Nine degrees of conspiracy kookification: "The Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President"

by Ken

"It was both a good year and a bad one for conspiracy theories and theorists," says The New Yorker's Alex Koppelman in a new blogpost, "2012: The Year of the Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President."

For one thing, Neil Armstrong died. That was sad for many reasons; included among them is that now he'll never be able to reveal the secret about the moon landing. On the other hand, it was a Presidential-election year, a particularly fertile time for conspiracy theorizing. People are fixated on an enemy, and they just need to take the next step and imagine all of the diabolical things that enemy could be up to. They certainly did plenty of that in 2012. Here are twelve of the highlights of the year's conspiracy theories. For the record, none of them are true.

Alex ventures that we're "probably familiar with this one already":

1. Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

He has a little more to say about this, but let's come back to that, and for now move on to his first embellished version.You're probably familiar with this one already -- after all, it's been around since at least 2008.

2. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist.

This one, he says, comes from WorldNetDaily, "the 'birther' headquarters," which progressed to the direct-to-DVD documentary "Dreams from My Real Father," advancing the ideat "that Obama's real father is in fact not Barack Obama, Sr., but Frank Marshall Davis, an American Communist who was friendly with Obama's grandfather Stanley." Alex says, "There's no credible evidence for this. But that hasn't stopped the birthers before, so forget about that for a second." He points out that if you accept this notion, it renders "instantly moot" all of W.N.D.'s strenuous efforts to prove its birther theories.

3. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay.

(Assorted crazinesses from assorted sources.)

4. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate.

This courtesy of the ineffably insane Jerome Corsi, the man who gave us the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry. "In at least one instance," says, Alex, "Corsi connected the two theories."

5. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim.

(More pure crackpottery.)

6. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records.

"Some of the birthers," says Alex, "suspect that Obama’s applications and financial-aid records would prove that he was registered as a foreign student, or maybe that his tuition was being paid for by secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate trainers."

7. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle.

In October no less excellent a source than Donald Trump promised a bombshell revelation. "Turns out," says Alex, "that [it] was not, in fact, records that showed the Obamas almost filing for divorce. Let this be a lesson to you all: never, ever take Donald Trump seriously."

8. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers.

Conspiracy theorists on the right tend to believe that the U.S. government is terrible at everything -- except at complex statistical manipulation and at keeping secrets. People like Jack Welch actually believed that the White House would push the Department of Labor to rig the unemployment and jobs numbers to help Obama win reëlection -- and that Labor would then be able to pull off their task with no one blabbing to the press.

As a matter of fact, it seems that various parts of the government were underestimating the economy's performance before the election. Late last month, the Commerce Department revised its estimate of how much the American economy grew in the third quarter of this year up from two per cent to 2.7 per cent, a significant change. For some reason, we didn't hear much from Welch about that.

9. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers -- and the media is skewing the polls.

For a little while, it was all anyone in the political world -- campaign staffers, pundits, reporters, observers of all kinds -- could talk about. Suffice it to say that the polls were not skewed and Nate Silver will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States on January 21, 2013.

SADLY, ALEX HAS TO TURN TO SOME "ON-THE-ONE-HAND,
ON-THE-OTHER-HAND" PRETEND "EVEN-HANDEDNESS"

Actually, there's already something weird in his discussion of the anti-Obama idiocies. Does anyone think this is a remotely reasonable review of the history of the Obama-the-Kenyan craziness. He does say that "it's been around since at least 2008." He continues, though: "But with the President up for reëlection, it came back in a big way in 2012. Even Mitt Romney was joking about it on the campaign trail."

I'm sorry, but among the people to whom this ridiculous story matters, it never went away. Of course it got more hearing in the election year, because it was, you know, an election year. That's when issues -- whether real or imaginary -- become, at least potentially, campaign issues. Is that really such a difficult concept?

Here's how Alex lays out his case for three more crazy conspiracy theories, these "from the left":

Until now, this list may have made you think that conservatives are the only paranoid people around. Not so! Some people are more prone than others to seeing patterns of malicious intent where none exists, but that's not a left-right thing. True, there have been more conspiracy theories coming out of the right lately, but that's probably more a function of structural factors -- a Democratic President, a conservative media establishment that's built around the idea that conventional sources are lying to you -- than anything else.

That doesn't seem to me at all to explain the birther kooky conspiracy theories, which seem to me quintessential specimens of modern-day right-wing flight from reality, replaced by the movement-conservative doctrine that reality is whatever it makes you feel better to believe it is.

Here then, are his examples of liberal tale-spinning this year:

10. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them.

Here we see one of the real problems that conspiracy theories pose for society. The low tax rate that Romney has paid over the years is a legitimate issue, one that was worth discussing. The suggestion that he was so good at avoiding taxes that in some years he paid none at all, however? With nothing but speculation to support it, it was just a shiny object distracting us from the loopholes and inequities in the tax code that allowed Romney to pay as little as he did. Worse, it was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who was dangling this particular shiny object. But hey, who wants to accomplish something useful when you can fuel conspiracy theories for short-term political gain, right?

Some of this is fine, but Alex has declared at the outset about his 12 conspiracy theories from 2012s: "For the record, none of them are true." Would he care to explain how he knows that no. 10 isn't true? Willard made damn sure we didn't find out, and now may never find out. I think you could make a case that, at least in part, and perhaps in good part, his decision cost him any realistic shot at the presidency.

Which brings us to the pathetically obvious point that the birther craziness is based on nothing factual, and can be explained as the product of ignorance and delusion in an environment of churning rage based on a militant denial of reality. In the case of Willard's taxes, the founding fact is that he staked his political future on his adamant insistence that nobody would see anything more that those two years' worth of carefully manicured returns. And it's not as if this man whose principal qualification for the presidency was supposed to be his CEO's-eye business acumen knew for damn sure how important it is to have a 10-year history of tax returns for vetting a candidate, because all his VP contenders had to supply same. If it makes me a wild-eyed liberal conspiracy theorist to say that it sure looks like there's something really big being hidden in those cloistered returns, well, I guess I'll have to live with that.

11. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated.

"It was a handkerchief, people," Alex explains -- in toto. Well, I'm sorry, this is just bullshit, in now way comparable to the right-wing kookeries.

12. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated. He's got a plan to cheat on Election Day, too -- his son owns the voting machines.

Here's a good -- if not totally foolproof -- way to check if something is a legitimate issue or a conspiracy theory: if it involves the words "voting machines," it's probably just a conspiracy theory.

Well, again, I'm sorry but this one link doesn't for me begin to make a dent in all we know about the quite elaborate conspiracies Republican operatives have been engaging in at least going back to the 2000 election to tilt and where possible steal elections. (It seems worth pointing out that conspiracies that don't achieve all their objectives, or haven't yet, are still conspiracies.) Waving your hand at it doesn't make all this body of information disappear.

(Or maybe it does.)

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Is Beyoncé In The Illuminati? Don't Ask The Republican Running For Congress In Northwest Illinois

Who even talks about the Illuminati but right-wing nut cases these days... and people on lunatic fringe websites? Illinois Republicans... meet your candidate in the 17th district-- Rockford, down along the Iowa border past Dubuque and Davenport to Burlington and over to Peoria, Kewanee and Galesburg, and as far south as Carlson and Swan lakes. Chicago Republicans have already nominated Art Jones, an actual Nazi, as their candidate in IL-03, famous for writing that "the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews. It's the blackest lie in history." He's proud to admit he's affiliated with the Nazi Party and says he votes for the Republican candidate "90% of the time." He has a very Trumpist anti-immigrant platform. Anyway, as if that wasn't enough, the Illinois GOP now has a conspiracy theory loon as crazy as Jones running on the other side of the state, Bill Fawell. So who is Republican Bill Fawell? He won the GOP nomination to oppose Cheri Bustos, a right-wing Democrat when the two other Republicans in the primary, Mark Kleine and Jon Schuh, withdrew. Kleine had raised (self-financed) $508,150 before withdrawing. Fawell hasn't raised the $5,000 that would trigger an FEC report.

Fawell, a real estate broker, pushed conspiracy theories in blogs and his 2012 book, New American Revolution.

In his book, Fawell pushed a conspiracy theory that 7 World Trade Center collapsed as part of a controlled demolition and the attacks were a plot to destroy documents.

"Go to YouTube and punch in 'Building #7' It's the third building that went down with the twin towers on 9/11," Fawell wrote. "Nothing hit this building, not a thing, and it fell entirely upon its own. If it looks like a standard commercial implosion demolition, it's because that is exactly what it is."

"It's interesting to note that the clandestine branch of the CIA was housed on the top floor," he added. "No personnel were lost, but any and all documents were destroyed, just like a giant shredder. The Pentagon was hit in a wing being remodeled (but few people), that held a mountain of paperwork regarding 1 trillion dollars which the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was having trouble accounting for. That mountain of paperwork became a pile of ash."

In a February 2013 post on the blog of a political action committee he established in 2012 called Elect a New Congress, Fawell said that Beyonce's husband, rapper Jay-Z, "has a long history of serving up the godless Illuminati" and shared a YouTube video that speculated that Beyonce's upcoming halftime performance at the Super Bowl would have Illuminati symbolism.

The Illuminati is a secret society that serves as the basis for a popular conspiracy theory that alleges that many of the world's leaders and celebrities are masterminding world events.

In the same blog post, Fawell said that the previous Super Bowl's halftime show, performed by Madonna, was satanic and influenced by the Illuminati. He also called Madonna a "narcissist skank with the crooked teeth."

In an interview with CNN, Fawell stood by his blog posts and the theories he espoused on them. He said that Jay-Z and Beyonce expressed their support for the Illuminati in their videos, and that singer Taylor Swift had as well.

There is no Illuminati now, except on Hate Talk Radio, but there was one, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power-- the Bavarian Illuminati founded in 1776. They were a boogey man to conservatives and were banned over and over again. It attracted progressives of the day but disappeared the 1780s. You can be sure anyone ranting and raving about the Illuminati today is mentally ill, as well as an extreme right-winger.

The internet is awash with theories about the Illuminati, a mysterious group that conspiracy theorists believe is seeking a 'New World Order' that would impose a totalitarian world government. Among the alleged members of the secret society are not just politicians and religious leaders, but actors and pop stars.

Echoing the anti-communist witch-hunts and black-listings of 1950s Hollywood, one of the core beliefs of Illuminati watchers is that the entire entertainment industry has been infiltrated and that Illuminati members are using the media to brainwash the masses.

So who are the Illuminati and who has the group apparently recruited from Tinseltown?

...In a recent interview with the BBC, David Bramwell, "a man who has dedicated himself to documenting the origins of the myth", claims the modern-day Illuminati legend was influenced not by Weishaupt but rather by LSD, the 1960s counter-culture, and specifically a text called Principia Discordia.

...One of the main proponents of this new ideology was a writer called Robert Anton Wilson who wanted to bring chaos back into society by "disseminating misinformation through all portals-- through counter culture, through the mainstream media," claims Bramwell.

He did this by sending fake letters to the men's magazine Playboy, where he worked, attributing cover-ups and conspiracy theories, such as the JFK assassination, to a secret elite organisation called the Illuminati.

...[T]he idea of a powerful modern Illuminati conspiring to rule the world remained a niche belief upheld by a handful of cranks until the 1990s. The spread of the internet changed all that, giving conspiracy theorists a global platform to expound their beliefs and present their evidence to a massive audience.

Theories about how the New World Order operates run from the faintly credible-- in light of the Davos summit, a cabal of politicians and business leaders getting together to decide global policies doesn't seem impossible-- to the outright bizarre.

Earlier this year, Canada’s respected former defence minister, Paul Hellyer, came out and claimed not only that the Illuminati is real, but that it does indeed control the world.

Speaking on the Lazarus Effect podcast, Hellyer said he believed the world’s elite has suppressed technology brought to Earth by aliens, which could reverse the effects of climate change and end our reliance on fossil fuels.

When asked why, he said many members of the Illuminati have stakes in oil and were therefore heavily invested in how well the industry did.

...At the other end of the believability spectrum is former TV presenter David Icke's claim that the world's leaders are actually super-intelligent lizards in human guise who control our reality from the Moon. Those who remember Icke from his days on Grandstand may be surprised to know his theories about our reptilian overlords-- who have included the Rothschilds, Bob Hope and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother-- have amassed a faithful following on the internet.

...As well as being king and queen of the charts, Beyonce and Jay Z are frequently depicted as lords of the New World Order. Beyonce's immense fame and popularity have long made her a favourite target for conspiracy theorists. Illuminati 'experts' seized upon her half-time performance at the 2013 Super Bowl as an example of her "devil-worshipping" choreography, even accusing her on-stage alter ego Sasha Fierce of being a "demonic entity."

Her recent performance at this year’s Coachella music festival sent conspiracy theorist tongues wagging again.

...[F]ormer MI6 agent John Coleman... claimed the Beatles' overwhelming transatlantic success was engineered by the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, a London-based social research group - or, as theorists would have it, a nefarious organisation dedicated to eroding the bedrock of US society.

To that end, argues the former special agent, the institute's Illuminati connections used the Fab Four to further its plan to promote "rock music and drugs" with the aim of "undermining and eventually destroying the family unit."

...When Prince died suddenly of an accidental overdose in April, a small but vocal corner of the internet accused the Illuminati of killing the singer-songwriter, who was famous for fiercely protecting his copyrights and artistic freedom from industry interference.

Proof?

At last, courtesy of Andy Borowitz, a plausible theory for how these, er, people came to be the 2012 "Republican presidential field"

"I'll take 'Intergalactic Travel, Socialist Plot?' for $100, Alex."

"It was like a sitcom with no main characters and just wacky neighbors."

-- conspiracy theorist Tracy Klugian, quoted in The Borowitz Report

by Ken

In a comment on Noah's kickoff of his Year 2011 in Review festivities earlier today ("Republicans Raised the Ante with Their Racism"), which focused on the tsunami of all-consuming craziness barreling down on us from the Right, our friend me wrote, simply and poignantly, "How I wish that Obama was a president I could support. But he's not."

I'm sure he's aware that this is a sentiment that Howie and Noah and I feel pretty strongly too, and I want to come back to that, possibly in my next post. (Or then again, possibly not. Who can say?) Still, there is something awe- and terror-inspiring about that onrushing wall of malign craziness -- and the "malign" part is important. I'm not aware of any natural law that dictates that craziness has to be so unremittingly hateful and dehumanizing. With right-wingers, it just seems to work out that way.

ARE RON PAUL AND JON HUNTSMAN EXCEPTIONS?

I don't think of them as exceptions so much as, say, asterisks. Ron Paul's trademark libertarianism indeed leads him to occasional pronouncements on issues, like the warmongering so beloved of more traditional ultra-right loonies, which would make the other candidates look like the imbeciles they are if anybody but the Republican base were doing the looking. But you'll notice he never pushes his contrarian positions very hard, and most of his "beliefs" are as wacky as the competition's. LIbertarianism always seems to me, well, not the last refuge, more like the second or third refuge, of minds that either have grown too tired to think or think they're more blazingly insightful than they really are. It takes a few correct but trivial observations about the world around us and pretends to inflate them into a "philosophy."

As for Jon Huntsman, to me he's sort of the Alan Colmes of the 2012 GOP presidential jamboree -- less whacked-out than his cohorts, yes, but not enough so as to matter that much, and in any case so milquetoastish (the technical term, I think, is "nebbishy") as to pose no threat to them or the reigning insanity.

For now, no doubt inspired by the, er, spectacle of yet another of these hideous Republican candidate debates, I can't help but step back and contemplate the cosmic incredibleness of it. And I do mean "incredible." How is it possible to believe that one of our only two major parties has come up with this as a field of candidates to offer its supporters?

As it happens, that eminent political theorist Andy Borowitz has come up with a theory to explain how. It's certainly no crazier than the stuff that came out of those people's mouths the other night.

Conspiracy Theorists Believe Actual Republican Candidates Are Tied Up Somewhere

Obama a Prime Suspect

DES MOINES (The Borowitz Report) – A growing number of conspiracy theorists believe that the Republican candidates who keep showing up for televised debates are impostors and that the actual GOP candidates are tied up in a warehouse somewhere.

“There’s no way that these people are the actual candidates,” said Tracy Klugian, a leading conspiracy theorist who subscribes to the warehouse theory. “The American people need to stand up and demand the return of the real ones.”

Mr. Klugian, who started the website WhereAreTheRealOnes.com, said he started suspecting “something was up” months ago when the “supposed Republican candidates started debating,” but last night’s debate in Iowa left little doubt in his mind that the actual Republican candidates have been detained elsewhere.

“When the most sensible person onstage is Ron Paul,” he said, “you know that what you’re witnessing is an elaborate hoax.”

Conspiracy theorists like Mr. Klugian leave little doubt who might be behind the conspiracy to tie up the actual candidates at some remote location: President Barack Obama.

“If you could ensure that you’d be running against Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, wouldn’t you?” he said. “When the truth about this conspiracy comes out, it’s going to make what happened with the aliens at Roswell look like a game of duck-duck-goose.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Klugian said he remains “baffled” by people who insist on believing that the seven people who debated last night in Iowa are the actual Republican candidates.

“There’s no way you can believe that if you actually watched the debate,” he said. “It was like a sitcom with no main characters and just wacky neighbors.”

Since I'm ripping Andy off so shamelessly, it seems only fair to carry his promotional water. In addition to once again hawking his damned book (hey, I guess if he doesn't, who will? okay, it's The 50 Funniest American Writers), he has news of an event he'll be doing in New York with "an A-list panel of comedians and journalists": "Andy Borowitz's Countdown to 2012: Ancient Mayan Prophets Edition," at Kaufmann Concert Hall on May 15. In addition to the regular $29 ticket option, there's a "Cocktails and Conversation" option available "from $40." (From $40?) There's also a previously announced L.A. event, a Writers Bloc "Conversation with Sarah Silverman" at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills on February 28.)

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Trump Keeps Driving The GOP Primary Into Darker And Darker Places

Tuesday night Kasich's campaign posted the incredible Trump-is-a-Nazi video based on Martin Niemöller's universally admired anti-Hitler warning. Kasich's ad (above) quickly went viral. Within hours a bizarre phishing website posted this false story about Kasich dropping out of the race under the headline, "BREAKING: Kasich to suspend campaign facing bankruptcy, low polls." Authorship was attributed to "Voltova Dmitri"

Tonight was supposed to be Governor Kasich’s night. He was to do “counter speeches” to Trump, who was campaigning in his home turf. Sadly, Kasich had few attendees and even less luck raising money from the poverty stricken masses that many say his policies had put into debt.

Kasich is also facing heat from Marco Rubio, who has been mocking him and Ted Cruz as “WIMPS”

Kasich, a former banker and wall street guy, is not right for America, most voters believe.

The governor doubled down on his critiques of Trump, but few are listening.

After months of sinking in the polls and not catching on, Jon Kasich, governor of Ohio, is expected to bow out of the GOP race prior to thanksgiving.

Donald Trump, via twitter, confirmed the rumor circling DC social circles.

Trump also brought this fact up at his massive speech.

Wall Street Journal:

John Kasich of Ohio, the House Budget Committee chairman whose bid for young and populist voters never caught on, is expected to announce he is dropping out of the crowded GOP field in the next couple of days, people close to the campaign said.

An older point reflects his failed 2000 campaign above.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB931824116648450540

(Visited 19,245 times, 13,230 visits today)

Then came this twitter exchange:

(I can confirm that malware including one bit from Indian hackers that is made to look like an official Safari website that can get control of your computer if you go along with their ruse.)

So is it a Trumpian site? I still can't tell. Krugman's It's A Conspiracy post yesterday is right in line with what everyone has been coming to realize about Trump and his sad, sad low-info followers. Herr Trump "just isn’t vulnerable to typical establishment attacks-- at least in the Republican primary. (The general election might be different.) Catch him making an utterly false assertion, and his supporters just see it as the liberal media conspiring against him. It’s driving the establishment Republicans wild." Krugman has no sympathy for the GOP establishment. Like I said a few days ago: they made this bed; let them sleep in it now.

But really, why should they be shocked? Think about what the establishment has to say on other issues. The chairman of the House science committee says that global warming is a fraud, perpetrated by a vast conspiracy at the NOAA, which is presumably part of a global scientific conspiracy. When the administration reported large numbers of people signing up for Obamacare, leading Republican Senators accused it of cooking the books-- and I’m unaware of any apology or even acknowledgement that they were wrong. Rush Limbaugh claimed that one of the Batman films was an anti-Romney conspiracy. And on and on.

So how are base voters supposed to know that Trump’s claims that the media suppressed films of Muslims cheering on 9/11 mark him as crazy, while all the other conspiracy theories on the right are OK? I guess someone could try to put out a cheat sheet listing acceptable and unacceptable tin-hat views; but Trump would just call that part of the conspiracy, and a lot of people would believe him.

Sorry, guys, you created this monster, and now he’s coming for you.

Finally yesterday, Christie worked up his courage to definitively shoot down Trump's bullshit about the thousands of Jersey City Muslims Trump claims to have "seen" celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The right-wing Daily Standard reported Christie directly contradicting Trump's audacious and false assertions: "Thousands of people did not cheer in Jersey City on 9/11. It just didn’t happen. I was there that day. Nothing like that was ever shown on the news. There’s no video of that. It didn’t happen." Earlier Guiliani was on Morning Joe also confirming that Trump's assertions are false.

Soon after Christie's report started circulating I got this Twitter "Like" for some long-forgotten, two-and-a-half month old anti-Christie tweet of mine. And, let me tell you, "Sasha Free" is not a typical Twitter follower of mine.

I know Trump isn't using his money to buy TV and radio ads. He he spending money on online campaigns to undermine his opponents? I can't wait for him to get around to Cruz, who, according to Sahil Kapur's report for Bloomberg, may be starting to identify Trump as an adversary who has to be taken down. "Cruz," wrote Kapur, "is tentatively beginning to take on the brash New York billionaire after months of cozying up. Twice in recent days, the Texan has seized opportunities to distance himself from Trump's policies and rhetoric."

First, Cruz disagreed with Trump after the New Yorker expressed openness to setting up a registry of Muslim Americans in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. “I'm a big fan of Donald Trump's but I'm not a fan of government registries of American citizens,” Cruz told reporters in Iowa, according to Politico. “The First Amendment protects religious liberty, I've spent the past several decades defending religious liberty.”

Then over the weekend, he politely chided inflammatory rhetoric from fellow Republicans on immigration, when asked about Trump during an interview with the Associated Press. “Tone matters,” Cruz said. “Are there some in the Republican Party whose rhetoric is unhelpful with regard to immigration? Yes.”

Cruz's campaign said to expect more distinctions to come.

“Senator Cruz has drawn policy contrasts with his opponents before and he will continue to do so as he shares his own record and positions with voters on the campaign trail,” said Catherine Frazier, Cruz's spokeswoman. “As the field continues to narrow, it's only natural that the contrasts between the front runners will become more evident.”

The contrast-drawing follows an unusual summer and fall bromance between Trump and Cruz that included a July meeting at Trump Tower in New York, instigated by the Texan, and a September rally on Capitol Hill headlined by the two Republican candidates. On Oct. 8, Cruz admitted his strategy was to eventually win over Trump's supporters. “In time, I don't believe Donald is going to be the nominee, and I think in time the lion's share of his supporters end up with us,” he told WABC's Rita Cosby.

Trump's persistent national lead since July, defying a steady stream of predictions about an impending implosion, has forced a strategic shift for Cruz. The Texan is looking to capitalize as he rises to the top tier of the GOP race and as former Iowa front-runner Ben Carson sinks under scrutiny. The new Quinnipiac poll of Iowa Republicans, released Tuesday, found Trump at 25 percent, with Cruz at 23 percent—a 2 percentage point gap that is inside the survey's margin of error. Carson was third in the Quinnipiac poll with 18 percent.

“Ted Cruz should be taken very seriously. He's laid out a very well thought-out grassroots and fundraising network across the country. He's been very strategic in his timing,” said Ron Bonjean, a veteran Republican operative who is not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns.

For Cruz, Trump presents an obstacle and an opportunity. The politically incorrect New Yorker has been outperforming the Texas firebrand at his own greatest talent: deploying scorched-earth rhetoric to channel the anti-establishment sentiments in the GOP. But Trump's bravado gives Cruz a chance to paint himself as something nobody in Washington would accuse him of being: prudent and measured.

“There is massive irony here for Ted Cruz to be asking Donald Trump to tone it down,” said Bonjean. “He's trying to look like the most adult candidate in the room-- the most realistic alternative that could take away Trump voters.”

The irony is that Cruz has built an image upon angering Republican leaders with tactics like incubating the government shutdown of 2013, forcing weekend work as he makes a stand, and calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the floor this summer. It has been a tactical use of his Senate seat, Bonjean said, that has enabled Cruz to cultivate his conservative base and that now positions him to seize his political advantage. “He has built a foundation brick by brick for this moment.”

Bonjean said Cruz is “trying to do is marginalize Trump with Republican primary voters-- very subtly-- without tripping the wire of having Trump go nuts on him.”

Meanwhile, Trump has suggested Cruz is copying his ideas, telling conservative radio host Laura Ingraham last week that “Ted Cruz is now agreeing with me 100 percent.” The confrontational New Yorker has also indicated he'll take the gloves off if Cruz becomes a threat to his nomination.

“If he catches on, I guess we’ll have to go to war,” Trump said last Monday on CNBC's Squawk Box.

Easy enough for Trump to dispose of weak, plodding characters like Perry, Jeb, Jindal, Dr. Ben, Kasich, Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, but will he have what it takes to handle someone with his own sociopathic disregard for any semblance of human decency? We haven't seen a good fascist vs fascist death match since... Operation Hummingbird, (AKA, 1934's Night of The Long Knives).

Benedict Trump? Individual 1

What's crazier-- Trump's furious twitter stream howling at the moon about his legal jeopardy (above)-- much of which was certainly written by his current lawyer-- or the very timely Trump Code of Dishonor (below). Yesterday, tacitly admitting he directed Michael Cohen to pay off the hookers Trump feared would derail his presidential bid, Individual 1 claimed he did not direct Cohen to break the law while making the payoffs. Trumpanzee tweet: "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law." At his sentencing session, Cohen attributed his offenses to his "duty to cover up [Trump's] dirty deeds."

Salon published an essay by Lucian Truscott, Maria Butina’s plea is the worst news ever for Trump and Trump is yet to make up what cockamamie story he wants his moron, primarily lo-education white evangelical followers to repeat to each other. The Russian spy plead guilty to engaging in a conspiracy against the U.S. The conspiracy, she admitted, was acting as an illegal foreign agent. Spies gotta spy.

She admitted to acting under the direction of Putin crony Alexander Torshin (who seems to have disappeared a couple of days ago). And here's the bad news for Trump and the Republican Party and the now bankrupt NRA: "She agreed to turn over any evidence of crimes she is aware of, submit a full accounting of her financial assets, sit for interviews with law enforcement (and waive right to counsel during those interviews) and testify before grand juries or in trials in Washington or elsewhere." Presumably she will have the goods on how the Russians laundered tens of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign through the NRA.



Back to Truscott who makes the point that this is the worst news Señor Trumpanzee has faced in months. Before she appeared and 'fessed up Thursday morning, Truscott wrote that she would "admit to conspiring with a Russian official believed to be Alexander Torshin 'to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. politics . . . for the benefit of the Russian Federation' (Torshin recently retired from being a deputy director of the Russian central bank). She will also admit to attempting to influence the National Rifle Association and 'Political Party 1,' believed to be the Republican Party. Butina will admit to setting up a meeting between senior officials of the NRA and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in December 2015, in the early months of the Trump campaign. She later reported to Torshin, 'We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.'

Butina has been indicted by the U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, whose investigation was separate from that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so you would think that would come as good news to Trump. But Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also charged by the D.C. U.S. attorney and the U.S.attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia as well, and it is known that Mueller has been cooperating with the U.S. attorneys for D.C., Eastern Virginia, and the Southern District of New York as well. So the fact that Butina is pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate means that Mueller will be a beneficiary of what she knows about Russian influence in the election of 2016. But even that isn’t the worst news Trump got this week.

No, what Trump should really be worrying about is what Butina’s guilty plea says about his friend Vladimir Putin in Russia. Butina was obviously operating as an intelligence agent of the Russian state, and she wouldn’t be agreeing to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators for Mueller or anyone else if she hadn’t been given the go-ahead by her bosses back in Moscow. Butina faces a sentence of zero to six months under the federal statute she was charged with, and even if she ends up serving time, she will be deported immediately upon her release from prison.

Marina Butina wouldn’t have anyplace to go in Russia if her handlers at the Kremlin hadn’t told her it was okay to tell U.S. prosecutors everything she knows about how her attempt to influence American politics worked from 2015 through 2016. If Putin has decided to cut Butina loose, he’s cutting Trump loose as well.

...With all of the guilty pleas and sentencings in court this week, speculation has been flying that Special Counsel Mueller is reaching the end of his investigation. Don’t believe it. The Washington Post reported this week that 14 Trump friends, associates, and campaign and transition officials had contacts with Russians during the 18 months of his campaign.

Note: Congressman Lieu, a former Air Force JAG officer, serves on the House Judiciary Committee

Every single one of them lied about Russia. They started out by flatly denying they had any contacts at all with any Russians. Then they admitted they had a few, but the contacts were innocuous. When numerous meetings with Russians came to light, they said the contacts didn’t amount to anything. When it turned out the contacts were serious, they began denying there had been any “collusion” with the Russians. Trump made it a refrain, that there had been “no collusion” with Russians during the many times he now had to admit his people had met with them.

Robert Mueller, who has indicted and/or taken guilty pleas from 33 individuals and at least three companies, is turning from indictments of Russians to indictments of their American counterparts. He is focusing his investigation not on “collusion,” but on conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. That’s what he indicted 13 Russians who worked for the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg: conspiracy “to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”

Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents for “Conspiracy to Commit an Offense against the United States” by hacking into Democratic Party emails and to “stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” He accused the Russians of using false identities and making false statements to hide their connections to “Russia and the Russian government.”

Mueller has been after a conspiracy between Trump and the Trump campaign and the Russian government all along. And he’s using fraud and conspiracy statutes under the U.S. Code to do it.

Mueller is going to connect Donald Trump and his campaign directly to the government of Vladimir Putin. This week, with the guilty plea of his agent Maria Butina, Putin appears ready to help him.

Robert Mueller has never cared about “collusion.” All he has cared about is breaking the law, which Donald Trump has done plenty of. Trump can tweet all he wants, but he can’t stop the big truck coming straight at him driven by Robert Mueller.

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 10

• Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery
• Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle


Newsmax, says Noah, "tells republicans what they want to believe." (See No. 1.) And the way Newsmax sees it, who better to tear President Obama down than "political analyst" Dick Morris? In this segment (watch it here), Dick's "news" is that Obama is blowing off national-security briefings -- part of his determined effort to undermine national security.

Crackpot Utopia: A dream world as envisioned by republicans; a manifestation or expression of the deranged, warped alternate universe inhabited by republicans, at least in their minds. See also: Bachmannism, Boehneresque.

by Noah

1. Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery


Ah, the good old days when we burned witches!

As we all know, republicans live in some sort of comic-book bizarro alternate universe. Unfortunately, that universe overlaps with the real world that normally adjusted people live in. It's a twist of fate that defies the laws of quantum physics, but it is what it is and it's not going to go away anytime soon. The last Dark Ages lasted hundreds of years. Witches were burned and people really thought that plagues are sent by God as punishments for perceived "sins." Sound familiar?

So, you might ask yourself, how has this come about? Is it as simple as what Karl Rove arrogantly said shortly after Bush the Usurper took over the White House? You recall:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Following that mission, what republicans have since created is indeed their own reality. They might as well be going back to the gory old days when people believed that the sun revolves around the earth. That's bad enough, but they want to take everyone down the drain with them.

To create this world you need more than lies from presidents, you need an alternative media. The selling of the Iraq war would be a case in point. People have a natural tendency to believe what they see on the TV and what they read on the Internet. "It must be true, I found it on the Internet." Orwell knew: People who lack critical thinking or just have the desire to be spoon-fed comfortable, reassuring lies that support their prejudices or superstitious preconceived notions are malleable. Just put it in the media and a certain percentage of people will numbly follow.

Goebbels also knew this. So did Stalin when Pravda was created. So did Roger Ailes when he first proposed his idea for GOP TV to Richard Nixon. But it isn't all just FOX. The corporate media supplies hours and hours of daily right -wing talk-radio lunacy for the acolytes. In fact, over 95 percent of talk radio is of the Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage ilk.

Then there's Newsmax.

Newsmax is not to be confused with Newsbusters. Newsbusters is another, perhaps even weirder republican font of information. Newsbusters is where righties find out about John Kerry faking his wounds and President Obama being secretly gay and married to man -- hence his support of "gay marriage." Newsbusters and Newsmax do have some things in common, though. For instance, both believe that President Bill Clinton's deputy White House counsel, Vince Foster, was murdered by one or both of the Clintons.

The link between Newsmax and Newsbusters is not just republican kookery. The link also exists in the form of one man, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy literally wrote the book on what is known as the Vince Foster Conspiracy. The book is The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation. It wasn't the first time Ruddy had put forth this tale. Before writing his book, he had "covered the story" as a "reporter" for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

When three separate official investigations of Vince Foster's death concluded that the death was a suicide, Ruddy concluded that those official investigations were obviously part of the conspiracy! One of the investigations was even headed up by Kenneth Starr, the man who tirelessly led the impeachment of President Clinton and the attempt to remove him from the presidency. One could argue that the current republican penchant for irrational conspiracy started with the strange mind of Christopher Ruddy and his Vince Foster conspiracy.

Ruddy also came up with what is known as the Ron Brown Conspiracy. Brown, the Clinton secretary of commerce, sadly died in a plane crash in Croatia in 1996. Ruddy claims that Brown's head was found with a bullet hole in it. The medical examiner found no bullet hole. Neither did the United States Air Force. I guess they were part of the conspiracy.

Christopher Ruddy was not to be deterred. He had been impressed with how the Internet virally spread the stories surrounding the Clinton impeachment effort. He decided that he would form his own media outlet and it would be called Newsmax. He's not a stupid man. He is apparently deranged, but that is all too often a characteristic that goes with being a republican. His mission was clearly to spread some derangement around.

Ruddy started Newsmax with money from Scaife, the family of former CIA Director William Casey, and others. Former Nixon and Ford administration chief of staff Gen. Alexander Haig and right-wing talk-radio host Michael Reagan are key players, as are Adm. Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (chief of naval operations at the height of the Vietnam War), and Jeff Cunningham, former publisher of Forbes magazine. Rape apologist George Will, homophobe Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and bug-eyed frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic Ben Stein are frequent contributors.

Dick Morris says that Newsmax has become "the most influential Republican-leaning media outlet" in the nation. Think about that. Now Newsmax is not just an Internet site, it's also a magazine, and they even have Newsmax Radio and Newsmax TV. People watch it. Lots of people. According to Nielson Online, Newsmax is the most trafficked conservative website, with approximately 4 million visitors per month. It tells republicans what they want to believe.

To illustrate where Newsmax is coming from, I thought a list of 2014 headlines would tell a story. I subscribe in order to see what members of the Crackpot Party are saying. I don't even need to really read the stories; the headlines tell the tales. You can see the agenda behind them. So many times you can also see a lot of wishful thinking. Often you can also see the paranoia. Here's a selection:

1/14/14: FBI Won't File Charges For IRS Targeting; Obamacare Death Spiral At Hand
2/5/14: CBO: Obamacare To Kill 3 Million Jobs; D'Souza Slams Obama Power Grab
2/6/14: Dick Morris: Obama creates 'Nation Of Independents': Rand Paul Warns Of Socialist Nightmare
2/11/14: Colt AR-15 Giveaway [This one was just an announcement of a special promotion -- runs about monthly!]
2/27/14: Sarah Palin Gets Reality TV Show; Son Of God Movie Blows Records
3/5/14: Shocker: Pope Open To Gay Civil Unions; Issa Hits IRS
3/18/14: FEMA Plans For Massive Depopulation? [This one is a sponsored article. Newsmax features a lot of this kind of thing, including Bible verse stuff, and endless warnings of stock-market collapse.]
3/27/14: Ruddy: Rick Perry Emerging
4/3/14: Tom DeLay: Obama Faces 'Armageddon'; Cruz Nabs $1.5 Million
4/11/14: Limbaugh Slams Colbert Pick
4/30/14: 'Smoking Gun' Benghazi Email
5/3/14: Where Was Obama During Benghazi Raid?
5/8/14: Revealed: The One Thing That Will Take Down Obama… Finally! [Another sponsored article. Runs frequently, to give readers hope.]
6/30/14: Obama: I Will Bypass Congress On Immigration
7/11/14: Matalin: Obama Has No Soul
7/15/14: Obama's Secret Plan For Illegals
7/25/14: CNN Poll: 33% Want Obama Impeached
7/27/14: Christians Face Extinction
8/4/14: Record Number Of Illegals Coming From Nations With Ebola Terror Ties
8/9/14: White Students To Be Minority
9/6/14: Franklin Graham Fears End Times Are Near
9/29/14: O'Reilly: Kissinger Agrees With Me
10/15/14: Ebola Droplets Spread In Air
10/20/14: Epidemic Still Getting Worse
11/8/14: Claim: Sharpton Chose Holder Replacement
11/17/14: NRA Warns Of Obama End Run
12/17/14: Obama's Cuba Deal 'Propaganda Coup' For Castro
12/22/14: Giuliani: Anti-Police 'Propaganda' Led To NY Police 'Assassinations'

2. Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 12: Michele Bachmann

Really, I couldn't just let Ms. Batshit Loco -- already featured in Part 4 -- leave Washington without one last parting kick. She'll probably resurface on the telly soon anyway. Something like Blaze TV or Newsmax TV will hire her to dispense her unique "wisdom" and "expertise." Meanwhile, shouldn't there be a big book of Bachmann's Greatest Hits so far?

Here's a great one from this year, where she proposes "a 100% tax on monies that immigrants send home," the idea being that a 100-percent tax will make it all disappear.



Really? All of it? Take it all? Now, that's the republican dream of human suffering for all but the few, and creating the slave class! Hey, why not go for 150 percent? How about yer firstborn is taken from you at age six and forced to work in the oil fields?

Or should we just make them pick cotton all day? Give them a bowl of watered down soup and a tent to sleep in? If they have no earnings in the first place, they can't send any back home either. Save the extra step of giving them money and then taxing it. Less work for the IRS too, and we know how she feels about the IRS. She hates the mere existence of the IRS. So why is she proposing giving them more work to do? Presumably they'd have to hire more people to collect these increased taxes. That was even one of her arguments against Obamacare. Wouldn't the hiring of more IRS agents to tax immigrant money leaving the country be expansion of government? Michele, have you really thought this through?

At first, when Bachmann proposed this, I thought she was referring to illegal immigrants, but she does just say "immigrants." She said this on a conference call with the anti-immigrant group Numbers USA this past summer. Specifically, she wants the 100-percent tax on money that immigrants send back to the Old Country, in this case Mexico and various Central American countries. Her proposal does not apply to, say, Canadians, Brits, French people, Germans, etc.

Then there's the question of what is done with this money once it's collected. Will it be going toward the Bachmann family's socialistic farm subsidies? Or will it be going for her socialistic lifetime health care and pension, whicht all ex-congresspersons get?

Damn, Michele, if you want to raise more money from taxation, it seems to me that you could have raised a lot more by taxing the money that U.S. corporations take out of the U.S. economy and stash in the Cayman Islands.


3. Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 13: Kimberly Guilfoyle



Now who, you ask, is Kimberly Guilfoyle? In the last installment of "Crackpot Utopia," I mentioned Rudy Giuliani's hot man-crush on Russian leader Vladimer Putin. Rudy loves Vlad so much that he rhapsodizes about him being our president. Kimberly is another poor, unfortunate asylum shut-in that Roger Ailes hired to dispense republican kookery on FOX, and she wants Putin or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in charge of the U.S. "for 48 hours."

Can I just make a special request in the magic lamp? Can we get, like, Netanyahu, or, like, Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?

Can you imagine if Kimberly had been around in the 1950s or 1960s and said she wanted Russia's leader to be president of the United States? Yeah, Kimberly. That's what we need. Someone who'll go to the UN and pound his shoe on the table! Great idea -- you go, girl!

It wasn't so long ago that none other than Michele Bachmann was calling for a media investigation into "anti-American activities" of members of Congress, along the lines of Joe McCarthy's famous hearings. ("I think people would like to see an exposé like that," she said in 2008.) Maybe it's time to investigate how many of Rupert Murdoch's employees have "anti-American" views? That's how far FOX has sunk. Love it or leave it, a-holes!

And a personal note to Kimberly: Cut your makeup use in half, at least. The Tammy Faye Baker thing doesn't work for you. And you too, Rudy!


UP NEXT IN PART 11: GOP and FOX whip up the hate over a POW exchange; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 14: Iowa asylum escapee Rep. Steve King

NOAH'S 2014 IN REVIEW --
Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy

Part 1: Princess Liz Cheney tries for the Smoothie of the Year Award; "Miss Beck regrets" -- Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1: Glenn Beck; and the Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama’s State of the Union speech [12/19/2014]
Part 2: Republicans wonder why normal people call them racists; Sean Hannity wants to self-deport; and the First Annual Mr. Burns Award, to ABC "shark" Kevin O'Leary [12/20/2014]
Part 3: Using fear, loathing, and paranoia to sell stuff; Arizona legalizes crack!; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 3: Bill O’Reilly [12/21/2014]
Part 4: A celebration of Michele Bachmann: Pray away the crazy?; What "War on Women"?; and the "Obama angle" on Malaysian Flight 370 [12/22/2014]
Part 5: The GOP and the kiss heard 'round the world; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 5: Joe the Plumber [12/23/2014]
Part 6: A word about South Carolina; Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid; and I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go, please [12/24/2014]
Part 7: And so it begins: The running of the buffoons; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 7, George Will has no idea what rape is; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 8, Rick Wiles calls for a coup [12/29/2014]
Part 8: Things to come: Forward into the past! (11 Presidential Dream Tickets); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 9: Former republican VP nominee Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 10: Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association [12/30/2014]
Part 9: Pompous Blowhard of the Year Award: Bill O’Reilly; FOX "News" announces new spinoff: the "FOX Benghazi™" Shopping Channel!; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 11: DiGiorno Pizza [12/31/2014]
Part 10: Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle [1/1/2015]
Part 11: GOP and FOX whip up the hate over a POW exchange; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 14: Iowa asylum escapee Rep. Steve King [1/3/2015]
Part 12: Arizona Republican protests busload of YMCA campers; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee(s) No. 15: the Impeachment Variations (group nomination); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 16: NM Rep. Steve Pearce [1/4/2015]
Part 13 (and last): TV for Dummies: Sarah Palin launches her own channel; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 17: Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal (rhymes with Neanderthal); and the final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner! [1/5/2015]

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy

For listings and links, see Part 1 of this year's series.

#

President For All Americans

Trump and the evangelicals who think God-- rather than Putin-- put him in the White House, don't always see eye to eye. Evangelicals claim the earth was created around 7,000 years ago (and men were created 6 days later). Earth was actually created 4.5 billion years ago and some kind of human-like creatures appeared around two and a half million years ago. In the video above Trump told Sacha Baron Cohen (video above) that "hundreds of millions of years ago people were doing business and they were trading in rocks and stones and other things."

See the lunatic in the Oval Office-- the one on the right in the picture below? That's Lionel Lebron. I guess if Trump can't get LeBron James to visit the White House, he has to make do with the grifter who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theories. Señor Trumpanzee invited him and posed for this picture with him and his wife on Thursday.

You know how Trumpanzee is always ranting and raving about the baseless nonsense about "Mueller and 17 angry Democrats?" TheQAnon grifters claim that's a friendly shout out to them because "Q" is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Other theories are way crazier-- like the child sex colony on the moon run by Hillary and the Deep State, etc.

Lebron is one of the internet’s leading promoters of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory based on a series of anonymous clues posted to internet forums. QAnon believers have interpreted the clues, which they claim without evidence are coming from a highly placed source in the Trump administration, to mean that Trump and the military are engaged in a high-stakes shadow war against a supposed globalist pedophile cult. The conspiracy theory has caught on with Trump supporters, who have held up QAnon-related signs and wear QAnon shirts to the president’s rallies.

...All four White House officials the Beast did speak with about how Trump, the leader of the free world, ended up in a smiling photo op at the Resolute Desk with a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist, pleaded ignorance about when this occurred, and why. Two of these West Wing officials audibly could not contain their laughter.

“This president is a president for all Americans,” one joked, including conspiracy theorists.

Nice that Trump was able to take a moment off from all the scandals swirling around him to spend some time with QAnon, which has, for example, claimed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz hired MS-13 to murder DNC staffer Seth Rich. My favorite QAnon scam is that Obama, Hillary and George Soros are planning a coup and that the Mueller investigation is actually a countercoup led by Señor T himself, who pretended to collude with Putin in order to hire Mueller to secretly investigate the Deep State Democrats. I wonder what the conversation was like between Trump and Lebron.

On Friday, writing for the NY Times, Eileen Sullivan reported that Trump pulled himself away from QAnon long enough to demand that Jeff Sessions get the heat off him by charging "the other side"-- presumably the Democrats, not the other side of the moon-- with some crimes.

Sessions on Thursday issued a rare public statement defending his record as attorney general and pledging his commitment to justice after the president accused him of never taking control of the department.

“Jeff Sessions never took control of the Justice Department and it’s a sort of an incredible thing,” Trump said during a recent interview with Fox News.

On Thursday afternoon, Sessions hit back. “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in,” he said in a written statement.

The sparring match between the president and the attorney general extended the public war that Trump has waged for more than a year on the Justice Department, training most of his fire on the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Sessions’ response Thursday, his most forceful public pushback yet on Trump, showed the treacherous political terrain he is navigating: appointed by a president who has made apparent that he views law enforcement as loyal protectors, but overseeing a Justice Department that views independence from political pressure as essential to the rule of law.

The president privately vented to associates that he was furious with Sessions for failing to protect him in the way he believes Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had protected President Barack Obama.

“Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side,’” Trump wrote in a pair of Twitter posts early Friday morning. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”

Trump listed people and political enemies who he believes deserve the attention of the Justice Department, including the targets of conservative conspiracy theories that claim the Russia investigation was motivated by politics.