Is Trump Re-Sparking Anti-Semitism Among American Evangelicals?

On Thursday, John Pavlovitz had some responses to people who say "you've gotten too political?" Know anyone like that? Pav: There are phrases you hear so much, they start to become white noise:

• “You’re too political.”
• “You’re too angry.”
• “You’re too partisan.”

He's been a registered Independent for thirty years and growing up he was "taught to avoid talking about politics and religion in mixed company, and made it a point never to vilify groups en masse or to demonize individuals in leadership outright whenever speaking about the events of the day. Even in the most challenging times," he continued, "I always lived and spoke with the assumption that most people were good, that the majority of Americans would default to decency over party,  and that our systems of checks and balances would keep us from veering too far into violent extremism. I always believed that the center would hold." Waiting for the "but." Hang in there.

In my twenty-five as a local church pastor, I always did my best to keep matters of politics at arm’s length, for fear of alienating the people in my care. I was careful to stay safely in the center, never choosing sides, always playing devil’s advocate-- which turns out to be a really lousy position for a minister. That middle place can actually be the spot where you lose your soul. You can think you’re hearing all perspectives-- when you’re really sitting on the fence of cowardice. It’s a place privilege anesthetizes you into neutrality and silence.

As I began writing publicly, I kept things similarly vague. In the first four years of the blog (prior to the 2016 Presidential campaign), I never singled out a politician by name or mentioned a political party in my writing. “If you do that” a good friend cautioned me, “you’ll eliminate half your prospective audience.”

Since 2016, it’s become clear that these are different times.

• They necessitate specificity.
• They demand clarity.
• They call for authenticity.

I believe this President, emboldened by this version of the Republican Party and a fully politicized Evangelical Church-- is doing irreparable and continual harm to our rule of law, our standards of decency, our environment, our personal liberties, our elections, our people, and our standing in the world.

I see this Administration as an unprecedented betrayal of the freedoms and systems we all hold dear. I believe there has been a wholesale soul-selling of Republican politicians and Conservative Christian leaders; a historic power grab the likes of which we’ve never seen in this country.

That, along with the increasing silence of many of my white, moderate Christian friends, has left me feeling more burdened than ever to speak explicitly and repeatedly; to leverage my platform and my newsfeed and my voice on behalf of a nation and Church that have lost the plot.

That’s not going to change.

Because of the volume and the relentlessness of this President’s cruelty-- there must be a similarly passionate and compassionate response.

Because every day we are bombarded with a new real or manufactured urgency-- we need to step in again with facts and truth to combat it.

Because each morning a different attack comes: on migrants or meal vouchers or national parks or transgender soldiers or Jewish Americans or journalists or shooting victims-- then each morning there must be those of us who unequivocally oppose it all.

As long as this man and his cadre of sycophants continues to shun their responsibility and horde wealth and preach fear and prey upon the vulnerable and serve only half of their constituents and use religion as a weapon-- I’m going to continue to say everything.

You’re free to label it “too political,” but I know that’s simply a term people use when someone else’s boldness conflicts with their comfort, challenges their prejudices, calls out their malevolence, and rattles their privilege.

If this clarity and directness offends you or you feel I’ve grown too angry or too political, you’re free to mute or unfriend me, to stop reading me or stop inviting me to dinner or talking to me at the bus stop. Social media is optional and my page is not a Democracy-- though I’m working to make sure we continue to live in one.

I’m not going to apologize for saying what I believe needs to be said, because I think the people who are threatened by this Administration are worth it. It’s really that simple.

Silence in turbulent times is a luxury that privilege affords.

I believe the greatest responsibility people of morality, faith, and conscience have, is to leverage that privilege for the common good.

I want to look back at the end of my life and know that I did all I could to protect diversity, equality, and justice.

• You think I’ve gotten too loud.
I believe you’ve grown frighteningly quiet.

• You believe I’m too opinionated.
I think you’re still trying to straddle the fence.

• You say I’ve gotten too political.
I say I’ve become more human.

Jewish Americans? Why throw us in there? Don't Evangelical Christians and Republicans love Jews? Sorry but... not so much. Jews from Europe like my family looked for refuge in America, primarily from Germans, from Eastern European fascists and from Russians. If they made it to America, it may have taken a generation or two but they've largely been integrated and accepted. Mostly. Evangelicals have always been mistrustful and filled with animosity towards Jews; they just kept it under wraps in recent decades, at least more than they are now, as Julie Zauzmer reported for the Washington Post Friday: How Antisemitic Beliefs Have Taken Hold Among Some Evangelical Christians

Some evangelical true believers have come to believe that the Tsar Trump "is surrounded by a Zionist environment with completely different values from Christians. It’s kabbalist. It’s Talmudic values. Not the word of God. In other words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Why do we have pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ values, and we do not have more freedom to protect our faith? We are persecuted now... [Jews] say, 'We’ve got America. We control America.'" That’s what these Trump voters think they know.

It’s an anti-Semitic viewpoint shared by a number of evangelical Christians across the country. The relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught for almost 2,000 years since the death of Jesus. Today, with a president who levels accusations about Jews and who encourages his fans to mistrust the mainstream media, a growing number of evangelicals are turning to the Internet for information and finding anti-Jewish beliefs there.

Christians take their cues for what to think about Jews from many sources. They include the long history of evangelicals’ support for the state of Israel and Trump, who this week declared that Jews who vote for Democrats-- meaning more than 70 percent of all Jews in the United States-- are “disloyal.”

In churches across America, evangelicals say they don’t believe they can get unbiased facts from any traditional news outlet that Trump has branded “fake news” (though many are fans of Fox News). They watch TV networks other than Fox and read major news websites but don’t trust them. Instead, they seek news from alternative websites and YouTube videos in which fiery pastors decry Jewish influence.

Pastors are aware of the conspiracy theories floating among their congregants, including a small number of virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic beliefs that some Christians interviewed by the Washington Post this summer professed.

But leaders can be unwilling to address these beliefs head-on. After a churchgoing evangelical Christian was charged with killing a Jewish woman at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., this year-- an act officials say he prefaced with a declaration including both anti-Semitic tropes from the Internet and Christian theology from church-- some pastors called for a national conversation about how evangelical pastors can make clear that such beliefs aren’t acceptable in their pews.

That doesn’t sit well with many evangelical pastors’ insistence that their job is to preach the Bible, not stray into current events.

...Historically, evangelicals have thought of themselves as very good friends of the Jews, not as anti-Semites. The two faiths share the Old Testament and basic watchwords of tolerance such as loving your neighbor as yourself. Evangelicals often think fondly of Jews as their religious forebears-- after all, Christ’s early followers were Jews of 2,000 years ago-- even if they think Jews are missing the crucial Jesus part of the story. Major evangelical publications regularly denounce anti-Semitism as evil, in the strongest terms.

And evangelicals tend to fiercely defend and embrace the state of Israel, a Jewish nation, because of its central role in their own faith. The nation is the site of Christian holy spots, including the places where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and resurrected. Certain interpretations of Revelation say that Jewish presence in Israel is important for Christians, because it will take the homecoming of Jews to the land of Israel to bring about the return of the Messiah.

But Christian theology has also gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism for centuries, dating back long before Martin Luther. To this day, some Christians believe that the Jews killed Jesus and that modern Jews should bear the guilt.

“There are plenty of evangelicals who have views about Jewish power, who assume Jews are controlling things. Jerry Falwell [Sr.] joked about how Jews could make more money,” said Daniel Hummel, a historian at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin who recently published a book about evangelicals and Jews.

Hummel described the deep-rooted anti-Semitic beliefs among some evangelicals as both cultural and theological, with the cultural beliefs coming from their conservative neighbors and the theological beliefs dating to early Christianity, when Christians first started casting themselves as the new chosen people replacing the Jews.



“Some associations in certain conservative areas, with Jews being liberal, cosmopolitan, international and that being a threat to American Christian identity: You’re going to find those views, weirdly, right alongside expressing support for Israel,” Hummel said. “Someone like that would be vaguely or even strongly anti-Semitic but also pro-Israel.”

And politically, evangelicals find themselves sharing common cause with right-wing anti-Semites. They might have little else in common, but both groups are enthusiastic supporters of Trump. And Trump, who strives to court that evangelical fandom, has flirted with anti-Semitism before this week. During his campaign, he retweeted and defended an image from a white supremacist website, showing Hillary Clinton’s face over a pile of money and a six-pointed Jewish star. He famously said that the demonstrators who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville included “very fine people.”

Deborah Lipstadt, a historian who is one of the foremost researchers on anti-Semitism, said she has noticed that politically conservative talking points echo the language common to anti-Semites much more often. She pointed to Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” 12 times.

“This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community,” Hawley said, referring not to Jews but to liberal elites.

“I’m sure most of the people who appeared there would say, ‘I’m a good friend of Jews,’ and they probably are,” Lipstadt said. “But if you took out the word ‘cosmopolitan’ and put in the word ‘Jew’-- it sounds like a traditional anti-Semitic trope… It’s the kind of thing that will attract the anti-Semites.

At its root, this trope relies on a mistrust of major institutions, and a suspicion that Jews are manipulating them. Some of this attitude, including skepticism of big government, has always been part of the American conservative mind-set, Lipstadt noted. But some of it is new, including increased hostility toward big business on the part of some conservative populists, in contrast to the old Republican Party embrace of commerce.

“There’s a theory that’s out and about, about the manipulation of news, fake news. And how you can’t trust judges. And you can’t trust big pharma, that’s why we shouldn’t be vaccinated… These kind of conspiracy theories [about manipulating institutions], for centuries, are just so connected to anti-Semitism that it’s hard to just ignore,” Lipstadt said. “It’s hard to say this is just by chance.”




Evangelicals are not inherently anti-Semitic, she noted. But they tend to share these conservative suspicions of the news media and of elites, and to view themselves as the victims of the elites-- a worldview that predisposes some to align themselves with anti-Semites.

Some online video-makers who espouse anti-Semitism do so with an openly Christian imprimatur.

Aryeh Tuchman, the associate director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, points to several YouTube channels where pastors promote a mix of Christian theology and anti-Jewish animus.

TruNews, a nightly newscast with more than 18 million views on YouTube, bills its purpose “to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream media.” Jews and Israel are a constant target for Rick Wiles, the Florida pastor who runs the show.

In the past month alone, Wiles has posited that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might not have died but instead been spirited away to a safe house in Israel; listed the names of “Hollywood Jews” who produced the pulled-from-theaters satirical movie “The Hunt” and suggested that they actually want to hunt and kill white Christians; called the non-Jewish billionaire “Rabbi Warren Buffett"; said the government could take away guns from anyone who criticizes Israel; referred to Ivanka Trump, who is Jewish, as “Yael Kushner"; and more.

Steven Anderson, the pastor of a Baptist church in Arizona who caused outrage during the Obama administration by saying he was praying for the president’s death, runs a YouTube channel with more than 62 million views. In sermons online, he claims, “The Jews believe that it’s okay for them to steal from Gentiles"; says that Jews and gay people run Hollywood; and emphasizes that Jews killed Jesus and are not God’s chosen people.

Tuchman said he worries that YouTube makes these beliefs unusually potent. First, the site’s never-ending recommendations feature might steer someone who was just looking for videos about the Bible to watch sermons that promote conspiracy theories. “To what extent can anti-Semitism jump from one stream of Christianity to another, especially when the anti-Semitic content may be queued up for a viewer by YouTube?” he asked.

And second, he fears that YouTube will treat with kid gloves a video creator who is also a pastor. “These channels may present themselves as mainstream, as religious Christian channels,” he said. “There may be reluctance to take them on, and they give them the benefit of the doubt that this is their religious belief, even if they may potentially violate the terms of service on YouTube or anywhere else.”

Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman for YouTube, did not comment specifically on Wiles, Anderson or other pastors, but said, “We enforce our policies consistently, and regardless of viewpoint, including religious beliefs.” That includes a new policy instated in June that bans statements that a race or religious group is superior to justify discrimination, even if the video does not explicitly call for violence.

For Wanda and Doug Meyer, like many other evangelical Christians across the country, these YouTube channels are their primary source of news. They turn to YouTube to understand events that seem vitally important to them, like policy in Washington that will impact their religious freedom at home in Brandon, Fla.

Wanda, who taught in a public elementary school for 33 years, and Doug, a semiretired insurance specialist, have given up on newspapers and TV channels, the outlets that Trump-- whom they adore-- calls “fake news.” On YouTube, they find the pastors who pray with Trump at the White House, the pastors they really trust.

“It’s right there on YouTube. You don’t hear it on mainstream media. We know Kenneth Copeland. We know Paula White. We know David Barton,” Wanda said. “Different ministers, that’s where we get our news. People who know what’s really going on.”

As they ate lunch after the service at their large evangelical church, the Meyers said they would like to someday visit Israel, which is religiously important to them. But they also watch a lot of videos online when they’re watching those pastors’ sermons. They believe, with total certainty, in what they hear, even when the information is false: That humans have nothing to do with climate change. That Muslims are trying to implement laws in U.S. states that would allow them to kill Christians with impunity. That a shadowy group, including wealthy Jews as leaders, meant to use Hillary Clinton to bring about “one world government.”

Wanda says they try to “stay up to date” on the “spiritual battle … financed by the Illuminati and the Rothschilds.”

After all, she trusts the source has a higher authority: “These are ministers we know, we respect.”

Frank Schaeffer was on Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning. He explained that the real audience-- a very, very dangerous audience-- for Trump's fit last week is the evangelical white nationalist voters. "They," Schaeffer explained, "are very suspicious of Jews, very anti-Semitic to their core when it comes to them saying that 'Jews are all lost and going to burn in Hell.' They love Israel because it is strong; it goes to war; it looks like them; there are guns around; they fight... Trump has painted a target on the backs of liberal Jews. He has said, 'If I lose in 2020, you know who to blame.' And who is it? It's the Jews again for being 'disloyal.' ... This is real stuff. He's a fool. So perhaps he doesn't understand what he's unleashing. But when you paint a target on the back of Jews and say 'Your disloyalty will cost me the election"... That's what he's saying... it has nothing to do with the Jewish vote. He is now back in the camp of white nationalism and genocide that came about in Europe when Hitler blamed the Jews for their economic problems in the Weimar Republic. Make no mistake-- this is horror and this is coming from the American president. He is a disgusting individual and he has to be stopped."

Going Into The Final Month Before The Midterms, 65% Of Americans See Trump As Dishonest

Joseph Goebbels, Master of Propaganda by Nancy Ohanian

Trump has an astonishingly bad job approval rating. In the latest SSRS poll for CNN his overall approval was just 36% and disapproval had risen to 58%. Worse yet, just 32% of Americans perceive him as honest and trustworthy. 65% of Americans see him as dishonest and untrustworthy. The only people who still say they find him honest have been brain-washed by Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. Normal Americans see right through the bullshit and gas-lighting.

Lisa Brown, former chancellor of Washington State University, seems to get offended by the way so many Republicans have suddenly embraced Trump's penchant for creating his own "facts" out of thin air. "Ironically, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has made 'civility' a theme of her campaign," she told me yesterday. "Yet, she was silent when the President mocked Dr. Ford and when he called Senator Elizabeth Warren 'Pocahontas,' and she doesn’t object when he makes statements that are demonstrably false. Her well-publicized distortions of my record and hers speak to a capitulation to a Trump-style loose relationship with the facts that feeds voter distrust of her and desire for change after 14 years of party-line representation."



Monday Matt Gertz of Media Matters, penned an essay on how all the lying is being dealt with by the mass media, The press helped build Donald Trump's lie; now it has to reckon with that.

Donald Trump rose to prominence and the presidency on the strength of his self-proclaimed mastery of The Art of the Deal. It was that business acumen, Trump claimed, that allowed him to turn a paltry loan from his father into a vast empire. But last week, the New York Times revealed that Trump was not the self-made billionaire he had claimed to be but rather the recipient of at least $413 million from his father, in part through tax schemes the paper described as “outright fraud.”

The painstaking investigation by Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner is not just a skillful demolition of the origin story Trump told. It’s also a rebuke to generations of journalists who bolstered Trump’s tale. Trump provided the myth, but he needed the press to trumpet it out to the public. The result was a lie so durable that no single story, however brilliant, can unravel it.

As president, Trump has waged war on the “fake news” press. But long before he reached the Oval Office, he depended on overly trusting journalists to burnish his reputation. To their credit, The Times reporters are up front about the role their own paper played, noting early in the piece that his self-proclaimed narrative “was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times.” In one particularly devastating example, they highlight a 1976 Times profile-- “a cornerstone of decades of mythmaking about his wealth”-- in which the then-30-year-old Trump simply passed off his father’s businesses as his own, claims the paper’s reporters obviously didn’t scrutinize at the time.

In the years that followed, media coverage would crystallize that image of Trump as a self-made success and deal-maker extraordinaire. Some pushed back on that story-- The Times article names four journalists and biographers whose work was particularly vital: Gwenda Blair, David Cay Johnston, Timothy L. O’Brien, and the late Wayne Barrett. But on balance, reporters were taken in by Trump’s skillful manipulation, vulnerable to his understanding that they were “always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better.” The early profiles of the 1970s would generate the magazine covers, tabloid frenzy, and talk show interviews of the 1980s. By the 1990s, Trump was a pop culture icon, a symbol of wealth and power. And in 2004, NBC launched the blockbuster reality show The Apprentice, bringing Trump’s preferred persona as a respected and ever-successful mogul into the homes of millions.

“Money is at the core of the brand Mr. Trump has so successfully sold to the world,” The Times’ reporters conclude. “Yet essential to that mythmaking has been keeping the truth of his money-- how much of it he actually has, where and whom it came from-- hidden or obscured. Across the decades, aided and abetted by less-than-aggressive journalism, Mr. Trump has made sure his financial history would be sensationalized far more than seen.”

Now Barstow, Craig, and Buettner have provided the aggressive journalism that had been lacking. But it remains to be seen whether the facts they have mustered can convince the public that the story so many of their colleagues helped Trump tell was a lie.

Trump has a built-in insurance policy against such reporting. No longer relying on the press to burnish his image, Trump has convinced his supporters that critical news outlets can’t be trusted. As the media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it, “Before journalists log on in the morning, one third of their potential public is gone.” Trump’s supporters instead tune in to sycophantic right-wing outlets like Fox News, where The Times story has been alternately ignored and spun as a good thing for the president. The network’s audience isn’t going to believe a story from what Trump terms the "failing New York Times" over the president himself.

And even audiences that might be open to learning new facts about Trump could simply miss them. The Times report was initially met with a flurry of secondary coverage by other media outlets. But that focus quickly dissipated in the face of the GOP push to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and by the end of the week, the story had largely faded from broadcast and cable news. On Saturday, The Times itself published an analysis finding that the previous week had been the best of Trump’s presidency. The piece did not mention the paper’s own bombshell report exposing how the president benefited from tax fraud.

The next day, perhaps in an effort to regain momentum, The Times republished its story in a separate section. But that morning, Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, and Fox News Sunday-- weekly talk shows that focus on politics and historically set the news agenda for the week-- all completely ignored it. (The story was brought up in passing by a panelist on CNN's State of the Union.)

But for all that Trump has been the star and producer of his own long-running soap opera, he’s not its only author. And The Times report has brought new players onto the stage: New York City and state regulators plan to review the foundations of Trump’s fortune, while congressional Democrats are promising to force the release of the president’s tax returns if they regain power. If the Times investigation turns into a long-running storyline rather than a one-off episode, it might finally break through.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin weeped over the rotting carcass of her Republican Party, whining that the "Trumpization is complete. It’s not a conservative party, or a small government party or an anti-authoritarian party (to the contrary!)... no principle, dismissive of courtesy and reasoned persuasion. Anger, not ideas, is its animating force. We have a nativist party that views America not as a creedal nation, but as a white Christian nation that is diminished by immigrants and is threatened by outsiders. If it possesses any coherent philosophy, it is one of victimhood-- which in turn justifies any and all bad behavior... Any Republicans thinking of challenging President Trump because they recoil from the party of Trump is, I hate to break it to them, out of luck. The party wants the mocking cruelty, the attacks on the press and on women, the protectionism and the white nationalism. These things define it." What's shocking to Ms. Rubin, was apparent to normal people who abhor a huckster long ago. How could anyone possibly feel any affinity for a party that allowed itself-- with barely a gasp-- to be taken over by a lowlife crook like Trump? Michael Bloomberg warned them.

Nunes Should Resign From Congress-- And Take Cathy McMorris Rodgers With Him

This morning, conservative writer Jennifer Rubin penned an OpEd, Devin Nunes, Trump's Political Stooge, Is At It Again, based on the Maddow report last night. If you missed it, watch the video above. She wrote that "The Post reports on the secretly recorded remarks of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) at a fundraiser for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)":

[Nunes] appears to have moved from criticizing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election to strategizing about how to blunt its impact should it imperil President Trump...

In comments captured in an audio recording aired Wednesday by The Rachel Maddow Show, Nunes laid out in stark terms the rationale for preserving the GOP majority in Congress.

“If [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions won’t unrecuse and [special counsel Robert S. Mueller III] won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones, which is really the danger,” Nunes said… “I mean, we have to keep all these seats,” Nunes added. “We have to keep the majority. If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away.”

Nunes also suggested the impeachment of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein is just a matter of “timing,” claiming that impeachment (which has yet to be formally taken up) would impede the Senate confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (It’s hard to tell if Nunes is offering a weak, illogical excuse for not impeaching Rosenstein or is promising that Rosenstein will get impeached if the GOP keeps its majority in the House.)

Nunes also seemed to imply that a candidate [McMorris Rodgers in this case] would be in trouble if a foreign national gave a candidate stolen information that the candidate later released. (“Well, if that’s the case, then that’s criminal.”) Like Trump, Rudy Giuliani and so many Trump spinners, Nunes seems unaware that soliciting something of value from a foreigner to be used in a campaign is illegal, whether the valuable item is stolen or not.

There is nothing illegal in Nunes’s admissions, nor do they seem particularly new. All but Trump partisans realize that Nunes is acting as the president’s political stooge, not as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. We knew he cared only about protecting Trump, not the country, when he made up the “unmasking” scandal, put out a patently misleading memo concerning the FISA warrant application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, started demanding confidential documents relating to an ongoing investigation (of Trump and his cronies), had a role in outing a confidential intelligence source and began his crusade to smear the FBI. The admissions, however, do reveal Rodgers, a member of the House leadership, to be joined at the hip with Nunes, perfectly content to let him run amok as a partisan hack. (She at one point seems to try to bolster Nunes’s excuse that they cannot impeach Rosenstein because the Senate would have to take it up and divert attention from the Kavanaugh confirmation.)

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) has played dumb when asked about Nunes’s antics. That’s for the Intel Committee. Not really aware of that. Not something I know much about. That’s preposterous. Not only do Ryan and Rodgers know exactly what Nunes is up to; they are also more than willing to let him raise money for them and to allow him to pursue his base-- pleasing partisan gamesmanship. In short, Ryan and Rodgers are weak, non-leaders who haven’t the nerve or the sense of obligation to remove Nunes from his chairmanship to protect the country’s national security interests. Without Rodgers and Ryan, we might have a responsible House Intelligence Committee chairman.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted, “Under our Constitution, the duty of Congress is not to clear the President. The duty of Congress is to be a check and balance on the Executive Branch, and to pursue the facts wherever they may lead.” He added, “Devin Nunes should resign for perverting the oath he took.” True, but the very same thing could be said of Ryan and Rodgers, who indulge Nunes. None of them seems to understand the oath of office. If we want representatives to uphold their oaths and quit acting like Trump’s TV lawyers, voters will have to turn the House over to the Democrats. There is no way on Earth that Ryan, Rodgers and Nunes are ever going to put country over party.

Nunes and McMorris Rodgers seem prepared to commit treason on behalf of Trump. They should both resign. I'm not especially a fan of Andrew Janz but he would certainly make a better congressman than Nunes. And McMorris' opponent, Lisa Brown, is one of the best candidates for Congress running anywhere. She's likely to win the contest between them anyway.

What Right Wing Former Wrestling Coach Jim Jordan Is Up To Now

UPDATE: After being turned down flat and mocked from every direction they turned yesterday, Jordan and Meadows threw up their hands, raised the white flag and buried their own absurd, self-serving resolution to impeach Rod Rosenstein. Now they're going to try to get a vote holding the Department of Justice in contempt.


Randy @IronStache Bryce frightened Paul Ryan out of his reelection plans and he's retiring from Congress instead. But Ryan is working hard now to make sure his party isn't obliterated in November. It's no longer a question of keeping power in the House-- that's long-- but of how many dozens of seats the GOP is going to kiss goodbye. Trump is an albatross and the Republican generic poll numbers are murderous. This week Ryan was looking at numbers for his own state where just 36% of likely voters say Trump is doing a good job-- the same number who say that in Michigan, two states that the Kremlin stole for Trump in 2016.

Ryan picked a clone (a corporate lawyer who used to be his driver) to try to defend the seat against Bryce. Ryan's superPAC, Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), isn't getting anywhere and instead is spending money to push an unelectable minor candidate against Bryce, last week by releasing a fake poll pretending the Democratic primary was tied, and this week was in the field with a push poll promoting the weak Democratic candidate who backed Hillary in a district that was firmly in Bernie's corner.

Meanwhile, Ryan is trying to contrast the mainstream of the House GOP with the extremists. He's using the extremists' latest call to impeach Rod Rosenstein to do that. One top GOP staffer told me that the 11 Republicans behind the move are "mostly seen as psychos... and pests." The leader of the pack is Ohio Republican Jim Jordan who's embroiled in 2 cases, spanning decades in which he protected child molesters who were having their way with under-age boys under his care. So far Jordan himself hasn't been accused of sexual relations with under-aged boys but almost a dozen men who were on a wrestling teach he coached have come forward to say he protected the man who was molesting them. In the other case, his staffer, Wes Goodman, was eventually forced to resign from the Ohio state House when it came out, so to speak, that he was having sex with young conservative boys who were impressed with his closeness to Jordan.

When he went on the attack against Rosenstein-- nothing more than a protected way to obstruct justice and derail the Mueller investigation-- Jordan complained about evidence being withheld. "Enough is enough," he whined. "It’s time to hold Mr. Rosenstein accountable for blocking Congress’s constitutional oversight role."

The same GOP House staffer who told me the whole bunch of them are considered "psychos" and "pests," also suggested I look into who exactly was working with Jordan on this. Scott Desjarlaid, a Tennessee doctor who used to drug his female patients and have sex with them when they were semi-conscious, was another misfit behind the push to destroy Rosenstein. "Given many opportunities to cooperate with Congress," he said in a statement, "Rod Rosenstein has demonstrated a chronic inability to answer questions important to our investigation of alleged criminal abuses of intelligence services under the previous administration. Even under subpoena, the Deputy Attorney General has refused to produce necessary documents, because they implicate top Department of Justice and FBI officials, including himself. His own role in fraudulent warrants and wiretapping the President’s campaign is a major conflict of interest that renders him unfit to oversee the Special Counsel or DOJ. Removing Mr. Rosenstein from office is the only option left to Congress."

Ryan made light of their caterwauling by noting to the media that Rosenstein's behavior doesn't rise to the status of a "high crime or misdemeanor," and is basically laughing at them. He told reporters he has no intention of allowing a vote on it. Jordan-- the ex-wrestling coach (like Denny Hastert-- who was eventually put in prison for raping underage boys after denying it for decades, as Jordan has so far)-- is running for the top Republican in the House. In fact, many Republicans say this unserious attempt to impeach Rosenstein-- if they really wanted to do it, it would have been a "privileged motion"-- accomplishes 2 things for Jordan:

1- diverts attention away from his sex scandal
2- helps him promote his bid to replace Ryan in the leadership

One member of Ryan's team, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who would like to run for Ryan's job himself but is afraid he won't be able to overcome Kevin McCathy, is gambling on backing the far right extremists on this one. He announced yesterday that he supports Jordan and Meadows on impeaching Rosenstein.

Wrestlin' by Chip Proser

Yesterday, in a column in the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin came right to the point-- the top take-away from all this is that The GOP Isn't Fit To Govern "[T]here has been," she reminds her readers, "no finding that Rosenstein is in contempt of Congress or that he has broken any regulation or law. The impeachment resolution is pure piffle. (“A Justice Department official said Wednesday that only one committee request has been formally denied-- a demand to see the unredacted Justice Department memo detailing which Trump associates are under investigation by Mueller and for which potential crimes. Officials declined that request because, they said, providing it could compromise ongoing investigations.”) Not even House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) thinks that the resolution has merit."

Indeed, former Justice Department officials and legal scholars have fretted that Rosenstein has been too accommodating to congressional requests. “The ironic thing about this push is that Rosenstein has done far more to satisfy what are really inappropriate requests from House Republicans than DOJ has ever done before,” former Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller says. “It’s been clear from the beginning that Meadows and company weren’t interested in anything other than shutting down the Mueller investigation, and this ridiculous move makes it even more obvious.”

The damage here is being done not by Rosenstein, but by irresponsible, hyper-partisan congressmen. Former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen and Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21, recently wrote about the impeachment gambit:

Key House Republicans are abusing their offices and the public trust to blindly provide protection for [President] Trump. They are doing so instead of working to get to the bottom of the worst foreign attack on American elections in our history.

They need to be called on their scandalous efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation and ignore Russia’s cyber invasion of our democracy. A bipartisan outcry greeted Trump’s Helsinki betrayals. We should be hearing protests at least as loud and bipartisan in response to this parallel-- and equally unmerited-- attack on American law enforcement right here at home.

It is not Rosenstein who should be removed from office, but rather, the House Republican members who are obstructing an ongoing investigation of the Republican president and his cronies. While their actions are protected (most likely) under the "speech or debate" clause (preventing criminal prosecution or civil suit for actions that would otherwise be actionable), their pattern of conduct (cooking up a misleading memo about the FISA warrant application for Carter Page’s surveillance, exposing a confidential intelligence source, smearing the FBI) amounts to multiple blatant attempts to thwart an entirely legitimate investigation. If anyone in the White House is conspiring with them to interfere with the investigation, such individuals could be investigated for obstruction of justice.

“This is a cynical, corrupt effort to kneecap the legitimate investigation of Jordan’s and Meadows’s ally, the president,” Eisen tells me. “Their gambit is entirely divorced from the reality of Rosenstein‘s compliance with congressional requests , which has been quite good on his part. For that reason, it is highly likely to fail.” He observes that a similar effort with “the same actors previously tried the same ploy with another set of baseless allegations, against IRS Commissioner [John] Koskinen. They were defeated by an overwhelming bipartisan vote and the same thing will likely happen here.” He concludes, “Unfortunately, real harm will be done to an outstanding public servant and to law enforcement itself in the process. Jordan and Meadows surely know that and are proceeding anyhow to protect the president. What a betrayal of their oaths-- and their country.”

...Ironically, Republicans have been arguing that if Democrats ever get control of Congress, they will tie the place up with bogus impeachment hearings and create gridlock. No, Republicans are doing that all on their own. “It’s a PR stunt that nobody who knows anything about impeachment could take seriously,” says constitutional scholar Larry Tribe. “But it will do great harm anyway by contributing to the degradation of the impeachment power, making it harder to use when it is truly needed to rein in a would be-dictator.” Referencing his book with Joshua Matz, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, Tribe tells me this is why he and Matz argue that “casual and frequent impeachment talk can damage the already frayed fabric of our dangerously polarized polity.”

Trust Jim Jordan? by Chip Proser

The Coming Civil War-- Inside The Republican Party

If conservative Republican journalist Jennifer Rubin keeps attacking Trump so vociferously, the DCCC will soon recruit her to run for Congress-- or fellow Beltway journalists will rebrand her a rising star in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. after all, being against Señor Trumpanzee seems to trump any and all other qualities. Yesterday Rubin wrote that Ending DACA would be Trump’s most evil act, "Some in the media," she wrote, "take seriously the notion that he is 'conflicted' or 'wrestling' with the decision, as though Trump were engaged in a great moral debate. That would be a first for Trump, who counts only winners and losers, never bothering with moral principles or democratic norms. The debate, if there is one, is over whether to disappoint his rabid anti-immigrant base or to, as is his inclination, double down on a losing hand.

[L]et’s not think Trump-- who invites cops to abuse suspects, who thinks ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio was “doing his job” when denying others their constitutional rights and who issued the Muslim ban-- cares about the Constitution (any of the “twelve” articles). Trump says, “We love the dreamers. … We think the dreamers are terrific.” But in fact he loves the applause he derives from his cultist followers more than anything. Otherwise he’d go to the mat to defend the dreamers and secure their legal status.

...[I]f Trump cancels DACA, it will be one more attempt to endear himself to his shrinking base with the only thing that truly energizes the dead-enders: vengeance fueled by white grievance. And it will also be an act of uncommon cowardice. (“Should Trump move forward with this decision, he would effectively be buying time and punting responsibility to Congress to determine the fate of the Dreamers,” writes The Post.) Dumping it into the lap of the hapless Congress, he can try evading responsibility for the deportation of nearly 800,000 young people who were brought here as children, 91 percent of whom are working. (And if by chance Congress should save DACA, it will be Trump who is the villain and they the saviors, an odd political choice for a president who cares not one wit about the party.)

As for Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who talks about sparing the dreamers, will be sorely tested to overcome the objections of the hard-line anti-immigrant voices in his conference. Does he have the nerve to bring to the floor a bill that lacks majority support among Republicans? Tie it to a must-pass bill (e.g., Harvey funding, the debt ceiling, funding for the government)? In the Senate, will opportunistic right-wingers such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) grandstand, perhaps filibustering a measure into order to out-Trump Trump?

However this turns out, the GOP under Trump has defined itself as the white grievance party-- bluntly, a party fueled by concocted white resentment aimed at minorities. Of all the actions Trump has taken, none has been as cruel, thoughtless or divisive as deporting hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve done nothing but go to school, work hard and present themselves to the government.

The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.

As it turns out, the crackpot far right Cotton wasn't the best example, even if he is a vicious xenophobe. Byron York reported for the right-wing Washington Examiner website that Cotton "would support the legalization of all current DACA recipients-- nearly 800,000 of them-- if Congress would at the same time pass measures to protect Americans workers from the effects of that legalization."

"We ought to take care of them," Cotton said in a telephone conversation Sunday, noting that DACA recipients arrived in this country illegally "through no fault of their own."

"In any legislative fix, I would like to see them receive a green card," Cotton said. At the same time, he continued, "We ought to recognize that giving them legal status has two problems. First, it creates a whole new class of people who will then be eligible for a green card and citizenship-- namely, the extended family members of those who will receive legal status who can, through chain migration, get legal status themselves."

"Second," Cotton said, "it will encourage more illegal immigration.

The first problem can be fixed by passing the RAISE Act, Cotton said-- the bill Cotton has sponsored with fellow GOP Sen. David Perdue that would strictly limit chain migration as well as re-balance current immigration policy in favor of skilled immigrants.

The second problem could be addressed by extending E-verify across the country, which Cotton called "the best way to reduce more illegal immigration."

All that said, let's forget Cotton and Rubin and get to Kurt Schlichter's piece for Townhall about who the "real" conservatives are, the neo-Nazis and racists who support Trumpanzee or the greed-and-selfishness GOP establishment types who loath Trumpanzee nearly as much as normal people do. Herr Schlichter's perspective is somewhat different than my description might suggest. He's one of the Trumpists and a dedicated Paul Ryanphobe. And he gets right into it: "After two years of lectures about 'principles' and 'the Rule of law' by the establishment-loving hacks furious that normal Americans rejected them and elected Donald Trump, their performance last week demonstrated that their high-minded dedication to conservatism is all a fraud. It’s not about 'principles' or 'the Rule of Law.' It’s only about holding on to power-- theirs." And that was right under a goofy photo of Speaker Ryan. Remember this isn't by someone supporting-- as far as I know-- Randy Bryce's crusade to repeal and replace Ryan in southeast Wisconsin. This is by someone who's premise is that Ryan isn't right-wing enough. [You can contribute to Stop Paul Ryan here, regardless of your reasons why.]

Let’s take the latest in a seemingly endless series of #fails from that smarmy dope Paul Ryan, King of the Fredocons. First, he rushed to help out the liberals with their ridiculous narrative about how Donald Trump is a “Nazi” (Wait, I thought the narrative memo had him being a Russian fifth columnist-- damn, our president sure is versatile!). You couldn’t keep Ryan from eagerly jumping in with his usual more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger-about-Trump thing to help the left push its latest meme. Antifa though? Not so fast! Ryan, the poodle that he is, obediently waited until Nancy Pelosi led the way and offered some tepid words about these commie blackshirts and their thirst for blood before Brave Sir Ryan ran out and offered some tepid words about these commie blackshirts and their thirst for blood.

Paul Ryan is a guy who can’t even take his own side in a fight-- or, more to the point, our side in a fight. Now, a quick quiz: When Donald Trump proposed to keep his promise to the Republican voters who elected him and end the unconstitutional DACA program that the Obama administration enacted to ignore duly-enacted immigration laws, what did Passive Paul do?

A. Ryan immediately offered his support for the president undoing this Rule of Law abomination that Ryan expressly called “unconstitutional” on Fox back in October 2014.

B. Ryan immediately demanded the president not undo this Rule of Law abomination that Ryan expressly called “unconstitutional” on Fox back in October 2014.

C. Ryan immediately asked someone to explain what the phrase “keep his promise to the Republican voters who elected him” means.

D. B and C

So, for the benefit of us suckers, basically Ryan was against DACA when it couldn’t be undone, but is now panicking when it can be undone because it might actually be undone-- unless President Trump lets Ryan roll him, in which case he deserves to be laughed at in exactly the way his Never Trump enemies will laugh at him.

Gosh, this DACA two-step kind of reminds me of Obamacare and how gung-ho the True Conservatives were to repeal it when they couldn’t repeal it and how suddenly they turned ungung-ho when they actually could. Weird. If I was cynical, I’d say that it seems like the establishment GOP has been lying to our faces for years and years, but that couldn’t be true because our establishment betters have principles and stuff.

Of course, it’s not just the Wisconsin Wimp shifting into conservagimp mode. Soon-to-be-former Senator Jeff Flake, that braying doofus, naturally joined the cave-in chorus. Ben Sasse, Flake’s braying doofus doppelgänger, probably joined in, but I refuse to spend valuable time looking at his tedious Twitter feed to find out. And since it involved betraying Republicans, you have got to assume John “Blue Falcon” McCain is in on it too.

Yeah, because “principles” and stuff. Because enforcing the law is the most important thing there is, except for doing what the rich guys who fund the establishment want. That’s really the most important thing.

Yeah, so after nearly two years of tiresome finger-wagging about “the Rule of Law” and how we need to put our “principles” above our desire for “winning,” the whole sordid scam we always knew it always was is revealed for the world to see. They can’t hide it anymore and they aren’t even trying. Their glorious “conservative principles” aren’t principles at all but a skeevy ploy designed to tie our hands and keep us from pursuing policy goals our establishment coalition partners disfavor. They want open borders. They want illegals. They want cheap foreign labor that doesn’t get uppity to man their donors’ corporations so the Captains of Crony Capitalism don’t have to fuss with American workers who won’t tolerate being treated like chattel. Yeah, “we’re better than that” all right-- if you mean that we are better than enforcing the laws the American people passed through a constitutional process if the ruling class decides it doesn’t like them.

“The Rule of Law” is for us, not for them. “The Rule of Law” was supposed to be a shield to protect us from the ravages of the powerful, but our Truer-Than-You Cons use it as a sword to cut our legs out from under us and keep us from defending our own interests.

Oh, you can’t possibly exercise the power against our leftist enemies that they always exercise against you. Because principles.

Oh, you can’t possibly be uncouth and actually fight back against our enemies. Because principles.

Oh, a principle is getting in the way of something the establishment wants? What’s a principle?

So now, suddenly, Congress is moving to try and keep DACA alive through-- gasp!-- legislation, though that’s probably not going to happen since most GOP legislators understand that amnesty is ballot box poison. See, that’s why they loved DACA-- they can’t pass it as a law, so they simply feigned outrage for the benefit of us rubes when Obama did exactly what they wanted with his pen.

And in the most Congressional GOP move of all possible Congressional GOP moves, they now want to try to pass a proposed DACA fix using Democrat votes and so their proposed deal to the Democrats-- who really, really want 800,000 future voters-- is to trade it for…wait for it…still waiting…nothing. The GOP isn’t asking for anything. No new limits on immigrants, no reform of chain immigration, certainly no wall. Nothing. I hope the dealer tries out this innovative new negotiation strategy on me the next time I bargain to lease a fine German sports sedan.

Actually, the GOP does get something-- shafted, as usual. Yeah, their deal is we give you Democrats what you want and, in exchange, you call us racists when Elizabeth Warren proposes to declare all these middle-aged Dreamer kids US citizens. Because, you know, they had dreams and stuff.

Pathetic. You know, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the real reason the Republicans don’t want to end the filibuster to allow them to pass legislation is that they would then be expected to pass legislation that their voters want and the GOP establishment doesn’t.

Here’s the thing. There are two parties in America, one to the right and one to the left. The left/right spectrum used to be the only axis that mattered, and the coalitions within the parties fit pretty well, if not perfectly. But the bipartisan establishment, the meritless meritocracy that rules us, grew more arrogant even as it grew more inept. It ignored problems and troubling trends even as it cashed-in for itself over the decades. I remember working in Congress back in Washington in 1986, and the region was not rich and it was not fancy. But now it’s fantastically rich and fantastically fancy. But the establishment ignored the normals out in America as it gorged on the fruits of the normals’ labor, and that’s why a second axis arose and intersected with the American politician spectrum. This new axis measures pro- or con- regarding the status quo and the ruling class. So now there are really four political parties stuffed into two political party infrastructures:

1 Right, pro-establishment (The RINOs)
2 Right, anti-establishment (The Trump voters)
3 Left, pro-establishment (Hillary’s snobby urban corporatist jerk corps)
4 Left, anti-establishment (The Bernie/Warren/Stalin Axis of Venezuela)

This explains why we see the DC establishment unifying to protect its power and privilege-- and holding us normals in utter contempt. Most Democrat senators and Republican senators have much more in common with each other than with us-- to the GOP establishment, Trump’s clearly the bigger threat than a counterpart across the aisle. It also explains why you hear about Bernie supporters who went for Trump instead of Felonia von Pantsuit. That’s the fault line-- the desire to keep or destroy this monstrous status quo. This new axis will reshape the political parties as their uncomfortable coalitions jockey for control of their respective party’s infrastructure (Yeah, the Dems have big problems too). Hell, it may reshape-- violently-- our whole country if we aren’t careful.

The fact is that the establishment doesn’t care about “the Rule of Law” or “principles”-- it cares about its own power and maintaining the status quo. So keep that in mind the next time you hear some establishment snob lecturing you on how you are morally obligated not to do anything to advance you own interests because of “principles.”

It’s all just another lie.

I wonder if Schlichter would short circuit if someone pointed out that there were around 3 million more Hillary voters than Trumpy-the-Clown voters. After all, he seems so enamored of the will of "the voters," he should keep a post-it note on his computer that reminds him that although 65,853,516 votes cast their ballots for Hillary, just 62,984,825 voted for Señor Trumpanzee.