Throwing It Back In Trump’s Face

-by Noah

Donald J. Trump has run his life as a bully. He shoots off his mouth as a bully. He sues as a bully. He refuses to pay contractors agreed amounts for work and threatens them if they don’t take less. He bullied his way through the 2016 campaign season. He encourages violence at his rallies. He hangs up on prime ministers. He shoves them aside. He recently insulted the country of Qatar when they wouldn’t rubber stamp his family’s business plans in their country, even heightening diplomatic pressure on them. He thinks he can use Twitter to bully the people investigating him. He thinks he can bully his way past the Constitution. He’s not alone in that, but, he is currently pre-eminent in it. The stories are numerous. He’s a taker. He’s a user. He’s a bully.

Too many people never realize that the way to stop a bully in the playground is to just walk up to them and drive your fist through their face. They then start crying and running home to mommy. It’s a joy to behold. In baseball, if a pitcher throws at your head, you can’t get away with running out to the mound bat in hand, but you do have options. You can try to line the next pitch right at him, or, if you get on base, you put a little extra into taking out the second baseman. Message delivered. More sophisticated variations of the fist in the face happen in the corporate world every day.

With all of this in mind, I cheered and was amused by the actions of the VoteVets organization (VoteVets.org) a few days ago. Vote Vets.org has the motto “Country. Service. Action.” They obviously support veterans causes and they support democratic veterans who want to run for office. When Señor Trumpanzee recently launched a tweet decrying the 9th Circuit Court’s decision on his failing travel ban, Will Fischer, Vote Vets’ Director of Government Relations threw the tweet of the orange fascist right back in his face for all to see. Fischer is an Iraq War veteran, so, he knows something about fighting back. Here’s the succession of tweets. First, the tweet from Señor Trumpanzee, After that, came a fusillade of tweets from Fischer.

• Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump-
Well, as predicted, the 9th Circuit did it again- Ruled against the TRAVEL BAN
at such a dangerous time in the history of our country. S.C.

Fischer, sick of Trump’s tweets, tweets that he somehow thinks will bend people, even courts to his will, struck back with the truth about just who is dangerous to our country.

• VoteVets @votevets-
B/c your Muslim ban is unconstitutional, immoral, & a threat to our nat’l security.
You are a threat to our nat’l security, @realDonaldTrump

• VoteVets @votevets-
While we’re on it, @realDonaldTrump, the way you treat our allies is a threat to
our nat’l security.

• VoteVets @votevets-
The way you @realDonaldTrump, praise homicidal maniacs like Duterte is a
threat to our nat’l security.

• VoteVets @votevets-
The way @realDonaldTrump fawns over and fan dances for Putin is a threat to
our nat’l security.

It brings a smile to my face just imagining that at this point, the Trumpanzee is on the ropes, whining and sweating in his bathrobe, seething, reaching for a bottle of pills or bottle of fine Russian vodka left behind by the Russians who visited him in the oval office. Maybe he’s even reaching for his desk phone to call Putin to ask what to do. Fischer wasn’t through telling off the orange idiot.

• VoteVets @votevets-
The cavalier way @realDonaldTrump speaks about sending young women and
men to war (not HIS kids) is a threat to our national security.

• VoteVets @votevets-
@realDonaldTrump’s climate change denials (despite the opinion of SecDef
Mattis) are a threat to our national security.

And, lastly

• VoteVets @votevets-
@realDonaldTrump, the way you and your family violate the Emoluments Clause
is a threat to our nat’l security.

After that last tweet, Señor Trumpanzee wilted. He crumbled. He could take no more. He did what bully does when you strike back. Like any bully eventually, his weakness had been found, so he blocked Fischer’s votevets twitter account. Like a beaten Roberto Duran, he said “No mas.” He could answer the call no more.

• Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump-
@realDonaldTrump blocked you
You are blocked from following @realDonaldTrump and viewing
@realDonaldTrump’s Tweets

Using twitter as a fist may seem like a small thing. It may even seem as childish as the target, but, remember, this is Trump we’re talking about. The Trumpanzee has a fragile psyche and a very thin skin. He’s no Obama, and he’s certainly no Ike or FDR. He’s not built for the job. He can’t take the abuse that comes with it. That’s why he resorts to the only thing he can, bullying like any bully, even trying to bully the courts.

By now, I’m sure Will Fischer has another phone and a new twitter account, just for one purpose. During WW2, there were posters of Rosie the Riveter, doing her small bit for the fight against fascism. Maybe we can get a Rosie the Tweeter poster for this war, and it is a war. It’s a war that has been fought against the American people for too long. Trump is merely it’s loudest and weakest bully. Senor Trumpanzee can dish it out but he can’t take it. He is a man-child, locked in the playground of the mind: not a good thing at all for a president to be. Twitter is a small weapon but every little bit helps save the country. Use it freely. One mosquito is irritating. Waves and waves of mosquitoes are a force of nature. You can’t block them all. It would take you all day every day. Send this bully back crying to his mommy, a peeing Russian whore, or whatever, maybe just his little golden security blankie.

What does Joan Didion's 1970 Gulf Coast road trip have to do with Tuesday's episode of "The Real O'Neals"?

On the day of KENNY's sister SHANNON's confirmation, boyfriend BRETT (Sean Grandillo) approaches KENNY (Noah Galvin) in the hallway of St. Barklay Church, carrying a small gift-wrapped box. (Watch the clip here.)

BRETT: Hey!
KENNY: Hey! [They kiss.]

BRETT: I brought a gift. Is that weird?
KENNY [smiling awkwardly]: No, great wrapping job! [Pause, turns serious] Uh, look, I have to talk to you.
BRETT: Okay.
KENNY: Yesterday, you said, 'I love you.' Which, which was so incredible to hear. And then I said it back. Which wasn't [hesitates] entirely true.
BRETT: Okay.
KENNY: Because, while I feel so many amazing things for you, love just isn't one of them, yet.
BRETT: I knew you were freaking out. I --
KENNY: No, that's -- You're my first boyfriend, and I don't know how I'm supposed to be feeling, or how fast I'm supposed to be feeling it. I, I don't want to screw this up. Can you forgive me?
BRETT: Yeah. Sure. [Pause] Then maybe we should hit the pause button.
KENNY: What? No, Brett that is not --
BRETT [handing gift to KENNY]: Tell Shannon I said congratulations. [Turns around and walks quickly off.]

-- from "The Real Confirmation," Episode 13
of Season 2 of ABC's The Real O'Neals

"Do you ever miss those times when we used to hide all our secrets and swallow our feelings?"

-- Eileen O'Neal (Kenny's mom), in Tuesday's episode

by Ken

Funny how things connect. As I wrote Wednesday, the considerable pleasure I was taking in Tuesday night's episodes of The Middle and especially The Real O'Neals kind of slammed into the New York Review of Books review-essay by Nathaniel Rich, "Joan Didion in the Deep South" (in the March 9 issue; unfortunately only an abstract is available free to nonsubscribers), of a highly unusual new offering from one of the most important writers of our time.

I hadn't known anything about the new Didion book, South and West (scheduled for publication on March 7), which turns out to be different from anything she has published before. It is, if I've got this right, a direct look at her work process: the notes she partly wrote and partly assembled for two writing projects that never came to fruition.

The "South" part is the record of a month-long trip along the Gulf Coast that Didion took in summer 1970. By way of background, Nathaniel Rich notes:

Joan Didion explained her decision to visit the Gulf Coast in a 2006 interview in The Paris Review: “I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South.”

Rich goes on to observe:

It is a counterintuitive theory, for the South and the West represent the poles of American experience—the South drowning in its past, the West looking ahead to distant frontiers in a spirit of earnest, eternal optimism. “The future always looks good in the golden land,” Didion wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” “because no one remembers the past.” In the South no one can forget it.

Understanding her native California has, of course, been a life-long preoccupation for Didion, and the notes that make up the "West" portion of the new book derive from a 1976 visit to San Francisco covering the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone, when she "found that she wanted mainly to write about her own childhood and the West’s conception of history."


SO WHAT ARE THESE "NOTES" OF DIDION'S?

This requires a considerable effort of explanation, but the short answer, as Rich puts it, is that "South and West offers for the first time a glimpse inside the factory walls." Here's his more extended background:

Didion’s notes, which surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits. Didion saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future.

South and West is, in one regard, the most revealing of Didion’s books. This might seem a far-fetched claim to make about an author who has written about her ancestry, her marriage, her health, and, with painful candor, her grief -- Didion’s readers are, after all, on familiar terms with the personal details of her life. But the writing itself -- the cool majesty of her prose, written as if from a great, even empyreal distance, elevating personal experience into universal revelation -- has an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain. South and West offers for the first time a glimpse inside the factory walls.

For each piece she reported, Didion converted pages of loose-leaf notebooks into scrapbooks of material related to her theme. She inserted newspaper articles and other writers’ works, like C. Vann Woodward’s “The Search for Southern Identity,” biographical summaries, lists of suggested themes, and overheard dialogue, which often seems taken from one of her novels. (“I never been anyplace,” says a Biloxi woman, “I wanted to go.”) In her notes we learn of her “reporting tricks,” which are less tricks than an intuitive genius for locating the people in a given community who will best reveal its character: the director of the local College of Cosmetology, the white owner of the black radio station, the bridal consultant of the largest department store.

The notebooks also include transcriptions of her observations, which she typed at the end of each day. These notes represent an intermediate stage of writing, between shorthand and first draft, composed in an uncharacteristically casual, immediate style. There are sentences that are ideas for sentences, paragraphs that are ideas for scenes: “The land looks rich, and many people from Birmingham, etc. (rich people) maintain places here to hunt.” “The country way in which he gave me names.” “The resolutely ‘colorful,’ anecdotal quality of San Francisco history.” “The sense of sports being the opiate of the people.” “The sense of not being up to the landscape.” The effect can be jarring, like seeing Grace Kelly photographed with her hair in rollers or hearing the demo tapes in which Brian Wilson experiments with alternative arrangements of “Good Vibrations.”

"[E]ven in its most casual iteration," Rich notes, "Didion’s voice, with its sensitivity to the grotesqueries and vanities that dance beneath the skim of daily experience, is unmistakable." And he provides lots of description and example.


SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THOSE ABC SITCOMS?

Well, with The Middle, not so much. In this case it's just that, for a show that I like so much, as I've written here a number of times, I'm surprised to find myself even fonder and more impressed in Season 8, with all three of the Heck children showing fascinating signs of perhaps surprising and yet (for me) totally believable and rather inspirational growing up -- and now even the senior Hecks, Frankie (Patricia Heaton) and Mike (Neil Flynn) having to roust themselves to catch up. The process has been so smartly and humanly as well as entertainingly executed that I've found myself wondering whether the suits at Disney-ABC have even noticed what's going out over their airwaves. Hey, it is Season 8, after all. The Middle has always, in its wry way, thumbed its nose at the psychotic bullshit of America's own Family-Values Fascists, but in this late flowering it's articulating a vision of how people actually develop which would have the FVFs boycotting ABC if they weren't so savagely obtuse.

Which brings us to The Real O'Neals. You know the network suits are paying close attention here, because the subject matter is potentially so explosive for a sitcom. It's another show built around a family with a mom and dad, Eileen and Pat O'Neal (Martha Plimpton and Jay R. Ferguson), and three offspring (Matthew Shively as Jimmy, Noah Galvin as Kenny, and Bebe Wood as Shannon), all beautifully delineated and with the various interrelationships carefully characterized. But what everyone knows about it is that in last season's pilot episode Kenny O'Neal, then 16, came out to himself and his family as gay.

That by itself would have been sufficient to cause an uproar, and the Christian Right exploded on cue. Not least because the situation wasn't presented as a psychiatric emergency but as a natural development -- and almost the least of the O'Neal family's problems. In fact, as we entered the O'Neals' lives, Eileen and Pat were coming to the realization that the one thing most sorely lacking in their marriage was a divorce (a deficiency that has since been rectified). Even more subversively, in the O'Neals we met a family that -- as rigidly enforced by Eileen -- was so hilariously devoted to maintaining the image of a model Irish-American Catholic family that the family was in danger of falling apart when the image turned out to be just that.

I imagine there was more apoplexy on the Crackpot Right when, after a 13-episode first season, The Real O'Neals was rewarded with a second season. Yet here it is, maybe not the most significant but another of those things that just a few years ago would have been utterly unimaginable. Or maybe the fact that it's now possible to do such a light-hearted sitcom about such once-barely-touchable subject matter is one of the more significant markers of how much the culture has evolved, in some ways almost unrecognizably so.


AND WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JOAN DIDION?

We have to go back to Nathaniel Rich, and his careful depiction of the play of values Didion encountered in the Deep South of 1970.

There is a long tradition of northern visitors seeing in the Gulf South an atmosphere of perpetual decline, in which “everything seems to go to seed.” Didion quotes Audubon’s line about “the dangerous nature of the ground, its oozing, spongy, and miry disposition,” though you could go back to 1720, when a visiting French official described the territory as “flooded, unhealthy, impracticable.” Didion is on narrower footing, however, when she describes her central thesis:

a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.

How could the hidebound South, in its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future? Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects, lies in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage -- “distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned.” In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid, and the subject of frank conversation.

After looking a bit at the nature of that "frank conversation," Rich writes:

This kind of thinking seemed retrograde in the Seventies. From the vantage of New York, California, even New Orleans, it still seems so today. But this southern frame of mind has annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among people -- or at least registered voters -- nostalgic for a more orderly past.

Do you see where Rich is heading? What in fact Joan Didion was already foreseeing in 1970? It's going to take us one more post to get there. That should happen Sunday.

#

"As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox"

Roger Ailes with his wife, Elizabeth Tilson, on July 19 in New York City. Credit Drew Angerer/Getty Images (source)

by Gaius Publius

In case you're wondering about the date in the headline, November 9 is the first day following the next U.S. election.

Thanks to a heads-up by digby, I took time to read Gabriel Sherman's excellent New York Magazine piece, "The Revenge of Roger’s Angels: How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media," from start to finish in one sitting. I strongly recommend you do the same — it's an excellent example of investigative journalism as well as investigative writing. The piece is a page-turner, and it's very well written.

There's too much information in it to capture here, but near the end there's a section that discusses what Fox becomes post-Ailes, and I'd like to focus on that. If Sherman is right on both of his counts — about the changes at Fox, about the emergence of Trump TV — the media landscape will drastically change post-election.

Will that change be for the better? That's a consideration for another time.

Fox After Ailes

On what Fox is about to become, Sherman writes:

Ailes’s ouster has created a leadership vacuum at Fox News. Several staffers have described feeling like being part of a totalitarian regime whose dictator has just been toppled. “No one knows what to do. No one knows who to report to. It’s just mayhem,” said a Fox host. As details of the Paul, Weiss [a law firm] investigation have filtered through the offices, staffers are expressing a mixture of shock and disgust. The scope of Ailes’s alleged abuse far exceeds what employees could have imagined. “People are so devastated,” one senior executive said. Those I spoke with have also been unnerved by [senior executive VP Bill] Shine and [Fox general counsel Dianne] Brandi’s roles in covering up Ailes’s behavior.

Despite revelations of how Ailes’s management team enabled his harassment, Murdoch has so far rejected calls — including from [Murdoch's son] James, according to ­sources — to conduct a wholesale housecleaning. On August 12, Murdoch promoted Shine and another Ailes loyalist, Jack Abernethy, to become co-presidents of Fox News. He named Scott executive vice-president and kept Brandi and [PR department executive Irena] Briganti in their jobs. Fox News’s chief financial officer, Mark Kranz, is the only senior executive to have been pushed out (officially he retired), along with [Ailes’s longtime executive assistant Judy] Laterza and a handful of assistants, contributors, and consultants. “Of course, they are trying to isolate this to just a few bad actors,” a 21st Century Fox executive told me.

Many people I spoke with believe that the current management arrangement is just a stopgap until the election. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” predicts one host. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.” ...

Meanwhile, the Murdochs are looking for a permanent CEO to navigate these post-Ailes, Trump-roiled waters. According to sources, James’s preferred candidates include CBS president David Rhodes (though he is under contract with CBS through 2019); Jesse Angelo, the New York Post publisher and James’s Harvard roommate; and perhaps a television executive from London. Sources say [Murdoch's son] Lachlan, who politically is more conservative than James, wants to bring in an outsider. Rupert was seen giving Rebekah Brooks a tour of the Fox offices several months ago, creating speculation that she could be brought in to run Fox. Another contender is Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.

You may remember the name Rebekah Brooks from the U.K. phone-tapping scandal (emphasis added):

Brooks was a prominent figure in the News International phone hacking scandal, having been the editor of the News of the World when illegal phone hacking was carried out by the newspaper. Following a criminal trial in 2014 she was cleared of all charges by a jury at the Old Bailey, which accepted her defence of incompetence: that she had no knowledge of the illegal acts carried out by the newspaper she edited.^[8]

In September 2015, Brooks was confirmed as CEO of News UK, the renamed News International, re-establishing the working relationship with News Corp founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch.

O"Reilly, Hannity, Megyn Kelly and more, all could be gone from Fox News after the election. It will be interesting to watch Fox reinvent itself as the competitor to what may be a network to its right, Trump TV, a network perhaps run by the attack dog, Roger Ailes, who turned Fox into what it used to be.

Trump TV

Trump TV, if it emerges after the election, will throw a spanner into the workings of a once unified right-wing (and alt-right) messaging ecosystem:

The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used [in order] to build a loyal audience at Fox News — especially race and class — and used them to stoke barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. Where that outrage is channeled after the election — assuming, as polls now suggest, Trump doesn’t make it to the White House — is a big question for the Republican Party and for Fox News.

As right-wing as they are, both Trump and Murdoch care about the money that goes to the most-watched media outlets. They're about to become competitors for it:

Trump had a complicated relationship with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it’s plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some kind is a real possibility.

And notice this tidbit, a hint of the infighting to come:

One prominent media executive told me that if Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers by blaming him for the defeat.

A battle for the eyes of the "deplorables" (an unfortunate, though interesting word) between Fox News and Trump TV — as well as for eyes and minds of the non-deplorable segment of the Trump-supporting world — should be fascinating to watch. One hopes they split the pie as they knife-fight to own it. I'd rather see an electorally divided "deplorables" than to see that group united, no matter how weakened their numbers.

As to the non-deplorable portion of Trump supporters — those suffering from the economic ravages of both pro-wealth Democratic rule and pro-wealth Republican rule — perhaps a newly populist Democratic Party can attract them for a change, instead of drive them away. Until a bad deed is done, one can hope for a good result.

Again, if you can spare the time, do read the whole thing. It's fascinating, incredibly lurid, and very well documented. If sexual office politics is your cup of tea, you'll drown in it. Fox News was a pit of predatory males, office women retained and passed around for sex, and mid-to-upper-level executives (of both sexes) who acted as procurers — "talent scouts" — to feed one toxic man's toxic need, along with the needs of those around him. Some of those needs were simply to survive in that kind of environment.

And Ailes? He's still at it, reportedly advising Trump as we speak. Lord help us.

GP
 

Trump's A Yella-Belly Like All Bullies

One thing I learned as a young kid on the playground in Brooklyn, not far from where Old Man Trump was raising the asshole who decades later managed to make fools of the GOP's whole "deep bench," was that bullies are always cowards. And no one from Brooklyn looked at El Trumpanzee during the Republicans debates and didn't see one laughable loud-mouthed coward. But Lyin' Ted, Sweaty Little Marco, the poor Jebster, NJ Blimp-man and the rest of the pathetic deep bench aren't from Brooklyn and had no idea how to deal with a bully blowhard like Trump. Look, even he never threatened to sue any of his befuddled primary opponents.

Peter Beinart's not from Brooklyn either, but Boston is Brooklyn enough for him to easily recognize a coward when he sees one. And yesterday at The Atlantic he explained why he senses a big yellow stripe down El Trumpanzee's flabby back. He starts with a little general background: "Crusaders against 'political correctness' often portray themselves as brave. They deride others for knuckling under to left-wing orthodoxy, for being too afraid of African Americans, Latinos, feminists, and gays to speak the truth. They, on the other hand, speak their mind, come what may. No presidential candidate has used this conceit more effectively than Donald Trump. His supporters love his willingness to say things about Mexicans, Muslims, and African Americans that ordinary politicians won’t say for fear of being called a bigot. That’s part of what they mean they say he 'doesn’t talk like a politician.' But over the last couple of weeks, Trump has illustrated something important about the anti-politically correct. They’re most comfortable confronting PC orthodoxy when the people they’re confronting aren’t around. Once they actually encounter African Americans, Latinos, and other minority groups, they become a lot less brave." And there's no better example than Señor Trumpanzee himself, of course.

In an effort to soften his image, Trump has recently begun doing something he previous avoided: Talking to blacks and Latinos. Two weeks ago, he met with his Hispanic advisory council. According to media reports, he was "humble" and "conciliatory." Did he call for deporting the undocumented immigrants already in the US, as he has repeatedly promised his overwhelmingly white crowds? Nope. According to Jacob Monty, who attended the meeting, Trump said "deporting them is neither possible nor humane.”

Then, last week, Trump flew to Mexico City to meet President Enrique Peña Nieto. Did he repeat the pledge that brings white crowds to their feet: That Mexico will pay for a wall along the two countries’ border? Nope. Beforehand, the two sides agreed not to discuss the subject. When Peña Nieto brought it up anyway, and announced that Mexico would never foot the bill, did Trump set him straight? Nope. Rudy Giuliani, who was attending the meeting on Trump’s behalf, reportedly declared the topic “off the table” and The Donald moved on to less controversial subjects.

When Trump appeared publicly with Peña Nieto after their meeting, he again “avoided direct confrontation,” in the Washington Post's words. He called it a “great, great, honor” to be invited to the country he has repeatedly trashed during the campaign. And he declared that he had “tremendous feelings” for the “tremendous” Mexican American people, a group he famously derided as rapists and drug dealers in his announcement speech.

But once Trump left Mexico and addressed an overwhelmingly white, anti-immigrant crowd that evening in Arizona, the Post noted, he ditched his “subdued and cooperative tone” and “returned to the aggressive tenor that has defined much of his campaign. Repeatedly raising his voice to a yell, he said that ‘anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.’”

The oscillation continued this weekend, when Trump addressed an African American congregation in Detroit. “Trump’s subdued rhetoric,” noted Politico, “was a jarring contrast to his typically boisterous rallies.” The Republican nominee said nothing about Black Lives Matter being responsibility for the murder of police, as he had told Bill O’Reilly. He didn’t imply, as he has to white audiences, that African Americans are prone to voter fraud. He said nothing about Barack Obama not being born in the United States. He didn’t repeat his claims that blacks should vote for him because their lives are so miserable that they have nothing “to lose.” Instead, he flattered his audience, calling black churches “the conscience of our country,” which had inspired America “toward a better moral character, a deeper concern for mankind, and spirit of charity and unity that binds us all together.” Trump’s remarks, noted the Post, constituted a “jarring shift in tone and message.”

This isn’t surprising. Even more than most politicians, Trump lives for the approval of the crowd. His ego is so overdeveloped, and his ideological convictions so underdeveloped, that it’s hard to imagine him walking into a room and saying things he knows his audience doesn’t want to hear. But Trump isn’t alone. Put Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, or most of the other conservatives who have made a career of being anti-PC in a small room with Latinos, African Americans, or Muslims and I suspect their rhetoric would dramatically soften, too. It’s harder to speak bluntly and nastily about people when they’re staring you in the face. It’s also harder because when you actually listen to them, they often defy your stereotypes. Up close, their grievances become harder to dismiss.

I’m glad Trump is now speaking to more diverse crowds. I’m glad because, in so doing, he’s proving that when it comes to “political correctness,” conservative politicians and pundits aren’t more courageous than their liberal counterparts. They’re just more isolated from the ethnic and racial minorities about whom they speak. When the distance disappears, the “bravery” does too.

Do the people protesting Kim Davis's "religious persecution" have any idea what actual religious persecution is?

Yes, she's back from the hoosegow, and the theory now is that marriage licenses will be issued in her holy see Rowan County, but without her name. Of course, if the theory is that her name on a document is supposed to signify its compliance with relevant law, hasn't that ship already sailed?


"Calling [Kim Davis's situation] persecution is insulting to the people who really are fighting for their right to live out their beliefs -- as human beings, not as elected officials with $80,000 annual salaries."

-- washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri,
in the post "The Passion of Kim Davis"

by Ken

The battle lines over Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis's refusal to do her job are familiar enough that they haven't seemed to require comment from me, beyond endorsing the terrific point that Greg Sargent made: that the real news in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision upholding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is how smoothly, on the whole, the transition has gone.

All through the ascendancy of the New Right in American politics it has been a source of, hmm, curiosity that such a coalition has been maintained despite large differences, and in fact open contradictions, of belief within that coalition. But I guess the Economic-Predator Right-Wingery who mostly had the final say could live with their unwashed brothers and sisters as long as they got their way on the important stuff, like invading Iraq in order to turn it into a model of free-market capitalism for the world to see and emulate. The unwashed, in exchange for their support, or at least non-opposition, on the Predators' issues, about which they didn't have strong feelings anyway, got handouts of Social-Fascist Wingnuttery, which sort of kept the whole polluted thing together.
 
PITY THE POOR POLITICAL PANDERERING
CLASS: WHO'S GOT THE HOT BUTTONS?

What's more, in those days the political Right was positioned to take full advantage of all the research and field-testing the Predators were funding and encouraging into "hot-button issues" that could keep their voting coalition broad enough to keep them in power. Alas, as the GOP's legions of presidential candidates are discovering to their chagrin, you have to keep up to date on hot buttons, which often have to be tuned or even outright discarded when they no longer touch the current terrors and rages of the core voters they need to corral. The mere existence of so many GOP presidential candidates makes it that much more important that each of them have his/her own button(s) not shared by more than, say, a dozen of the hundreds of other candidates. Wasn't it Plato who said, apropos of candidates for political office, "Ya gotta have a gimmick"?

Under such circumstances, even the most committed, determined panderer doesn't know who to pander to or how.

As Howie was just pointing out yesterday, though, in dissecting the down-for-the-count "campaign" of the prince of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, as he desperately tries to retool his "campaign" (I really don't see any alternative to putting what he's put forth so far as a "campaign" in quotes), bringing back his "signature" issue, union-bashing, union-busting doesn't seem to be the hot-button issue that fervid Economic-Predator Right-Wingers have made it in the recent past. Either the folks are bored, or perhaps they've noticed that Prince Scott's economic "reforms" have turned his state's economy to crap. They may even have begun to make the connection that U.S. employers have: that the less they have to fear the pushback of labor unions, the less they have to listen to the whiny wants of their employees.

Well, the polling I've seen so far shows that the Social-Fascist Right-Wingers who've been trying to play the Kim Davis "religious persecution" card aren't getting the play they would once have taken for granted when you have an unobstructed shot at homo-bashing. Oh, they're getting the usual core crackpots and religious delusionalists and bullies, but inside the circled wagons the territory has shrunk. Put all the "Hate the Homos Now and Forever" diehards together, and you don't seem to have an especially potent voting bloc.

A LOT OF AMERICANS ARE GRASPING THAT KIM
DAVIS'S PROBLEM IS HER REFUSAL TO DO HER JOB

Her job is to carry out the laws that fall under the jurisdiction of a Kentucky county clerk. She is, of course, entitled to her opinion of those laws, but she isn't entitled to pick and choose which laws she will and which laws she won't enforce.

This might not even be an issue if it had been dealt with in the case of pharmacists and the day-after abortion pill. Again, people have the right to their opinion of drugs that have been certified by the relevant governmental authorities as legal for sale in their jurisdiction, but there isn't any stretch by which they could possibly have a right to selectively disburse or refuse to disburse drugs approved for sale. Pharmacists are by definition licensed enforcers of the meting out of the drug-authorizing authorities' decisions.

If you can't or won't fulfill the legal obligations of your chosen profession, no one can force you to, but you have to recognize that your conscience requires you to seen another profession, one you can exercise within the limit of your principles.

Granted, Kim Davis's case is made particularly preposterous by the views on marriage reflected in her own marital history -- four times married, to three different men. On the radio I heard an enraged citizen of Kentucky express outrage that this issue was raised against Davis, outrage that seems to me ridiculous. The Davis woman claims the right to decide who can and can't get married, and her own marital history is somehow out of bounds?

I think washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri got this just about right yesterday.

ComPost

The Passion of Kim Davis

By Alexandra Petri | September 14 at 10:00 AM

Kim Davis is a false idol.

To suffer for your beliefs can be ennobling. To suffer for your misconceptions is just embarrassing. And she’s doing the latter, not the former.

Today, she’s back at work.

Last Tuesday afternoon found her being released from jail, as Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz rallied around her and “Eye of the Tiger” played. (Survivor issued a cease and desist.) Crosses waved, “Amazing Grace” was sung, speeches were given. It was all the fun of martyrdom with none of the stigma(ta.)

But make no mistake. Kim Davis is not being persecuted for her beliefs. This is to actual religious persecution as anything in that Alanis Morrisette song was to irony: which is to say, this only looks like it if you don’t properly understand the meaning of the word.

She’s celebre in a bad cause.

And now everyone is frantically trying to lay hands on this relic before she loses her potency.

(Poor Ted Cruz, whom Huckabee staffers headed off as he tried to touch the hem of Davis’s robe. He stood glumly offstage watching the rally unfold. It seemed, to use a biblical metaphor, like pretty small pottage for which he had traded the birthright of being someone who appeared to possess an understanding of the law.)

Kim Davis has gone even farther than John C. Calhoun, who, when he was suggesting wild extra-constitutional solutions to Supreme Court decisions he disliked, at least offered up the theory that the state could interpose between a court decision and its people. All Davis suggests is that Kim Davis can interpose herself between court and people.

At the risk of sounding like Javert, you must learn the meaning of the law.

This is not a case of the law interfering with her ability to practice her faith. That would indeed be a grave matter. This is a case of her faith interfering with her ability to uphold the law as a public official. You have every right to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, but you can’t expect to keep your job at the U.S. Geological Survey if you won’t backdate the rocks. And if they fired you, we would not call you persecuted. We would say, “Well, science is clearly not your field.”

It is one thing to disagree with a law that you are required to uphold by your job. What you do in that case is resign.

It’s fine that if you don’t want your name on the marriage licenses. What you do in that case is resign.

It’s fine if you feel that you can’t perform your job and avoid hell simultaneously. What you do in that case is resign. It’s a quandary, certainly. What it is not is religious persecution.

But not to hear Mike Huckabee tell it.

“Where does this end when you have this level of outright discrimination and, frankly, persecution [of] someone who genuinely believes in her heart the difference between marriage and something that the Supreme Court has created?” said Mike Huckabee on CNN. (See: Judges 15:16.)

This is not someone being persecuted for her faith. This is someone being punished for failing to do her job, then being in contempt of court. Calling it persecution is insulting to the people who really are fighting for their right to live out their beliefs — as human beings, not as elected officials with $80,000 annual salaries.

Religious persecution of Christians is real and ongoing. It is what is happening in North Korea, where tens of thousands of Christians live in forced labor camps. It is what is happening in Saudi Arabia, where even building churches is prohibited. But it is not what is happening to Kim Davis.

In China, pastors are imprisoned, churches closed and crosses torn down.

In America, a county clerk is — displaying a baffling lack of understanding when it comes to the law of the land, and presidential candidates are enabling her.

Once more, with feeling: You don’t have to do your job. But equally the taxpayers do not have to pay you. You have the right to your beliefs. You do not have the right to be a county clerk.

If your job offends you, cast it out.

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Will it matter to the anti-Planned Parenthood witch hunters that the frame job is even crookeder than we knew?

It turns out that the "original" versions of the Planned Parenthood sting videos are already tampered with. What a surprise!

by Ken

The good news is that Planned Parenthood is fighting back against the crusade of lies being waged against it. The bad news is that the anti-Planned Parenthood witch hunters are the kind of people who not only don't care about but actively despise the truth when it comes in conflict with their ideological psychoses. And right now the right-wing sociopaths see an opportunity to destroy their enemy. Why should the truth matter to them more here than it does in any other aspect of their lie-based lives?

The startling disclosure here is that, according to the independent investigator hired by Planned Parenthood, the supposedly "full" versions of the videos that were so deceptively edited down to produce the bogus videos circulated by the witch hunters are themselves edited.  When you consider that the people who produced these videos are confirmed, dyed-in-the-wool liars, the discovery that the theoretically "unedited" versions are in fact edited leads inescapably to the conclusion that they're already bogus -- that what we're in fact dealing with here is literally lies upon lies. (And, oh yes, some of the "transcripts" circulated by the sting perpetrators are doctored. Ho-hum.)

But again, will it matter? It might if these people had any interest in the truth. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

Videos deceptively edited, Planned Parenthood tells Congress


Antiabortion activists rally on the steps of the Texas Capitol in Austin, Tex., to condemn the use of tissue samples from aborted fetuses in medical research. (Eric Gay/AP)

By Sandhya Somashekhar | August 27 at 10:12 PM

Officials at Planned Parenthood mounted an aggressive defense in a letter to Congress on Thursday, offering evidence from an outside investigator that undercover videos targeting the women’s health organization were heavily edited and should be considered unreliable.

The letter, written by the ­organization’s president, Cecile Richards, comes as four congressional committees are pursuing investigations into allegations that Planned Parenthood sells ­fetal tissue for profit, which is prohibited by law, and that it has changed its abortion procedures to extract better specimens. The accusations stem from an elaborate undercover investigation by antiabortion activists, who recorded Planned Parenthood employees while posing as representatives of a tissue procurement company.

Planned Parenthood has repeatedly denied the allegations. On Thursday, the group attempted to go on the offense, with Richards accusing the activists from the Center for Medical Progress of acting “fraudulently and unethically — and perhaps illegally.”

Her letter was accompanied by a 10-page report commissioned by Planned Parenthood and penned by an independent investigator, former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson. Through his firm Fusion GPS, Simpson enlisted experts who analyzed both the short, highly produced videos publicized by the antiabortion group, as well as hours of “full” footage the group posted on YouTube.

The implication is that the longer footage was unedited. But Simpson said he found significant gaps.

“Anytime someone removes a piece of audio or video tape . . . that renders the file unreliable,” Simpson said during a teleconference for reporters.

Simpson said he also discovered discrepancies between transcripts posted by the antiabortion group and dialogue in the video. And he said he found instances in which the undercover actors goaded Planned Parenthood officials into making flippant remarks, and where inaudible dialogue was transcribed in a way that represented “wishful thinking” — for example, when a lab technician is said to have looked at a fetus and said, “It’s a baby.”

David Daleiden, project leader at the Center for Medical Progress, said the gaps in the longer video were bathroom breaks taken by the actors wearing hidden cameras, or long periods during which an actor sat silently in a waiting room.

He said the group has made that fuller raw footage available to law enforcement authorities as well as congressional investigators. A judge’s order in California, however, has restricted the release of some footage, he said.

Daleiden accused Planned Parenthood of skirting the heart of the issue: whether it is selling fetal tissue or participating in other illegal activities, such as employing an abortion procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion, which is outlawed in most circumstances.

“We’re now seven weeks into this news story. They spent 11 pages now talking about camera Number One or camera Number Two,” Daleiden said. “What they still haven’t spent any time addressing is the questions over their use of partial-birth abortion or giving any type of detailed accounting of the costs and how much they’re actually getting paid.”

In the letter, Planned Parenthood officials write that only two affiliates still participate in tissue donation, a service provided to women who decide to donate fetal material for medical research. Before the video sting, four other affiliates — all in California — participated in tissue donation but stopped because of threats or other issues.

The letter says the lone California affiliate that still donates tissue receives $60 per specimen, a “modest reimbursement” to recover costs. Such a charge is permitted under state and federal law.

Planned Parenthood officials acknowledge that doctors sometimes make minor adjustments to abortion procedures to extract specimens. However, Richards contends in the letter that the adjustments do not make the procedure more risky. Moreover, she said, there is no federal prohibition against making these adjustments as long as the research is not federally funded.

Still, she wrote, Planned Parenthood has adopted voluntary guidelines against any “substantive alteration in the timing of terminating the pregnancy or of the method used . . . for the purpose of obtaining the blood
and/or tissue.”

“Mr. Daleiden and his associates have sought to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and unsuccessfully to entrap Planned Parenthood physicians and staff for nearly three years,” Richards wrote. “Yet it is Planned Parenthood, not Mr. Daleiden, that is currently subject to four separate congressional investigations.”

This Daleiden thug apparently can't draw breath without lying. Planned Parenthood has repeatedly addressed its tissue-selling practices, which were not, in fact, illegal, and which don't appear to have been in any way unethical either, but simply reflect standard scientific research practice. But Daleiden is a lying sack of garbage, whose life is devoted to lies. Why would he be in any way embarrassed about conducting a crusade of lies?

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Will the right-wing perpetrators and co-conspirators pay any price for their bogus smear campaign against Planned Parenthood?

Attack Of The O'Keefe Clones

Rob Tornoe, Media Matters for America blog (click to enlarge)

"Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky pledged to “introduce an amendment to pending Senate legislation to immediately strip every dollar of Planned Parenthood funding.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called for defunding and for “an investigation of Planned Parenthood’s activities regarding the sale and transfer of aborted body parts.” The House Energy and Commerce Committee is undertaking an investigation, and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have ordered investigations in their states."

-- from the New York Times editorial "The Campaign
of Deception Against Planned Parenthood"

by Ken

This is the story we should be reading today:

Today, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz (R-TX), Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee (R-UpTheirButts), Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), and Gov. Booby Jindal (R-LA) all announced that they are quitting their jobs and contemplating applying a Second Amendment solution to ther personal shitsuckitude, on the ground that, while they have long known that they are enemies of all truth and decency, their role in the 100 percent fraudulent attack on Planned Parenthood is simply one monumental abuse too many, and makes their continued presence in public life, and probably life of any sort, not merely unjustifiable but intolerable to any person of even the slightest good faith. They all insisted on offering belated apologies for having been born, and everything they have said and done since.

Instead, despite having been thoroughly discredited, this conspiracy of liars and imbeciles -- centered around a front group called "Center for Medical Progress," which appears to have no reason to exist except to spread likes -- not only will go unpunished but will likely remain lodged in the heads of the gullible targets of the right-wing lie factory as "truth." Yeah, Planned Parenthood gets rich by illegally selling fetal tissue, we got it on video.

No. Not true. None of it.

Let's jump to the conclusion of the New York Times editorial I've already referenced above, "The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood":

The Center for Medical Progress video campaign is a dishonest attempt to make legal, voluntary and potentially lifesaving tissue donations appear nefarious and illegal. Lawmakers responding by promoting their own anti-choice agenda are rewarding deception and putting women’s health and their constitutionally protected rights at risk.

Just to be clear: There's nothing ambiguous about this case. Two videos have been released which were fabricated by persons engaged in a calculated, knowing, deliberate fraud. Every second of time put into this scheme by everyone connected with the manufacture of the hoax had no intention except to create and disseminate a package of total lies for the purpose of creating a furor among gullible right-wing followers and also discrediting Planned Parenthood for no legitimate reason. (No, their hatred is not a "legitimate" reason.) There are probably crimes for which they could be prosecuted, but that won't happen, and the crimes they could be prosecuted for probably wouldn't carry much in the way of punishment -- certainly nothing like the punishment they deserve for the massive fraud they perpetrated.

Let's say it again: There is no limit to the contempt and loathing right-wing demagogues feel for the American they spend all their waking hours shitting on. They hate the people they manipulate almost as much as they hate the truth. But only "almost," because the people they manipulate are their key to power and riches, whereas the truth is always their enemy and must always be destroyed.

And in this case, it seems safe to say that as far as the bulk of the American public is concerned, the truth has been safely destroyed. The perpetrators of the fraud attempted to lure the Planned Parenthood people they video-recorded into some sort of misdeed, and completely failed. So they edited the video into lies. None of the accusations cobbled together is true. But right-wingers know that truth is for saps. They have something better than truth. Their ideological insanity.

Not just the perpetrators but their co-conspirators -- for starters, see the names up top -- will go unscathed. I suppose it could be said that the co-conspirators weren't part of the original fraud and had no way of knowing that every word they said was a lie. Except that the same thing happens almost every time one of these frauds is perpetrated, and these corrupt pols continue to trumpet every new one without regard to the quantity of lies they have already championed. There is, apparently, no limit to their passion for truthlessness, and there never will be as long as the American public not only tolerates but rewards their unremitting assault on truth and decency.


THE NYT EDITORIAL

The editorial does such a good job of "unpacking" the story that it really needs to be taken whole (links onsite):

EDITORIAL
The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | JULY 22, 2015

A hidden-camera video released last week purported to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells tissue from aborted fetuses. It shows nothing of the sort. But it is the latest in a series of unrelenting attacks on Planned Parenthood, which offers health care services to millions of people every year. The politicians howling to defund Planned Parenthood care nothing about the truth here, being perfectly willing to undermine women’s reproductive rights any way they can.

The nine-minute video clip released by the Center for Medical Progress, an outfit apparently created in 2013, invites viewers to “Hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their illegal sale of baby parts.” In it, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, is seen discussing the collection of fetal tissue in a lunch meeting with two people posing as potential tissue buyers. A second video, released on Tuesday, shows another Planned Parenthood staff member discussing fetal tissue.

After the first video’s release, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky pledged to “introduce an amendment to pending Senate legislation to immediately strip every dollar of Planned Parenthood funding.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called for defunding and for “an investigation of Planned Parenthood’s activities regarding the sale and transfer of aborted body parts.” The House Energy and Commerce Committee is undertaking an investigation, and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have ordered investigations in their states.

The full video of the lunch meeting, over two hours long and released by the Center for Medical Progress after complaints by Planned Parenthood, shows something very different from what these critics claim. Clearly, the shorter version was edited to eliminate statements by Dr. Nucatola explaining that Planned Parenthood does not profit from tissue donation, which requires the clear consent of the patient. Planned Parenthood affiliates only accept money — between $30 and $100 per specimen, according to Dr. Nucatola — to cover costs associated with collecting and transporting the tissue. “This is not something with any revenue stream that affiliates are looking at,” she said. Under federal law, facilities may be reimbursed for costs associated with fetal tissue donation, like transportation and storage.

According to a letter sent by Roger Evans, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood, to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the video is a result of a yearslong campaign of deception. The head of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, created a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services almost three years ago for the purpose of tricking Planned Parenthood employees, the letter alleges, even setting up exhibits at Planned Parenthood’s national conferences. The letter also says Biomax offered a Planned Parenthood affiliate $1,600 for a fetal liver and thymus, presumably to trap the affiliate in the act of accepting a high payment for fetal tissue. The affiliate declined.

In a statement on its website, the Center for Medical Progress says it “follows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work.”

Anti-abortion groups have long pushed to defund Planned Parenthood, even though no federal money is used to provide abortions. But that hasn’t stopped their efforts to shut down the clinics, which provide services like contraception, cancer screening and other tests.

The Center for Medical Progress — which managed to get tax-exempt status in 2013 as a biomedicine charity, according to a report by The Huffington Post — appears to have done little beyond producing the undercover video. According to its registration form with the California attorney general, it has three officers: Mr. Daleiden; Albin Rhomberg, who has participated in anti-abortion protests; and Troy Newman, the president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

In a statement last week, Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that “our donation programs — like any other high-quality health care providers — follow all laws and ethical guidelines” and that “Planned Parenthood stands behind our work to help women and families donate tissue for medical research when they wish to.”

Researchers use fetal tissue to study and develop treatments for diseases and conditions like H.I.V., hepatitis, congenital heart defects, retinal degeneration and Parkinson’s. Last year, the National Institutes of Health gave $76 million in grants for fetal tissue research. Planned Parenthood is certainly not the only collector of fetal tissue — clinics associated with universities also supply tissue for research.

The Center for Medical Progress video campaign is a dishonest attempt to make legal, voluntary and potentially lifesaving tissue donations appear nefarious and illegal. Lawmakers responding by promoting their own anti-choice agenda are rewarding deception and putting women’s health and their constitutionally protected rights at risk.

WHO OR WHAT IS THE "CENTER FOR MEDICAL PROGRESS"?



In real-world terms, there doesn't appear to be any such thing as the "Center for Medical Progress." As Amanda Marcotte reported on Slate, it appears to be a created-for-the-smear front created by a band of right-wing crazies called Live Action, which pushed the "news" hard while managing mostly to keep its own name out of the story. Amanda notes:

Despite years of effort, Lila Rose and her crew have never been able to prove any of their accusations of illegal behavior. The organization has a credibility problem, one that might have interfered with getting mainstream media traction for a video with its name on it. But the Center for Medical Progress didn't have the same name recognition problem—or it didn't until now.

Amanda's Slate piece is cited by Laura Bassett in the HuffPost piece cited by the NYT editorial, "Group Behind Planned Parenthood Sting Video May Have Tricked IRS, Donors," which notes that the IRS would have had no reason to understand CMP as merely a "front group" for Live Action "when considering the group's application for tax-exempt status, and not how the group originally presented itself to the public in soliciting donations." Laura cites reporting by the Bridge Project that it was granted tax-exempt status under a code used by the IRS for "biomedicine charities," as CMP claimed to be in a now-deleted version of its website viewable via the Wayback Machine. (There's a different code for nonprofit propaganda outlets like Live Action.)

Since being approved by the IRS in 2013 as a "biomedicine charity," CMP doesn't seem to have done anything except release these videos. The current site has a completely different "about us" description, claiming to be "a group of citizen journalists dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances. We are concerned about contemporary bioethical issues that impact human dignity, and we oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings."

Of course if the IRS were to investigate the case and find that CMP has committed fraud, against both the IRS and potential donors, and apply the legally available penalties (shutting the operation down and seeking fines or prison time for the individuals responsible) the Right-Wing Noise Machine would no doubt howl about political persecution.

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