Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

Writing for the New York Times yesterday, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch noted that "the Ukraine scandal now unfolding in congressional impeachment hearings has at its core a Shakespearean twist: President Trump, abetted by his paladins of spin, has trapped himself in an alternate universe. To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine. In so doing, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president’s bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016. Mr. Trump and his enablers-- Rudolph Giuliani foremost among them-- have scrambled all year to do two deeds at once. They want to besmirch Joe Biden, without foundation, for supposedly using his office as vice president to protect his son Hunter, who served until recently on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. And they want to reinvent what happened in 2016 so as to switch the blame for the election meddling from Moscow to Kyiv."

There's may be room to argue that William Barr is the foremost and most toxic of Trump's enablers, but there's no need to quibble at this point. The Wall Street Journal's-- formally Ronald Reagan's-- Peggy Noonan barked-- not without a tinge of regret-- "Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated. What was said consistently undermined Mr. Trump’s case, but more deadly was what has never been said. In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was under way and the two weeks since the Intelligence Committee’s public hearings began, no one, even in the White House, has said anything like, 'He wouldn’t do that!' or 'That would be so unlike him.' His best friends know he would do it and it’s exactly like him."

Wisely, Adam Serwer, wants to make sure everyone knows that Trump's crime against America-- his offense-- is abusing his power to stay in office, not disputing Ukraine policy. "Republicans and Trump defenders," he wrote, "have sought to cast the impeachment inquiry as an effort to criminalize a policy dispute. Trump’s attempt to coerce a foreign country to frame a political rival was 'inappropriate, misguided foreign policy,' in the words of the Texas Republican Will Hurd, but he insisted he had 'not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.'" But these kinds of weak arguments "obscure the core reason for the impeachment inquiry, which is that the Trump administration was engaged in a conspiracy against American democracy. Fearing that the 2016 election was a fluke in which Trump prevailed only because of a successful Russian hacking and disinformation campaign, and a last-minute intervention on Trump’s behalf by the very national-security state Trump defenders supposedly loathe, Trump and his advisers sought to rig the 2020 election by forcing a foreign country to implicate the then-Democratic front-runner in a crime that did not take place. If the American people could not be trusted to choose Trump on their own, Trump would use his official powers to make the choice for them."

It was, in short, a conspiracy by Trump and his advisers to keep themselves in power, the exact scenario for which the Framers of the Constitution devised the impeachment clause. This scheme was carried out by Trump-appointed officials, and by the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, running a corrupt back channel aimed at, in his words, “meddling in an investigation.” And it came very close to succeeding. As Brian Beutler writes, “Had the whole scheme not come to light in a whistleblower complaint, and Trump not released his hold on aid to Ukraine, we might have awaken [sic] one morning to a blaring CNN exclusive about international corruption allegations against the Democratic presidential frontrunner and his party.”

As the Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.” And as the U.S. official David Holmes told the House Intelligence Committee, Sondland had told him that Trump was merely concerned about “‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the, quote-unquote, ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”

This point is crucial. Trump was not concerned about “corruption” in Ukraine-- his own Pentagon and State Department had certified that Ukraine had taken sufficient steps to root out corruption. Nor was Trump particularly interested in an actual investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden-- what he wanted was a public accusation that he could use to cripple a political rival’s aspirations. Trump was not defying the bipartisan war lobby in an effort to extricate the U.S. from foreign entanglements, and he was not engaged in a dispute over policy with unelected bureaucrats pursuing their own agenda, because he was fundamentally uninterested in the policy in question, except in that it might be exploited to benefit him personally.

Trump saw an opportunity to strong-arm a weaker country into helping him win reelection, he abused his presidential authority to coerce it into doing so, and then he and his advisers sought to hide what they had done in order to maximize the public impact of the conspiracy. This plot, spearheaded by Giuliani, had already drawn credulous coverage from sympathetic reporters, and would likely have succeeded had the anonymous whistle-blower not registered a complaint exposing the scheme on September 9, which forced the Trump administration to release the aid to Ukraine on September 11.

...The impeachment inquiry has revealed the president’s personal corruption, but it has uncovered a more abstract one as well. The broken reputations of weak, conniving men litter the Trump era like corpses on a Civil War battlefield. Each of them believed, as some Trump officials currently do, that the president’s racism and corruption might be bent toward legitimate ends, and each of them has paid the price for his folly.

In only one sense have they succeeded: The president’s economic populism and his promises not to destroy the welfare state have been replaced with the traditional Republican agenda of providing low taxes for the wealthy, and freeing corporations from regulations designed to protect the public from their greed. But as the impeachment inquiry shows, it is Trump who has bent the establishment to his will, turning the party of Lincoln into little more than a subsidiary of the Trump Organization, with no higher purpose than executing the president’s corrupt schemes and shielding him from the potential consequences.

The rest of the country, however, should not lose sight of why the president is being impeached, and it is not because of a good-faith dispute over Ukraine policy. Trump and his advisers conspired to rig the 2020 election on his behalf, scheming to defraud the American people of a free and fair election. A genuine republic cannot survive chief executives who utilize their powers to make anyone who might challenge their authority into a criminal by extorting weaker entities into leveling false charges at their political rivals. Indeed, the republic’s Founders foresaw such a circumstance, and created the impeachment clause as a last resort against it. The high crime that the president has committed is not against Ukraine, but against America.

This may have little meaning to the minority of Americans who have decided that Trump is the only legitimate vessel of popular will, and that the only legitimate election is one that ends with Trump’s victory. But it matters to everyone else.

John Kruse is an M.D., a Ph.D., a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist and the author of the book, Recognizing Adult ADHD: What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. With 25 years of psychiatry experience, Dr. Kruse specializes in treating adults with ADHD. Recently he noted that the book by Anonymous, A Warning, describes "wild pronouncements the president had made on Twitter," how he "tunes out intelligence and national security briefings," "is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information," and careens "from one self-inflicted crisis to the next." Kruse delineates 3 signs that Trump has undiagnosed ADHD, which is behind much of his chaotic, confusing, and choleric behavior:

1- Impulsivity: Tweets that compound legal troubles, exacerbate tensions with adversaries, and alienate allies.
2- Inattention: Tuning out information regarding intelligence and security briefings and not learning what the constitution says or means.
3- Hyperactivity: Walking around at summits, debates, and press briefings when others remain seated.

Trumpf Wants To Know: "What Are Calgary Values?" He's About To Find Out

As you can see from the video above, which Cruz has been sending around to justify his "New York values" comment, he's not going to curl up in a ball and whine the way the other Republican commander-in-chief wannabes have when Herr Trumpf looked at them crosseyed. As Fox's Chad Pergram pointed out on twitter yesterday, when Cruz was rescued from a stalled elevator in South Carolina Saturday morning, he emerged asking "Who put Donald Trump in charge of the elevators?" That may have been a comment on Trump trying to harm him or a comment on the shoddy workmanship Trump projects are so infamous for worldwide. But Cruz's attack, vicious as it might be in Republicanland, is pretty much water off a duck's back to Trumpf fans who don't care what he said in an interview in 1999. They're looking for a fuehrer, a caudillo... end of story.

This morning, Herr was on ABC's This Week, taking pot shots at Cruz and pontificating about how little chance he has to win, also calling him "a nasty guy... Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him. He's a very... he's got an edge that's not good. You can't make deals with people like that and it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the country. Very nasty guy... Oh, he's a total hypocrite. How about his fundraising and how about when he does his personal financial disclosure form, and he doesn't put on that he's borrowing money from Goldman Sachs and then today it comes out that he's also borrowing money from Citi Bank and he doesn't list it. You know why? He wants to look like Robin Hood. That he's the one protecting the people from the banks while he's actually borrowing money and personally guaranteeing it and not disclosing it, which is illegal."

He added that "if you look at the polls I'm leading Ted Cruz by a lot. He even lied about that. You know he got up and said, 'Well the polls.' Well the polls are showing that I'm the one that's on the upswing. He's the one on the downswing. A big downswing."

But none of that will stop Cruz from trying to re-define Trumpf as "the other," not one of us (meaning not a real conservative or, at least in Iowa and South Carolina, not among "the people of God"). He's not talking about how much he likes and respects and admires Herr Trumpf any longer. He knows Trumpf is what's standing in the way of him and the White House. And he knows what kind of a welcome he'd get when he slinks back, vanquished by the clown, into the Senate. Saturday, Trumpf was attacking Cruz in South Carolina but the audience didn't want any of it-- and booed Trumpf loudly. At least no one boos Trumpf on Twitter, his favorite toy:

The ole strategy of not alienating the Trumpists so that after Herr imploded they'd eventually come over and vote Cruz, seems to be sitting on the smoking garbage heap of history now. Cruz has no choice but to batter Trumpf's brains out or have his own battered out-- unless he wants to come off looking like a girly-man that way Jeb Bush does. Over the last few days the Cruz surrogates have been out in force, spreading their poison far and wide.

“If Donald wants to have honest, open policy contrasts, we’re ready for that,” campaign chairman Chad Sweet said. “If, on the other hand, he’s going to engage in discussions over nonsensical issues, over birther issues or who’s the real evangelical-- which, by the way, someone from his background should be careful about questioning the faith of our candidate,” something Trump has also done recently.

Asked what he meant by Trump’s “background,” Sweet continued, referencing a Trump appearance at a cattle call in Iowa last summer. “I think it’s interesting that Trump … basically said at [a] family values forum he’s never asked for forgiveness, but yet he is Christian. I would ask most Christians the question, ‘What is the first thing you do to become a Christian?’ Christians know what the answer to that question is.”

Charlie Condon, the former attorney general of South Carolina and a newly minted surrogate, was more pointed in discussing Trump’s “background,” a preview of the potentially nasty nature of the new Cruz-Trump dynamic.

“A thrice-married man is going to come into South Carolina expecting to be the Republican nominee?” Condon asked incredulously. “He’s pro-choice. He’s pro- gay marriage. He’s against traditional values. He’s New York, and he’s got to talk about that.”

Yesterday Trumpf suggested, via twitter, that his fans read a meandering and unfocused column by Wall Street Journal fossil Peggy Noonan, mostly because of this slam at Cruz: "It matters what people think of you. It’s important that people have a high opinion of your essential integrity, trustworthiness and good faith. It matters that they like you. Mr. Cruz, when challenged by Mr. Trump, could have used some backup from prominent Republicans, but they didn’t throw him a lifeline. John McCain: 'I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into.' You know why Mr. Cruz had no backup? Because almost no one who works with him likes him. They haven’t experienced him as a trustworthy person of good faith. They waited, as people do, for a chance to hurt him, and when they got it they did."

Trumpf is being inadvertently helped by the hapless Rubio, who is still stomping his high-heeled booties and punching up towards Cruz, even if he's now in the Christie/Jebster league. After the Thursday debate he was on Fox and Friends, his message that Iowans can't trust Cruz because he's a sneaky, unreliable flip-flopper without a moral compass to guide him, who has gone back and forth on issues of great import to them, like ethanol subsidies, crop insurance and trade policies. "He campaigns as a consistent conservative. The only thing consistent is the consistent political calculation that 'I’m going to change my position if it helps me politically in a given moment.'" Huckabee, clearly running for a post in a Trumpf Administration is also attacking Cruz. "Look," he told the media, "if you want to talk about candidates who've switched positions, you've got a bunch of them out there who've changed on the Trans Pacific Partnership, and on ethanol, and on foreign policy. Donald Trump's positions, if they've changed, have changed over the last 15 years; not the last 15 minutes." Trumpf must have been jumping up and down and barking like a trained seal about get be thrown a smelt.

McConnell Accuses DeMint's Right Wing Super PAC Of Illegal Coordination With The Democrats

That's the ad the Senate Conservatives Fund is spending tens of thousands of dollars running all over Kentucky television a year out from the Republican primary pitting Mitch McConnell against Tea Party activist Matt Bevin. And McConnell is furious-- and flipping out. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan caught his anger at the Tea Party idiots pretty well. McConnell told her beating a teabagger in a congressional primary in southwest Alabama with a Chamber of Commerce shill was more important than Chris Christie's win in New Jersey or Ken Cuccinelli's loss in Virginia! "What seemed to be on his mind," she wrote, "was something like Star Wars: The Establishment Fights Back. What he expressed was more like The Establishment Voices Some Aggravation.

"The most important election yesterday wasn't the governor of New Jersey and it wasn't the governor of Virginia, it was the special election for Congress in South Alabama, where a candidate who said the shutdown was a great idea, the president was born in Kenya, and that he opposed Speaker Boehner came in second." The victory of a more electable Republican, is significant, Mr. McConnell says. To govern, parties must win. To win, parties must "run candidates that don't scare the general public, [and] convey the impression that we could actually be responsible for governing, you can trust us-- we're adults here, we're grown-ups."

Republicans must enter the 2014 election cycle remembering the advice of William F. Buckley: "He always said he was for the most conservative candidate who could win."

Is the GOP in civil war? "No, I don't think so." Everyone agrees on the central issue: "We would all love to get rid of ObamaCare. If we had the votes to do it we'd do it in a heartbeat. It's the single worst piece of legislation that's been passed in modern times."

But "we have a disability right now-- it's called in the Senate '55 of them and 45 of us.' I'm not great at math, but 55 is more than 45… I think it's irresponsible for some people to characterize themselves as sort of true conservatives, to mislead their followers into believing you can get an outcome that you can't possibly get."

The tea party, he says, consists of "people who are angry and upset at government-- and I agree with them." But "I think, honestly, many of them have been misled… They've been told the reason we can't get to better outcomes than we've gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that's just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit… They raise money... take their cut and spend it" on political action that hurts Republicans.

He refers to the Senate Conservatives Fund. "That's the one I'm prepared to be specific about." The fund "has elected more Democrats than the Democratic Senatorial Committee over the last three cycles." The group is targeting Mr. McConnell with ads slamming his leadership during the shutdown. "Right now they're on the air in obvious coordination with Harry Reid's super PAC-- Harry Reid's!-- in the same markets, at roughly the same amount, at the same time."

…Are members of the tea party on the ground being fooled by operators, profit makers and cynics? "Yes," he said, followed by a brief silence. He declined to say more, but emphasized again that "I make a distinction between the leaders and the followers. I mean, I think a lot of well-meaning people are sending money to organizations having no idea they're gonna spend all that money against Republicans. Because they're being misled."

Yes, they're being misled, but wasn't that always the name of the game with the poor deluded teabaggers right from the start? All careerists like McConnell ever cared about though was who was doing the misleading and to what purpose. When it was Dick Armey and the Koch brothers rallying angry, low-info, low-IQ racists and the GOP's enragés, he didn't make a peep. Now that they've turned on him and his careerist cronies, he's screaming like a stuck pig. And, no, this isn't just something Democrats are playing up to make McConnell look weak-- although it was a riot yesterday when the conservative Democrat running against him, Alison Lundergan Grimes, challenged him to meet her at a shooting range. The National Review playing up his problems with the Tea Party, though, might be a more immediate concern for the effete McConnell. Democrats may snidely refer to the notorious closet case as "Miss McConnell," but the old girl has another reputation as well, a knife fighter and bad ass.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell likes to say, “If someone flicks a pebble at you, you hurl a boulder back at him.” His political team is just as emphatic. Some Republicans in Kentucky who flirted with working for his primary opponent, Matt Bevin, were told by the McConnell allies that they would get the “death penalty.” Another frequent warning: “Mitch McConnell doesn’t take prisoners.”

McConnell’s team “shoots the wounded on the battlefield as a matter of course,” says University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato. A former GOP leadership aide who has seen the McConnell operation up close sounds terrified. “They’re all killers,” he says, without a trace of humor in his voice. “These are not guys to be trifled with. They are burn it down, piss on it, then blow it up kind of guys.”

And it’s not a secret. The New York Times reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) was blacklisting a GOP ad firm, Jamestown Associates, for working with the Senate Conservative Fund (SCF), which is helping Bevin. Privately, McConnell aides acknowledge that it was McConnell who had Jamestown blacklisted for cutting ads that the SCF ran in Kentucky. McConnell’s former chief of staff, Josh Holmes, spoke to the Times, offering a dark analogy: “The SCF has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into. The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar, and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.” Holmes, who is now heading McConnell’s campaign committee, later confirmed on Twitter that his quote alluded to a scene in A Bronx Tale in which a group of mafiosos savagely beat members of a biker gang who vandalized their bar-- a scene as violent as any in the movies.



In blacklisting Jamestown, McConnell has opened up a new front in what has become an open war between McConnell and Holmes, on the one side, and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint and SCF executive director Matt Hoskins on the other.

Freshly re-provisioned from millions of dollars in donations that flooded in during the government-shutdown episode, Hoskins, a former DeMint aide, invaded enemy territory October 18 when he decided to back Bevin.

For McConnell, this is the direst threat of his career, as he’s now in a two-front war, with Bevin on one flank and Democratic challenger Allison Lundergan Grimes on the other. The wily incumbent is upping the ante, casting the fight as a battle for the future of the Republican party.

“This is an election where you are choosing sides,” says former McConnell chief of staff Billy Piper, now a lobbyist at Fierce, Isakowitz, and Blalock. “We’re finding out where people are. This is not just about the May 2014 primary. This is about the future of the party. Do we want to get to 51-- and, we hope, 55 over time? Or do we want to have 25–30 guys in the Senate who we think are going to be reliably conservative no matter what but who are never able to achieve anything other than drafting a strongly worded white paper?”

Hard-charging Hoskins is undaunted. “Mitch McConnell is doing this because he can’t defend his record and running dirty campaigns is all he knows how to do,” he says. McConnell has often exercised power in D.C. by pressuring major donors to withhold donations from a given lawmaker or organization. His allies on K Street are often the people who deliver this message and “enforce” it. SCF is receiving most of its donations from a large number of individuals who send in small-dollar amounts. McConnell can’t easily pressure these grassroots donors-- they aren’t professional politicians and they’re far from D.C.

Is There An Amorality To Romney's 47% Comment-- Or Something Much Worse?

When I first saw the secret Romney tape at $50,000 a plate fundraiser in the mansion of sex orgy king and vulture capitalist Marc Leder, I figured this would really hurt Romney with people of faith. I don't think I've ever heard a message from a presidential  candidate more inimical to Jesus Christ than the divisive claptrap that Romney was spewing about 47% of Americans. 47% of Americans, by the way, was (on Sept. 1 of this year) 147,773,640 people. That's a helluva lot of moochers for the Republicans to ignore and not be concerned about. But Ayn Romney gets pissed off if anyone dares criticize her husband. We don't know how lucky we are her husband has deigned to take time away from his life of predatory capitalism to run for president, a degrading step down for the Romney clan. "Stop it," she shrieked menacingly at her husband's critics. Not that that's stopping right-wing Republicans already distancing themselves from the GOP debacle coming on November 6. Peggy Noonan's latest undercuts Romney's most positive attribute, that he's a skilled manager. Of course he isn't... like so many CEOs, he's a propped up, stumbling dud and incompetent. "This week I called it incompetent," she reminded us, "but only because I was being polite. I really meant 'rolling calamity'." And she lists 7 of the more calamitous things dragging Romney down into electoral ignominy:

1. Mr. Romney came out of the primaries "a damaged and flawed candidate." Voters began to see him as elitist, rich, out of touch. "Here the Democrats' early advertising was crucial." Newt Gingrich hurt too, with his attacks on Bain.

2. The Democrats defined Mr. Romney "before he had a chance to define himself." His campaign failed in "not doing a substantial positive media buy to explain who Mitt Romney is and what kind of president he might be."

3. "Perceptions of the economy are improving." Unemployment is high, but the stock market has improved, bringing 401(k)s with it.

4. Obama's approval ratings are up five to six points since last year. He is now at roughly 49% approval, comparable to where President Bush was in 2004.

5. "The president had a strong convention and Romney a weak one." The RNC failed "to relaunch a rebranded Romney and create momentum."

6. Team Romney has been "reactive," partly because of the need for damage control, but it also failed to force the Obama campaign to react to its proposals and initiatives.

7. The "47%" comment didn't help, but Mr. Romney's Libya statement was a critical moment. Team Romney did not know "the most basic political tenet of a foreign crisis: when there is an international incident in which America is attacked, voters in this country will (at least in the short term) rally around the flag and the President. Always. It is stunning that Team Romney failed to recognize this."

Furious, Ayn Romney challenged her to "get in the ring" herself and run for president if she thinks it's so easy. "This is hard," said the pampered, spoiled princess of trashy white bread self-entitlement. Peggy Noonan is a pundit; they rarely run for office. But let's get back to a more important point when we all first saw Romney's attack on the core message of Jesus Christ. Where was the criticism from the country's religious leaders? I don't mean the hucksters and charlatans from the fake religions on the fringes of society. I mean crackpot Satanists like Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, who lead unsuspecting Christians astray with their hate-filled messages of greed and avarice, naturally agree with Bishop Romney. But where are the mainline Christian leaders? Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't heard about any mainstream Christian leaders calling Romney out for his hateful, anti-Jesus message. Is that how morally bankrupt they've become?

Not long ago, we talked with a secular Mormon running for Congress in northern Utah, Ryan Combe who told us a lot about Mormonism as a force for progressive ideals. This week, a Mormon scholar, Gregory Prince, penned a piece for HuffPo that landed him in that MSNBC video above, Mitt Romney Is Not The Face Of Mormonism. He too was mortified by Romney's willingness to spit in the faces of over 140 million of his fellow Americans who aren't wealthy like he is. He went from being a Romney supporter to someone who is eager to do what he can to keep Romney out of the White House.

Having been a missionary myself, I know the formative power of two years of missionary service. Having served as an assistant to one bishop and four stake presidents-- and Romney served as bishop and stake president-- I know the even greater formative power of those offices. I understand completely what his father George meant when he said, "I am completely the product of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." That face of Mormonism is the one that calls on some of its members, particularly bishops and stake presidents, to devote as many hours gratis to their church jobs as they do to their professional jobs. It is the one that summons up extraordinary acts of love, compassion and generosity, often in response to the deepest tragedies of life-- and death.

But it is not the one that dismisses out-of-hand half the population of the United States by saying, "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." As a bishop and stake president, Romney worried about those very people. Indeed, he worried far more about them, and spent far more time and means in assisting them, than the others in his flock who were more fortunate.

The very basis of Mormon community, stretching back to the earliest years of Mormonism nearly two centuries ago, is that the more able have a sacred obligation to assist the less able. That sense of physical community was institutionalized in the Church's Welfare Program, which sprang out of the Great Depression as an exemplary and effective means of combining church and government assistance not only to give to those in need, but also to help them to help themselves. Any who have visited Welfare Square in Salt Lake City, as did the producers of a recent "Rock Center" documentary on MSNBC, cannot help but be impressed with what we have attempted, for over seven decades, to accomplish through what is now an international network of church facilities and volunteers.

Judge Mitt Romney as you will, and vote for or against him as you will; but do not judge Mormonism on the basis of the Mitt Romney that was unveiled to the public this week. He is not the face of Mormonism.

It would certainly be awesome to watch Dr. Prince debate Ayn Romney. But I'm guessing she'd prefer mud-wrestling. It's more who she is under the silk taffeta Oscar de la Renta dresses. And if you think the GOP isn't going to close ranks behind shunned-for-a-minute-and-a-half Todd Akin, you don't know the GOP.

Boehner And Cantor Deal With Sequestration By Turning It Into A Right-Wing Talking Point For Their Base

Thursday the House Republican leadership-- Boehner, Cantor, McKeon, Ryan and their cronies-- dealt with the sequestration disaster they've put the country into as though it were just some political talking point they can use to rev up their delusional electoral base with. And speaking of delusional, the bill, H.R 6365 was introduced by Florida war criminal Allen West and co-sponsored by Joe "You Lie!" Wilson (R-SC). It passed 223-196, only one sleazy Blue Dog, Indiana Senate candidate Joe Donnelly, voting with the Republicans-- but a full dozen Republicans abandoning Boehner and Cantor to cross the aisle and vote with the Democrats, including Justin Amash (R-MI), Ron Paul (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Steve LaTourette (R-OH), Johnny Duncan (R-TN) and others who felt this is too important an issue to play narrow partisan politics with.

Before the closer-than-expected vote, the Democrats offered a Motion to Recommit as an alternative, that did try to deal with sequestration in a serious and responsible manner. Their bill would eliminate sequestration by requiring "upper income taxpayers to pay their fair share by instituting a 'Buffett rule' [and extending] "middle class tax cuts while allowing components of the tax extensions that benefit upper income beneficiaries to expire as scheduled under current law and including targeted spending cuts." That failed 170-247, not a single Republican voting for it... and 13 Democrats voting with the GOP against it:

•Justin Altmire (Blue Dog/New Dem-PA)
• John Barrow (Blue Dog/New Dem-GA)
• Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
• Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)
• Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
• Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)
• Lipinski, Jr (proto-Blue Dog-IL)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC)
• Gary Peters (New Dem-MI)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Chellie Pingree (D-ME)*
• Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-K Street)

The bolded names are the Democrats "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel is spending the lion's share of DCCC money on-- so they can be reelected and continue voting with the GOP next year. And as far as non-incumbents, most of Steve Israel's recruits are reactionary Blue Dogs, New Dems and other conservatives who will be part of the anti-family, anti-worker coalition that secretly agrees with Mitt Romney that corporations are people and deserve all of Congress' efforts to make them more profitable and more able to bribe political elites. Steve Israel's worst recruits for 2012:

•Hayden Rogers (Blue Dog-NC)
• David Crooks (Blue Dog-IN)
• Gary McDowell (Blue Dog-MI)
• Pam Gulleson (Blue Dog- ND)
• Nick Lampson (Blue Dog-TX)
• Brendan Mullen (Blue Dog-IN)
• Patrick Murphy (R/New Dem-FL)
• Sal Pace (Blue Dog/New Dem-CO)
• Charlie Wilson (Blue Dog/New Dem-OH)
• Val Demings (New Dem-FL)
• Juan Vargas (New Dem-CA)
• Rob Wallace (Blue Dog-OK)

Watch Israel flush millions of dollars in contributions down the toilet futilely trying to persuade Democrats to vote for these conservatives.

* Chellie Pingree is a stalwart progressive and has been a battle-hardened leader for Maine's working families for many years. She's on this list because of a clerical error. When I called her office to ask why she voted with the GOP, she wasn't aware that she "had." She added that her feeling is that "the sequestration cuts are extreme and don't reflect the values of the American people. I didn't vote for the Budget Control Act in the first place for this very reason. Cutting budgets this way is no way to run the government. Republicans steadfastly refuse to accept a balanced approach that includes higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires and have forced us into these difficult situations."

Peggy Noonan is rarely right about anything, but equating Romney to Nixon was the smartest thing she's said in two decades. “At one point, he had a certain slight grimace on his face when he was taking tough questions from the reporters. And I thought, ‘He looks like Richard Nixon.’... Sometimes when really bad things happen, when hot things happen, cool words or no words is the way to go... I think... that in times of great drama and heightened crisis, and in times when something violent has happened to your people, I always think discretion is the better way to go. When you step forward in the midst of a political environment and start giving statements on something dramatic and violent that has happened, you're always leaving yourself open to accusations that you are trying to exploit things politically."

Did Peggy Noonan REALLY expect her pal Rummy to come clean on his screw-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq?

No doubt about it, Old Rummy's got plenty to answer for, and our Peggy has done a swell job of nailing him to the wall for failing to begin to do so. She's just got a dangerously and delusionally screwy idea of what exactly he has to answer for.

by Ken

A fair amount of attention is being paid to a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan skewering a fellow for whom she begins by professing kindly feelings, former Defense Secretary Donald "Old Rummy" Rumsfeld: "I like Donald Rumsfeld. I've always thought he was a hard-working, intelligent man. I respected his life in public service at the highest and most demanding levels." Of course, as Howie tweeted yesterday, "When Peggy Noonan starts by writing 'I like Donald Rumsfeld,' you can be sure she's going to rip him to shreds."

I doubt that any DWT reader will shed tears over the ensuing shredding job. Of course it's always fun when our friends on the Right are at each other's throats. Naturally, since it's Peggy Noonan, you expect that at the core the piece will be stupid, and our Peggy doesn't disappoint (it fascinates me that you can be as smart as she is and yet have what comes out of your mouth or word processor be so crackers), but let's come back to that.

Old Rummy's recently published memoir, Known and Unknown, says our Peggy, "is so bad it's news even a month after its debut." And a lot of what she has to say seems to me directly to the point.

Now I take with a grain of salt her complaint:

You'd expect such a book (all right -- you'd hope) to be reflective, to be self-questioning and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin of U.S. foreign policy circa 2001-08. He was secretary of defense until 2006, in the innermost councils. He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You'd expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since some of those decisions are in the process of turning out badly, and since he obviously loves his country, you'd expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets and assumptions so that later generations will learn.

You have to think Peggy is being disingenuous here, even with that distinction between what one expects and what one hopes. Really now, on what basis would any reasonable observer of the modern American political scene imagine that any "player," least of all one as shifty and devious and secretive and especially self-serving as Old Rummy, might even consider producing such a book as she describes? And surely nobody understands this better than Peggy, which is why I suspect disingenuousness rather than naiveté.

Nevertheless, on the theory that Old Rummy owes us such an accounting -- and who could disagree? -- her conclusion seems to me on the money:

When he doesn't do this, when he merely asserts, defends and quotes his memos, you feel overwhelmed, again, by the terrible thought that there was no overall, overarching strategic thinking. There were only second-rate minds busily, consequentially at work.

And by now Peggy has already diagnosed the, er, literary technique Old Rummy has brought to bear on what he's instead set out to do with the book:

It takes a long time to read because there are a lot of words, most of them boring. At first I thought this an unfortunate flaw, but I came to see it as strategy. He's going to overwhelm you with wordage, with dates and supposed data, he's going to bore you into submission, and at the end you're going to throw up your hands and shout, "I know Iraq and Afghanistan were not Don Rumsfeld's fault! I know this because I've now read his memos, which explain at great length why nothing is his fault."

Fault of course isn't the point.

Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection. Mr. Rumsfeld didn't ignore the generals, he listened to them too much. Not enough troops in Iraq? That would be Gen. Tommy Franks. Turkey's refusal to allow U.S. troop movements? Secretary of State Colin Powell. America's failure to find weapons of mass destruction? "Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error." Yes, I'd say so. He warned early on in a memo he quotes that the administration was putting too much emphasis on WMD. But put it in context: "Recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning."

"A WORD ON THE USE OF MEMOS IN MEMOIRS"

And then she makes a point that strikes me as brilliant.

A word on the use of memos in memoirs. Everyone in government now knows his memos can serve, years later, to illustrate his farsightedness and defend against charges of blindness, indifference, stupidity. So people in government send a lot of memos! "Memo to self: I'm deeply worried about Mideast crisis. Let's solve West Bank problem immediately." "Memo to Steve: I'm concerned about China. I'd like you to make sure it becomes democratic. Please move on this soonest, before lunch if you can." A man in the Bush administration once told me of a guy who used to change the name on memos when they turned out to be smart. He'd make himself the sender so that when future scholars pored over the presidential library, they'd discover what a genius he was.

Most memos prove nothing. It is disturbing that so many Bush-era memoirs rely so heavily on them.

I'd like to think there are a bunch of political stiffs with book contracts in their rolltops, not to mention the legion planning to unleash their literary agents on an unsuspecting public, who are even now experiencing tightness in the gut if not waves of nausea. Memo-free memoirs? Has the woman gone mad? Does she not understand that the e-memo is Modern Technology's gift to the ancient public arts of self-aggrandizement and butt-covering?

On the contrary, she seems to understand this only too well. And it's hard not to chant "Amen" when she writes, "The terrible thing about the Rumsfeld book, and there is no polite way to say this, is the half-baked nature of the thinking within it. The quality of analysis and understanding of history is so mediocre, so insufficient to the moment."

WHAT DOES OLD RUMMY HAVE TO ANSWER FOR?

The only problem comes when Peggy gets down to cases -- to, as she puts it, "the point at which I tried to break the book's spine."

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys -- to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations. New York at the time of the invasion, October 2001, was still, literally, smoking; the whole town still carried the acrid smell of Ground Zero. The scenes of that day were still vivid and sharp. New York still isn't over it and will never be over it, but what happened on 9/11 was fresh, and we wanted who did it to get caught.

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom. Or, less good but still good, to find him, kill him, put his head in a Tiffany box with a bow, and hand-carry it to the president of the United States.

It wasn't lust for vengeance, it was lust for justice, and for more than justice. Getting Osama would have shown the world what happens when you do a thing like 9/11 to a nation like America. It would have shown al Qaeda and their would-be camp followers what kind of unstoppable ferocity they were up against. It would have reminded the world that we are one great people with one terrible swift sword.

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment -- the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world -- from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused. The administration in Washington, emboldened by what it called its victory over the Taliban, decided to move on Iraq. Its focus shifted, it took its eye off the ball, and Afghanistan is now what it is.

Now this last part is fine, and begins to point toward Old Rummy's really monstrous failures and malfeasances. But the notion that the catastrophe was the failure to find bin Laden may be one of the stupidest things ever written. And it's dangerously, delusionally stupid.

Oh, to be sure, to the extent that the failure to capture bin Laden was Old Rummy's fault, he has something to answer for, and here again Peggy makes a strong case.

Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else—Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet. "Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run" was "worth the risks." Needless to say "there were numerous operational details." And of course, in a typical Rumsfeldian touch, he says he later learned CIA operatives on the ground had asked for help, but "I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had." I can.

No problem here in so far as holding Old Rummy's feet to the fire is concerned. But we don't in fact know that it was ever within our power to capture bin Laden, and there ought to be some lesson to be learned -- a colossally important lesson -- about making out of something that may or may not be in our power something we need, let alone something on which our entire future depends. This is just childish playground whining. We gotta have him, we gotta have him.

And there's no way of measuring the stupidity involved in assuming that we would have been a whit better off if we had captured him. For goodness' sake, we haven't even been able to handle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Can you imagine, has Peggy even begun to imagine, how much worse off we might be if we were sitting on a captive Osama bin Laden?

The notion that some kind of justice might have been served is comical. Does Peggy have no conception of the concept of martyrs? I guess she thinks the world would have been somehow impressed if we had proved we always get our man, even though (1) the nature of reality is such that we can't always assume that we can get our man, and (2) I don't see any indication that the world gives a damn about it, or that we would necessarily be in any way better off if we had. The world has its opinions of the U.S. and of bin Laden, and I don't see any of that changing if Old Rummy had bagged him. Of course normally people over on Peggy's side of the American political spectrum don't give a damn what the world thinks.

If Peggy had focused on the monumental catastrophe of the waste in life, destruction, billions of dollars down the tubes, and a military given over to the principles of totalitarian control (including officially sanctioned torture) involved in immersing the country in two never-ending wars, that would have been fine. If she had charged him with the megalomaniacal compulsion to control the all aspects of U.S. participation in the two invasions, including excluding the State Department or anyone else who might have considered what would happen after the next bombing, great.

Just as she suggests, Old Rummy has more to answer for than any single human being ought ever to have to answer for, and I gather that in his book he hasn't taken so much as the first step toward illuminating what happened for the sake of history, in the hope of sparing us the repetition of those blunders. On all of that, she's nailed the son of a bitch. I just don't think she has a clue what exactly she's nailed him for.

#

The struggle for the soul of the Republican Party (and the conservative movement): It's the age-old war between crazy and stupid

"AND, OH YES, I'M MAD AS A FRIGGIN' HATTER"

Anyone who's tried to read the drivel penned over the decades by Peggy Noonan, or has been forced to listen to the "eloquent" speeches she's written for presidents and such, knows the feeling of trying helplessly to puzzle out: Is she just dumber than spit, or is she completely out of her pea-pickin' mind?

"We’re not talking fringe activists here; we’re talking U.S. senators. The truth is that lunatics have been running this particular asylum for years."

-- Paul Krugman, in a NYT blogpost yesterday (see below)

by Ken

I have been left mostly speechless (as some of you may have noticed) by the, um, "intellectual" climate of what now passes for political discourse in this great country of ours. As usual, I have my ups and downs with the people on Our Side, but what's struck me dumb is the total abandonment of even the slimmest pretense of sense or sanity by the Other Side.

I loved Howie's piece yesterday ("Cornyn Denounces Limbaugh and Liddy Denounces . . . Women," with a really terrific batch of comments) about what appears to be a pullback among Official Republicans, notably Texas Sen. John Cornyn (chairman of the GOP's Senate campaign committee), hardly a voice of moderation himself (as I understand it, he has been a principal architect of the GOP's "All No All the Time" strategy, and is more than anyone else responsible for keeping Al Franken from taking the Senate seat to which he was elected -- for the simple reason that, as he realized, he can prevent it), from the cliff over which, they finally understand, the Un-official Party, that passel of raving lunatics ringled by the Daddy of the Dittoheads, is leading them.

In part, I loved the piece because Howie is a lot more confident than I am about where the country is in all of this. Not only do I share commenter Balakirev's concern about the irreducible 24 percent "base" that appears to be willing to follow Rush and Glenn and the crazies over the cliff, I think the 24 percent figure seriously understates the portion of the public that's susceptible to the reign of craziness. Even if they're no immediate threat to regain power, I worry that 30 or even 40 percent of the country in the thrall of ignorance and insanity makes for a powderkeg that could blow up what's left of our democracy.

One of the things I've been trying to dope out is what part sheer stupidity plays, and what part evident insanity.

One should never underestimate the stupidity factor. Both Howie and I have written frequently about the stupidification of America, which he believes is the result of a careful right-wing master plan to turn the American educational system into poop for the conscious purpose of turning masses of Americans into retards who will cheer madly at the wackiest inanities passed off as policy prescriptions.

Me, I'm not so sure about the careful planning. I think if you elevate stupidity to a virtue, and make heroes of enough dimwits whose nitwittitude is their only virtue, you'll wind up at the same point, especially if you have enough "opinion leaders" -- in particular the kind who claim to get their guidance straight from God -- who have as their educational goal making their offspring as smart as they are. Throw in ruthless manipulators like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, and the rest is history -- our history, from Reagan through Little George.

I've been trying for months to write something on this subject, and failing. So I was greatly cheered by a pair of delicious posts this week on Paul Krugman's NYT blog, "Conscience of a Liberal." The one I really loved was this one from Wednesday:

May 27, 2009, 6:40 PM
A note on identity politics

The attacks on Sonia Sotomayor are getting crazier by the minute. The pronunciation of her name is unnatural. Her fondness for Puerto Rican cuisine -- sorry, her "claimed" fondness (you never know) -- may cloud her impartiality. She doesn't have enough money in her retirement account.

But is this any crazier, when you come down to it, than the Cult of Bush that ruled much of Washington for years? It was positive, not negative (though there was plenty of that too), but it was similarly about identity politics -- you were supposed to support Bush, not because of how he did his job, but because he was, drumroll, a regular guy. Remember Peggy Noonan:

I was asked this week why the president seems so attractive to the heartland, to what used to be called Middle America. A big question. I found my mind going to this word: normal.

Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He's normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He's not exotic. But if there's a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help. He'll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, “Where's Sally?” He's responsible. He's not an intellectual.

Of course, a year and a half later there really was a fire on the block — actually a flood in New Orleans, but basically the same thing — and what he actually said was, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” But I digress.

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.

Paul is, of course, being kind to our Peggy. There isn't a word in her paean to her beloved George W., unless you count the declaration that her boy "isn't an intellectual," that doesn't mark her as the dumbest life form in the history of creation. (The "isn't an intellectual" comment merely marks her as someone implacably hostile to the thought process.)

"He thinks in a sort of common-sense way"?

This is a man who doesn't think, ever. He seems to have discovered at Yale, surrounded by all those smart kids, that thinking wasn't his forte, and that trying was only going to get him into trouble. Out of sheer laziness, mixed with the arrogance of a subhuman blob who believed himself as entitled as he is ignorant, he willed himself into an ignoramus, and that ought to be literally unforgivable -- not praised by pseudo-populists like drooling Peggy.

"He speaks the language of business and sports and politics"?

Uh, yeah, I suppose, but he knows only the tiniest, most superficial bit about sports, and nothing whatsoever about business or politics, unless you count "how to fake it."

Maybe I'm just slow to adapt, but I don't believe that Noonanism has been banished from American discourse. Yeah, I saw Karl Rove, the master of this form of political manipulation in our time, pulling back from his earlier ritual smears of Judge Sotomayor. But I don't believe for a moment that he's lost faith in those tactics, or that they won't work just fine another time: "[insert name of latest defiantly ignorant blob of human waste] is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s normal."

As I suggested above, I'm less than persuaded by John Cornyn's sudden conversion to reason in the matter of the Sotomayor nomination. Can the arch-loon in Cornyn really be put to rest so easily? Captain Courage he's not. I guffawed at the contribution of another commenter on Howie's post yesterday, Comrade E.B. Misfit:

"Coryn's apology to el Rushbo in 3....2....1..."

Um, yeah, Comrade, I hear you.


POSTSCRIPT: ANOTHER STROLL DOWN CRAZINESS LANE

I mentioned that Paul Krugman had written a second blogpost on this subject, and I would be remiss not to direct your attention to it as well:

May 29, 2009, 11:46 AM
Same as they ever were

Obama is a socialist/fascist; Sonia Sotomayor is a racist, and La Raza is the KKK; there’s an evil plot against Republican car dealers. The GOP is sounding a bit, well, demented these days.

But here’s the thing: it always did. A few trips down memory lane:

Senator Tom Coburn:

In a tape recently released by Brad Carson, Coburn’s Democratic opponent for the Senate race there, Coburn is heard warning the good clean citizens of Oklahoma of the great lesbian threat to their state.

On the tape, Coburn tells how a campaign worker form Coalgate, Okla., told him that lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom."

Senator James Inhofe:

Why did the UN cook up the idea of global warming? To “shut down the machine called America.” In fact, we learned, global warming is a plot to destroy the US economy and to initiate one-world government–a goal not only of the UN but of the American political left more broadly.

Establishing his Christian credentials, Inhofe invoked Romans 1:25 (For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever) to suggest that taking steps to ameliorate global warming would constitute a form of idol worship.

We’re not talking fringe activists here; we’re talking U.S. senators. The truth is that lunatics have been running this particular asylum for years. But in a classic case of emperor’s new clothes, it wasn’t acceptable to notice this until the lunatics lost power.

Thanks for that little stroll down Craziness Lane, Paul. I still can't help considering that if only, say, 40 percent of the insane blithering being blithered about Judge Sotomayor, by people who ought to know better (and, yes, some who probably don't), is being absorbed by the public, that still represents a staggering quantity of psychotic lies and filth.


[For the record: The world is anxiously awaiting word from Senator Doctortom Coburn (who like his unlamented colleague, former Senate Majority Leader Doctorbill Frist, is a physician, but more importantly is a beyond-certifiable kook, proud to be known as "Doctor No" for his tireless one-man crusade of obstructionism in the Senate) as to whether he will run for reelection. If he doesn't, can we expect that the Oklahoma Republican cult has someone of comparable, er, stature to slot in? We know that Oklahoma Democrats have nothing better to throw at the seat than unspeakable DINO Rep. Dan Boren.]

#