The Deadbeat Theory, an Occam's Razor Explanation of Donald Trump's Subservience to Putin

"Trump and Russia: Which conspiracy is it?" is the title of this cartoon. What if it's both?

by Gaius Publius

It's very hard to write about "Trump! Russia!" in today's environment, though I've tried. On the one hand, so many things may be true but can't really be proved, and on the other, so many things that may not be true at all are presumed true, that it's hard to find — and even harder to present — the actual evidenciary basis for the many allegations.

Is Trump's behavior "treacherous," as John Brennan, Obama's CIA director, recently wrote? That's quite a serious charge. Treachery means treason, the kind they hang you for.

Is Trump being blackmailed by Putin, as Nancy Pelosi has implied several times? That's quite a serious charge as well, though she won't commit to holding House hearings on the matter if she's elected speaker, which may suggest she doesn't believe the charge herself. But after all, if a president really were being blackmailed — by anyone — isn't it the constitutional duty of Congress to investigate and, if true, stop it? If she believed her words, why would she shirk her duty on such an important matter?

Is Trump an "agent of Russia" or a "Russian asset,"as any number of writers have asserted? This too is a serious charge, and puts us into a John LeCarré world of spies and double dealing.

Finally, as I've asked many times, is it possible there's more to this story than almost anyone is reporting? Could some (but not all) of what Democrats and the anti-Trump media are asserting be correct, while at the same time, some (but not all) of what pro-Trump partisans are saying is also true?

The obvious answer is, yes, of course it's possible. Far stranger things have happened in the world of spooks and government officials. After all, the CIA also had "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Either they blatantly lied — a possibility with any intelligence service — and served up "information" that Establishment consensus wanted served up, or "high confidence" doesn't mean what most people think it means. (Most people think it means "proof.")

George W. Bush, new-minted Hero of the Resistance, looking for Saddam's WMD, the ones our intelligence community had "high confidence" he possessed

And let's not forget, Resistance hero Robert Mueller is also the Bush FBI director who subverted (kinder souls say "bungled") the 2001 Anthrax Attack investigation when it looked like it was pointing in the wrong direction. "Wrong direction" means pointing to a domestic conspiracy that may have involved right-to-life religionists, an angle Mueller's FBI refused for eight years to pursue.

As a result he proved almost nothing. Mueller didn't even prove that the purported "lone gunman" in that attack, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide after he was finally accused, was even involved, just that his lab was.

Is it possible Mueller is handling the Trump-Russia investigation in the same way he handled that one — and, as before, working for Establishment players whose motives he's not disclosing? Or has he really transformed himself into the paragon of integrity, the shining knight in armor, that we now wish him to be?

What can we truly believe, independent of what we may want to believe, and what the voices all around us are shouting?

The Deadbeat Theory

Let's start here in our search for more solid ground, with a piece by Thom Hartmann. He writes that there are three prominent and plausible (if only remotely) theories that explain Trump's recent apparent subservience to Vladimir Putin. These are:

• The Manchurian Candidate theory
• The Wannabe Dictator theory
• The Deadbeat theory

Each theory has its adherents and logic, but for Hartmann's money, the third makes the most sense. I'll leave you to read the whole of his piece to see his presentation of the first two explanations (his titles are descriptive; the theories assert what you think they assert).

About the Deadbeat theory, Hartmann writes this:

We all know that Trump is both a terrible negotiator and a terrible businessman. Dozens of his companies have gone down in flames, thousands of small businesses and workers have been screwed out of money he owed them, and his bankruptcies are legendary.

If the American people didn’t seem to think this was a big deal, the American banks sure did. After Trump’s last bankruptcy, so far as press reports indicate, he could no longer borrow money at reasonable rates here in the U.S., and a real estate developer who can’t borrow money is rapidly out of business.

So Trump, as his son Eric tells it, turned away from U.S. banks and went to a number of Russian billionaires for his money. In 2014, when asked directly how he could have acquired $100 million in cash for new golf course acquisitions, Eric Trump famously said, “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

So, if President Putin were to order his own billionaires to get their money back out of Trump’s properties and refuse to give him any more, Trump could well end up broke.

Really broke.

As in, losing all his properties, from Mar-a-Lago to Trump Tower.

Imagine Trump in a world in which no human structure says "Trump" but his own mailbox. It's safe to say that aside from his family, or some of its members at least, what Trump prizes most in the world is money and the Trump Organization, a fact that makes Trump uniquely vulnerable to blackmail (including by Robert Mueller, who's investigating its finances).

After describing why "losing all his properties" may terrify Trump, Hartmann continues:

Trump isn’t afraid of being exposed as a lout or a racist; he’s afraid of being financially wiped out if Russian oligarchs pull out of Trump properties.

It’s why he’s even willing to take the risks and political hit by defying the Constitution and hanging onto the Trump Hotel in D.C.—he needs the money to keep his businesses afloat.

In 2016, Fortune magazine analyzed his federal public filings, and concluded that he’s both less wealthy than he says and appears, and that he regularly lies about it.

Occam’s razor dictates that, like with everything else in Trump’s entire life, this is all about money and its relationship to his own fragile self-image. If a few Russian oligarchs said, “Nyet,” he would suffer severe damage, both reputational and business-wise, and it may well be damage from which he couldn’t recover....

A man who depends on you for his financial lifeblood is a man more willing to give in around governmental and policy areas.

Now that Robert Mueller has, according to some reports, acquired access to Trump’s business records, all this may be coming out, which may explain why Trump seems so obsessed with, and frightened by, Mueller’s and the FBI’s “witch hunt.”

He concludes: "This is one of the few scenarios that explain pretty much everybody’s behavior within the Trump Crime Family, as well as the people in their immediate orbit."

It's true we're still hip deep in speculation, and speculation has been getting a very bad name lately, with statements like these — "We just watched a U.S. president acting on behalf of a hostile power" — being bandied about.

Still, Occam's Razor might allow us to restrict our thoughts to motives that, absent other evidence, make the most sense.

GP
 

The Empire Strikes Back-- Trumpanzee Sends Huckabee's Gross Daughter Out To Attack The Bushes

Well, to be fair... George I and George II started it, poking Señor T while he was being boo-ed and picketed in Hawaii on his way to prepared cheering crowds in... well, at least Manila. I'm sure by now you've heard about historian Mark Updegrove's new book, The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The "blowhard" description of Trumpanzee was all over the Internet on Saturday. Trump's populism has as much to do with their vision of America as... well, let's put it like this: Bush I admits in the book he voted for Hillary. Their views are way more in synch with the Clinton's than with Trump's. Peter Baker's NY Times piece yesterday was a news story, not a book review.

President Trump is not a favorite in the extended Bush household. Former President George Bush considers him a “blowhard,” only interested in feeding his own ego. Former President George W. Bush, his son, thinks Mr. Trump fans public anger and came to office without any understanding of the job.

And both worry that Mr. Trump has blown up a Republican Party that they spent two lifetimes building, a party that was once committed to removing boundaries to trade and immigration, promoting democracy and civil society and asserting a robust American leadership role in the world, according to an author who has interviewed them.

A new book on the two Bushes who served in the White House provides a glance at their apprehension over Mr. Trump’s rise to power and what it means for the country. The first book ever written with their cooperation about their relationship, it also opens a window into the only father-and-son tandem to hold the presidency since John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

In The Last Republicans, Mark K. Updegrove chronicles an era that feels almost dated in today’s reality-show politics, when the Republican establishment controlled the party and Washington, and when a single family could occupy the presidency and vice presidency for a combined 20 years.

Neither of the two Republican former presidents voted for Mr. Trump-- the father voted for Hillary Clinton and the son voted for “none of the above,” as he told Mr. Updegrove.

Indeed, at one point during the 2016 presidential campaign, the younger Mr. Bush confided to the author, “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.”

Trumpanzee went ape-shit, although at the point I was writing this he hadn't tweeted and just allowed the White House communications staff express his feelings about the Bushes. Weak tea though. They told CNN that the younger Bush's war in Iraq was "one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history," which it was but what does Trump know about American history? In a statement to the Washington Post, that cretinous monster daughter of Huckabee's who Trump uses as a mouthpiece, told The Hill that "The American people voted to elect an outsider who is capable of implementing real, positive, and needed change-- instead of a lifelong politician beholden to special interests. If they were interested in continuing decades of costly mistakes, another establishment politician more concerned with putting politics over people would have won."

Sarah Huckabee Sanders by Nancy Ohanian

Even Dubya Recognizes A Dangerous Charlatan When He Sees One! Trump's Stature

Sam Jammal had a fantastic idea about how to use George W. Bush's denunciation of Trumpism against Ed Royce, the rubber stamp Orange County incumbent whose seat he's contesting. And I think most any Democratic challenger could use the same idea. I know Sam well enough to know he wouldn't even mind.

So here's the full text of the speech that someone wrote for Bush to read yesterday. It was such a relief for Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin who was hired to give a right-wing perspective on the universe and spends all her time lately denouncing Señor Trumpanzee. Yesterday she blared, proudly, This is what a president sounds like! Yeah, yeah... "Former president George W. Bush gave a speech today-- a bookend, if you will, to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) address early in the week upon accepting the Liberty Medal. Bush spoke in a tone and with substance so different from what we have become acclimatized to hearing that his address has provoked a huge, bipartisan thumbs-up, as though the country collectively could say, 'Oh, that is what a president is supposed to sound like!'"

Bush surely had President Trump in mind when he addressed conspiracy theories, nativism, incivility and more, but I think it’s safe to say his intended audience was the moribund GOP. We have now seen the party he used to lead decline into passivity and pure partisanship, again and again enabling Trump rather than rallying to American principles and looking to the c0mmon good. We’ve seen Republicans eschew governance in favor of divisive sloganeering. One president like Trump is bad enough; the acceptance of his inhumanity by one of the major parties is a tragedy and national emergency.

...Every Republican who endorsed Trump, turns a blind eye to his unfitness, or excuses his heinous language and conduct should feel shame upon hearing those words.

Bush’s recommendation is simple but hardly simplistic: “We need to recall and recover our own identity. Americans have a great advantage: To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.” He’s talking to you, Republicans, who’ve forgotten what he rightly calls the American creed:

Our identity as a nation-- unlike many other nations-- is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.

There is nothing in his four basic recommendations-- hardening our defenses against external threats to democracy, maintaining U.S. leadership in the world, strengthening democratic citizenship and “call[ing] on the major institutions of our democracy, public and private, to consciously and urgently attend to the problem of declining trust”-- that Democrats of good faith should dispute. They’ll have differences in specifics (When should we intervene internationally? Which electoral reforms do we need?) but that is understandable and healthy.

What is critical is that Bush has identified precisely the issues that must be addressed if we are to stave off Trump and Trumpism. Democrats, including ex-presidents, would be foolish not to embrace Bush’s agenda and where possible work together. After all, we are all Americans who embrace the “ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence . . .  [and] the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution” as well as the commitment to equal rights and justice for all Americans. It’s the current president who doesn’t get it, but there is a solution (several, actually) for that as well.

Bush sees Trump as a threat to American democracy. Why do so many Republicans in Congress claim to not see that threat? Bush says "bigotry seems emboldened." How come he sees it but California congressional Republicans like Ed Royce, Darrell Issa, David Valadao, Mimi Walters, Steve Knight, Jeff Denham and Dana Rohrabacher don't. Why is that? Why?

UPDATE: Bannon Denigrates Bush-- California Republicans Cheer

Friday night, Bannon gave the keynote address at the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim. He depicted Bush as bumbling and inept, faulting him for presiding over a "destructive" presidency during his time in the White House. Bannon said Bush had embarrassed himself and didn’t know what he was talking about.

When Truth Falls Apart-- How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?

by Maria Bustillos

If I have recognized the spread in drug warnings and financial doublespeak, where the corporate use of language approaches the absurd, where the shell of a communicative form is used to foreclose communication, I have also recognized it in forms of poetry that deliberately push us to confront the contingency and craziness of our culture’s use and abuse of words.
-Ben Lerner, Contest of Words, Harper's, October 2012

The lunatic notion of a “post-truth” or “post-fact” society gained traction during the administration of George W. Bush, whose lackeys lied their heads off so spectacularly and for so long, with the aid of the effectively state-sponsored Fox News Network. Mocked as “truthiness” by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and soberly analyzed in various books, the key idea of the “post-truth” society was this: if a given public utterance had sufficient appeal-- emotional, political or otherwise-- its empirical truth was immaterial. What we can be persuaded to wish to believe, in other words, is as good as the truth. How else to explain the long currency of such whoppers as the connection between Iraq and 9/11, the likely cost and duration of the “necessary” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “the smoking gun that would be a mushroom cloud,” the lawfulness of torture, and of domestic surveillance, etc. ad nauseam?

The peculiar mendacity of that catastrophic presidency left us with worse problems than a bunch of lies to put straight and reflect on. There’s a broken trust to restore-- to the extent that it’s possible to replace toxic cynicism with healthy skepticism-- in media and in government.

In 2004,a decorated Vietnam War hero ran for the presidency. This was an inconvenient fact for George W. Bush, his draft-dodging preppie opponent. It was vital, then, for the Republicans backing him to find a way to tarnish John Kerry’s service record while still noisily maintaining their “respect for the troops,” whom they were in the process of sending to the Middle East to be blown to bits by the thousand. The Republicans succeeded in discrediting Kerry through a new type of propaganda that effectively destroyed the obvious and instinctive assumption that a battle-hardened veteran and pacifist-- and not the soft rich boy-- would be better qualified to lead the country out of war.

The story of Kerry’s treatment in the media in the 2004 campaign provides a clear illustration of the cleverness and novelty of the Republican attack against him. Many politicians have resorted to the same playbook in the years since. As we enter the home stretch of this substantially more ghastly election, a review of their strategy, which I will call dismediation, is in order.

Dismediation is a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels, like a computer virus that bricks the whole machine. Thus, for example,

• Information: John Kerry is a war hero who was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star;
• Misinformation: John Kerry was never wounded in the Vietnam War;
• Disinformation: John Kerry is a coward;
• Dismediation: ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ are disinterested sources of information about John Kerry, equivalent in integrity to any other source that might be presented on the evening news.

These four narratives were distributed simultaneously across various channels during the 2004 election, though only one of them (the first) is true. To begin with, there was some criticism of how readily Purple Hearts were handed out during the Vietnam war. Two of Kerry’s wounds didn’t require time off duty, though that doesn’t matter a bit: the rules governing the award are quite clear that even the slightest wound sustained in enemy combat qualifies for the medal. That’s how the misinformation that Kerry hadn’t been wounded was spread, perhaps unintentionally giving a biased impression of his service. Accusations of cowardice followed, and these were disinformation-- false information planted by partisans for Bush.

When he came home, Kerry became one of the best-known protestors against the Vietnam War. He testified in 1971, at the age of twenty-eight, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as a leader of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War:

In our opinion… there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom […] is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

(Thirty-eight years hence, he would chair the committee he addressed on that day.)

The portion of the electorate predisposed against dirty hippie pacifists was as eager to hear criticism of Kerry then as it would be in 2004, but by the time of his campaign, many were unaware of either Kerry’s bravery in battle or his anti-war activism. This relative ignorance gave Bush Republicans an opening. The Swift Boat group was financed by Bob J. Perry-- a rich Republican donor and associate of Karl Rove’s-- and real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Together with Houston lawyer and former Swift Boat commander John O’Neill and conservative author Jerome Corsi, they cobbled together a book full of whoppers called “Unfit for Command.”

They also hired the guys who took down Michael Dukakis to make TV commercials attacking Kerry’s service. Swift Boater William Schachte shamefully insinuated that Kerry had deliberately wounded himself in order to secure a quick discharge. By the time the Kerry campaign realized people were paying attention to the Swift Boaters, the damage was done. Kerry had risked his own life in combat to save others, but a circus troupe of charlatans had sown the requisite doubts in the American electorate.

“Only in an election year ruled by fiction,” wrote Times columnist Frank Rich, “could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.” The lasting harm of this unfortunate episode, however, was not to Kerry’s reputation or to his candidacy. It was that afterward, millions of minds were uncertain as to what really constitutes “news,” or “reporting,” or “fact-checking.” This state of uncertainty hasn’t ever been adequately addressed, let alone mended.

In other words, the problem with my Republican relatives isn’t what they think of Fox News; everybody knows it’s propagandistic. The real problem is what Fox News et al., over time, have made them think of NPR, or MSNBC, or the New York Times. The Swift Boat style of twisting the facts has poisoned the well of public discourse for a whole generation of American adults-- for all of us-- by persuading so many that the confected “news” peddled on Fox is more or less equivalent to that on any other channel.

Dismediation isn’t discourse. It doesn’t disinform, and it’s not quite propaganda, as that term has long been understood. Instead, dismediation seeks to break the systems of trust without which civilized society hasn’t got a chance. Disinformation, once it’s done telling its lie, is finished with you. Dismediation is looking to make you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again. Not on Fox, and not on NPR. It’s not that we can’t agree on what the facts are. It’s that we cannot agree on what counts as fact. The machinery of discourse is bricked. That’s why we can’t think together, talk together, or vote together.

The success of dismediation projects like Fox News, Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show set the stage for Donald Trump, a buffoon beyond the satires of Dr. Strangelove or Infinite Jest. Trump happened in part because some of my cousins are now literally incapable of identifying facts, let alone weighing them. They apparently still intend to vote for a man who describes himself as “a genius” and in the same breath proposes to commit literal war crimes, break treaties, and steal the resources of other nations.

Dismediation is hard to combat, as it distorts not the facts, but the means by which facts can be understood. It’s like trying to win a chess game when the board has been flung into the air and the pieces scattered; quite often the bewildered victim finds himself trying in vain still to play e5 Qxe5 or whatever.

It’s easier to see dismediation when it’s practiced abroad, because foreign blinders are different from our own. Adrian Chen wrote in the New Yorker of the Russian troll farms he has been studying since 2014--  outfits operating armies of sock-puppet social media accounts churning out an avalanche of fake posts in order to produce the appearance of pro-government grassroots movements. But the real point of the troll farms, Russian activists told Chen, isn’t to make anyone believe the trolls. “The real effect… was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.” The point is to prevent dissidents from finding one another, and to prevent any given individual from standing up and raising his voice.

There’s credible evidence that the Chinese government is engaging in similarly deceitful propagandistic practices on social media such as Weibo through its so-called “Fifty Cent Party.” A recent working paper published by Gary King, a social scientist at Harvard, estimates that the Chinese government fabricates in excess of 448 million “astroturf” posts annually (more than one million posts, every single day). “The goal of this massive secretive operation is… to regularly distract the public and change the subject,” King writes; the goal is to alter what constitutes “common knowledge.”

The Trump campaign is a would-be dismediation project almost certain to fail, simply because it was bound to hit the adamantine wall of his dishonesty and stupidity. He is so manifestly a con artist, a racist and an incompetent gross creepo that it’s nearly impossible to blur, confuse or fudge his true nature. All but the most willfully blind and/or deranged Republicans have therefore deserted him, and self-described conservatives find themselves, for the first time in years, actively questioning their own leadership. It’s become near impossible for Republicans to say to themselves, “Trump is only saying these false things for expediency’s sake, until he can get elected; after that, he’ll be fine.”

Trump is a black cloud with a silver lining. It’s so easy to see where the lies are. He is a grotesque, small-minded man unbelievably posing as the savior of the nation. The curtain has been drawn aside, and there he is, a sad little bullshitter, grabbling and pointing with his mean little hands into the camera, always at the camera.

The mammoth amount of available media in the internet age almost guarantees that we will see everything through the pinhole of our own worldview. We can so easily choose to experience only what we wish, and too often it’s the things we already agree with and believe. The walls of our gardens are grown very thick. What does “trust” mean in this new atmosphere? What will it mean, on November 9th?

“In theory,” wrote Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew (“the father of public relations”) in Propaganda (1928):

[E]very citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything… from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

That is to say, we choose not to investigate and reason out every question, but to trust authorities in whom to place our confidence to do so for us. It is an old vulnerability become newly dangerous, as the sources of information and disinformation have spread and multiplied.

Dismediation isn’t limited to politics. Business is a past master at it; Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool is particularly fine on that subject. More recently, Elizabeth Holmes proved herself a skilled dismediator, actively endangering people with faulty blood testing technology while ginning up a Silicon Valley fairytale around herself and her company, Theranos. It took government agencies and dedicated journalists who gave a shit about the truth to put a stop to her TED-talking baloney. What will you think, the next time a Silicon Valley triumphalist comes along bragging about “changing the world”?

The advent of Brexit in the United Kingdom, and of the presidential bid of Donald Trump-- two national campaigns characterized by the wholesale spread of disinformation in mass media-- resuscitated the concept of “post-truth” in a number of recent pieces. If anything good can be said to have come of this election, it may be that the Republican candidate has demolished what remains of the “post-truth” era by demonstrating the poverty and malignity of lying as a campaign strategy.

The most heartening comment on the election so far came from Wisconsin conservative Marybeth Glenn, who made her feelings limpidly clear in a seventeen-part tweetstorm, condensed here:

When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in. I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex.

Not only charges of sexism, but I defended @marcorubio during Go8, I fought in my state to stop the @ScottWalker recall, etc… Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out?

He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I --  and other female conservatives --  said you were & back down like cowards. Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed [us] to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation…

I’m sooo done. If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you.

I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc., You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door. And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines. Men who truly see women as lesser beings, & women without self-respect. & your “guiding faith” & “principles” will be attached to them as well. And when it’s all said and done, all you’ll have left is the party The Left always accused you of being. Scum.

Here is an opportunity to make our politics better and more honest. To repudiate dismediation, to promote nuance rather than dogma, and to find such goals and policies that all principled people can agree on and move forward. It was a great thing to be able to unite with @MBGlenn. I was so happy to be able to find some common ground at last. We agree about the need to respect women! And we can fight for that together. Who knows where this rapprochement might end? Because it’s not possible for dismediation to occur in an atmosphere of mutual respect among citizens, re-establishing that respect should be our first goal.

Contrary to conventional opinion, it’s neither necessary nor remotely okay to lie in order to participate in politics. You can be a passionate partisan, make the best case you can for your side; nothing wrong with that. But there is an incandescently bright line between making your best case, and saying things that you know to be untrue. The latter is no good, not in any cause, however just.

There’s a chance, for the first time in many years, of restoring at least the goal of consensus among people of varying politics. We should be able to distinguish between good-faith attempts to inform us-- partisan or otherwise-- and self-interested, lying charlatanism. If the above is any evidence, that process of healing has already begun.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles. This piece originally appeared in The Awl.

"Abortion Can No More Be Legislated Than Niagara Falls Can Be Dammed with a Spoon"

Former right-wing evangelical Frank Schaeffer confesses his sins (seriously)

by Gaius Publius

Another in our series, "They knew and they didn't care." The video above shows ex-evangelical minister Frank Schaeffer talking about the birth of the anti-choice movement and how it's responsible, among other things, for the presidency of George W. Bush. Schaeffer on that:

"We [the anti-choice part of the right-wing movement] created that audience — alienated, angry people convinced of their own victimhood. So, they became a majority while the mainstream media slept, and when everybody suddenly woke up to the fact was when George W. Bush was sitting in the White House as a totally unqualified crazy person who launched two wars we didn't need to be in. So the fallout had a direct ramification on American history."

The title quote —  "Abortion can no more be legislated than Niagara Falls can be dammed with a spoon" — comes after the four-minute mark, as Schaeffer says he's come to think of abortion as simply a fact of life, "like broken relationships, and abortion is no different ... part of the warp and woof of life, part of our mortality as a human being."

It's really a striking clip, both for the admission and for the language it's couched in. And yes, he admits he was in it for the money.

Schaeffer Knows What He Did

Schaeffer and his family are directly and personally responsible for the anti-choice movement in this country, and in this five-minute clip he sees unblinkingly — and profanely (this is not-safe audio if your boss is nearby) — what he, to his deep and passionate regret, helped do to the entire country.

It's not a surprise, this confession, because he's said many of these things before. But it's on the level of Lee Atwater's deathbed regret for his Willie Horton-ization of Republican politics. Schaeffer and his family had that great an impact on the political landscape of, let's face it, almost the length of our lives.

The interviewer is Samantha Bee, though she makes no appearance. Also, it really is a profane clip. Schaeffer is both colorful, a delightful speaker, and effective. Headset warning.

GP
 

How Oil Fuels ISIS

ISIS acts like a state that owns an oil company. Notice, at the bottom right, that the non-ISIS market for ISIS oil is local, meaning civilians, and also includes anti-ISIS rebels in Syria and Iraq (click to enlarge; source).

by Gaius Publius

ISIS is a complex entity, in part a state and in part a jihadist insurgency. To the extent that they're a state, they hold territory and govern (including, ironically, offering free government-provided health care). Here's a look at ISIS-held territory, including the location of oil fields and refineries within that territory.

ISIS-held and -supported territory in red; anti-ISIS territory in blue. Note that even the rebels are customers of ISIS oil (click to enlarge; source).

The U.S. and its allies are in a bind. ISIS finances its operations from its oil revenue. Most of its oil isn't sold on the international market, but the local one. That is, millions of people in the region depend on ISIS oil for their energy needs, even the anti-ISIS rebels in Syria. If those oil fields and refineries were bombed or otherwise put out of commission, the disruption to civilians in the region would be enormous. This likely accounts for the fact that of the more than 10,000 air strikes against ISIS by the U.S.-led coalition, fewer than 200 have targeted its oil infrastructure.

The story comes from the Financial Times. Only part is below, but it's all fascinating:

Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists

Erika Solomon in Beirut, Guy Chazan and Sam Jones in London

Jihadis’ oil operation forces even their enemies to trade with them

On the outskirts of al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria, with warplanes flying overhead, a line of trucks stretches for 6km. Some drivers wait for a month to fill up with crude.

Falafel stalls and tea shops have sprung up to cater to the drivers, such is the demand for oil. Traders sometimes leave their trucks unguarded for weeks, waiting for their turn.

This is the land of Isis, the jihadi organisation in control of swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory. The trade in oil has been declared a prime target by the international military coalition fighting the group. And yet it goes on, undisturbed.

Oil is the black gold that funds Isis’ black flag — it fuels its war machine, provides electricity and gives the fanatical jihadis critical leverage against their neighbours.

But more than a year after US President Barack Obama launched an international coalition to fight Isis, the bustling trade at al-Omar and at least eight other fields has come to symbolise the dilemma the campaign faces: how to bring down the “caliphate” without destabilising the life of the estimated 10m civilians in areas under Isis control, and punishing the west’s allies?

The resilience of Isis, and the weakness of the US-led campaign, have given Russia a pretext to launch its own, bold intervention in Syria.

Despite all these efforts, dozens of interviews with Syrian traders and oil engineers as well as western intelligence officials and oil experts reveal a sprawling operation almost akin to a state oil company that has grown in size and expertise despite international attempts to destroy it. ...

Estimates by local traders and engineers put crude production in Isis-held territory at about 34,000-40,000 bpd. The oil is sold at the wellhead for between $20 and $45 a barrel, earning the militants an average of $1.5m a day.

About selling to their enemies in Syria:

“It’s a situation that makes you laugh and cry,” said one Syrian rebel commander in Aleppo, who buys diesel from Isis areas even as his forces fight the group on the front lines. “But we have no other choice, and we are a poor man’s revolution. Is anyone else offering to give us fuel?”

It's both a complicated situation and a lucrative one (my emphasis):

When [ISIS] pushed through northern Iraq and took over Mosul, Isis also seized the Ajil and Allas fields in north-eastern Iraq’s Kirkuk province. The very day of its takeover, locals say, militants secured the fields and engineers were sent in to begin operations and ship the oil to market.

“They were ready, they had people there in charge of the financial side, they had technicians that adjusted the filling and storage process,” said a local sheikh from the town of Hawija, near Kirkuk. “They brought hundreds of trucks in from Kirkuk and Mosul and they started to extract the oil and export it.” An average of 150 trucks, he added, were filled daily, with each containing about $10,000-worth of oil. Isis lost the fields to the Iraqi army in April but made an estimated $450m from them in the 10 months it controlled the area.

While al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network, depended on donations from wealthy foreign sponsors, Isis has derived its financial strength from its status as monopoly producer of an essential commodity consumed in vast quantities throughout the area it controls. Even without being able to export, it can thrive because it has a huge captive market in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, diesel and petrol produced in Isis areas are not only consumed in territory the group controls but in areas that are technically at war with it, such as Syria’s rebel-held north: the region is dependent on the jihadis’ fuel for its survival. Hospitals, shops, tractors and machinery used to pull victims out of rubble run on generators that are powered by Isis oil.

“At any moment, the diesel can be cut. No diesel — Isis knows our life is completely dead,” says one oil trader who comes from rebel-held Aleppo each week to buy fuel and spoke to the Financial Times by telephone.

The article details well the way the oil industry is managed. ISIS, unlike a number of other jihadist groups, has a professional core and it shows. ISIS, after all, is led by a ex-Iraqi army officers, the people L. Paul Bremer fired almost as soon as he took office as Bush's "proconsul" in Iraq:

As the top civilian administrator of the former Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer was permitted to rule by decree. Among his first and most notable decrees were Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1, which banned the Ba'ath party in all forms[14] and Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2 dismantled the Iraqi Army.[15]

In a very real sense, ISIS is Bush's and Bremer's direct creation.

How will this end? The authors aren't sure:

Isis’ luck with oil may not last. Coalition bombs, the Russian intervention and low oil prices could put pressure on revenues. The biggest threat to Isis’ production so far, however, has been the depletion of Syria’s ageing oilfields. It does not have the technology of major foreign companies to counteract what locals describe as a slow drop in production. Isis’ need for fuel for its military operations means there is also less oil to sell in the market.

For now, though, in Isis-controlled territory, the jihadis control the supply and there is no shortage of demand. “Everyone here needs diesel: for water, for farming, for hospitals, for offices. If diesel is cut off, there is no life here,” says a businessman who works near Aleppo. “Isis knows this [oil] is a winning card.”

The situation in Iraq and Syria isn't stable, but it isn't unstable either. Dismantling ISIS is going to be a tough nut to crack. Radicalizing a great many more of the region's residents is a distinct possibility if Western and Russian attacks increase.

A Nation Free of Oil

One final thought. Have you ever wondered what the nation and our foreign policy would be like today if Jimmy Carter had won in 1980, the solar panels had stayed on the roof of the White House, renewable energy production had thrived, and the nation, by determined effort, were freed of all dependence on fossil fuel?

That world, with the possibility of leisurely conversion from carbon, is gone. But for a time in the 1970s the door was wide open. If a certain Presidential candidate hadn't cut a deal with a certain hostage-holding government, we might even have walked through it. How much better would our lives be today, if we were a nation free of oil?

GP

Barbara Bush Was Completely Right That The Country Doesn't Want Another Bush In The White House

Let's talk about a service the Trump campaign is doing for America. Thanks to Obama and Pelosi, Bush and Cheney were never held accountable for their 8 years of mayhem. And thanks to Trump-- or, more accurately, thanks to the Trump campaign's jihad against Jeb-- the Bush-Cheney responsibility for 9/11 and then destabilizing the Middle East by attacking Iraq under false pretenses is again being discussed by the American people. I'm sure you've noticed. We touched on it over the weekend to illustrate how a ruthless predator like Trump can force a sad patsy like Jeb to commit suicide by pressing the right buttons. Early this morning, Peter Beinart, writing for The Atlantic, made the devastating case that "Bush didn't do all he could to prevent the attack-- and it’s time Republicans confronted that fact"... and that the unsavory Trump is doing the right thing by bringing it up, even if for the wrong reasons. Beinart called it "an ugly truth," in contrast to the ugly untruths we've come to expect from the Trumpish mouth-- and noted that "politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments 'pathetic.' Ben Carson dubbed them 'ridiculous.'... and that the reporter who had asked Trump the question said, 'Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that.'" But, as Beinart said, "Oh yes, you can."

There’s no way of knowing for sure if Bush could have stopped the September 11 attacks. But that’s not the right question. The right question is: Did Bush do everything he could reasonably have to stop them, given what he knew at the time? And he didn’t. It’s not even close.

When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke both warned its incoming officials that Al Qaeda represented a grave threat. During a transition briefing early that month at Blair House, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Tenet and his deputy James Pavitt listed Osama Bin Laden as one of America’s three most serious national-security challenges. That same month, Clarke presented National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice with a plan he had been working on since Al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole the previous October. It called for freezing the network’s assets, closing affiliated charities, funneling money to the governments of Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Yemen to fight Al Qaeda cells in their country, initiating air strikes and covert operations against Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, and dramatically increasing aid to the Northern Alliance, which was battling Al Qaeda and the Taliban there.

But both Clarke and Tenet grew deeply frustrated by the way top Bush officials responded. Clarke recounts that when he briefed Rice about Al Qaeda, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.” On January 25, Clarke sent Rice a memo declaring that, “we urgently need…a Principals [Cabinet] level review on the al Qida [sic] network.” Instead, Clarke got a sub-cabinet, Deputies level, meeting in April, two months after the one on Iraq.

When that April meeting finally occurred, according to Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz objected that “I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.” Clarke responded that, “We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States.” To which Wolfowitz replied, “Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example.”

By early summer, Clarke was so despondent that he asked to be reassigned. “This administration,” he later testified, “didn’t either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem. And I thought, if the administration doesn’t believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there’s an urgent problem and if it’s unprepared to act as though there’s an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job.” In July, the Deputies Committee finally agreed to schedule a Principals level meeting on Clarke’s plan. But the schedule for July was already full, and in August too many Cabinet members were on vacation, so the meeting was set for September.

During that same time period, the CIA was raising alarms too... But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, “the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.”



...The warnings continued. On July 11, the CIA sent word to the White House that a Chechen with links to Al Qaeda had warned that something big was coming. On July 24, the Daily Brief said the expected Al Qaeda attack had been postponed but was still being planned. Finally, on August 6, the CIA titled its Daily Brief: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US.” The briefing didn’t mention a specific date or target, but it did mention the possibility of attack in New York and mentioned that the terrorists might hijack airplanes. In Angler, Barton Gellman notes that it was the 36th time the CIA had raised Al Qaeda with President Bush since he took office... On the morning of September 11, 2001, Clarke’s anti-Al Qaeda plan was sitting on Bush’s desk, awaiting his signature. It was the ninth National Security Presidential Directive of his presidency.

...When Donald Trump hurls insults at his opponents, respectable people generally roll their eyes. But it is precisely Trump’s refusal to be respectable that helps him spark debates that elites would rather avoid. And sometimes, those debates are important to have.

Given that George W. Bush’s advisors still dominate the Republican foreign-policy establishment-- an establishment that has not broken with his ideological legacy in any fundamental way-- his record both before and after 9/11 remains relevant to the terrorism debate today. For many years now, that foreign-policy establishment has insisted that questioning Bush’s failure to stop the September 11 attacks constitutes an outrageous slur. That’s why Fleischer is now calling Trump a “truther.” He’s purposely blurring the line between accusing Bush of having orchestrated the attacks and accusing Bush of having been insufficiently vigilant in trying to stop them. But Bush was insufficiently vigilant. The evidence is overwhelming.

If Jeb’s loyalty to his brother makes it impossible for him to confront that, fine. But he has no right to demand that the rest of the public avert its eyes.

Maybe it's more than Jeb's blind loyalty in play here, though. David Sirota, writing for today's International Business Times noted the real irony about Jeb's laughable assertion that his brother "kept us safe." Jeb himself, in his role as Governor of Florida didn't keep us safe, in fact, quite the contrary. "Many of the 9/11 hijackers were able to obtain Florida driver’s licenses or identification cards-- and train freely in the state-- while Jeb Bush was governor." Jeb, of course is trying to pass the buck and blame his subordinates.

While Jeb Bush has called Trump’s criticism “pathetic,” the immigration policies of Bush’s gubernatorial administration were under the microscope in 2001 when law enforcement officials acknowledged that Florida had issued driver’s licenses or state identification cards to 12 of the hijackers, all of whom had come to the United States on visas. The St. Petersburg Times reported that at the time of the attack there was a warrant in Florida to apprehend one of the lead hijackers, Mohammed Atta, but “the warrant for Atta's arrest was ignored.” A national conservative organization pushing tougher immigration laws soon criticized Bush for his unwillingness to support what the group said was legislation necessary to stop terrorism.

...In the days after the 2001 attacks, news broke that most of the 9/11 hijackers carried driver’s licenses or identification cards issued by Florida’s department of motor vehicles-- an agency controlled by Bush and the other statewide elected officials who comprise the Florida Cabinet. Some of the licenses and ID cards were issued by the state while Bush was governor. Some of the hijackers trained for the attacks at Flight Safety International in Vero Beach, Florida. Local newspapers said the Florida licenses played a pivotal role in helping the hijackers conduct business in the United States.

“Terrorists known to have Florida licenses or identification cards made more than a dozen trips total to driver's license offices in the state,” the St. Petersburg Times reported “That's how often the terrorists willingly called themselves to the attention of the state, either to acquire a license or to update their address, both of which might have helped them rent cars or board planes without arousing suspicion.”

Mohammed Atta lived in Delray Beach and rented an airplane. He had been stopped a few months before 9/11 by Florida law enforcement officials, and was told to appear in court the next month. However, he was not arrested and, the Times wrote, “deputies never learned that Atta reportedly was on a U.S. government ‘watch list’ of people tied to terrorist activity.” The newspaper also noted that while Atta tried and failed to get a driver’s license at one Florida facility, he was able to get one later at another facility.

Another hijacker, one of several aboard the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon, was stopped for a traffic violation in Arlington, Virginia, days before the attack and had a Florida driver’s license, according to CNN.

Others bided their time in Florida; the Palm Beach Post reported that “at least seven and possibly nine of the hijackers lived in Delray Beach in the months leading up to the attack” and “three others lived in Boynton Beach.” Several also looked into renting crop duster planes-- officials believed they may have been aiming to use them to drop chemicals, according to news station WPBF.

“Gov. Jeb Bush has ordered a ‘top-to-bottom’ review of all state security measures, including Florida's licensing laws,” the St. Petersburg Times wrote in an editorial just after the attacks. “That so many of the terrorists obtained IDs and flight instruction here was not a coincidence.” Noting that the majority of hijackers “were able to obtain state driver's licenses and identification that enabled them to nestle within the fabric of society,” the newspaper declared: “Alarm bells should have gone off but never did. We can no longer afford these kind of security lapses.”

Bush signed an executive order in October 2001 for foreigners to receive only 30-day temporary driving permits while police investigate their identification, and he called for the regulation of flight schools to be reviewed.

"The world has changed and we're going to respond to that change," Bush told the Tampa Bay Times that month, as he accepted a report on the state's readiness to prevent terrorism.

But now Jeb is trying to raise money by attacking Trump over the issue! "If you believe as I do," his campaign wrote in an e-mail, "that my brother kept this country safe and strong after those horrific attacks, then I need you to donate $5 and fight back against Donald Trump." Neither his nor his brother's policies did anything but throw out a welcoming mat to the 9/11 terrorists.

What a terrible time for Jeb's campaign for Truth, the SONY movie about how Dan Rather and producer Mary Maples were fired for reporting the truth about George W. Bush's shady record in the Texas Air National Guard, to get released! I hope everyone goes to see it.

What Drove The Republican Party Base Insane? (Spoiler: It Was More Than Just Fox And Hate Talk Radio)

This morning's first post-- based primarily on the work of Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson conflating today's off-the-rails Republican extremists with the post Civil War secessionist Democratic extremists of 1879-- is one of the most chilling ever at this blog. If you missed it, I heartily recommend you go back and read it right now. It will certainly put into context the GOP's hallucinatory dogma of paranoia and disorientation, something that goes beyond the silly Trump (and Carson) phenomena just to the heart of the neo-fascist train the Republican Party is about to unleash in the person of Ted Cruz, likely the real reason Reince Priebus was moaning last week that the party he presides over is "cooked" as a national party.

In a revelatory post at Salon Sunday Chauncey DeVega-- drawing brilliantly on the work of German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss (1877-1973), who was the dude, by the way, who laid the ground for Godwin's Law in 1951 with his Reductio ad Hitlerum-- does a deep dive about what's become of the GOP's "conservative" grounding and ability to handle actual analytic thinking. Today "the power and appeal of the Republican Party," he writes, "lies in how its consultants and media accomplices have created a highly entertaining and confusing type of absurdist political theater. While wealth and income inequality are central to America’s political polarization and dysfunction, the alternate reality cultivated by political leaders and right-wing media has a heavy impact on a political culture where broken politics is not just an aberration or outlier, but rather the norm." This is about to get very scary.

Movement conservatism is compelling for so many people because of its visceral emotional appeal, and how the mindsets of conservative authoritarians are oriented toward accepting a Manichaean, binary, fear-centered, and dominance-oriented perspective of the world.

Moreover, movement conservatism is obsessed with protecting “real America.” This functions both as salvation and as something at risk by “liberals,” “progressives,” people of color, immigrants, gays, or whatever other group is viewed as a threat to the status quo of the “good old days.” Alas, this “real America” never truly existed.

Nevertheless, this illusory world must be protected at all costs because it is central to the “politics of disorientation,” a vaudevillian and spectacular political belief system that today’s conservatism uses to make sense of the world.

The politics of disorientation has several elements:

Apocalypticism: Historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously in his seminal work The Paranoid Style in American Politics, noted how conservatives, even in the 1950s and 1960s, were creating a cult-like political system that prized orthodoxy over critical thought, alternative evidence, or empirical reality. This is the shadow under which the politics of disorientation operates for movement conservatives. On this point, historian Robert Toplin explains at the History News Network how:

Individuals who seek a broader understanding of the present political standoff in Washington may find Hofstadter’s judgments thought-provoking.

Richard Hofstadter recognized that evangelical leaders were playing a significant role in right-wing movements of his time, but he noticed that a “fundamentalist” style of mind was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. It affected opinions about secular affairs, especially political battles. Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do.

Spectacle: The culture of illusion and distraction, wherein entertainment is a stand-in for full and authentic human experiences, enables the Reality TV-esque popularity of demagogues like Donald Trump, and the litany of ridiculous policy positions-- again divorced from empirical fact or reality-- offered by the leading Republican candidates. Here, Fox News, a “news” operation that has made right-wing talking points interchangeable with “facts,” represents the culture of illusion in full operation. That Fox News is America’s highest rated “news station” and actually has the most ignorant and uninformed viewership of any major news media outlet, signals to how entertainment is confused with substance in the culture of illusion and distraction. The masses are asses in such a system, not because such behavior is “natural,” but because such behavior is normalized and encouraged.

The right-wing media is one of the most effective propaganda operations in modern history.

Lies and Deception: The Right-wing media, the elites in the Republican Party, and its various interest groups, are engaged in a systematic campaign of deception toward the American people. This is philosopher Leo Strauss’s theories on truth and leadership in action.

As explained by political writer Jim Lobe:

…Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical-- divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right-- the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,”The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right (St. Martin’s 1999).

Movement conservatives, and Republican voters, en masse, are utterly confused about the nature of reality, and respond with rage and anger when confronted by facts-- a version of the Dunning-Krueger effect, in which where people are ignorant but do not have the expertise or awareness even to know just how ignorant they are-- because they have been systematically misled.

A hallucinatory ideology. This is a dangerous system of belief wherein people are unmoored from reality and embrace distorted views of the world and the people around them, often driven by stereotypes or other types of hatred, which then works to legitimate destructive behavior.

Authoritarian political attitudes are on the increase in the United States. This trend is especially prominent among conservatives. Authoritarianism, with its intolerance, appeals to violence, and eliminationist rhetoric about “liberals,” “progressives,” and any type of “Other,” are fixtures and habits of the right-wing media and conservative political elites.

Hallucinatory ideology helps to create the intractability and hostility to political compromise and good governance that form the brand name of conservatism and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama.

Thus we find ourselves. And the question-- one that has lingered over American politics since the election of a Black and Democratic president drove movement conservatives to mouth-frothing derangement in 2008 and 2012-- still remains: Will normal politics on display in last week’s Democratic debate be able to defeat the madness and insanity of the Republican Party in November of 2016?

Or will a Republican win the White House, not because they are serious people with serious thoughts about how best to serve the Common Good, but rather because they are demagogues, more captivating than their Democratic rivals? The latter is a distinct possibility, as the politics of disorientation are a difficult foe for the rational and the reasonable to battle and overcome.

Late today, news broke from Denver that the former Republican president, George W. Bush detests the junior senator from his state, Ted Cruz, a neo-fascist who is also a Republican. Cruz worked for Bush when he was president but that didn't stop him from telling a roomful of rich Jeb donors yesterday that "I just don't like the guy."

Bush took a harsh view of Cruz’s apparent alliance with Trump, who stood with the senator at a Capitol Hill rally last month in opposition to the Iran deal. While Trump, the current GOP poll leaders, has attacked most of his competitors in the 2016 field, he has avoided criticizing Cruz.

One donor, paraphrasing the former president’s comment in response to a broad question about how he viewed the primary race and the other Republican candidates, said: "He said he found it ‘opportunistic’ that Cruz was sucking up to Trump and just expecting all of his support to come to him in the end," that donor added.

George W. Bush is well acquainted with his home-state senator, who served as a domestic policy adviser on his 2000 campaign before rising to national prominence by distancing himself from-- and often going out of his way to antagonize-- the GOP establishment. In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling "bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements."

While Jeb Bush’s campaign is spending far more time of late pushing out information that contrasts favorably with Rubio, his oldest brother seemed to see Cruz as the biggest threat in the end. According to several donors, the former president said not to doubt Cruz’s strength.

"He said he thought Cruz was going to be a pretty formidable candidate against Jeb, especially in Texas and across the South," a donor said.

...Bush also cast Cruz’s candidacy as an exercise in personal gain, not service. "He sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons," a donor said. "He's frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington."

It well may come down to a battle between GOP over-confidence and wretched, self-defeating Democratic Party leadership, but, unless Bernie Sanders figures out a way to overcome the Clinton/Wall Street money machine, it will certainly come down to another nauseating lesser-of-two-evils election that will change nothing for the country.