Trump Has A Plan To Steal The 2020 Election-- And It's Strong

Today began with one of the longest essays I ever posted on this blog-- and the parts about Beto O'Rourke fighting Nazis and Lindsey Graham roasting on a spit in Hell, were afterthoughts. What I had intended to include was another video from cult-fighter Steven Hassan, the one up top and a few thoughts about McKay Coppins' Atlantic piece yesterday, The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign To Reelect Señor Trumpanzee. We have come a long way from Jospeh Goebbel's day. And yet... Coppins set out to explore how new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election.

Coppins must have been planning this article for a long time. Last fall he created a new Facebook account in order to experience what people who slip into the Trump cult experience. "Facebook’s algorithm," he wrote, "prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like 'In Trump We Trust.' I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers." The Trumpanzee reelection campaign "was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside."

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video-- served up by the Trump campaign-- that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself-- about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else-- felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

I don't know Coppins personally and I'm not a psychologist. I've read his work for almost a decade and I know he was the editor of his college paper. My guess is that he IQ is considerably higher than average. The mean IQ, by definition, is 100. Half the country has IQs under 100 and half have IQs over 100. People who have IQs under 100 have a tougher time with abstract reasoning than people with IQs over 100. I always figured people with low IQs are easy victims for slick propaganda, whether on TV or the internet. I explained the Trump election by assuming-- with the skimpiest of evidence-- that Trump was elected by the half the country with the lowest IQs, the ones for whom those Russian Facebook posts were motivational. No one I knew. And yet... Coppins admits the strategy made him question what he knew to be logical and what he knew to be normative reality.

He warned that he was "seeing a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes-- jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise."

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view-- one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

Did you see any of the Iowa caucus-goers being interviewed during the process in the gyms? It scared me. Critical thinking was in short supply. No-- not short supply... nowhere to be seen. Every time a reporter asked a voter why he or she was voting for or switching to Biden or Klobuchar or Warren or Mayo Pete of whomever, they simply repeated that candidate's advertising talking points.

It was hilarious when after the voting a reporter asked a Mayo Pete supporter who voted for Mayo because of his phony-made-for-TV military service, if he knew Mayo was openly gay. The voter screamed he wanted his vote back.

Bloomberg has every attention of matching his former friend/bitter rival Trump million for million, billion for billion in these brainwashing efforts. Hurray for our side?

Brad Parscale, who looks like Satan, has a sulphur-odor and, wrote Coppins, had "no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending-- none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them... From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump 'got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.'"

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression [the ones that helped elect Filipino fascist leader Rodrigo Duterte] as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology-- muddy the waters; alternative facts-- but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting-- the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie-- who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster-- said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

...Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful-- and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”-- a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use-- and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps-- including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser-- a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear-- and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts-- written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend-- were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

...[A] lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content-- no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media-- while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by the Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and the Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas-- which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm-- instead of paying the sites directly-- candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal-- the one in which Joe Biden is the villain-- and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”-- prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case-- that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal-- if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not-- but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along-- and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear-- not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

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

by Maria Bustillos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annals of the Right-Wing Right to Lie: Ryan, Boehner, and Amtrak

"Thank God for human error!" says Rep. Paul "Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Stoopid" Ryan. And thank God, he and his fellow right-wing lying nutjobs are no doubt saying, that right-wingers have their Official U.S. Right to Lie. If you want to watch the Burbling Boobster, you'll find the clip here.

by Ken

Ah, you have to hand it to the Fox Noisemakers and their golden boy, Rep. Paul "Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Stoopid" Ryan. It's like the kid who, fearing that his parents suspected he was wearing his sister's underwear, thought he could distract them by suddenly declaring angrily, "Just so you know, there's no way I'm wearing Sissy's underwear." And never mind that at the time he was wearing no pants over Sissy's panties and Sissy's bra was popping out of his unbuttoned lumberjack shirt.

So we know that the train that crashed in Philadelphia was going 106 mph as it entered that fateful curve (speed limit 50 mph). The Republican's who've been doing their darnedest to starve Amtrak are off the hook!

Disasters are always awkward for right-wing misappropriators. They expect the important funding needs they disdain -- because of their unyielding commitment to Ideology, Imbecility, and Personal Profit -- to suffer and shrivel comfortably out of sight of mainstream Americans. It takes some finesse to lie their way through the awkward public displays that occasionally flare up in the wake of disasters.

Finesse like Frankenstein's monster look-alike Paul Ryan exhibited this week. Here's ThinkProgress's Josh Israel reporting Thursday (lots links onsite):

At least seven people died and 200 were injured in Tuesday’s Amtrak train crash in Philadelphia — even though technology exists that could have prevented the tragedy. A day after his Republican colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines to cut about one-fifth of Amtrak’s budget, House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) incorrectly claimed that Congress had already funded implementing the safety system it mandated in 2008.

Positive Train Control (PTC) would allow railroads to use GPS to stop or slow trains in cases of driver emergencies, switches left in the wrong position, hijacking, natural disasters, or other human error. Seven years ago, Congress enacted the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which required the nation’s busiest railroad operators to have these technologies fully in place by December 2015. Though Amtrak’s president has called PTC “the most important rail safety advancement of our time,” the chronically cash-strapped Amtrak has struggled to put in place its Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System (ACSES) PTC technology system on the timetable it planned and the section of track where Tuesday’s accident did not yet have an operational PTC system. The train was reportedly traveling at more than 100 miles per hour in a 50 MPH zone. Robert Sumwalt, the National Transportation Safety Board official leading the investigation into Tuesday’s crash, made clear on Wednesday, “Based on what we know right now, we feel that had such a system been installed on this section of track, this accident would not have occurred.”

Paul Ryan, who has made budget cuts a top priority, warned in a Fox News interview on Thursday that Congress cannot “rush to judgment and try doubling the size of government programs” in response to what he believes was “human error.”

Ryan noted that Congress had already “authorized and mandated the sort of speed control systems to be put in place,” though he noted “it wasn’t put in place here at this time.” Asked by Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade whether Congress had actually funded those systems, Ryan claimed that they had.

“Yes!” Ryan responded, “Yeah, we already passed an Amtrak funding, an authorization bill earlier this year. And the appropriations process is working its way through right now.”

Ryan did not note that this appropriation would be well below Amtrak’s request which had included millions for PTC — and below even the past several years’ funding levels. And if Congress had provided the necessary funds to install PTC across the country, there would be no need for a Senate bill filed just weeks ago to delay the implementation deadline from December 2015 to 2020.

Ryan said he hoped “cooler heads can prevail” and “people won’t seize on political opportunities out of tragedies like this” to spend more money. Asked whether he thought rebuilding America’s infrastructure should be a priority, Ryan noted that the Highway Trust Fund goes bankrupt later this month but that he would not back tax increases for infrastructure improvement as “we can do better by saving more money [and] being more efficient.”

Well, oops! As stoopid as Ryan always pretends to be -- every time he opens his fool mouth -- he knows perfectly well that Amtrak operates on a bare-bones operations-only budget and has no way of finding money for capital projects like installing PTC, which therefore have to be done in dribs and drabs as driblets of money can be found. Yes, Paulie knows, but Paulie doesn't have to tell, 'cause Paulie's officially allowed to lie his stinking guts out.

Phew, thank goodness for the Official U.S. Right to Lie that absolves right-wingers from any need to even acknowledge, let alone explain or apologize for, their lies. Their mandate is just to continue dreaming up bigger 'n' better ones.

Kelly Eleveld chronicled this some other instances of the all-important Official U.S. Right to Lie as applied to the Philadelphia train crash. Here, for one, is a little committee kerfuffle growing out of House Republicans' "slash and burn infrastructure habits":

GOP Rep. Mike Simpson went at it with Democratic Rep. Steve Israel in the committee hearing where Republicans ultimately voted to cut Amtrak's budget just hours after the crash:

After Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) told the committee that Congress had “failed to invest in their safety,” an irate Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) accused him of exploiting the incident.

“You tied it directly to an accident and a tragedy and suggested because we hadn’t funded it that caused that accident and you have no idea what caused it – and that’s a shame,” Simpson said.

Yep. When your party doesn't fund infrastructure projects, that's the risk you take Congressman—being on the hook for safety concerns.

And here's the biggest House Republican slasher-and-burner of them all (again, links onsite):

House Speaker John Boehner fired back at a reporter Thursday who dared to ask him about the House committee vote Wednesday to cut Amtrak funding.

"Are you really going to ask such a stupid question?"

Well, yes. People are just a tad concerned about Tuesday night's crash that has now claimed the lives of eight people. But Boehner apparently isn't.

"It's hard for me to imagine that people take on the bait on some of the nonsense that gets spewed around here," he said.

And... scene. Boehner ended the press conference.

Maybe people are concerned about Amtrak's $21 billion backlog in maintenance and repair. That's the type of "nonsense" that Democrats were trying to address by increasing Amtrak funding another $1.31 billion instead of cutting about a fifth of its budget.

Now Sunny John obviously knows he's lying. He and his cronies know perfectly well that they starve Amtrak, and only wish they could starve it more so they might have a little more money to disperse to their Big Money patrons worthier citizens. After all, people who want more money for Amtrak are people: (1) whom they don't know, (2) who don't vote for them, and, most important, (3) who don't give them generous piles o' cash. Why would they shovel more money to people like this when they have so many rolling-in-dough people who satisfy two if not all three of the above-noted conditions of Worthiness to Receive Gummint Handouts?

#

"Gotcha, bitch!" screamed Scott Brown at NH Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Only the cannonball landed on his own foot, which happened to be in his mouth at the time

"Ooh, gotcha!" apparently thought once and would-be-future Sen. Scott Brown. "Bitch'll never know what hit her!" Maybe, maybe not.

by Ken

Normally the modern blood sport of "gotcha" politics thrives on ignorance and stupidity, a perfect match for the virtually achieved right-wing dream of an electorate -- and a snoozemedia gang -- dominated by people with absolute-zero functional IQs (fIQs). Every now and then, though, this dream of a world where political intercourse is squeezed free of any intelligence quotient encounters a hiccup.

It turns out that in America in the year 2014, it may after all be possible to be too stupid. Today's posterboy is former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who of course is currently campaigning to be New Hampshire Sen. Scott Brown. And man, did the Scottster ever think he had his eventual general-election opponent, NH Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, set up for one of those "Gotcha!"s that constitute the intellectual core of modern-day policy-making. Except, well, except for that old problem of not having a clue WTF he was talking about.

The Washington Post's In the Loop team of Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz reports:

Mass., N.H., whatever . . .

Scott Brown’s New Hampshire Senate campaign sent a news release Wednesday questioning why Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) wasn’t appearing with President Obama while he was “in town.”

But Obama was in Worcester, Mass., about 50 miles from the New Hampshire border. The president will then visit Boston to raise money for Senate Democrats.

Brown’s hometown is Wakefield, Mass. And for one term, he served the state as its U.S. senator. He moved to neighboring New Hampshire to challenge Shaheen.

When asked what constitutes being “in town,” Brown campaign spokeswoman Elizabeth Guyton said the statement itself clarified that Obama was “in New England.” Guyton reiterated that Shaheen “wasn’t there, even though the money raised at the event will be used to prop up her race.”

The Senate is in session and had votes scheduled on a health-care bill for veterans and student-loan legislation. Shaheen also attended the state delegation’s fifth annual New Hampshire reception on Capitol Hill in the evening.

Pro-tip for the Brown camp: When your aim is to endear yourself to a new constituency, suggesting that your old and new states are one and the same (it’s all New England, we guess) may not be politically wise.

Gotcha! (At least within the standard right-wing margin of error of 100 percent.)

#

Paul Krugman (et al.) on Marco Rubio: Today, for a Republican, "listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated"

Antarctic ice sheet past 'point of no return'

Warning: In this clip there's every chance that you may hear from (shudder) a scientist. Just thought you should know, and take the appropriate precautions.

"Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated -- hence Mr. Rubio's statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,
Points of No Return"

"My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record. On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one's."

-- FL Sen. Marco Rubio, quoted by The Borowitz Report

by Ken

As Daily Kos's LaFeminista says, "Paul Krugman is in fine form today" -- "nail[ing] the modern GOP."

Institutionalized stupidity is a subject we necessarily keep coming back to in recent years, since the Rampaging Right has made the worship of ignorance the dominant feature of our political landscape. Not surprisingly it's also been on PK's mind, with unapologetically slimy, slithery pandering whores like Marco "I'm Lovely, Absolutely Lovely" Rubio and Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz staking their claims to "leadership" roles as the 2016 presidential rodeo descends on us.

Just to refresh your memory of the story he's harking back to in today's NYT column, here's how The Borowitz Report covered it:

May 12, 2014
G.O.P. RIVALS QUESTION RUBIO’S IGNORANCE CREDENTIALS
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) echoed Gov. Perry’s criticism, calling Rubio a “dummy-come-lately” on climate change.

“At the end of the day, I have faith that Republican voters can tell the difference between someone who’s truly uninformed and someone who’s just faking it,” he said. “These comments by Marco don’t pass the smell test.”

By Sunday evening, a defensive Sen. Rubio was pushing back against the attacks, telling reporters, “Any questions about the authenticity of my ignorance are deeply offensive to me.”

“My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record,” he said. “On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one’s.”

HERE'S HOW PAUL K STARTS HIS COLUMN TODAY

The column is called "Points of No Return," and begins thusly (lotsa links onsite):

Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.

Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves — weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied “I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he confidently declared the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change false, although in a later interview he was unable to cite any sources for his skepticism.

So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.

Drawing on his own field of economics, PK says, he's "been thinking a lot lately about the power of doctrines — how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme." Apparently it's become a common operating principle in economics, "but the same story applies with even greater force to climate."

He offers as a parallel from economics "the recent history of inflation scares."

More than five years have passed since many conservatives started warning that the Federal Reserve, by taking action to contain the financial crisis and boost the economy, was setting the stage for runaway inflation. And, to be fair, that wasn’t a crazy position to take in 2009; I could have told you it was wrong (and, in fact, I did), but you could see where it was coming from.

Over time, however, as the promised inflation kept failing to arrive, there should have come a point when the inflationistas conceded their error and moved on.

In fact, however, few did. Instead, they mostly doubled down on their predictions of doom, and some moved on to conspiracy theorizing, claiming that high inflation was already happening, but was being concealed by government officials.

"Why the bad behavior?" PK asks. "Nobody likes admitting to mistakes, and all of us -- even those of us who try not to -- sometimes engage in motivated reasoning, selectively citing facts to support our preconceptions."

Bu-ut --

Hard as it is to admit one’s own errors, it’s much harder to admit that your entire political movement got it badly wrong. Inflation phobia has always been closely bound up with right-wing politics; to admit that this phobia was misguided would have meant conceding that one whole side of the political divide was fundamentally off base about how the economy works. So most of the inflationistas have responded to the failure of their prediction by becoming more, not less, extreme in their dogma, which will make it even harder for them ever to admit that they, and the political movement they serve, have been wrong all along.

Does this begin to ring a bell, folks?

The same kind of thing is clearly happening on the issue of global warming. There are, obviously, some fundamental factors underlying G.O.P. climate skepticism: The influence of powerful vested interests (including, though by no means limited to, the Koch brothers), plus the party’s hostility to any argument for government intervention. But there is clearly also some kind of cumulative process at work. As the evidence for a changing climate keeps accumulating, the Republican Party’s commitment to denial just gets stronger.

Think of it this way: Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated — hence Mr. Rubio’s statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance.

STUPIDITY IS HARDLY A NOVELTY IN AMERICAN POLITICS

We are, after all, a country that can boast in its heritage of a Know-Nothing Party. But the Know-Nothings were a fringe party. Rafael "Ted" and Marco are vying for the leadership of a putatively mainstream party. I think again of that point Dana Milbank made so well in January 2013 in connection with the return to Congress of Texas crackpot Steve Stockman -- "the same [Steve] Stockman I found so entertaining back in the '90s. What's frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier."

Now, says, PK, "truly crazy positions are becoming the norm."

A decade ago, only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; witch hunts against scientists reporting evidence of warming have become standard operating procedure, and skepticism about climate science is turning into hostility toward science in general.

"Turning into hostility toward science in general," Paul? Hasn't that turn long since happened?


RUTH MARCUS TAKES NOTE

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus sounds pretty disgusted writing from her familiar perch in Jane Eyre's attic ("Marco Rubio’s changing climate; more links onsite):

“I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” Rubio told the [Miami] Herald in December 2009 when asked whether climate change was the result of human activity. Climate change, by the way, isn’t the only issue on which Rubio punted to scientists: When GQ asked in 2012 how old the Earth is, Rubio demurred, “I’m not a scientist, man.”

Which is it, senator? You don’t know as much as these scientists or you don’t believe them?

Rubio’s shift sadly mirrors his party’s. As Paul Waldman recounted on The Post’s Plum Line blog, in 2012, the leading Republican presidential candidates had “embarrassing flirtations with climate realism.”

The 2016 crowd, by contrast, ranges from skepticism to blanket denial. “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming,” asserted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “The Earth’s 4.5 billion years old, and you’re going to say that we had four hurricanes and so that proves a theory?” offered Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

“Climate is always evolving,” Rubio told ABC. Sadly, it’s not the only thing.

EVEN MICHAEL GERSON TAKES NOTE

The man who takes pride in pretending to bring a voice of moderation to far-right-wing extremism writes about Americans' resistance to science ("Americans’ aversion to science carries a high price"), though he spins like mad to make it seem as if the modern-day worship of ignorance comes primarily from people on the Left, rather than being the centerpiece of the 21st-century right-wing creed, so that his column winds up being a moderate-sounding orgy of lies and imbecilities.

It never seems to occur to a useless blob of protoplasm like Gerson that having spent his career coddling right-wing merchants of imbecility and evil, from which he draws every dollar that finds its way into this pocket, as his admittedly piddling payoffs from the merchants of evil and death, he has been a central enabler of the worship of ignorance. (Whores who sell out relatively cheap don't earn brownie points.)


PK'S TRADITIONAL KO PUNCH IS LYING IN WAIT

And boy, does he land it:

It’s hard to see what could reverse this growing hostility to inconvenient science. As I said, the process of intellectual devolution seems to have reached a point of no return. And that scares me more than the news about that ice sheet.

#

Moving on to Benghazi, is there any possibility that in THIS case GOP demagogues will own up to their crusade of lies?

Any chance the lying right-wing liars will stop lying about Benghazi?

"Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?"

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column yesterday,
"The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare"

by Ken

Last night I wrote ("E. J. Dionne Jr. asks if there's accountability for the Rs' wrong-wrong-wrongness about the ACA? (Accountability? Ha!)") about E. J. Dionne Jr.'s column about the spectacular wrongness of the Republicans' war of lies about Obamacare, in which he raised that lovely question: "Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?"

Of course E.J. knows the answers to those questions. As I wrote yesterday, sainted soul that he is, he would be thrilled if it turned out that in this "moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes," there is even the slightest glimmer of accountability for the Obama haters' unrelenting wrongness, if indeed there was mere acknowledgment that their fabrications and false predictions have been exposed. But we all know perfectly well that we're in for the alternate plan, so beautifully described by E.J.: Instead, they wlll "calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones."

E.J. had more excellent questions:

From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law's enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn't, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the "replacement" plans?

Perhaps more importantly, will we finally be honest about the real argument here?

In the case of health care, he argued,

Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don't want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered.

It was, I thought, a great "health care" column, but even more, it was a stupendous description of the present-day modus operandi of the Republican Party and indeed the modern American Right.


WHICH BRINGS US TO THE BENGHAZI CRUSADE OF LIES

And if I had been of a mind to pile on yesterday, I could have offered in evidence Dana Milbank's Washington Post column yesterday:

Latest Benghazi hearing is another Republican flop

By Dana Milbank

House Republicans on Wednesday held Benghazi hearing number 1,372,569, give or take, and this time they were determined to find the proof that had eluded them in the previous 1,372,568: that Obama administration officials had put politics before national security.

Alas for the accusers, this hearing went the way of the others.

Lawmakers had another go at Michael Morell, a former deputy and acting CIA director and the man who revised the infamous “talking points” that said the September 2012 attack on American facilities in Libya had grown out of a protest. The talking points are key to the Republicans’ claims that President Obama tried to hide the true nature of the terrorist attack because the presidential election was just weeks away.

Morell, a now-retired career intelligence official who served under six presidents and was with George W. Bush in Florida on the day of the 2001 terrorist attacks, has the credibility to validate the conspiracy theories Republicans have been floating about Benghazi. But instead, he used the rare public session to rebut the accusations.

“I never allowed politics to influence what I said or did — never,” he testified. “None of our actions were the result of political influence in the intelligence process — none. . . . The White House did not make any substantive changes to the talking points, nor did they ask me to.” He called the talking points — which turned out to be wrong — “the best available information at the time.”

Did he have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the nature of the talking points?

“No, sir.”

His thoughts on the false information Susan Rice gave on TV the Sunday after the attacks?

“What she said about the attacks evolving spontaneously from a protest was exactly what the talking points said.”

How about the claims that somebody in the administration told the military not to assist on the night of the attack?

“I am aware of several requests by CIA for military support that night, and those requests were honored and delivered.”

The former official’s denials of any skullduggery drove the Republicans on the panel into a fury and caused Rep. Lynn Westmoreland to lose command of his vocabulary. The Georgia Republican, trying to find sinister meaning in the CIA’s changing of a phrase from “attacks” to “violent demonstrations,” explained that if there had been a protest, “you would see people malingering around and doing things. . . . They didn’t see anybody malingering around.”

Malingering? Perhaps the congressman expected the terrorists to be complaining about a persistent cough.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) let loose a string of insults on the uncooperative witness, saying Morell was either “misleading by omission” or “lying by omission” and violating “your obligation to this committee.” King went on to suggest that there was something suspicious about Morell going into business with former State Department official Philippe Reines (never mind that another partner in the venture is a former Republican staff director of the House Intelligence Committee) and about Morell becoming a commentator for CBS News, where President David Rhodes is brother of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes (never mind that CBS is the network that ran a damning but false account of the Benghazi response).

“When you see the whole totality here, this is why people have questions,” King said.

Questions — such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) asking Morell if he “conspired” with the White House.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) skipped the questions in favor of accusations. “I believe that the totality of the information was obfuscated and that there was an intentional misleading of the public,” she said, charging Morell with changing the talking points “for the White House.”

Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who is retiring to be a talk-radio host, had drawn grumbles from some conservatives for being insufficiently zealous about Benghazi. Wednesday’s three-hour extravaganza should help him with those critics, because it gave Republican lawmakers a chance to vent their rage.

Angriest, or at least loudest, was Rep. Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), who shouted virtually his entire statement: “We get on talking points, and we get about who said this and whether the station chief said that. And the bottom line is that we’ve got people running around who killed Americans, who are sipping mai tais or whatever they’re sipping, and we can’t do anything about it.”

Good point. So maybe Republicans will drop their obsession with 19-month-old talking points and start asking what more can be done to get the bad guys.

We know beyond question that the Republican Benghazi-liars don't give a flying fig about death and destruction at a U.S. embassy, because they've never uttered a peep about previous such incidents, in particular those that occurred under Republican administrations. What's more, it's the "fiscally prudent" Republicans who have denied the State Department the funds it needs to protect American installations abroad. These pathologically lying scumbags have no idea where Benghazi is, or what might have happened, or what could have been done, or what should be done now. All they care about is the most repellently cynical political opportunism.

My own feeling is that they should all be taken out and shot. But I'd settle for some of them owning up to their lies and delusions, acknowledging a tiny bit of the truth. Come to think of it, though, as against acknowledging even a tiny bit of the truth, they might rather be shot.

#

E. J. Dionne Jr. asks if there's accountability for the Rs' wrong-wrong-wrongness about the ACA? (Accountability? Ha!)

Plus update: At Mozilla, Prop 8 supporter is out



"From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law's enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn't, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions?"

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column today,
"The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare"

by Ken

As I always say, you have to love Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., and today we have a reminder why. Who else would have the devilish innocence to write a column called "The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare"? E.J. knows as well as you or I that the chances of the GOP admitting it was wrong about anything are the storied slim to none.

But that's not the end of it. E.J. launches the column with this graf:

Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?

I mean, could you bust a gut laughing?

Accountability in American politics for being completely wrong?

Snort! Hack! Gag! Guffaw!

Any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?

Stop, you're killing me! Is there anyone who doesn't know that Republicans now spend every waking moment saying things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly moving on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones? Why do you think the Rs took out a lifetime, inviolable License to Lie? Any R who's caught telling the truth about anything in public is summarily threatened with a primary.

But no, still with a straight face, E.J. announces that with Obamacare signups reaching the magic 7 million mark, this --

ought to be a moment of truth -- literally as well as figuratively. It ought to give everyone, particularly members of the news media, pause over how reckless the opponents of change have been in making instant judgments and outlandish charges.

Of course it ought to. And of course it won't. This isn't the way the New American Right works. Ever since the wingnuts took over and proclaimed their ambition to practice politics as the absolute scum of the earth, the concept of accountability for their delusions and lies went out the window.

When the health-care Web site went haywire last fall, conservatives were absolutely certain this technological failure meant that the entire reform effort was doomed. If you doubt this, try a Google search keyed to that period relating the word -- doomed" to the health-care law.

It should be said that the general public was much wiser. A CNN poll in November that Post blogger Greg Sargent highlighted at the time found a majority (54 percent to 45 percent) saying that the problems facing the law "will eventually be solved." Political moderates took this view by 55 percent to 43 percent, independents by 50 percent to 48 percent. Only Republicans -- by a whopping 72 percent to 27 percent -- and conservatives (by 66 percent to 33 percent) thought the law could never be fixed.

Their representatives in Washington, moderate conservatives as well as the tea party's loyalists, followed the base's lead. In mid-November, for example, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told Fox News flatly that the law is "destined to fail," "fundamentally flawed" and "not ready for prime time." House Speaker John Boehner predicted dire outcomes before the Web site fiasco. He repeatedly insisted, as he did in July, that "even the Obama administration knows the ‘train wreck' will only get worse."

This attitude affected more neutral observers. Forbes magazine posted a piece on Nov. 22 under the headline: "What to do if and when Obamacare collapses." The op-ed modestly acknowledged that "it's too soon to write an epitaph for Obamacare," but then barged forward, since "its crises are piling up so fast that one has to begin looking ahead."

At this point, the etiquette of commentary typically requires a "to be sure" paragraph, as in: To be sure, the law could still face other problems, blah, blah, blah. But such paragraphs are timid and often insincere hedges. After all, every successful program, even well-established ones such as Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, confronts ongoing challenges.

So let's say it out loud: The ACA is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do. It is getting health insurance to millions who didn't have it before. (The Los Angeles Times pegged the number at 9.5 million at the beginning of the week.) And it's working especially well in places such as Kentucky, where state officials threw themselves fully and competently behind the cause of signing up the uninsured. Those who want to repeal the law will have to admit that they are willing to deprive these people, or some large percentage of them, of insurance.

[Lots of links onsite.]

Now I believe that E.J., being the kindest and gentlest of souls would be sincerely thrilled if any number of Rs took him up on his suggestion that they come clean, once and for all, at least on this one subject. He would be the first one applauding their honesty and courage. But it's pretty clear that he isn't holding his breath.

Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don't want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered. Admitting this can sound cruel, so they insist that their objections are to the ACA's alleged unworkability, or to "a Washington takeover of the health system" (which makes you wonder what they think of Medicare, a far more centralized program). Or they peddle isolated horror stories that the fact-checkers usually discover are untrue or misleading.

Thus the moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes.

"From now on," E.J. asks, "will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA?"

Given how many times the law's enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn't, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the "replacement" plans?

"Perhaps more importantly," he asks, "will we finally be honest about the real argument here:"

Do we or do we not want to put in the effort and money it takes to guarantee all Americans health insurance? If we do -- and we should -- let's get on with doing it the best way we can.

Will we finally be honest about the real argument here? Oh, E.J., you funny, funny man!

Okay, I'll play it straight. Will we finally be honest about the real argument here? Uh, no, I don't think so. That's not in the cards.


UPDATE FROM MOZILLA: EICH IS OUT

On Sunday I wrote ("A Prop 8 supporter as the new guy in charge of Firefox -- is that OK?") about the call to action by Credo Action's political director, Becky Bond, against the naming of Prop 8 supporter Brendan Eich as its new CEO. A few hours ago sent out an e-mail update that starts out:

Mozilla stands up for equality

Today, Mozilla’s Board of Directors and CEO Brendan Eich announced that Eich has decided to step down from the role of chief executive officer, effective immediately. The decision to step down comes after a week of intense backlash against Mozilla over Eich’s past support for efforts to deny equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

This is an important moment for the Mozilla community and a critical development in our ongoing fight for equality and the open web. As someone who signed the petition to Mozilla, you made a difference in this fight.

From Mozilla’s official statement:

Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community. Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.

Later on Becky makes this significant point:

It’s important to remember that Mozilla is not a company, it’s a movement supported by tens of thousands of volunteers around the world. Mozilla is a non-profit organization fighting to keep the web open and free for all of us. They put people above profit, and fight for user choice and privacy. Their mission is vitally important to every grassroots movement, including the work that we do here at CREDO.

You can read Mozilla's full statement here.

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