virtually everything Hillary Clinton has ever done has violated Strict Father Morality, that makes her immoral to strict conservatives. The metaphor makes her actions immoral, which makes her a crook. The chant “Lock her up!” activates this whole line of reasoning.

3. Well-known examples: When a well-publicized disaster happens, the coverage is repeated over and over, and watched on tv and read about many times. Neurally, the repetition activates the frame-circuitry for it over and over, strengthening the synapses with each repetition. Neural circuits with strong synapses can be activated more easily that those with weak synapses, and so the probability that they will be activated is higher. And so the frame is more likely to be activated.

Repeated examples of shootings by Muslims, African-Americans, and Latinos make it seem probable that it could happen to you. It thus raises fears that it could happen to you and your community — despite the miniscule actual probability. Trump uses this technique to create fear. Fear tends to activate desire for a strong strict father to protect you — namely, Trump.

4. Grammar: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists” imposes a frame on the scale, suggesting that terrorism is built into the religion itself. The grammar suggests that there is something about Islam that has terrorism inherent in it. Imagine calling the Charleston gunman a “radical Republican terrorist.”

Trump is aware of this to at least some extent. As he said to Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer who wrote The Art of the Deal for him, “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”

5. Conventional metaphorical thought is inherent in our largely unconscious thought. Such normal modes of metaphorical thinking are not noticed as such. Consider Brexit, which used the metaphor of “entering” and “leaving” the EU.

There is a universal metaphor that states are bounded regions in space: you can enter a state, be deep in some state, and come out of that state. If you enter a café and then leave the café, you will be in the same location as before you entered.

But that need not be true of states of being. But that was the metaphor used with Brexit; Britons believed that after leaving the EU, things would be as before when the entered the EU. They were wrong. Things changed radically while they were in the EU.

That same metaphor is being used by Trump: Make America Great Again. Make America Safe Again. And so on. As if there was some past ideal state that we can go back to just by electing Trump.

6. There is also a metaphor that A Country Is a Person and a metonymy of the President Standing For the Country. Thus, Obama, via both metaphor and metonymy, can stand conceptually for America. Therefore, by saying that Obama is weak and not respected, it is communicated that America, with Obama as president, is weak and disrespected. The inference is that it is because of Obama.

The corresponding inference is that, with a strong president like Trump, the country should be strong, and via strict father reasoning, respected.

7. The country as person metaphor and the metaphor that war or conflict between countries is a fistfight between people, leads to the inference that just having a strong president will guarantee that America will win conflicts and wars. Trump will just throw knockout punches. In his acceptance speech at the convention, Trump repeatedly said that he would accomplish things that, in reality, can only be done by the people acting with their government. After one such statement, there was a chant from the floor, “He will do it.”

8. The metaphor that The nation Is a Family was used throughout the GOP convention. We heard that strong military sons are produced by strong military fathers and that “defense of country is a family affair.” From Trump’s love of family and commitment to their success, we are to conclude that, as president he will love America’s citizens and be committed to the success of all.

9. There is a common metaphor that identifying with your family’s national heritage makes you a member of that nationality. Suppose your grandparents came from Italy and you identify with your Italian ancestors, you may proudly state that you are Italian. The metaphor is natural. Literally, you have been American for two generations. Trump made use of this commonplace metaphor in attacking US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is American, born and raised in the United States. Trump said he was a Mexican, and therefore would hate him and tend to rule against him in a case brought against Trump University for fraud.

10. Then there is the metaphor system used in the phrase “to call someone out.” First the word “out.” There is a general metaphor that Knowing Is Seeing as in “I see what you mean.” Things that are hidden inside something cannot be seen and hence not known, while things are not hidden but out in public can be seen and hence known. To “out” someone is to make their private knowledge public. To “call someone out” is to publicly name someone’s hidden misdeeds, thus allowing for public knowledge and appropriate consequences.

This is the basis for the Trumpian metaphor that Naming is Identifying. Thus naming your enemies will allow you to identify correctly who they are, get to them, and so allow you to defeat them. Hence, just saying “radical Islamic terrorists” allows you to pick them out, get at them, and annihilate them. And conversely, if you don’t say it, you won’t be able to pick them out and annihilate them. Thus a failure to use those words means that you are protecting those enemies — in this case Muslims, that is, potential terrorists because of their religion.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Our neural minds think in certain patterns. Trump knows how to exploit them. Whatever other limitations on his knowledge, he knows a lot about using your brain against you to acquire and maintain power and money.

What the Majority Can Do

A strong American Majority movement is necessary, and its backbone has to be a citizens’ communication system — or systems — run through the internet, framing American values accurately and systemically day after day, telling truths framed by American majority moral values — and appealing honestly and forthrightly to those in-group nurturant values in small towns across America. The idea that must be brought across is empathy for those in your in-group, your town. This is basic progressive thought: citizens care about citizens and provide public resources for all, maximizing freedom. It fits in-group nurturance. And it undermines — rather than negates — strict father morality.

What a Strict Father Cannot Be

There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust.

Trump lost the popular vote. To the American majority, he is a Loser, a minority president. It needs to be said and repeated.

Above all, Trump is a Betrayer of Trust. He is acting like a dictator, and is even supporting Putin’s anti-American policies.

He is betraying trust is a direct way, by refusing to put his business interests in a blind trust. By doing so, and by insisting on his children both running the business and getting classified information, he is using the presidency to make himself incredibly wealthy — just as Putin has. This is Corruption of the highest and most blatant level. Can the media say the words: Corruption, Betrayal of Trust? He ran on a promise to end corruption, to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Instead, he has brought a new and much bigger swamp with him — lobbyists put in charge of one government agency after another, using public funds and the power of the government to serve corporate greed. And the biggest crock in the swamp is Trump himself!

The Trump administration will wreak havoc on the very people who voted for him in those small towns — disaster after disaster. It will be a huge betrayal. The $500 billion in infrastructure — roads and bridges, airports, sewers, eliminating lead water pipes — will probably not make it to those thousands of small rural towns with in-group nurturance for the townspeople. How many factories with good-paying jobs can be brought to such towns? Not thousands. Many of those who voted for Trump will inevitably be among the 20 million who will lose their health care. And they will become even further victims of corporate greed — more profits going to the top one percent and more national corporations, say, fast food and big-box stores paying low wages and offering demeaning jobs will continue to wipe out local businesses. Will this be reported? Will it even be said? And if so, how will it be said in a way that doesn’t wind up promoting Trump?

The American majority must create an online citizen communication network — or multiple networks — to spread its positive American values and truths as antidotes to those small towns with in-group nurturance as the Trump swamp swamps them!

The message is not merely negative, they are being betrayed. That’s the Don’t Think of an Elephant! trap. Rather it is that the town’s in-group nurturance is nurturance. It works because care is morally right.

Right now the majority is fighting back, pointing out what is wrong with Trump day after day. In many cases, they are missing the message of Don’t Think of an Elephant! By fighting against Trump, many protesters are just showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight, rather than highlighting the majority’s positive moral view and viewing the problem with Trump from within the majority’s positive worldview frame. To effectively fight for what is right, you have to first say what is right and why.

Do You Want The Democratic Party To Be As Ruthless And Brazen As The Republican Party?

"President Obama," Michael Moore told Chris Hayes on Friday, "wants to be the nice guy." Neo-Nazis-- I mean Republicans-- on social media sites now routinely taunt Democrats as "snowflakes." Are they up to leading the resistance against Trump? Ted Lieu, a Congressman from the stretch of southern California coastline from Malibu through Santa Monica, Venice and Manhattan Beach to Rancho Palos Verdes, is also an Air Force colonel. Saturday morning he told us that "It is possible that Donald Trump-- who lost the popular vote-- will have some ideas that benefit my constituents, California and our nation as a whole. On those policies-- such as withdrawing from the TPP-- I will support. What I will fight-- in every way at my disposal as a member of the United States House of Representatives-- are any policies that put our national security, our privacy, our economy or the well-being of Americans at risk. Any attempt to pass a sham infrastructure plan: I will fight. Any plan to gut the VA and privatize care for our Veteran heroes: I will fight. Any plan to create a so-called Muslim registry: I will fight. Any plan to gut the Affordable Care Act or Wall Street regulations: I will fight. Any plan that moves our nation further away from leading the clean energy revolution and undermines the undeniable science of climate change: I will fight. This is a challenging time in our great nation's history; a time that calls for serious leaders with serious policy solutions that make our nation healthier, more sustainable, more just and more prosperous. My hope is that Trump arrives at the White House and governs differently than he has campaigned."

The video above starts with a segment from Rev. William Barber discussing the pernicious Republican coup d'état in North Carolina. Barber, who you should remember as one of the most inspiring speakers at the Democratic National Convention this past summer. Friday he was on Democracy Now talking with Amy Goodman about how the white fascists-- I mean Republicans-- routinely steal elections and subvert Democracy in Nazi dominated-- I mean Republican dominated-- regions, like the Old Confederacy of slave holding states (and Dunces).

[I]f you rule the South, if you can control the South, you control 171 electoral votes, by just controlling the former 13 Confederate states. You control 26 senators in the United States Senate, which means you only need 25 from the other 37 states. You control 31 percent of the United States House of Representatives, which means you only need 20 from the other 37 states. And you control 13 governors and 13 general assemblies, that control state boards of election. So, if you break through that, then you have fundamentally changed politics.

I believe all of the pushback we’re seeing-- the voter suppression, the redistricting-- is because the extremists see the possibility of a third Reconstruction. They know that if we register 30 percent of the African-American voters, unregistered voters, in the South, and if we add to that whites and progressive whites and Latinos, you will have changed the South. And if you ever change that map and you ever gave deep down organizing that gets people to stop voting against their own interests, [have] grown-up conversations about race and economics, and people begin to see themselves as allies, blacks and whites, and no longer fear one another, then you have a third Reconstruction. I think we’re in the birth pangs of it. North Carolina is one of the places that points to it. Virginia is one of the places that points to it. The closing gaps that we’re seeing-- when you look at Trump, he didn’t win the South by the gaps that Ronald Reagan did. And if we have deep down organizing in the South, we can have-- we can push this third Reconstruction to full adulthood.

...I actually think a lot of what we’re seeing a last stand. I think when President Obama was elected, for instance, and you had this fusion coalition-- remember, he won in Virginia, won in North Carolina early on, Florida-- I think that scared extremists, which is why you had the 15 who got together and said, “We’re going to block him from doing anything.” You know, Jeff Sessions was in that group, who is now being proposed for the attorney general.

I think that the fact that Ryan and McConnell-- we talk a lot about the racism of Trump, but look at the racism of McConnell and Ryan, because, for me, racism is not the KKK or David Dukes or calling somebody the N-word. It’s policy. It’s systemic racism. So, for instance, Ryan and McConnell and Boehner have held up fixing the Voting Rights Act for over a thousand days, almost over 1,200 days, since June 25th, 2013, when the Supreme Court passed this ill-fated decision in Shelby. Strom Thurmond only filibustered the Civil Rights Act of ’57 for a day, 24 hours. These people have held up fixing Voting Rights Act Section 4, so that Section 5 can be implemented in states like North Carolina, for over 1,200 days. They’re afraid. They are afraid of this possibility of us organizing all of America.

And I think that that’s the same thing you see here. This Legislature now has been told twice, by the highest courts, “You are racist. You have engaged in racist voter suppression and racist gerrymandering.” They know they cannot win without this. For instance, what they did when they redistricted, they put 49 percent of black voters into 19 out of 50 Senate districts, and they put 51 percent of black voters into 27 out of 120 House seats. They did that to isolate, stack and pack the black vote, not just to disallow or keep black people from being elected, but to keep black and white people from forming fusion coalitions to elect progressive candidates. That’s what the game was. And all of that is falling apart now, every bit of it. And they see it falling apart in their face. And we have to understand what is at stake here.

And none of it, lastly, would have been possible if we had Section 5 preclearance. If Section 5 preclearance was in place-- and the people in the Congress understand this-- none of these laws that have been passed in the South would have been able to have been passed. And without them-- and I think the story, Amy and others, that we have not talked about is, people talk about this election. Ari Berman says we’ve had almost 900 less voting sites in the black community in this election than we had in 2012. It could have impacted more than a million African-American voters. And we did not have one discussion in our national debates, candidates for president, about voting rights and racism as it relates to voting rights. That was a tremendous error during this campaign.

As Paul Waldman wrote over the weekend in the Washington Post, in regard to the GOP coup in North Carolina, "[P]erhaps nowhere in the country have Republicans moved more aggressively to solidify power by disenfranchising their opponents as they have in North Carolina... This isn’t just hardball politics. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach to government, one that says that when we win, we get to implement our agenda, and when you win, you don’t.”

It's not just North Carolina, of course, or even just the South. Maine stumbled into electing a fascist, Paul LePage, in 2010 (with 38.1% of the vote) and reelecting that same fascist in 2014 with 48.2% of the vote. His approval rating this month is 38% across his state but Friday he announced he plans to nullify the minimum wage law approved by referendum last month. The referendum passed with 834,264 votes (55.5%), fair more votes than LePage ever got from Mainers or anyone else. (His 2010 vote total was just 218,065 and his 2014 vote total was 294,533. LePage combined vote total for his two gubernatorial campaigns is 321,666 less than the votes in favor of a modest, gradual increase in the minimum wage. He ordered his department of labor to not enforce the changes and has every intention of trying to overturn the will of the voters in the legislature. Republicans control the state Senate, 20-15 but Democrats, who are extremely tepid to act against the colossally unpopular LePage control the state House, 78-69 (with 4 independents). The House has consistently refused to make any serious impeachment moves against LePage after a series of unconstitutuional acts. The Bangor Daily News described the bullshit Democratic efforts as "having no teeth or sustained meaning." That about sums it up.

Normally when a U.S. Senator leaves office during their term, the governor of the state appoints a successor to either finish the term or on an interim basis until a special election can be called and organized. On the other hand, when a House member leaves office during their term, there is no appointment, just a special election-- except in Montana. Trump announced that he's appointing Montana's sole congressman, Republican Ryan Zinke, to head the Department of the Interior. Montana's newly-reelected Democratic Governor Steve Bullock can appoint an interim replacement-- just like they do for senators-- and then has between 85 and 100 days to hold a special election. There's some contention about whether or not this law allowing for an appointed congressman is even constitutional-- the state's Democratic Secretary of State, Linda McCulloch, says it isn't-- and Bullock has indicated he will not be appointing anyone. Imagine if the governor was a Republican. Do you think there would be the slightest hesitation?

In a piece last week, George Lakoff pointed out how many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media are inadvertently helping Trump on a daily basis-- spreading his vile message.

Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.

When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.

Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate. When he picks a fight, he does so deliberately. He tweets or says outrageous things, knowing they will be repeated millions and millions of times. When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.

...When you repeat Trump, you help Trump.

How To Defeat Trump Every Single Day

What did Trump voters-- his potential victims-- enable on Nov. 8? In their mad dash to get even with the hated establishment, they unleashed something much worse. First I want to point out an OpEd by over 100 Jewish historians from universities all over America in last week's Jewish Journal. "As scholars of Jewish history," they wrote, "we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles... Hostility to immigrants and refugees strikes particularly close to home for us as historians of the Jews. As an immigrant people, Jews have experienced the pain of discrimination and exclusion, including by this country in the dire years of the 1930s. Our reading of the past impels us to resist any attempts to place a vulnerable group in the crosshairs of nativist racism. It is our duty to come to their aid and to resist the degradation of rights that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has provoked."

We condemn unequivocally those agitators who have ridden Trump’s coattails to propagate their toxic ideas about Jews. More broadly, we call on all fair-minded Americans to condemn unequivocally the hateful and discriminatory language and threats that have been directed by him and his supporters against Muslims, women, Latinos, African-Americans, disabled people, LGBT people and others. Hatred of one minority leads to hatred of all. Passivity and demoralization are luxuries we cannot afford. We stand ready to wage a struggle to defend the constitutional rights and liberties of all Americans. It is not too soon to begin mobilizing in solidarity.

As a reader of this blog and others like it, you probably have a sense that Steve Bannon is a bad man. Let's look into that a little more closely though. Over the weekend, Cynthia Tucker Haynes' piece about the old racism inside the new Alt-right packaging for the National Memo puts Bannon (+ Mercer and Trump) into some kind understandable context. "Bannon," she wrote, "came to Trump’s campaign from his post as executive chairman of Breitbart News, a vitriolic outpost of the ultraconservative fringe. The 'news' site is vehemently misogynist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and racist."

The appellation “alt-right” sounds trendy, like alternative rock. It severs a white supremacist ideology from its Ku Klux Klan roots. It applies a hefty coat of Wite-out (pun intended) to a dangerous and frightening appreciation for Adolf Hitler. In other words, it’s a brilliant marketing strategy to normalize beliefs with which most Americans don’t wish to be associated... [The] so-called “alt-right” is nothing but the same old white supremacy that has oppressed minorities for centuries. It was present at the Continental Congress and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The KKK took up the same beliefs with great enthusiasm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hitler’s version was centered on his hatred for Jews, but he and the KKK, which was also anti-Semitic, could easily have made common cause. In other words, there is nothing new or trendy about this bigotry.

Many journalists and political commentators remain in denial about the racism that fueled Trump’s rise. They maintain that economic anxiety lifted him to victory, that working-class whites are increasingly anxious about job loss and wage stagnation.

There is obviously some truth there. There were counties in a few states that voted for Obama twice but which Clinton could not hold. It’s hard to see racism in those votes.

But racial resentment was easy enough to detect in the Trump voters who embraced his calls for “law and order,” who cheered when he described inner cities as dystopian nightmares, who showed up at his rallies to hurl racial epithets every time Obama’s name was mentioned. Let’s remember how Trump introduced himself to national politics: with a five-year stint as birther-in-chief, insisting that Obama was a usurper who didn’t belong in the Oval Office. It’s hard to see economic anxiety in that.

As much as anything else, Trump’s election was a backlash against cultural forces that have changed American civic and social life over the last several decades. A black president was the starkest symbol of those changes, but other cultural dynamics also played a role. Many Trump voters resent the legalization of same-sex marriage. Others could not stomach the idea of a female president.

That's the context. Monday's NY Times piece by Scott Shane could have lifted the racist rock Bannon hides under and shined a strong spotlight on him as he scurried away. (I refused to be interviewed for the profile.) I suspect that for many Times readers, it was one of their first encounters with Bannon who tended to stay in the background-- for obvious reasons-- during the campaign. What obvious reasons? Although Shane danced around the topic and never flat out asserted that Bannon is a racist-- and used that bullshit journalism school tactic of giving him plausible deniability to quoting souces saying thing like nice he always was to this black person or that black person-- let's start with this from Shane's piece:

In a radio interview last year with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon complained, inaccurately, that “two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia.” He has sometimes portrayed a grave threat to civilization not just from violent jihadists but from “Islam.” He once suggested to a colleague that perhaps only property owners should be allowed to vote. In an email to a Breitbart colleague in 2014, he dismissed Republican congressional leaders with an epithet and added, “Let the grass roots turn on the hate.”

...[Julia] Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.

“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’"

...Bannon systematically courted a series of politicians, especially those who share his dark, populist worldview: at home, a corrupt ruling class preying on working Americans; globally, “the Judeo-Christian West” in a “war against Islamic fascism.” They were views that placed him closer to the European right than to the Republican mainstream.

He made flattering films about Michele Bachmann, the former congresswoman from Minnesota, and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate; repeatedly pressed the television host Lou Dobbs to run for office; and flirted with a range of Republican presidential hopefuls, including Rick Santorum, Ben Carson and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Finally, in Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon found his man.

Mr. Bannon told a colleague in multiple conversations during the presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an “imperfect vessel” for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart candidate and the media entrepreneur bonded anyway.

In August 2015, Mr. Bannon told Ms. Jones in an email that he had turned Breitbart, where employees called certain political stories “Bannon Specials,” into “Trump Central” and joked that he was the candidate’s hidden “campaign manager.” He hosted Mr. Trump for friendly radio interviews and offered tactful coaching. This August, with the Trump campaign foundering, Mr. Bannon took over as chief executive.

I want to go back to Trump, back to the National Memo and over to @LOLGOP and George Lakoff. "Trump," wrote @LOLGOP in explanation of a Lakoffian look at Trump, "can’t quote William F. Buckley and likely prefers Barry Manilow to Barry Goldwater, but he may be the most brazen 'Strict Father' candidate ever. His fixation on 'winning' and dominating his opponents reinforces the hierarchical nature of conservative thought. His vile preening may have repulsed your 'Nurturant Parent' brain but it offered his voters 'self-respect, authority, and the possibility of power.'... Lakoff laid out how Trump’s bullying bombast appealed to Evangelicals, Pragmatic Conservatives and Laissez-faire Free Marketeers. He saw Trump exploiting elements of the conservative worldview-- including the 'country as person metaphor' and simplistic 'direct causation'-- that the right has spent hundreds of millions of dollars nurturing.

In addition to his mastery of the broad strokes of the right-wing politics of dominance, Trump’s decades of experience selling crap taught him how to use your brain against you, including repetition, framing like “Crooked” Hillary, and “truthful hyperbole.”

Lakoff also explained how Trump could win over people who had voted for Barrack Obama, despite being a birther who represented the exact opposite of Obama’s nuanced, systemic thinking.

“Many union members are strict fathers at home or in their private life,” he wrote. “They believe in ‘traditional family values’-- a conservative code word-- and they may identify with winners.”

This brain scientist’s insights into American politics first came into vogue during the George W. Bush era, when he pointed out that approaching voters as logical issue-weighing machines gave Republicans-- who employ the same marketing techniques that sell cars and timeshares-- a huge advantage.

And he thinks Democrats made that mistake again in 2016, though Lakoff-- like pollsters and much of America-- didn’t see Trump’s narrow Electoral College win coming.

“They failed to understand unconscious thought and moral worldviews” he wrote. “While hailing science in the case of climate change, they ignored science when it came to their own minds.”

Instead of building upon the progressive frame, Democrats unconsciously aided Trump.

“They kept running ads showing Trump forcefully expressing views that liberals found outrageous,” he wrote. “Trump supporters liked him for forcefully saying things that liberals found outrageous. They were ads paid for by the Clinton campaign that raised Trump’s profile with his potential supporters!”

So how to defeat a master of self-promotion like Trump?

Start by pointing out that Trump is the biggest popular vote loser ever to win the Electoral College.

“Don’t let anyone forget it,” Lakoff suggests. “Keep referring to Trump as the minority president, Mr. Minority and the overall Loser. Constant repetition, with discussion in the media and over social media, questions the legitimacy of the minority president to ignore the values of the majority.”

Trump’s unique status as the most unpopular man ever to enter the White House can chip away at his core “Strict Father” appeal, which explains why pointing it out irritates him so much.

“There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust,” Lakoff writes.

Trump’s conflicts of interests and their potential for corruption are also unprecedented in American history and any retreat from his promise to preserve Medicare must be framed as a catastrophic betrayal.

But Lakoff warns Democrats against “showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight” and urges them to instead to focus on reinforcing the values of the “American Majority” movement.

“The idea that must be brought across is empathy for those in your in-group, your town.”

Empathy is conservative Kryptonite.

But in order to use it effectively, progressives need to understand that the things that repulsed them most about Trump are what he used to bring out the conservatism in swing voters’ brains.

Yesterday, Trump's Art of the Deal ghost writer, Tony Schwartz, tweeted "Trump tweeting recklessly and inaccurately is not a political choice he is making, but rather a psychological compulsion." If that doesn't scare you, you're not think about it carefully enough.

This isn't funny; none of this is funny.