Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

The words "Republican love of country" just don't go together anymore. People like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Rudy Giuliani are the embodiment of that sad fact. Can you imagine going back to the 1950s and seeing Dwight Eisenhower have his lawyer go on national TV and say there's nothing wrong with working with the Russians on his campaigns? Both parties would have gotten together and impeached him in a single afternoon. Make that 2 hours. He would have been gone and put on a train to the nearest Federal penitentiary. Not even his war record would have saved him. But this is the Age Of Trump. We the people of this country are so far gone that we even tolerate TV personalities raising the level of their own disgracefulness by having Russia apologist Rudy Giuliani as a guest on their show. That's what NBC's Chuck Todd did on Sunday. That was the day Chuck Todd had Rudy on the once venerable Meet The Press. Even worse of course, we have 24 hours 'round the clock of FOX "News" which is nothing less than a TV network peopled by highly paid Russian assets who broadcast Tokyo Rose styled propaganda. We still have a government funded Voice Of America, which has never been perfect, to say the least, but, people like Rudy Giuliani and his fellow "Hacks For Trump" on FOX are determined to be the Voice Of Putin. And, they are proud of it. In Ike's time, Russian assets infiltrated and operated in secrecy, undercover. Now they seek and get the spotlights and national airtime. Hell, they even get elected to the highest offices in the land!

Meanwhile, no one echos the famous words of former Chief Counsel of The United States Army Joseph Nye Welch who, during the infamous 1954 Army/McCarthy hearings, asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, a slimy little worm of a man who saw Russians lurking in every dark corner whether they were there or not, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Now, we have an America where Russian assets operate in the open and there's nothing imaginary about them. McCarthy could find tens and multiply it into imaginary tens of thousands in his frenzied mind. He self-immolated in doing so. Today, any of his targets that might have actually been working for Russia would have their own shows on FOX and elsewhere! This is how warped, twisted, and turned on its head our American society has become. At some point in the past, the patriotic part of the fabric of America was torn up into a million threads and randomly reassembled and re-twined into an alternate universe America, all with the approval of the people we are foolish enough to elect. Like I've always said, it's an Idiocracy thing.

It's worth noting that, back when Joseph Welch publicly confronted Joseph McCarthy on live television, McCarthy was working with the uber-corrupt prosecutor Roy Cohn who would become Donald Trump's mentor and lawyer before Cohn got himself disbarred. We are are a stranger brew than we care to acknowledge. Certainly, future historians will get it wrong due to a lack of path that makes sense. They won't see that a lack of sense and logic is the key.

If someone in a position of credible authority were to exist now, and that someone asked the decency question of Giuliani or any one of a multitude of politicians, the irony would be staggering, beyond staggering. Why would anyone need to ask? We're so far gone that if any writer pitched so-called Liberal Hollywood on a movie idea based on that premise, they would probably be blacklisted for life.

What's Wrong With Donald Trump? Are There Flaws?

Let's leave aside today's Rolling Stone interview with Bruce Springsteen that saw the rock icon declare Trump's candidacy "a tragedy for our democracy" and the candidate himself "a moron, basically." I can't imagine there's a DWT reader who doesn't already know that. In the video above, you can watch ABC News' Brian Ross reporting on Trump's financial entanglements with Russia. Another huge batch of retired high-ranking military officers didn't need to see it before signing onto a joint statement about Trump's unfitness for the presidency. Trump, said Army General Wesley Clark, former supreme allied commander of NATO, "doesn’t do his homework. There’s nothing in Donald Trump’s background that shows us he’s anything other than totally consumed by self-interest." 15 of the retired officers but up the money to make this video about why they trust Clinton and why they don't trust Trump. Rear Admiral Jamie Barentt provided the context: "This is one of the most consequential elections we've ever had. On the one hand we have Hillary Clinton, who has had so much experience, understanding, good judgment, level head, great relations with our allies. On the other hand: Donald Trump, who's consistently shown himself to be belligerent, impulsive, a bully..."



There are two New Yorker pieces published this week that I want to call your attention to, one by Evan Osnos on what we can surmise about Trump's first term from his own statements, and the other by Jelani Cobb on how Joseph McCarthy is the model for Trump's relations with the media.

Trump's connection to McCarthy, one of there arch-villains of American history-- which makes Ann Coulter such a devotee-- is through the slime-bag fixer they shared, notoriously corrupt and dishonest attorney (disbarred) Roy Cohn. Cobb, in pointing out that Trump has shown himself to be a mendacious demagogue, has a "hostile relationship with facts" and accuses him of being "the second coming of Joseph McCarthy. Trump and McCarthy share not only the kindred traits of demagogues-- bombast and the manipulation of public fear in the service of their own ends-- but a curiously close, almost familial resemblance. McCarthy’s hallucinatory anti-Communism was facilitated in part by a kind of swaggering masculinity that he deployed to differentiate himself from his patrician G.O.P. colleagues. He distorted his record of military service to portray himself as a fearless fighter against unambiguous evil. As with Trump’s, McCarthy’s world view was defined by a hypertensive, conspiratorial outlook... Trump’s Presidential campaign has been a miasma of conspiracy theories, virtually from the outset. Yet those parallels-- disturbing as they may be-- are surpassed by the similarities between Trump and McCarthy’s relationships with the press."

McCarthy’s demagogy was essentially enabled by a symbiotic press corps that was both frustrated by the senator’s pervasive dishonesty and beholden to him as a source of public interest and, therefore, newspaper sales. As David Oshinsky points out in A Conspiracy So Immense, his biography of McCarthy, the version of “objective” journalism in which the media simply reports the statements made by public figures, irrespective of their veracity, is uniquely vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues and serial liars. As Oshinsky writes,

Quite often, then, the reporter becomes a conveyor belt for material he knows to be false. He is helpless because the system inhibits him from imparting his version of the truth. In McCarthy’s case this objective approach was particularly frustrating. “My own impression was that Joe was a demagogue,” a newsman remarked. “But what could I do? I had to report-- and quote-- McCarthy. How do you say in the middle of your story ‘This is a lie’? The press is supposedly neutral.”

Strip away the default male pronouns, and this is similar to the situation that confronts the media covering Donald Trump in 2016-- and precisely the kind of enabling that Chris Wallace’s refusal to fact-check during the Presidential debate he will moderate might resurrect. One McCarthy-era Kansas newspaper took to printing parenthetical corrections next to false statements by the senator-- an approach that has found favor again in the Trump era. At the same time, the sheer volume of untruth McCarthy generated and the challenges of fact checking in the analog era of news reporting insured that a significant number of his lies made their way into print and were accepted as valid by a portion of the public susceptible to his manipulation. McCarthy struck back at journalists-- in one instance literally, slapping and kicking Drew Pearson, a syndicated columnist-- who did challenge his feverish distortions, labelling them dupes or knowing participants in Communist conspiracies. It should also be remembered that McCarthy’s disastrous feud with Edward R. Murrow was prefaced by an attempt to intimidate the CBS anchor away from critical coverage of McCarthy’s anti-Communist broadsides. Instead, the effort prompted Murrow to create a television segment pulling together McCarthy’s most transparently demagogic and embarrassing moments, which was rapturously received by the public.

...It’s worth recalling that McCarthy’s demise came about not as a result of his disingenuous use of anti-Communism as a cudgel against his Democratic opponents but because he continued lobbing those grenades once the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected. There is an operative lesson here for both Republicans and the media. Demagogues are incapable of maintaining an allegiance to interests other than their own. And those who are most responsible for showing the public exactly who they are might well be those who’ve previously benefitted from their presence.

Onset reminded his readers that "many of Trump’s policy positions are fluid. He has adopted and abandoned (and, at times, adopted again) notions of arming some schoolteachers with guns, scrapping the H-1B visas admitting skilled foreign workers, and imposing a temporary “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He has said, 'Everything is negotiable,' which, to some, suggests that Trump would be normalized by politics and constrained by the constitutional safeguards on his office... Many from Trump’s party say they do not expect him to fulfill some of his most often stated vows." But as Osnos showed "campaigns offer a surprisingly accurate preview of Presidencies. In 1984, the political scientist Michael Krukones tabulated the campaign pledges of all the Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter and found that they achieved seventy-three per cent of what they promised. Most recently, PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking site, has assessed more than five hundred promises made by Barack Obama during his campaigns and found that, to the irritation of his opponents, he has accomplished at least a compromised version of seventy per cent of them."

When Trump talks about what he will create and what he will eliminate, he doesn’t depart from three core principles: in his view, America is doing too much to try to solve the world’s problems; trade agreements are damaging the country; and immigrants are detrimental to it. He wanders and hedges and doubles back, but he is governed by a strong instinct for self-preservation, and never strays too far from his essential positions. Roger Stone, a long-serving Trump adviser, told me it is a mistake to imagine that Trump does not mean to fulfill his most radical ideas. “Maybe, in the end, the courts don’t allow him to temporarily ban Muslims,” Stone said. “That’s fine-- he can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia. He’s a Reagan-type pragmatist.”

William Antholis, a political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of Virginia, pointed out that President Trump would have, at his disposal, “the world’s largest company, staffed with 2.8 million civilians and 1.5 million military employees.” Trump would have the opportunity to alter the Supreme Court, with one vacancy to fill immediately and others likely to follow. Three sitting Justices are in their late seventies or early eighties.

...As President, Trump would have the power to name some four thousand appointees, but he would face a unique problem: more than a hundred veteran Republican officials have vowed never to support him, and that has forced younger officials to decide whether they, too, will stay away or, instead, enter his Administration and try to moderate him. By September, the campaign was vetting four hundred people, and some had been invited to join the transition team. An analogy was making the rounds: Was Trump a manageable petty tyrant, in the mold of Silvio Berlusconi? Or was he something closer to Mussolini? And, if so, was he Mussolini in 1933 or in 1941?

Michael Chertoff served both Bush Presidents-- as a U.S. Attorney in Bush, Sr.,’s Administration, and then as Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. He was one of fifty senior Republican national-security officials who recently signed a letter declaring that Trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.” Chertoff told me that he has been approached for advice by younger Republicans who ask if joining Trump, after he has already been elected, would be regarded as patriotic, rather than political. “I think anybody contemplating going in will have to have a very serious look in their own conscience, and make sure they’re not kidding themselves,” Chertoff said.

Trump’s Presidential plans are not shaped by ideology. He changed parties five times between 1999 and 2012, and, early on the campaign trail, he praised parts of Planned Parenthood (while opposing abortion), vowed to protect Social Security, and supported gay rights (while opposing same-sex marriage). He is governed, above all, by his faith in the ultimate power of transaction-- an encompassing perversion of realism that is less a preference for putting interests ahead of values than a belief that interests have no place for values.

...Some of Trump’s promises would be impossible to fulfill without the consent of Congress or the courts; namely, repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, and opening up “our libel laws” that protect reporters, so that “we can sue them and win lots of money.” (In reality, there are no federal libel laws.)... However, Trump could achieve many objectives on his own. A President has the unilateral authority to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, to order a ban on Muslims, and to direct the Justice Department to give priority to certain offenses, with an eye to specific targets. During the campaign, he has accused Amazon of “getting away with murder tax-wise,” and vowed, if he wins, “Oh, do they have problems.”

...Modern Presidents have occasionally been constrained by isolated acts of disobedience by government officials. To confront terrorism, Trump has said, “you have to take out their families,” work on “closing that Internet up in some ways,” and use tactics that are “frankly unthinkable” and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” General Michael Hayden, a former head of the C.I.A. and of the National Security Agency, predicts that senior officers would refuse to carry out those proposals. “You are required not to follow an unlawful order,” he has said.

Donald Trump would be the first Commander-in-Chief with no prior experience in public office or at high levels of the military. As a candidate, he has said that he would not trust American intelligence officials (“the people that have been doing it for our country”) and declared, “I know more about isis than the generals do.” Once he became the nominee, Trump received his first batch of top-secret information. During a national intelligence briefing at his offices in New York, he was accompanied by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a senior adviser who reportedly kept interrupting the briefing with questions and comments until Christie asked him to calm down. (The campaign denied that account.) Trump later told a television interviewer that the briefers’ “body language” indicated that “they were not happy” with Obama.

Intelligence professionals faulted Trump for publicly discussing, and politicizing, a classified briefing. Several national-security officials told me that a determining factor in any President’s approach would be his response to a shock-- say, a crippling power outage that might be terrorism or might not. “Would he or she be impetuous?” Jim Woolsey, a Trump adviser who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, asked. “One thing you can be pretty sure of is that the first report is almost always wrong, at least partially. When the President of the United States says, ‘I just got a report-- the United States military forces are under attack,’ it is very hard for anybody to stand in the way of that.”

In Trump: Think Like a Billionaire (2004), Trump wrote that others “are surprised by how quickly I make big decisions, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts and not to overthink things.” He added, “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” He prides himself on vengeance and suspicion. “If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck!” he wrote, in 2007. “Be paranoid,” he said in 2000.

For many years, Trump has expressed curiosity about nuclear weapons. In 1984, still in his thirties, he told the Washington Post that he wanted to negotiate nuclear treaties with the Soviets. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “I think I know most of it anyway.” According to Bruce G. Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, Trump encountered a U.S. nuclear-arms negotiator at a reception in 1990 and offered advice on how to cut a “terrific” deal with a Soviet counterpart. Trump told him to arrive late, stand over the Soviet negotiator, stick his finger in his chest, and say, “Fuck you!” Recently, a former Republican White House official whom Trump has called on for his insights told me, “Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

...Trump’s overarching argument to voters has been, in the end, economic: as President, he would draw on his business experience, “surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” and lead Americans to greater prosperity. Some aides did not help fortify that proposition: Trump fired his first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who manhandled a female reporter, and then forced out his chief strategist, Paul Manafort, after Manafort was weakened by allegations of unreported lobbying and secret cash payments from leaders in Ukraine. (Manafort has denied these allegations.

To understand whom Trump trusts to put policy vision into practice, I contacted Stephen Miller, his national director of policy, who serves as a fiery warmup speaker at Trump rallies. Miller, who is thirty-one, worked for Michelle Bachmann, of Minnesota, and, later, for Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, a prominent Republican critic of free-trade deals and illegal immigration. Miller has been described by Politico as “a deeply unsettling figure, even to many in his own party,” in part because of his writings in college and high school. While attending Duke University, Miller accused the poet Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and described a student organization as a “radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority.” Miller asked me to speak to several of Trump’s advisers on the economy and trade.

For economic advice, the campaign enlisted the Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore, who co-founded the Club for Growth, a conservative lobbying group. At fifty-six, Moore is amiable and unpretentious, “a little bit scatterbrained,” by his own description. (During the 2000 campaign, he forgot to mark on his calendar an invitation to brief the candidate George W. Bush, foreclosing the prospect of a job in the White House.) In 2012, he helped Herman Cain, the former C.E.O. of Godfather’s Pizza, develop his “9-9-9” plan, which would have narrowed the tax code to three categories, capped at nine per cent.



Moore visited Trump on his plane, and, during a series of meetings, he and others crafted an economic plan based on the cornerstone of supply-side economics: cut taxes to encourage people to work and businesses to invest. “That’s basically the theory there,” Moore said. “This is the signature issue for conservatives since Reagan went into office. This has been the battle between the left and the right. The liberals say tax rates don’t matter”-- for stimulating growth. “We say they do.”

Trump’s team focussed, above all, on reducing the business tax rate. Moore said, “What I recommended to him is this should be your stimulus to the economy-- do this in the first hundred days.” Economists’ reactions have been mixed. Paul Krugman, the left-leaning Nobel laureate, argued that the supply-side argument was refuted by a basic fact: job growth has been higher under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than under George W. Bush. Moore counters that Reagan achieved job growth through tax cuts.

The other half of Trump’s economic thinking is his view that “we are killing ourselves with trade pacts that are no good for us.” As President, he would have the legal authority to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the North American Free Trade Agreement, to impose tariffs on categories of goods from China, and-- if the World Trade Organization objects to his actions-- to withdraw from the W.T.O., just as President Bush withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, in 2002.

But interviews with Trump’s trade advisers leave no doubt that this is a kind of theatre-- a bluff, which, they believe, will achieve their aims without actual tariffs. In 2006, Dan DiMicco, the former C.E.O. of Nucor Corporation, the largest steel producer in the United States, which has faced heavy Chinese competition, self-published a book called “Steeling America’s Future: A CEO’s Call to Arms.” Long before most Republicans foresaw the political backlash against free trade, DiMicco wrote, “Shame on our government leaders if they refuse to provide us with a level playing field on which to compete.”

DiMicco, a blunt, barrel-chested New York native, used his position at Nucor to publicize his argument in television interviews, and Trump contacted him. “We had a discussion about China back then, about trade, cheating, and all those issues,” DiMicco told me. Now a member of Trump’s Economic Advisory Council, he has visited Trump in New York, and he prides himself on offering unconventional advice. To deal with China, he says, the United States should act like an aggressive patient at a dentist’s office: “Here’s how the patient deals with the dentist: sits down in the chair, grabs the dentist by the nuts, and says, ‘You don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.’ ”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior policy adviser on trade and China, is a business professor at the University of California at Irvine. He does not speak Chinese, and he is at odds with many mainstream China scholars, but he has directed documentaries, including Death by China, and written books such as The Coming China Wars. During a lull at the Republican National Convention, Navarro told me that he argues for the need to “balance the trade deficit.” He said, “If you simply do that, it sets in motion a process where you grow faster, there’s more employment, that pushes real wages up, and that floods the government coffers with tax revenues, and then you’re able to pay for the infrastructure and social services and defense, which have been neglected.” He added, “You focus on the trade deficit and good things happen. That’s the philosophy of Donald Trump.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit, an economic-and-geopolitical-analysis firm, has ranked the prospect of a Trump victory on its top-ten risks to the global economy. Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary, predicts that, taken together, Trump’s economic and trade policies would help trigger a protracted recession within eighteen months. Even if Trump stops short of applying tariffs, Summers told me, “the perception that we might well be pursuing hyper-nationalist policies would be very damaging to confidence globally and would substantially increase the risk of financial crises in emerging markets.”

If Trump followed through on tariffs, the effects could be larger still. Mark Zandi, a centrist economist who has advised Republicans and Democrats and is now the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, a research firm, forecasts that Trump’s trade plan could trigger a trade war that would put roughly four million Americans out of work, and cost the economy three million jobs that would have been created in Trump’s absence.

But Trump would not need to take any of those steps to have an abrupt effect on the economy. His belief in the power of the threat, which he has used in private business, takes on another meaning if he is the leader of a country with national-debt obligations. In May, Trump, whose businesses have declared bankruptcy four times, said, “I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” and “if the economy crashed you could make a deal.” The notion that he might try to make creditors accept less than full payment on U.S. government debt caused an outcry. Under criticism, he clarified, to the Wall Street Journal, that U.S. “bonds are absolutely sacred,” but the incident left an enduring impression on the financial community.

Anthony Karydakis, the chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak, an asset manager, told me that a Trump victory is now generally regarded as “a major destabilizing development for financial markets.” He went on, “If he ever even alludes to renegotiating the debt, we will have a downgrade of U.S. debt, and that event will cause a massive exodus of foreign investors from the U.S. Treasury market.” In 2011, when feuding in Congress delayed raising the debt limit, the stock market fell seventeen per cent. This would be a far larger event. “The rating agencies could not ignore the comment,” he said. “The cornerstone of the right to raise sovereign debt is the willingness and ability of the government to service it normally and fully.” He added, “The markets have no patience for stupidity or ignorance. They get scared.”

For more than a year, Trump has encouraged supporters to regard him as a work in progress-- “Everything is negotiable”-- and the ambiguity has ushered him to the threshold of power. But envisaging a Trump Presidency has never required an act of imagination; he has proudly exhibited his priorities, his historical inspirations, his instincts under pressure, and his judgment about those who would put his ideas into practice. In “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” he included a quote from Richard Conniff, the author of “The Natural History of the Rich”: “Successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world, an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”

Trump’s vision, even his “irrational belief in unreasonable goals,” was never a charade. In the early decades of this century, Americans have sometimes traced our greatest errors to a failure of imagination: the inability to picture a terrorist, in a cave, who is able to strike; the hubris to ignore extensive State Department predictions of what would come of the invasion of Iraq.

Trump presents us with the opposite risk: his victory would be not a failure of imagination but, rather, a retreat to it-- the magical thought that his Presidency would be something other than the campaign that created it.

Take action... for real:

Did You Think Ted Cruz Was The Only Candidate Using McCarthyite Tactics In His Campaign?

Corey Robin, author of The Conservative Mind is one of the most credible scholars on the pathology of conservatism and neoconservatism. In the introduction to that book, Robin wrote that "[w]hen the conservative, looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. Witnessing the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Theordore Sedgwick lamented, "The aristocracy of virtue is destroyed; personal influence is at an end."...Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty-- or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force-- the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere." Later in the book, he fleshed outer conservative mind more fully:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom, but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levellers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

I always watch for his writings and this weekend he penned an essay on the presidential campaign for JacobinMag.com. Like many of us, he's worked up about how far the Clinton campaign is already swinging in dark, ugly directions and brought up the orchestrated smear campaign against Bernie, beginning with a few lines from Dan Roberts at The Guardian: "The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to The Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as 'a Democrat,' alleges that Sanders 'sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War' because he went on a trip there to visit a twinned city while he was mayor of Burlington. Similar 'associations with communism' in Cuba are catalogued alongside a list of quotes about countries ranging from China to Nicaragua in a way that supporters regard as bordering on the McCarthyite rather than fairly reflecting his views.

This is becoming a straight-up rerun of the 1948 campaign against Henry Wallace. Except that Clinton is running well to the right of Truman and even, in some respects, Dewey. It seems as if Clinton is campaigning for the vote of my Grandpa Nat. There’s only one problem with this strategy: he’s been dead for nearly a quarter-century.

As was true of McCarthyism, it’s not really Sanders’s communism or his socialism that has got today’s McCarthyites in the Democratic Party worried; it’s actually his liberalism. As this article in the NY Times makes clear:

Some third party will say, ‘This is what the first ad of the general election is going to look like,’” said James Carville, the longtime Clinton adviser, envisioning a commercial savaging Mr. Sanders for supporting tax increases and single-payer health care. “Once you get the nomination, they are not going to play nice.” . . .

A Sanders-led ticket generates two sets of fears among Clinton supporters: that other Democratic candidates could be linked to his staunchly liberal views, particularly his call to raise taxes, even on middle-class families, to help finance his universal health care plan; and that more mainstream Democrats would have to answer to voters uneasy about what it means to be a European-style social democrat.

Raising taxes to pay for popular social programs: that used to be the bread and butter of the Democratic Party liberalism. Now it’s socialism. And that-- now it’s socialism-- used to be the bread and butter of Republican Party revanchism. Now it’s Democratic Party liberalism.

Later in his essay he points to a Bloomberg poll for the Des Moines Register which hasn't gotten a lot of media attention but that shows 43% of likely Democratic caucus participants describe themselves as socialists, including 58% of Sanders’s supporters and about a third of Clinton’s. And it's not because so many Iowa families have roots in Scandinavia.

Senator Bernie Sanders’s speech on Thursday explaining his democratic socialist ideology carried little risk among supporters and other Democrats: A solid majority of them have a positive impression of socialism, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month.

Fifty-six percent of those Democratic primary voters questioned said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view.

Robin's poem, First They Came For..., indicates a certain dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party establishment that is echoed from coast to coast:

First they came for the Revolution
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Revolution.
Then they came for the Parliamentary Socialism
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Parliamentary Socialism.
Then they came for the Third Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Third Party.
Then they came for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
Then they came for the Green Lantern
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Green Lantern.
Then they came for me
but that was cool
because I’m a Democrat.

If you'd like to contribute to Bernie's campaign and/or to the campaigns of any of the congressional candidates who have endorsed him and are running on his platform... here's an ActBlue page for you.

Can Trumpf Really Win? Or, Conversely, Can Trumpf Really Lose? Have We Ever Elected A Demagogue President?

OK, so this is the more involved second half of the post from 10 am-- slightly more abstract and something I'd suggest the Trumpf fans not bother trying to grapple with. We're going to do a little mashup of Aaron Zitner at the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman at the NY Times and Sean McElwee at Salon. Don't freakout if you never heard of McElwee; he's the research-oriented guy and his Salon piece is something I want to use to bolster my long-held believe that the only thing that might actually stop Herr Trumpf has nothing to do with the lame hopes the GOP establishment keeps floating. If Trumpf loses it won't because he finally says something so dumb and offensive that his dumb and offensive supporters find it too dumb and offensive. To life's losers-- the Trumpf core-- there is nothing too dumb or too offensive to make them vote for anyone else. The chances of them switching to Jeb or Kasich or Christie or Rubio are about as good as them switching to Hillary; it's not going to happen. The question, though, is will they vote for Trumpf? His fans are reality TV viewers, not actual voters. If he can get them to the polls, he'll be the nominee; if not... get ready for an even worse nightmare for the GOP DC establishment: Ted Cruz. This morning on CNN's State of the Union John Kasich speculated that Trumpf's supporters won't even show up to vote in the primaries.

And that brings us to the research by Brian Schaffner and Stephen Ansolabehere that McElwee delved into yesterday. They found that "only 25 percent of Americans voted in all four elections between 2006 and 2012. These Americans, who are disproportionately white, rich and old, have dramatically more influence over politics than nonvoters (who make up 37 percent of the population)." In other words, "far more people voted in zero elections between 2006 and 2012 than voted in all four elections." About a quarter of the non-voters are non-voters because they're not registered and among those who only voted in presidential years, disliking the candidates, lack of information and busy-ness were the top reasons for not voting in midterm elections. This is interesting: "nonvoters were mostly either Independents (30 percent) or Democrats (43 percent). [So 27% Republican.] Presidential-only voters tilt the most strongly toward the Democrats, with 53 percent saying they are Democrats and only 32 percent identifying as Republican. [So 15% independent.]

The first solution to boosting turnout is clear: Registration barriers are the most important factor depressing turnout. Thus, robust enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act, expanded access to same day registration and more states adopting automatic voter registration will all boost turnout. Second, it’s clear that many voters are alienated by parties, and many see very few differences, which can depress turnout. Low-income Americans are the most likely to perceive large differences, possibly because parties overwhelmingly favor the preferences of the rich. Some have advocated Democrats pushing toward the center, but a working paper by political scientist Seth Hill finds that parties are far more successful in pulling in new voters than in converting swing voters.

The data from Shafner and Ansolabehere suggest there are millions of potential progressives who need to be mobilized-- but America lacks strong unions, which tend to mobilize the working class. This leads to a final way to boost turnout: nonprofits. A study released this week by Nonprofit Vote, “Engaging New Voters,” finds that nonprofits tend to engage non-white, young, low-income and low-propensity voters. They find that when nonprofits contacted individuals, those people turned out at high rates, suggesting that nonprofits could dramatically reduce the class, race and age bias of the electorate.

As I’ve noted before, parties have reduced contacts to low-income people and many people of color and young people go ignored by campaigns because they aren’t registered. Nonprofits could step in and fill the void left by parties.

Is Trumpf going to get his mass of slobs and malcontents to register and to vote? His fan base is whiter and older, but not richer and not educated. Some will vote and some won't. He's got a big headstart over his party establishment rivals. But who are they really? Let's start with Zitner's look, at The Journal. He defines them as "an underappreciated segment of the GOP-- blue-collar voters who aren’t especially animated by social issues." They're not really religious and Zitner remarks that his "appeal is a form of secular populism rarely seen in Republican primary races, and one he is pressing in part with appearances in working-class communities in Iowa that include independent voters and even Democrats who may be lured into the caucuses. The celebrity businessman’s message appears to resonate among voters who believe most strongly that political leaders are unable to put the nation back on track." Trumpf's followers, he claims, "don’t have a college degree and don’t identify strongly with the party’s touchstone social issues, such as opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage. What they want is a strong man type-- a fascist dictator to be precise-- but they would never call it that.

These voters care less about a candidate’s résumé or the nuances of policy than a promise to set a direction and follow through-- as when Mr. Trump says he will stop illegal immigration by building a wall on the Southwestern border and make Mexico pay for it.

A Quinnipiac poll this week showed that Mr. Trump’s tone is more important to his supporters than are policy stances. He held a large lead of 10 points over his nearest opponent among Republicans who said the most important attribute for the party nominee is to be a "strong leader." He has a much smaller lead, 4 points, among those who said “shared values” were most important.

Mr. Trump’s backers tend to be more working class than upper income, with a large share with no college education. In combined Journal/NBC News polling this year, Mr. Trump was the top choice of 25% of all GOP primary voters under age 50 who lack a college degree, but of only 13% with a college degree. The same split appeared among older voters: He won support from 23% with no college degree but only 15% of college graduates. No other candidate showed a similar skew.

A national CNN/ORC survey released Friday showed a similar pattern: Mr. Trump had the support of 46% of registered Republicans with no college degree and a much-smaller 18% of those with a degree. His support was also stronger among voters making less than $50,000 than those earning more. Polls in the early-primary states of Iowa and South Carolina have shown the same character to Mr. Trump’s support there.

...At least some of Mr. Trump’s support comes from conservative independents and Democrats who say they plan to vote in GOP primaries, and who account for nearly a third of the GOP primary electorate, Journal/NBC polling shows. Mr. Trump is essentially tied with Mr. Carson for the lead among those voters, Journal/NBC surveys through the fall have found.

[Former Iowa GOP Chairman Matt] Strawn said many of those voters haven't attended Iowa caucuses before, and that Mr. Trump has a challenge in motivating them to attend. His campaign has held calls to train supporters on the mechanics of the caucus. Mr. Strawn notes that Pat Robertson successfully drew new voters to the caucuses to propel his second-place finish in 1988, and that Ron Paul did the same in 2012 on the way to a third-place finish.

One question posed by Mr. Trump’s coalition is whether it creates the greater challenge for social conservatives or for establishment centrists to rally behind a single, favored candidate. By drawing more heavily from less-religious voters than from strong social conservatives, Mr. Trump may most complicate the establishment-wing vote.

Another question is whether Mr. Trump has created a model for building support that future GOP candidates could follow. "Great question," said Mr. Strawn. "At present, this appears to be a Trump-specific phenomenon, rather than a new electoral portal for a nonbillionaire, nonreality TV star Republican to follow."

Healy and Haberman report on the Times' analysis of Trumpf's vocabulary. In other words, how he manages to communicate to the angry, paranoid, hateful, dumb, low-info bigots who have been drawn to his proto-fascist banner. Recall, that last week we talked about another study that found his vocabulary was geared towards a 4th grader.

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings-- policy, endorsements, commercials, donations-- and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades, and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century.

Mr. Trump’s breezy stage presence makes him all the more effective because he is not as off-putting as those raging men of the past, these experts say.

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use, based on a quantitative comparison of his remarks and the news conferences of recent presidents, Democratic and Republican. He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other-- usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.

...While many candidates appeal to the passions and patriotism of their crowds, Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).

“‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,” said Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying how the 2016 presidential candidates speak. “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border-- not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’”

In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies. He bragged on Thursday about psyching out Jeb Bush by repeatedly calling him “low-energy,” but he spends far less time contrasting Mr. Bush’s policies with his own proposals, which are scant.

...The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight. For a man who speaks off the cuff, he always remembers to bring up the Islamic State “chopping off heads.” And he has expressed enthusiasm for torturing enemies beyond waterboarding. Last month, after several men hit a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies, Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”

“Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right-- and necessary,” said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, echoing the slogan that Barry Goldwater used in his 1964 presidential campaign.

And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric. “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information. He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He promises to “bomb the hell” out of enemies-- invoking Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- and he says he would attack his political opponents “10 times as hard” as they criticized him.

And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.

These patterns of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, who used fiery language to try to win favor with struggling or scared Americans. Several historians watched Mr. Trump’s speeches last week, at the request of The Times, and observed techniques-- like vilifying groups of people and stoking the insecurities of his audiences-- that they associate with Wallace and McCarthy.

“His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s-- his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University. “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s-- it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”

“And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,” said Ms. Mercieca, noting a particular remark of Mr. Trump’s on Monday in Macon, Ga. (“When you’re really smart, when you’re really, really smart like I am-- it’s true, it’s true, it’s always been true, it’s always been true.”)

“Part of his argument is that if you believe in American exceptionalism, you should vote for me,” Ms. Mercieca said.

Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals. These politicians used emotional language-- be it “segregation forever” or accusatory questions over the Community Party-- to persuade Americans to pin their anxieties about national security, jobs, racial diversity and social trends on enemy forces.

A significant difference between Mr. Trump and 20th-century American demagogues is that many of them, especially McCarthy and Wallace, were charmless public speakers. Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.

For some historians, this only makes him more effective because demagogy is more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke. Highlighting that informality, one of his most frequently used words is “guy”-- which he said 91 times last week and has used to describe President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a stranger cheering him on at a rally and a celebrity friend.

“His relaxed, jokey tone makes statements about his resolve to solve every problem because he’s knows what’s right and has the energy to do it more persuasive,” said Mr. Kazin of Georgetown, who described Mr. Trump’s idea for a database of Muslims in the United States as insidious but also said he found Mr. Trump amusing at points.

It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil. Mr. Trump often makes that point when he criticizes his Republican rivals, though he also pretends that he is not criticizing them.

“All of ’em are weak, they’re just weak,” Mr. Trump said in New Hampshire on Tuesday of his fellow candidates. “I think they’re weak, generally, you want to know the truth. But I won’t say that, because I don’t want to get myself, I don’t want to have any controversies. So I refuse to say that they’re weak generally, O.K.? Some of them are fine people. But they are weak.”

Grayson On The New McCarthyism: You're Not Supposed To Use Taxpayer Funds For A Political Witch Hunt

Sensibly, the New York Times is now calling for Congress to shut down the Benghazi Committee, as have many Members of Congress, including Rules Committee ranking member Louise Slaughter. Rep. Alan Grayson of Orlando went one step further and filed an ethics complaint today against Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Benghazi Committee chairman Trey Gowdy. Yesterday's Times editorial demanded that if the GOP refuses to disband the committee, they at least rename it "the Inquisition of Hillary Rodham Clinton" committee, although I think MSNBC's Morning Joe already has that name copywritten.

Lawmakers have long abused their investigative authority for political purposes. But the effort to find Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the Libya attacks, was personally responsible for the deaths has lost any semblance of credibility. It’s become an insult to the memory of four slain Americans.

The deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and his colleagues have been exhaustively investigated by several other congressional committees and an independent panel of experts commissioned by the Department of State. The reviews found systemic failings at the State Department. But they found no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was directly responsible for the security lapses, which, of course, is the goal of the Republicans who want to derail her presidential bid. The possibility that all those investigators have somehow missed a crucial, damning piece of evidence seems negligible.

Led by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former federal prosecutor, the Benghazi committee has trudged on, summoning a seemingly endless list of witnesses who have offered little new substantive information about the attacks. Since it was impaneled in May 2014, the committee has spent more than critical congressional committees, including the House Intelligence and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, which have oversight over bureaucracies with multibillion-dollar budgets.

“There’s nothing to justify the committee’s long duration or expense,” said Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who sits on the committee and has called for it to be disbanded. “We have nothing to tell the families and nothing to tell the American people.

Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Oct. 22. The hearing will give Republicans another chance to attack the credibility and trustworthiness of the leading Democratic presidential candidate. It will do nothing to make American embassies abroad safer or help the relatives of the four killed in Libya.

The hearing should be the last salvo for a committee that has accomplished nothing. If the Republicans insist on keeping the process alive, the Democrats should stop participating in this charade.

With the exception of 7 right-wing Democrats who vote with the GOP as their default position-- only three of whom, Patrick Murphy (FL), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Collin Peterson (MN), are still in Congress-- all Democrats knew this was a charade from day one. Idiotically, Murphy now claims that he was 100% confident the committee would vindicate Clinton. Yesterday's Washington Post reported that Trey Gowdy is still conspiring with Murphy and the two other creeps:

When people tell the story of Clinton, Benghazi and the Republican Congress, Gowdy will be a central figure-- maybe a protagonist or antagonist, depending on your point of view. The reality, of course, is blurred. But McCarthy’s comment allowed Democrats to say with new authority what they have argued all along: that the panel is a political tool for Republicans to undermine Clinton. Gowdy says he will strive to correct the record, not only on the left but within his own party, when Clinton comes to before his panel on Oct. 22.

“There were seven Democrats that voted to form the Benghazi Committee, and I have talked to some of the ones who are still in the House because what Kevin said put them in an incredibly bad position,” Gowdy said.” I told them, ‘I want you to tell the people who are criticizing you for taking a chance on us to watch on the 22nd. If they think she’s being treated unfairly they can take it out on you. But that’s not what they are going to see.'”

Grayson, you may recall, has been an outspoken opponent of the Benghazi Committee from the day it was proposed. Last year we had even suggested to Pelosi that she appoint him-- and only him-- as the sole Democratic member so that he could make the Republicans rue the day they had ever come up with this routine. "As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I have read every email, every brief, and every classified memo about the tragic events in Benghazi," he said. "There is not one scintilla of evidence that anyone in the State Department, from entry-level employees to Secretary Clinton herself, took any action that put lives at risk, or covered up anything." At one Foreign Affairs hearing, Congressman Grayson referred to Benghazi as "the scandal that never was." Today he reiterated that the Committee "has been a political dog-and-pony show for its entire 17-month history. It has been clear even to casual observers that the purpose of the committee was never to investigate the tragic death of four Americans in a terrorist attack; it was to attack Hillary Clinton. I am asking OCE to investigate how Reps. McCarthy and Gowdy misused $4.5 million of taxpayer money in an unscrupulous attempt to torpedo Secretary Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President."

Today Grayson called McCarthy's Benghazi comments "a callous admission that demands an investigation," and referred to the committee as a "Stalinesque showtrial," part of the Republican Party's "new McCarthyism." Eeveryone but Murphy, Sinema and Peterson already knew the committee’s only real objective was to hurt Hillary Clinton politically, which is certainly what McCarthy (Kevin, not Joe) implied.



This is the full letter Grayson sent to David Skaggs at the Office of Congressional Ethics:

Dear Mr. Skaggs:

Pursuant to Rule 3(a) of the Office of Congressional Ethics Rules for the Conduct of Investigations, this letter constitutes a complaint against Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Harold “Trey” Gowdy for flagrant violations of 31 U.S.C. § 1301(a) and the regulations implementing that statute by the House Committee on Administration, in the Committees' Congressional Handbook.  Specifically, Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Trey Gowdy violated federal law and House rules by using official funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi to pay political or campaign-related expenses.

Federal law requires that appropriated funds may only be used for the purposes for which they were appropriated.   House Administration Committee regulations implement this law by requiring that: "Committee funds may only be used to support the conduct of official business of the committee.  Committee funds may not be used to defray any personal, political or campaign-related expenses . . . ."  The House Ethics Manual stresses that this general prohibition against the use of official resources for campaign or political purposes "applies not only to any Member campaign for re-election, but rather to any campaign or political undertaking" (emphasis in original).   The prohibition applies to "campaigns for the Presidency" and it applies "whether the Member is a candidate or is merely seeking to support or assist (or oppose) a candidate in such a campaign."

House Resolution No. 567 established the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi (the “Select Committee on Benghazi”) for the purpose of conducting an investigation of the attacks on United States facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.   The resolution specified that the operations of the Select Committee on Benghazi "shall be paid out of applicable accounts of the House of Representatives" (which are appropriated funds), and required that these appropriated funds "be expended in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Committee on House Administration."   Accordingly, no funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi may be used for political or campaign-related purposes, and specifically (as noted supra) not to “oppose a candidate in . . . a campaign.”

Representative Kevin McCarthy and Trey Gowdy have violated federal law and House rules by using funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi to oppose the Presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.  On September 29, 2015, Representative McCarthy appeared on The Sean Hannity Show on Fox News, and he stated that the true purpose of the Select Committee on Benghazi was not to investigate the tragic death of four Americans killed during the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya, but rather to drive down the poll numbers of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.  Specifically, Representative McCarthy stated that: "Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?  We put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? ‘Cause she is untrustable. But no one would’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen."   This is a clear and unequivocal misuse of appropriated funds for political purposes, which is prohibited by the regulations of the Committee on House Administration.

Congressman Gowdy is the Chair of the Benghazi Committee.  He has dragged out the work of the Committee for 17 months already, a period longer than Congress investigated Watergate. According to public reports, the Committee hasn’t held a single hearing since January.  Congressman Gowdy evidently has dragged out the work of the Committee so that it would coincide with the Democratic Presidential Primary race.  In the meantime, the Committee under Gowdy’s leadership has subpoenaed State Department employees and others close to former Secretary Clinton, in an apparent effort to generate anti-Clinton information and disinformation.

Accordingly, the Office of Congressional Ethics should conduct a complete investigation regarding the extent to which Representative McCarthy, Representative Gowdy and others unknown illegally used appropriated funds for political or campaign-related purposes.

I understand that 18 U.S.C. § 1001 applies to the information that I am providing.  To the best of my ability, I affirm that the evidence submitted was not obtained in violation of any law, rule or regulation.

UPDATE: No Lessons Learned In Crazytown

Apparently the Republicanos haven't learned their lesson-- even if doofus-Democrat Patrick Murphy has-- to stop wasting taxpayer money on their partisan ideological flights of fantasy. Deranged North Carolina Christmas tree farmer Virginia Foxx proposed starting a special witch hunt committtee against Planned Parenthood yesterday. Yes, another of their idiotic Select Committees! It passed 242 to 184. Two wretched Republicans-disguised-as-Democrats, Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) and Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL), crossed the aisle and voted with the GOP, as they almost always do. The only Republican voting with the Democrats was David Jolly, who appears to be more frightened of the general election voters in Florida than of the Republican primary voters. Jolly's aiming for the GOP nomination for the open Marco Rubio Senate seat. His Tea Party opponent, Ron DeSantis, will be trying to use this vote against him in the Republican primary. But Floridians are broadly pro-Choice and pro-Planned Parenthood, so Jolly was willing to take the chance of alienating the extremists, few of whom were going to vote for him anyway.

UPDATE #2: McCarthy Drops Speaker Bid

Right after Grayson filed his ethics complaint against McCarthy, McCarthy withdrew from his quest for the Speakership. Grayson: "When Democrats with guts stand up to corrupt Republicans, we get results. This is a victory against the new McCarthyism and the Republican witch-hunt against Hillary Clinton... Kevin McCarthy and Trey Gowdy broke federal law and violated House rules by using taxpayer money to try to bring down a Democratic presidential candidate and they should be held accountable. I will continue to fight this unethical and illegal Stalinesque show trial."

Or did McCarthy drop out because Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Freedom Caucus psychopath was threatening to expose his affair with Renee Ellmers (R-NC), which wasn't much of a secret inside the Beltway anyway but hadn't filtered back to the voters in either congressional district.

The affair is something of an open secret in Washington, D.C. Reporters at other publications, lobbyists, congressional staffers of both parties all know about it. One staffer for a congressman describes it as the “biggest open secret” in D.C. A lobbyist describes Ellmers as a “social climber who has ingratiated herself” with McCarthy.

House leadership also knows about the affair. Speaker John Boehner reportedly told McCarthy to stop the affair once McCarthy was elected Majority Leader says a well placed congressional staffer. At least one leadership staffer doesn’t think the affair ended. “They are unusually close,” says the staffer who insists that the affair is going on. “It’s weird if he’s not fucking her.”

The source is Got News, which is run by right-wing extremist Charles Johnson, whose reporting is usually found at Drudge and the Blaze. Yesterday he got a cease and desist order for writing about the Ellmers-McCarthy affair. This is getting really ugly. Is the House GOP officially in turmoil?

Ted Cruz, Joe McCarthy And… Benghazi!

Yes, Texas extremist Ted Cruz looks a lot like ugly, dead, alcoholic neo-fascist Joe McCarthy. But the superficial similarities are hardly the reason why people have dubbed Cruz "the new McCarthy." One of the most reviled villains in American history-- right up there with Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth, Jefferson Davis, Herbert Hoover, Sam Giancana and Nathan Bedford Forrest-- McCarthy could be an icon for today's Republican Party. And that's why Ted Cruz and his obstructionist agenda have risen in esteem among the racists, bigots, greedy self-servers, and anti-American hate mongers that make up the GOP base. Last week, Cruz did a little victory dance-- worthy of Hitler in Paris-- after House Republicans humiliated John Boehner by forcing him to establish a witch hunt committee headed by brainless South Carolina zombie Trey Gowdy to "investigate" Benghazi.

The last thing in the world Cruz, Gowdy, Issa and their far right partisan allies want is an actual "investigation." Deadly violence against U.S. diplomats, isn't all that infrequent occurrence. In 2012 alone, the year of Benghazi, there were 86 “significant attacks” against diplomatic outposts. The death toll from these 2012 attacks was not four, but 24. And this is not a new problem. Since 1970, there have been 521 attacks on U.S. diplomatic targets, killing 500 people. Since 1977, 66 American diplomats have been killed by terrorists. If Cruz and his allies cared at all about providing better embassy security, it would create a select committee to investigate this perennial problem, instead of creating one about Benghazi. The question of how to give adequate protection to diplomats stationed in dangerous places has vexed Democratic and Republican administrations alike-- and has already been investigated plenty.) But of course Cruz and the right-wing cohort around him don’t care about that-- as it showed in November when it pilloried Obama as he prepared to move the Vatican embassy, for security reasons, from Rome’s Aventine Hill to Via Veneto. (In another example of the kind of obstructionism that defines right-wing politicians like Cruz and Gowdy, Congress subsequently passed a spending bill blocking the move!) Yesterday, MSNBC's Tim Noah helped she more light on what Benghazi is really all about. "There is, in fact," he wrote, "absolutely no reason to investigate Benghazi further except to rake Hillary Clinton, who may run for president in 2016, over the coals. It is, to paraphrase Krauthammer, a clear manifestation of Clinton Derangement Syndrome, a malady that, in one form or another, has afflicted much of the population for two decades."

Over at the Wasshington Post Dana Milbank was poking around the similarities between Cruz and McCarthy, beyond the GOP Benghazi fraud.

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech to fellow conservatives at the Federalist Society this week, provided detailed evidence of what the right calls the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration.

The Texas Republican, in his latest McCar­thyesque flourish, said he had a list of “76 instances of lawlessness and other abuses of power.”

To his credit, Cruz made his list public. But perhaps he shouldn’t have. An examination of the accusations reveals less about the lawlessness of the accused than about the recklessness of the accuser.

Cruz was particularly agitated about President Obama’s use of signing statements, executive orders, recess appointments and unconfirmed “czars”-- omitting the salient detail that this president has used four less than George W. Bush, for whom Cruz worked as a campaign adviser and administration official.

Beyond such perennial check-and-balance disputes, Cruz’s list was a recitation of policy grievances (Cruz, if you haven’t heard, doesn’t like Obamacare very much, nor the president’s immigration policy). These were interspersed with some whoppers that the senator, a former Texas solicitor general, couldn’t have researched thoroughly.

…There are, among the 76, legitimate grievances about expanded surveillance at the National Security Agency and about efforts to get reporters’ phone records. But it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the alleged abuse and lawlessness are actually differences of politics and policy.

Obama “shut down the Amber Alert website, while keeping up Let’s Move website, during the partial government shutdown,” writes Cruz-- who almost singlehandedly caused the shutdown.

“Actively aided in George Zimmerman protests,” Cruz complains.

“Canceled all White House tours after sequestration . . . even though President Obama had spent more than $1 million in tax money to golf with Tiger Woods.”

“Reneged on campaign promise to broadcast healthcare reform negotiations on C-SPAN.”

Cruz disagrees with Obama on just about everything. But this doesn’t make Obama a criminal.

It does on Hate Talk Radio and on Fox-- which is all Cruz actually cares about because that is, after all, where all the GOP base voters are… and where the people who they expect to sell the Benghazi! tote bags are.