Jail To The Chief? Will Ex-President Trump Be Tried?

I'm not a supporter of Joe Biden's and have detested him since I first read about him in 1972 when he ran for the Senate. Although I'd never vote for him, I certainly hope Trump loses the election or dies trying. The U.S. has never had a loathsome criminal as president before. We've had some really bad presidents-- Nixon in my time (and I moved overseas for 7 years to avoid his presidency), Republican royalists Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding in the Roaring 20s and Civil War era disasters James Buchanan, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore. But none came close to Trump in terms of disregard of-- if not contempt for-- the country and sheer criminality. The one thing I heard Joe Biden say that I liked this year was that he would not pardon Trump. But not pardoning is not the same as prosecuting. My Twitter followers are split-- between those who want to see Trump tried as a criminal and those who want to see Trump tried as a traitor. He certainly better hope no DWT readers are on the jury.

Yesterday, New York Magazine carried a click-bait piece by Jonathan Chait about the need to try Trump after he's out of office. I think most Americans at this point would agree with Chait's assertion that "the most salient fact about Donald Trump may simply be that he is a crook. He has been defying the law since at least the early 1970s, when he battled the Department of Justice over his flagrant refusal to allow Black [and Puerto Rican] tenants into his father’s buildings. He has surrounded himself with mafiosi, money launderers, and assorted lowlifes. His former attorney, national security adviser, and adviser, and two of his campaign managers, have been arrested on or convicted of an array of federal crimes ranging from tax fraud to perjury to threatening witnesses. He employs the lingo of the underworld: People who cooperate with law enforcement are 'flippers' and 'rats'; investigators pursuing his misconduct are 'dirty cops.' To him, the distinction between legal and illegal activity is merely an artificial construct enforced by sanctimonious hypocrites."

The prospect of an electorally defeated Trump, though glorious, would immediately set off a conflict between two fundamental democratic values: the rule of law and mutual toleration. The rule of law is a banal yet utterly foundational concept that the law is a set of rights and obligations, established in advance, that apply equally to everybody. It is an ideal rather than a lived reality. Black America, to take one obvious example, has never experienced equal treatment from institutions like the police and the courts. But this serves only to illustrate its essential value. The civil-rights movement has consisted in large part of fighting to extend the protection of the rule of law to Black people.

The experience of Black racial oppression shows that the absence of the rule of law is a pervasive, terrifying insecurity. A society without the rule of law is one in which the strong prey upon the weak. The small-scale version is a town where you need the local warlord or mafia boss to solve any problem or dispute; the nation-state version is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the mafia is the government and bribery is endemic.

Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves. The criminalization of politics is a kind of toxin that breaks down the cooperation required to sustain a democracy. This, along with the misogyny, was what made Trump’s embrace of “Lock her up!” so terrifying in 2016. He was already using the threat of imprisoning opponents as a political-campaign tool.

If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.

One of the most corrosive effects of Trumpism upon the political culture has been to detach the law from any behavioral definition and to attach it to political identity. As Trump likes to say, “The other side is where there are crimes.” He has trained his supporters to understand this statement as a syllogism: If Trump’s opponents are doing something, it’s a crime; if Trump and his allies are doing it, it isn’t. The chants, which applied enough pressure to force James Comey to announce a reinvestigation of Hillary Clinton in October 2016, simply to protect the FBI from being delegitimized by Republicans after an expected Clinton victory, showed how the field had been sown for Trump even before he took office.

It is because Trump views the law as a morally empty category, a weapon for the powerful to use against their enemies, that he has spent his presidency calling for the prosecution and/or imprisonment of a constantly growing list of adversaries: Joe Biden and Barack Obama (for “spying” and “treason”), House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (for paraphrasing Trump’s Ukraine phone call in a speech), John Kerry (for allegedly violating the Logan Act), John Bolton (for writing a tell-all book), Joe Scarborough (for the death of a former staffer), Nancy Pelosi (for tearing up his State of the Union Address), and social-media firms (for having too many liberals). Trump has alleged a variety of crimes against at least four former FBI officials and three Obama-era national-security officials.

...That Trump made it to 2017 without being personally convicted of a crime is itself a testament to the ineffectiveness of white-collar-criminal-law enforcement. That Trump has not been charged since taking office is owed to the privileges of being president of the United States. Because the Justice Department has a policy against charging the president with crimes, it did not indict him for the same crime Cohen went to jail for-- even though Trump had ordered Cohen to commit it. The same protection held back Robert Mueller from officially describing the many actions Trump had taken to obstruct the FBI’s investigation as “obstruction of justice.” And his standing as president has allowed him to keep his tax returns out of the hands of New York prosecutors.

But at some point, the impunity will end. The law is coming.

At the moment, Trump is reportedly the subject of three investigations. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., New York State attorney general Letitia James, and Southern District of New York acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss are all probing reported crimes by the Trump administration, ranging from tax fraud to embezzling funds at his suspiciously expensive inauguration, a large proportion of which was spent at his own properties. (Strauss took over after William Barr clumsily attempted to remove her boss, who had clashed with Barr over his investigations into Trump’s misconduct, but is reputed to be independent.)

Even beyond these ongoing probes, the potential for criminal liability is vast. Trump was impeached for leveraging support from Ukraine for an announcement of an investigation of Joe Biden. But the plot reportedly involved Rudy Giuliani and his clients hitting up Ukrainians for business deals, even as Giuliani was representing Trump’s agenda-- which is to say, they were apparently seeking a personal payoff in addition to a political one. The Washington Post has pried loose from the Secret Service just a portion of the records of its spending at Trump properties, giving evidence of, at minimum, severe conflicts of interest.

Trump has fired and intimidated the inspectors general who monitor the executive branch for misconduct and has virtually halted all cooperation with congressional oversight. It stands to reason that turning over more rocks will reveal even more crimes. Upholding the rule of law is going to lead straight to the kind of grisly spectacle Americans associate with banana republics: the former president leaving office and going on trial.

“Usually, these kleptocracies are the ones that hang on to power most bitterly,” says Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die. Trump is particularly dependent on his incumbency. His various legal appeals to keep his financial information from prosecutors have relied on his status as president, and he has used campaign funds to finance his legal defenses. Most important, he has bluntly wielded his power either to pardon his allies or to get the Justice Department to withdraw its charges as a signal of the benefit of remaining loyal.

The political climate will not easily permit a peaceful, straightforward prosecution. The maniacal Republican response to the past two Democratic administrations shows that the prospect of any real Republican cooperation is a fantasy. The fever is not going to break. So what is a post-Trump administration to do?

Biden’s position on this problem is easy enough: He will leave it up to the prosecutors. But what will the prosecutors do? The prospect of fitting the orange man for an orange jumpsuit, delicious as it may seem for MSNBC viewers (or readers of this magazine), would create new problems of its own. To begin with, it would be essential that any prosecution of Trump not only be fair and free of any political interference but be seen as fair. A prosecution that appears vindictive would serve only to confirm the politicization of the law that Trump has done so much to advance. Prosecutors in New York and the Justice Department can make every effort to apply the law neutrally, not singling out Trump for punishment, but it will be difficult to avoid the impression of banana-republicanism formed by the sequence of a Trump criminal trial following an election defeat-- especially when his supporters have been primed to fight “witch hunts” for years. Want to lock up the “Lock her up!” guy? Good luck avoiding the appearance of turnabout, however legally legitimate the process.

An incoming Biden administration is going to need a peaceful transition-- not least because the federal government will probably be either distributing or in the final stages of approving vaccines and treatments for a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans and is crippling the economy. Biden will require months of some form of broad social cooperation with measures like mask wearing and vaccine uptake, all of which could easily and legally be sabotaged by a cornered Trump.

Biden has emphasized some measure of social peace as a campaign message and will be tempted to offer a pardon as a gesture of magnanimity-- why not use all his partisan chits on substantive policy goals?

To think about a society in which Trump’s gangster-state logic prevails, consider Russia. Putin is one of the richest people in the world, having amassed a net worth believed to range up to $200 billion. Obviously, one doesn’t make that kind of money honestly while spending decades in public service. Putin’s political network is honeycombed with criminals, whose impunity is a direct function of their ties to him. The way you can tell whether wealthy Russians have fallen out of favor with the regime is that they’re charged with crimes. While Americans tend to think of Putin as an autocrat, it’s more accurate to see him as the boss of a criminal syndicate that gained control of a failing state. Even in a second Trump term, America would be many steps removed from an oligarchy like Russia’s but still several steps closer than it had been a short while before.

...In a series of letters, Trump’s lawyers have argued that he enjoys almost complete immunity from investigation by law enforcement or Congress. “The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they wrote in 2017. Last year, the president and his lawyers described impeachment as “illegal,” “unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process,” and “no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.” One of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, wrote that Trump could not be impeached even if he handed over Alaska to Russia.

Trump’s incredible claim to be both the sole arbiter of the law and beyond its reach was on vivid display at his nominating convention, a festival of televised lawbreaking. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits using government property to promote any candidate for office. It has been observed continuously, often in exacting detail. Political scientist Matt Glassman recalled working as a staffer at the lowly Congressional Research Service, where he had to remove old political memorabilia, like a 1960 Kennedy poster and an 1884 Blaine-Logan handkerchief, lest those items be mistaken by passersby as endorsements for a living candidate.

Trump has smashed the Hatch Act to bits, to the point where he turned the White House into a stage for his party convention. It isn’t that he was simply willing to pay the price of breaking the law in order to get the best backdrop. Trump’s aides told the New York Times he “enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics-law violations,” and “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.” Unashamed legal impunity was itself the message.

A democracy is not only a collection of laws, and norms of behavior by political elites. It is a set of beliefs by the people. The conviction that crime pays, and that the law is a weapon of the powerful, is a poison endemic to states that have struggled to establish or to maintain democracies. If the post-election period descends into a political crisis, having all the relevant prosecutors promise immunity for Trump would be the most tempting escape valve. Yet the price of escaping the November crisis, and simply moving past Trump’s criminality by allowing him to ease off to Mar-a-Lago, is simply too high for our country to bear.

Gulag, Anne Applebaum’s 2003 history of Soviet concentration camps, argues in its conclusion that the failure to come fully to terms with the crimes of the old regime had “consequences for the formation of Russian civil society, and for the development of the rule of law... To most Russians, it now seems as if the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were.” This observation, written in the early years of Putin’s regime, captures a cynicism that pervades Putin’s now-almost-unchallenged autarky.

Ziblatt likewise suggested to me that Spain’s handling of the post-Franco era has soured in retrospect. In the immediate wake of Spanish democratization, letting many of Franco’s fascist collaborators walk away scot-free seemed like a masterstroke. But over time, a “growing resentment of a collusive bargain between elites” discredited the system and fueled the growth of extremism.

Before 1945, the international norm held that deposed rulers, however crooked or abusive, should be allowed exile. Kathryn Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade: How Human-Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics captures the modern norm, which emphasizes the social value of transparent and fair prosecutions as a deterrent. These cases apply most often, though, to states transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. There is less precedent for what to do when a reasonably healthy democracy elevates a career criminal to the presidency.

Trump’s unique contribution to the decay of the rule of law has been to define criminality in political terms, but he has also joined a very old project in which the political right has long been engaged: associating criminality with a category of people, so that knocking over a 7-Eleven makes you a “criminal” but looting a pension fund does not. Trump’s unusual level of personal crookedness dovetails with a familiar reactionary agenda of combining permissive enforcement of white-collar crime with a crackdown on street crime-- or, as Trump calls it, simply “crime.” The implicit meaning of “Law and Order” is that order is distinct from lawfulness and that some crimes create disorder while others do not.

Trump’s reversals of Obama-era police reforms and his open contempt for the law send a signal about whom the law constrains and whom it protects. The fashioning of a more equal society means sending a different message: The rule of law must bind everyone, just as it protects everyone. A world where the power of the state can be brought to bear against a person who was once its most famous symbol of wealth is one where every American will more easily imagine a future in which we are all truly equal before the law.

Traitor In The White House? Or Just A Doofus?

A new Ipsos poll released by Reuters shows Trump losing badly, with just 38% of registered voters saying they intend to back him in November. Not exactly newsworthy. But what is is how undecideds and third-party backers split.

Reuters/Ipsos polling in 2016 found that support was evenly split that summer between Trump and then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among registered voters who had not backed a major party candidate. On Election Day, Trump won a majority of voters who said they decided in the final week.

This year, the poll found that 61% of undecided or third-party registered voters said they would support Biden if they had to choose, while 39% would vote for Trump.

Seventy percent of undecided or third-party registered voters say they disapprove of Trump’s performance in office and the same number said they think the country is headed on the wrong track. And 62% said they thought the U.S. economy was headed in the wrong direction.

Trump's response has been desperate, all about deceitful fear-mongering-- and dangerous for national unity, willing to rip apart the fabric of the country to try to persuade a few voters that Biden is an anarchist-backing socialist.




Yesterday, on Joe Madison's Sirius XM morning show, Bobby Rush (D-IL) responded to a question about Department iff Homeland Security thugs occupying Portland by telling Madison he believes Trump's reelection gameplay is "to instigate a race war. He wants to have black folks fighting white folks. So he can rise up and say, 'I'm the real Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan and I'm the President. Re-elect me. That's what he's trying to do. He's trying to play to the fears, to the racial animus that exists among certain white people, and he will do everything and anything to do that, because he wants to be re-elected at all costs."

A day earlier Peter Wehner penned an essay for The Atlantic, Donald Trump is a Broken Man that everyone should read, especially people who missed the disastrous Fox News interview Trump did with Chris Wallace last Sunday. "At the conclusion of the interview," Wehner wrote, "Wallace asked Trump how he will regard his years as president. 'I think I was very unfairly treated,' Trump responded. 'From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.' When Wallace interrupted, trying to get Trump to focus on the positive achievements of his presidency-- 'What about the good parts, sir?'-- Trump brushed the question aside, responding, 'Russia, Russia, Russia.' The president then complained about the Flynn investigation, the 'Russia hoax,' the 'Mueller scam' and the recusal by his then–attorney general, Jeff Sessions. ('Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama,' Trump said about the first senator to endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary.)" What a small, sick, ugly man!

Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer-- what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?-- triggered a gusher of discontent.

But the president still wasn’t done. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very-- everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.”

Just in case his bitterness wasn’t coming through clearly enough, the president added this: “That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this-- the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail; it would’ve started two years ago, and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.”

With that, the interview ended.

...The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities-- self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice-- means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind. As a result, he not only nurses his grievances; he acts on them. He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain against those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.

So Donald Trump is a vindictive man who also happens to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department, and there is no one around the president who will stand up to him. He has surrounded himself with lapdogs.

But the problem doesn’t end there. In a single term, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party through and through, and his dispositional imprint on the GOP is as great as any in modern history, including Ronald Reagan’s.

...There were certainly ugly elements on the American right during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan himself was not without flaws. But as president, he set the tone, and the tone was optimism, courtliness and elegance, joie de vivre.

He has since been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. But not just that. One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

In another time, in a different circumstance, there would perhaps be room to pity such a person. But for now, it is best for the pity to wait. There are other things to which to attend. The American public faces one great and morally urgent task above all others between now and November: to do everything in its power to remove from the presidency a self-pitying man who is shattering the nation and doesn’t even care.

Hardball by Nancy Ohanian

Another new poll just released, this one of likely Georgia voters, shows both Trump and enabler David Perdue both losing to utterly worthless Democratic candidates. Another one, by Quinnipiac of Texas voters, shows Trump losing there too! And, again, Trump's response: hideous and profoundly unpatriotic divisiveness. Ron Brownstein: "On one front, Trump is taking his confrontational approach toward big cities to an ominous new level by deploying federal law-enforcement officials to Portland and potentially other locales over the objection of local officials… On the other, Republican governors, especially but not exclusively across the Sun Belt, have repeatedly blocked mostly Democratic local leaders from locking down their communities, despite exploding caseloads in cities from Atlanta to Phoenix. The common thread in these twin confrontations is that they pit Republican officials who rely on support primarily from exurban, small-town, and rural voters against major metropolitan areas that favor Democrats. In the process, these Republicans-- Trump in particular-- may be hoping to rally their non-urban voter base by defining themselves explicitly in opposition to the cities." Trump is trying to split America while painting himself as a hero combating violent crime in fetid American cities filled with disloyal, threatening minorities.





In his new book, Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, set for publication in late October, days before the election, historian David Rothkopf wrote how "Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has repeatedly, egregiously, betrayed his country. Regardless of how Senate Republicans have let him off the hook, the facts available to the public show that Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. He has clearly broken faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead, starting long before he took office, then throughout his time in the White House. And we may not yet have seen the last of his crimes. But the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises a question that has never before been presented in American history: is the president of the United States the greatest threat this country faces in the world?"

Rothkopf concludes that Trump and his many abettors have committed the highest-level, greatest, most damaging betrayal in the history of the country-- worse than Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr and leaders of the Confederacy!

A Spy Named McTurtle? Do We Need-- God Forbid-- Another HUAC Now?

Undoubtably one of the worst chapters in American history revolved around a House committee established in 1938-- HUAC: the House Un-American Activities Committee. Late in its existence it worked in tandem with Wisconsin's deranged fascist Senator Joseph McCarthy. But when HUAC was established Congress was firmly controlled by the Democrats, who were eager to investigate "disloyalty and subversive activities" by private citizens, public employees, and organizations suspected of having ties to the Russians. It wasn't formally abolished until 1975. The roots of HUAC were actually honorable-- Democrats John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein investigating fascist plots against America, including the plans for a Wall Street/DuPont coup (Smedley Butler) against FDR. When it morphed into HUAC, the first chairman was a Texas Democrat and with deep Nazi sympathies and rabid hatred for communists, Martin Dies. At first, HUAC was commonly known as the Dies Committee and was more a laughing stock than a genuine threat. Joe Starnes of Alabama ranted and raved about Greek playwright, "Mr. Euripedes" preaching class warfare and asked the head of the head of the Federal Theater Project (a part of the New Deal) if Christopher Marlowe had been a commie.

HUAC stopped being a joke when it put together plans to round up Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps. When it was later suggested that the HUAC would be of more service to the country if it investigated the KKK, that was voted down and one white supremicist who was clearly ahead of his time and would probably be in Trump's cabinet today, Mississippi Democrat John Rankin noted admiringly that "The KKK is an old American tradition." Two decades later, in 1965, HUAC, finally took a few moments out of railing against commies to focus on the KKK. When HUAC became a permanent committee, the first chair was Edward Hart (D-NJ) and it was full steam ahead as an anti-Russian/anti-Communist vehicle.

It has been suggested that in light of the Republican Party pandering to Putin and the Russians, perhaps House Dems need to bring back HUAC and give it the mandate to look into the connects between McConnell's-- Moscow Mitch as Joe Scarborough has dubbed him-- and Trump's refusal to protect American elections from the Russians. One DWT corespondent suggested that he is "wondering if we are witnessing a latter-day Cambridge Five with Mitch McConnell declining to protect our electoral system from foreign hacking." Further, he thinks it significant that McConnell like Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Donald MacLean is a closeted gay man vulnerable to exposure. "McConnell is hiding a damaging [for him] sexual history. Is this a sell-out because of kompromat, or is this simply GOP politics? In either case, why are the Democrats not taking a page from the standard GOP playbook" to show how the Republicans are working with the Russians to undermine America? He wondered if the House should consider an actual resurrection of the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate Republican connections to past and current election tampering in advance of the 2020 elections?




When I told my correspondent that just the thought of HUAC makes me shudder with horror, he later wrote that "Of course you are right. My impulse was irony that is expressing a frustration with what Teresa Tomlinson diagnosed so convincingly this morning on your site: the Dems don’t have balls. They need to learn some lessons from the GOP and do some forceful grandstanding that captures the nation’s attention. Unfortunately, as you point out consistently well, many don’t have any convictions to rally around. Alas. Willing to share the name of the hotel in Yangon that you referred to on Feldman’s show?" [The hotel is The Strand for anyone else wondering.]

Chip Proser, HUAC artist

In his New York Magazine column today, Andrew Sullivan wrote about why Mueller's testimony didn't shake the country up the way it certainly should have. (Keep in mind that when Sullivan uses the words "we" and "us" he always means elites and insiders.) "The Mueller hearings," he wrote, "told us almost nothing that we didn’t know already. We knew that the president welcomed assistance from a foreign power in order to win an election, and has fawned over his political patron in this endeavor, Vladimir Putin, since he became president. We knew that though he was not competent enough to construct a conspiracy, he was eager to collude with a foreign foe to defeat his domestic one. And we knew that he then lied about it as baldly as he lies about almost everything, and tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into the affair. His attorney general then blatantly lied about the key conclusions of the Mueller report, distorting the public debate for weeks as he kept the contents under wraps, and then bet that Americans, with our gnat-like attention spans, would simply move on. We also knew that in contemporary America, none of these facts matter in the slightest. The notion that the average citizen should care deeply about the rule of law and constitutional norms-- and even actively defend them-- has become terribly passé. Now, all that truly matters is whether we are entertained by someone who can command televisual excitement the way Trump does on a daily, hourly basis. If he can’t, whatever the underlying facts, no one gives a damn. American political elites are no better. The president’s assault on the Constitution has merely revealed the Democratic Party as the lame farce we knew it was. Its ancient, pusillanimous congressional leadership was never going to do what duty, rather than politics, requires."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Given the incremental fascism that American voters have been choosing over the past many decades, a complete fascist in the White House was inevitable. Over the years, the waters pushed and pushed against the dike. Now the tsunami has come and its name is a madman named Trump. If we accept Trump and do nothing, the next crazy will not just be putting kids in cages, he'll be cooking and eating them like Idi Amin. The country will be completely done by then, though.

As a whole, we have repeatedly accepted whatever we have gotten, so now we have a cheap, impulsive, petulant central casting mobster/dictator masquerading as a president in the greatest show on Earth. He's doing so with the full support of our other elected officials and their Wall Street masters; in even worse cases, their Moscow masters. Moscow Masters. Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Trump and his White House staff and cabinet aren't the only vile traitors in our midst. One need look no further than Mitch McConnell but if you do, you'll find he is only a capo in the game. Wise Guys and Made Men abound. A few women, too. How modern.

Now, Trump has thrown one of his tiny gauntlets in our faces. He wants to be all powerful and has decided to test his limits, much like the small, spoiled, tantrum-throwing child that he is. How did the child get that way? No one ever said "No!" to him. Now, he has declared a national emergency, a national emergency that he arrogantly admits that he doesn't really need to declare. He wants to see how much he can get away with in going around Congress and subverting the Constitution. His cult cheers him on, as does his TV channel. His party takes Putin's cash and keeps their silence, for obvious reasons. And the rest of us?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Impeachment is just a compromise position now. More drastic measures are called for. Impeachment is, in fact, now just an unsatisfactory compromise, as if it was ever really on the table anyway. What we should now be doing if we, as a society had any brains at all, (which, sadly, we do not) is not have any meetings in the White House to end the Trump shutdown. Those two words are in the wrong order. Shutdown Trump is more like it. We should send in some military special operations teams and drag Trump's obese, Russian-branded orange ass out of there and drag him all the way down to GITMO where we can give him a military trial with a pre-determined outcome equal to what all GITMO enemy combatants get and leave him there in a cage for the rest of his days. In fact, add some cages for the McConnell types, too. I wouldn't want my tax payer dollars going for a wall but I'd gladly pay for cages and nameplates for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani, and all the rest. Just make sure to leave the cages out in the sun. Even give them a nice humane looking daily water bottle, straight from the sea. Give them all a fine Caribbean vacation, forever.

Even back in the summer of 2016, two long years ago, it was obvious that Trump is an agent for Russia. The fact that he had the Republican platform committee make changes in regard to our position on the Ukraine that Trump's handler Putin favored sent a loud and clear signal. Then there was the "Russia if your listening" request for Hillary's emails and the announcement of an important speech full of dirt about the Clintons the Trumps were planning to receive at a now infamous Trump Tower meeting. Even well before that 2016 Republican Kleveland Kook Konvention, there were plenty of "If it walks like a duck" indicators as to what is going on with our now Manchurian President. The corporate media, of course, refused to pull back the curtain or breathe much of a word. Instead, they chose to broadcast Trump's mini-klan rallies every night while Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler looked up from Hell with smiles and laughter.

Then came the cowardly electoral college "election" and the inauguration that was swarming with so many Russians that you could smell the vodka and caviar all the way past the beltway. Then, when it became obvious that Russia had committed an act of cyber warfare against us, Trump and his co-conspirators in congress did nothing. There's no need to wonder why. Next, Trump quickly invited some Russians, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a "former" Russian intelligence agent, right into the oval office so they could celebrate their joint victory and our Manchurian President could hand him some top secret Israeli intelligence. Many patriotic Americans speculated that Trump's Russian guests might have been able to sneak a few bugs into the oval office, but really, why would they when they know that Trump will just pick up the phone and tell them anything they want to know? The only reason would be to tape enough of whatever Trump is up to to have even more to hold over his head than they already do but, after decades of grooming Trump, why bother? They already had more than enough on him to control him

The story goes on and on. There will be more. The whole thing is now like a nightly old-style radio suspense serial, but the only thing anyone in Washington is worrying about is not about treason and trials but how they can end this story with a free pass given to Trump like Nixon got. This time, the crimes are even worse, and more multi-faceted. This time, the plumbers have names like McConnell, Nunes, Ryan, Gowdy... It's a very long list, a list of politicians who "appear to have" taken laundered Russian money from the NRA. They probably even got the envelopes handed to right on the floors of congress. It's a much longer list, a list with slimy, treasonous tentacles that spread deep into our government, a list with direct connections to what republicans, FOX "News" included, call Mother Russia.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Check out the latest Republican high fashion from Ivanka's clothing line! These two Trump super models are proud to parade around in regulation Republican swag that screams "I'm with Donnie and I'm a traitor too!" The model citizen on the right is even sporting an RNC accessory pin on his MAGA hat. All hail President Trump!

I'm not sure what the shirts say on the back. Is it "Proud To Be Stupid" or "Proud To Be One With Putin" or something else? Obviously there is no depth that is too low for Trump supporters. Oh the irony of despising immigrants! But, at least we now know what the White House staff wears on Casual Fridays.

I have other questions like: Are these shirts made in China? If they were made here in the U.S.A., were immigrant workers involved? Did Rand Paul take one to Putin on his "kiss the ring" trip to Moscow? If so, where was Putin wearing the ring? And finally, does the shirt come in XXXXL for Steven Seagal. Now that he's working for Putin, he'll surely want one for every day of the week.

I will be very interested to see how many Republicans wear these new "Shirts By Ivanka" at NFL football games as they boo any players who take a knee.

The time has come to offer Russia-loving Republicans the chance to move to Russia to see just how they'd really like living there. The offer should come with the proviso that once you go, there is no coming back. You have self-deported. Period.

If you happen to know a Republican, or maybe harbor one in your basement or under a rock in your backyard, remember, nothing will say "Merry Christmas" to them this December better than ordering one of these shirts from the RNC Merch & Swag catalog.

Meanwhile, for me, I'm going to look somewhere for a shirt that says "I'd Rather Be An American Than A Republican!"

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

"If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out, you want to buy anything, you need ID, you need your picture."
- Donald J. Trump, Traitor

Oh, we've got you ID'd Donnie. We've got you ID'd alright. We don't need to see a photo ID to know who and what you are. At this point we don't even need Robert Mueller to tell us what you are. That's just a legal formality and a means to whatever end. We have eyes. We have ears. We've seen your tweets. We've seen you on TV as you revel in your disloyalty.

No matter what we hear from the Mueller Investigation, a simple question that we may never know the answer to is this: At what point in his life did Donald J. Trump decide to sell out his country for rubles? Was it during his 2013 trip to Russia or before? Will some future biographer or investigator pin it down to an actual hour? A specific meeting? If so, with whom? The bottom line is that it doesn't really matter. We know enough. It's just a detail of the treachery that future historians will want to know, just like they want every detail about what what was going on in Benedict Arnold's mind as he tried to sell out the American Revolution, the minds of the Rosenbergs as they passed nuke secrets, or, say the mind of Carlos Marcello on 11/22/63. Eventually, something that at least approaches the truth comes out but it often takes decades. My guess is that the details about Trump will be so horrible that the powers that be will wrongly decide that we can't handle the truth, just like they did with Watergate and with Dallas. That decision will be, as much as anything, done to preserve the corrupt system that enabled Trump to become president in the first place. And, because of that, something similar will happen again in a few decades time.

So you know, Traitor Don, Benedict Arnold died without respect or honor in England, largely ostracized by those whose affection he craved. The Rosenbergs were executed, and, Carlos Marcello died at home in the care of nurses, after being released from prison. Which of the three fates would be most appropriate for you Donnie? I vote for none of the above. I'm thinking that you should stand trial for treason, be found guilty, a then, in a bit of Roman-style theatre, you should be drawn and quartered as halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl while all the players stand at attention, none being the slightest bit inclined to take a knee.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

I've often said in my posts that FOX "News" is a modern day equivalent of Tokyo Rose. For those younger readers that may not know who Tokyo Rose was (due to cuts in education and censored textbooks no doubt), Tokyo Rose was a "radio personality" who broadcast out of Tokyo during World War II. Her role, was to essentially sweet talk American and Australian military personnel into believing that, not only were the allies losing the war but they would be rewarded if they laid down their weapons and surrendered. Even swearing allegiance to Emperor Hirohito was, at times, suggested. Tokyo Rose offered an extremely twisted reinterpretation of things occurring in both naval and land battles, even events leading up to the war. If you believed Tokyo Rose, you would wonder why you were fighting. You might have even thought that it was us who had attacked Japan's navy on December 7th 1941. The whole Tokyo Rose thing was aimed at lowering the morale of the troops and weakening the war effort against Japan. It was propaganda put out even in hopes of influencing our political leaders to stop fighting Japan.

Sound familiar? Substitute Russia for Japan and the likes of Sean Hannity for Tokyo Rose and you pretty much have it. Throw in Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and fellow traveling accomplices like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the rest of their party for good measure, but FOX "News" is their epicenter. It is their oracle, their oracle of bullshit, treasonous bullshit. Whether it's crackpot Nunes memos, Seth Rich conspiracies, birtherism, Hillary's emails, or, more pertinent to this post, Robert A. Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in our elections, chances are damn close to 100% that the talking points of any Republican politician, Republican voter, or Putin apologist stem from there. If you factor any Russian internet bot "sources" into the conversation, it just becomes a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" scenario. Does it matter? No, because, no matter what the nonsense, FOX "News" is the bigger funnel through which all of this bullshit gets to the larger amount of our gullible, naive, and hate-run fellow citizens.

Notice that I didn't mention Donald J.Trump. I only omitted him because comparing him to Emperor Hirohito would be a grave insult to Emperor Hirohito.

So what set me off about FOX "News" this time? It was their coverage of Friday's announcement that Robert Mueller had issued 13 indictments of people involved in the engineering of swaying public opinion in favor of Comrade Trump in the 2016 election. Their spin was a thing to behold. Tokyo Rose would have been gleeful.

I watched FOX "News" on Friday and Saturday. I know you ask why, but I do it out of morbid curiosity, and so you don't have to. It's not a strictly a morbidity thing. It's just that deranged people and how they got there almost fascinates me. I watched because I wanted to see just how they would twist or ignore such a momentous story. The United States of America has been attacked by a foreign adversary and the evidence of the severity keeps mounting up. Meanwhile our so-called "president" says nothing. I knew how pro-American news outlets would react. The question in my mind was exactly how would FOX "News" react. I wasn't surprised. They sank even lower.

The only question left about FOX "News" now is can we really call them treasonous since they are owned by an Australian and a Saudi or does the visibility and weight of the Tokyo Rose-speak outweigh that? I vote for the later. It's obvious. The majority of those who work at FOX "News" and those who deliver the message are Americans. They are doing the work of Russia but they are Americans. They may think others are prime targets for arrest and deportation (or more) but maybe they should look in the mirror.

The goons on FOX twisted the indictment story so heinously it was breathtaking. What the Mueller indictments actually mean went basically unmentioned. To FOX "News," the indictments somehow showed, in true opposite world fashion, that our fake president is now vindicated. They enveloped the indictment story in their ongoing Nunes conspiracy and, most despicably, tied it to the horrific murders of 14 students and 3 staffers at Parkland Florida's Stoneman Douglas high school which had occurred just 2 days before. Keep in mind that this is the same channel that has been pushing their Nunes conspiracy and anti-law enforcement conspiracies for months. They tied the shootings into those conspiracies to create one all-encompassing super vomitous conspiracy by saying that the Parkland Florida high schoolers who are vocally protesting the shootings are only doing so because Democrats are paying them to do so; George Soros and Tom Steyer, no doubt. Think how deranged and downright evil you have to be to go there in the service of your twisted agenda. And, how dare they protest! All of this was done in order to assault the credibility of the Mueller investigation and protect our apparent Manchurian president.

To FOX and fellow travelers, the indictments were not a reason to discuss what to do and what Señor Trumpanzee should do in response to the attack on our country; they were just all part of a conspiracy to get at their boy Putin, er, Trump. It's obvious that FOX "News" and Comrade Trump don't want us to respond at all, certainly not by imposing the sanctions or investigating how we might defend this country from further attacks.

Just imagine if FOX "News" and wacko social media had existed during World War II. FOX "News" viewers might not even know what actually happened at Pearl Harbor. A Trump version of FDR (sorry Franklin) would have not given his stirring "Day of Infamy" speech. There would have been no Jimmy Doolittle raid on Japan. No Rosie the riveter. No battle for Guadalcanal or the Philippines. Half the country would be speaking Japanese and half would be speaking German. If that's what we really want, we should all probably sign up for Russian language lessons right now. If it isn't, then we need to start having a lot of trials and convictions. Oh, and by the way, Tokyo Rose was an American.

Let's credit Richard Cohen with renewing the conversations provoked by Edward Snowden's document cache

"Snowden seems to have sold out to no one. In fact, a knowledgeable source says that Snowden has not even sold his life story and has rebuffed offers of cash for interviews. Maybe his most un-American act is passing up a chance at easy money. Someone ought to look into this."

-- Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen,
in the column "Edward Snowden is no traitor"

by Ken

The odds that a correction will catch up with the original misstatement aren't great, but the correction is still important. And for a newspaper columnist to say, "As time has proved, my judgments were just plain wrong," well, that's something.

As I mentioned last night, the columnist in question is the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, and the column in question is "Edward Snowden is no traitor."

"What are we to make of Edward Snowden?" Cohen asks now.

I know what I once made of him. He was no real whistleblower, I wrote, but "ridiculously cinematic" and "narcissistic" as well. As time has proved, my judgments were just plain wrong. Whatever Snowden is, he is curiously modest and has bent over backward to ensure that the information he has divulged has done as little damage as possible. As a "traitor," he lacks the requisite intent and menace.

As I also mentioned last night, the new column is actually a little stronger than the title suggests. But I suppose it's to Cohen's credit that he takes the accusation of treason seriously. And as he notes, "traitor is what Snowden has been roundly called" (links onsite):

Harry Reid: "I think Snowden is a traitor." John Boehner: "He's a traitor." Rep. Peter King: "This guy is a traitor; he's a defector." And Dick Cheney not only denounced Snowden as a "traitor" but also suggested that he might have shared information with the Chinese. This innuendo, as with Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, is more proof of Cheney's unerring determination to be cosmically wrong.

The "early denunciations" of Snowden," says Cohen, "now seem both over the top and beside the point."

If he is a traitor, then which side did he betray and to whom does he now owe allegiance? Benedict Arnold, America's most famous traitor, sold out to the British during the Revolutionary War and wound up a general in King George III's army. Snowden seems to have sold out to no one. In fact, a knowledgeable source says that Snowden has not even sold his life story and has rebuffed offers of cash for interviews. Maybe his most un-American act is passing up a chance at easy money. Someone ought to look into this.

Whoa, a good joke! And one that actually makes a point! Lest we be rendered wholly insensible, Cohen also makes a bad joke, but it too comes in the context of making a point.

Snowden's residency in Russia has been forced upon him -- he had nowhere else to go. Those people who insist he should come home and go to jail lack a healthy regard for the rigors of imprisonment. After a while it can be no fun. Snowden insists that neither the Russians nor, before them, the Chinese have gotten their grubby hands on his top-secret material, and indeed, this fits with his M.O. He has been careful with his info, doling it out to responsible news organizations -- The Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, etc. -- and not tossing it up in the air, WikiLeaks style, and echoing the silly mantra "Information wants to be free." (No. Information, like most of us, wants a home in the Hamptons.)

I think what Cohen means is that many peddlers of information want a home in the Hamptons, which isn't at all the same thing. But I suppose the confusion is an occupational hazard for folks who have dwelled too long in the arcadian meadows of the Village.

Cohen also has some writerly difficulty transitioning to his crucial paragraph:

Snowden is one of those people for whom the conjunction "and" is apt. Normally, I prefer the more emphatic "but" so I could say "Snowden did some good but he did a greater amount of damage." Trouble is, I'm not sure of that. I am sure, though, that he has instigated a worthwhile debate. I am sure that police powers granted the government will be abused over time and that Snowden is an authentic whistleblower, appalled at what he saw on his computer screen and wishing, like Longfellow's Paul Revere, to tell "every Middlesex village and farm" what our intelligence agencies were doing. Who do they think they are, Google?

(That's another joke, I guess, but there may be some question as to whether this tie-breaker belongs in the "good" or "bad" category. Some people may think that a wicked point has been made about Google.)

I wrote last night that the importance of Cohen's owning up to his previous error goes beyond merely correcting the record, important as that function it is. It also puts the subject of Snowden's whistle-blowing back on the table, having been largely obscured by that hectoring chorus of "Traitor!"

Again, he has a little trouble getting to his point.

My initial column on Snowden was predicated on the belief that, really, nothing he revealed was new. Didn't members of Congress know all this stuff and hadn't much of it leaked? Yes, that's largely true.

Um, well, if we're talking just about the issue of NSA spying, I suppose it's somewhat true, but if anything, the fact that members of Congress have been sitting on that information makes the revelations that much more significant. There's an awful lot that's known to members of Congress and assorted other gnomes of our government -- people who are supposed to be working for us -- which is routinely and intolerably withheld from us. So yes, "the sheer size of these data-gathering programs," which has Cohen's mouth "agape," is an issue, but only one of many raised in those documents leaked by Snowden.

But Cohen hits another dandy point when he recalls that in his earlier writing he "also wrote that 'No one lied about the various programs' Snowden disclosed."

But then we found out that James Clapper did. The director of national intelligence was asked at a Senate hearing in March if "the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false" and he replied that it was. Actually, it was his answer that was "completely false."

What? The director of national intelligence just plain lied at a Senate hearing? You bet! And that point can't be repeated enough. Because it seems a pretty good bet that that lie wasn't a lone aberration, that in fact a lot of government officials have lied a whole lot -- at a lot of times, in a lot of places.

And this is the call that Snowden, with apparently great difficulty, took it upon himself to make: that the information in those documents he revealed demanded, not "to be free," but to be public, and as a result we've had more public discussion of a range of issues than we've had since . . . well, maybe ever. We need to have a lot more discussion, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that without Snowden we wouldn't have had any. Factor in the price he has paid for his actions, and it seems to me we're dealing with a pretety impressive act of patriotism.

And again, I have to give Richard Cohen credit for reopening and renewing the conversation. Even if, again, he gets a little balled up laboring his way to a conclusion.

But (and?) I am at a loss to say what should be done with Snowden. He broke the law, this is true. He has been chary with his information, but he cannot know all its ramifications and, anyway, the government can't allow anyone to decide for himself what should be revealed. That, too, is true. So Snowden is, to my mind, a bit like John Brown, the zealot who intensely felt the inhumanity of slavery and broke the law in an attempt to end the practice. My analogy is not neat -- Brown killed some people -- but you get the point. I suppose Snowden needs to be punished but not as a traitor. He may have been technically disloyal to America but not, after some reflection, to American values.

It's not at all clear to me that Snowden has been shown to be even technically "disloyal to America." But it's certainly worth that period of reflection for Cohen to be able to declare that Snowden has not been disloyal to "American values." This seems to me a darned fine place to wind up, Richard. Nicely done.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Are All Conservatives Traitors By Nature?

During our Revolutionary War as many as half a million people were dyed in the wool conservatives and, as opposed to the Patriots, considered themselves Loyalists (aka, Tories, Royalists or the King's Men). Many-- especially in Georgia and the Carolinas-- fought on the side of the British and mercenary occupation forces and after the war about 20% of them left the new United States of America for Britain, Canada, Florida and the Caribbean Islands (where so many conservatives still tuck away vast fortunes). We've talked about this before, and in his book, Conservatism in Early American History, Leonard Woods Larabee identified eight characteristics of the Loyalists that made them essentially conservative. Among them were that psychologically they were older, better established, and resisted innovation; that they felt the Crown was the legitimate government and it was morally wrong to resist; they wanted to take a middle-of-the-road position and got angry when the Patriots insisted they declare their opposition to the British; many had longstanding sentimental, family and business attachments to Britain; many were procrastinators who realized independence was bound to come some day but they just wanted to postpone the inevitable; many feared "mob rule" and anarchy, particularly property owners; many were pessimists who lacked confidence in the future.

Among the traitors who deserted the new nation were Isaac Low, who had been a delegate to the first Continental Congress and the first President of the New York Chamber of Commerce and Benjamin Franklin's son William (Governor of New Jersey). Just sayin'.

Remember when Elizabeth Warren, early in her campaign explained how nobody in this country got rich on his own? It's worth watching again:



So why bring and all that stuff from the 1780s now? Well, over the weekend the NY Post reported that wealthy conservatives are back in traitor mode. And I'm not talking about Romney tucking away his millions in Swiss and Caymen Islands bank accounts. I'm alking about right-wing greed heads renouncing their American citizenship-- lots of them. At least Romney will be losing some of his base before the November election.

America’s rich are renouncing their citizenship at record levels-- just to get richer.

Startling new data from Uncle Sam show that defections by Americans are expected to double this year, largely to avoid any stiff tax bills resulting from the proposed 55 percent hike on the rich-- as well as the likely expiration on Dec. 31 of the Bush era tax cuts.

As many as 8,000 US citizens are projected by immigration officials to renounce in 2012, or about 154 a week, versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week.

“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” said Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy.

“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said.

“Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Duggan. “But largely it’s an economic decision.”

There’s a catch to reaching tax nirvana. To renounce citizenship-- and thus escape any future US taxes forever-- a citizen must buy that unique freedom with a a one-time exit tax of 15 percent on the fair-market value of all assets-- including real estate, securities, businesses and personal belongings-- less their basis price.

“Many see it as a cheaper way to get out from under any tax liabilities on future wealth, while their assets have lower values during the weak economy,” he said.

The step before dumping citizenship is, of course, finding a new homeland and getting citizenship there.

Duggan said scores of tax-haven nations and island regimes around the world eagerly welcome disenchanted rich Yanks with quick citizenship, business deals and protections from the US Justice Department and the IRS.

Among the popular spots: Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Guernsey and Antigua.

There is one way to have your cake and eat it, too, Duggan said.

The US possessions in the Caribbean-- St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix-- give a 90 percent tax credit to US citizens living there at least 183 days a year, resulting in an effective tax rate of just 3.5 percent, he said.

Why Is The Regime So Concerned About McClellan? And Who Are The Real Benedict Arnolds?

Today the dead-enders still clinging to the hem of Bush's ermine have worked themselves up into a frothy frenzy of righteous indignation over the revelations-- none that are new to anyone who pays even a little attention-- in Scott McClellan's book. It's "total crap." He's a "traitor," a "turncoat," and a "Benedict Arnold." One Bush Regime propaganda tool has even managed to blame their bete noir, George Soros, and the always helpful National Review points out that Scotty is and has always been an agent of Hamas. Yesterday we wondered why none of the Regimebots had been calling Scotty a homo. Well, today the first shot in that direction from the Bush Regime's in-house male prostitute, Gannon/Guckert: "What I hear about the book does not sound like the Scott McClellan I knew for two years. I can say without fear of contradiction, that I knew Scott better than any other White House correspondent or Washington reporter." Oh dear. Why are they so upset?

Cable TV news shows competed to grab Bush allies and enemies to chatter about the McClellan they knew. On CNN, Dan Bartlett, Bush's former counselor who worked with McClellan for nearly a decade, said the onetime spokesman gave voice to "an outrageous accusation that mostly was coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party."

Sure, we all know what the Bush Regime has been up to, but there are still that 25-30% of Americans who think Bush is doing a good job and who form the base of the McCain electoral push. They still have no idea and this kind of stuff, coming from the familiar Regime insider, could be more damaging that the far more revelatory leaks that come out monthly.

But if you want to have a serious discussion of who's a Benedict Arnold or a traitor-- not to the personalities inside the criminal regime-- but to America itself, let's start with what White House correspondent Jessica Yellin had to say about news coverage in the run-up to war:

I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives-- and I was not at this network at the time-- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.