SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
lee atwater
Trump's Hunger Games
More damage to our nation’s most successful anti-hunger program is on the horizon.
Dec 12, 2019
Approximately 700,000 people are expected to lose food stamps due to the Trump Administration's new rule on time limits and a related work requirement--a rule that will be especially difficult for those lacking transportation, low-wage workers with unpredictable schedules, people living in rural areas, veterans, former foster youth, people reentering the community after prison, and those with no education past high school. In short, some of the people most vulnerable to hunger in our nation, with an average income that is just 18 percent of the poverty line, or about $2350 annually.
And even more damage to our nation's most successful anti-hunger program is on the horizon.
It raises an age-old question: can anyone--the Democratic party, progressive or union organizers, community-based organizations, a revitalized Poor People's Campaign--build multiracial coalitions to overcome the practice of people voting against their own economic interests based on racial animus that is constantly stoked?
Two other rules that are teed up include changing the utility deductions used when calculating a family's net income and benefit levels. It would especially hit northern states in the winter months. Another rule would bar households with more than $2500 in assets--or $3,500 for a household with a disabled adult--from qualifying for food assistance, and undermine states that want to help families with annual incomes greater than 130% of the poverty line, or more than about $26,000 for a family of three. Taken together, the Urban Institute estimates that had all of these proposed changes been in effect in 2018, 3.7 million fewer people would have received food stamps that year and annual benefits would have fallen by $4.2 billion. (Nearly a million students would have also lost their eligibility for free or reduced price school meals.)
The language the Trump Administration used around the release of the newest attack on assistance is akin to a tutorial on how to demonize people who are struggling. "Government dependency has never been the American dream," said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in a press release. And in a column for the USA Today, he writes of the need to "move people toward self-sufficiency." If he had pointed out that the average SNAP recipient receives about $4.17 per day the public might realize how ludicrous the idea of a dependency problem is.
The Trump administration's framing is also consistent with a strategy conservatives have used to divide the white and black working class since even before Ronald Reagan's assault on the safety net. As Darrick Hamilton, fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and executive director of The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity put it, conservatives portrayed those who benefit from public spending as black and brown people who were "lazy, unvirtuous and undeserving welfare queens." Indeed Lee Atwater, advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described this tactic as a way to get the white vote. Republicans could no longer use the n-word, Atwater said: "That hurts you--backfires." Instead, they would create a caricature of people of color abusing assistance, and talk about cracking down on so-called fraud. They would employ "much more abstract" language, Atwater said--often called "dog-whistles"--to communicate that voting for them means "blacks get hurt worse than whites." That racialized myth is now so ingrained in white America's conscience that when Sec. Perdue writes that the new rule will "restore the dignity of work to a sizeable segment of our population" and "do right by taxpayers," many people--and particularly the Republican base--wrongly perceive "leaders" who are "getting tough" with "freeloading" people of color.
Of course, the assumptions people make about who is in poverty--and who is impacted by cuts to antipoverty programs--have literally nothing to do with reality. In fact, there are 17 million white people in poverty, 9 million African American people, and 10.8 million Hispanic people. And, according to the Urban Institute, the loss of food assistance eligibility due to the new work requirement rule "differs little among racial groups." But the households most impacted by the other rule changes waiting in the wings? Non-Hispanic white and Asian--13 percent of each would have lost food stamp eligibility had the rules been in effect in 2018, compared to 8 percent of African American and 9.5 percent of Hispanic households; and 14 percent of African American and Hispanic participants would have received lower benefits, compared to 17 percent of non-Hispanic white households and 22 percent of Asian households.
It raises an age-old question: can anyone--the Democratic party, progressive or union organizers, community-based organizations, a revitalized Poor People's Campaign--build multiracial coalitions to overcome the practice of people voting against their own economic interests based on racial animus that is constantly stoked? Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, raised the issue in a recent interview: "What happens if a movement is able to help people see how they're being played against each other?" he asked. "You could reset the entire political calculus."
The Trump administration was unmoved by the approximately 140,000 comments it received in opposition to the rule changes--comments from bipartisan mayors, governors, pediatricians, and other interested parties. As with so much else during Trump's reign, the efficacy of the normal political process is gone. It begs the question: what will we each do now to stand up for the right of a nation to be free from hunger?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Despite Front Seat to Last Four Decades of US Politics, Biden Repeats Claim That GOP 'Epiphany' Coming Soon
"Make it stop."
Nov 05, 2019
Former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the three frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, on Wednesday repeated the assertion that if President Donald Trump was not in office the Republican Party would happily work alongside Democrats in Congress and the White House to get things done.
"With Donald Trump out of the way, you're going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany," said Biden. "Mark my words. Mark my words."
Biden's comments came as part of a longer soliloquy on rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who Biden has been hammering since the senator suggested last week the former vice president was in the wrong party's primary.
"Make it stop," author Elon Green tweeted in response.
The comments follow remarks over the weekend where Biden reportedly said that "the road is clear for significant change."
"The only thing that stands in the way is Donald Trump," said Biden, who served in the President Barack Obama administration. "The only thing."
Blogger Atrios immediately pounced on Biden's rosy view of the GOP.
"Explain why they never had this epiphany when your best friend was president," Atrios tweeted, referring to Republican behavior for the only eight years the U.S. has thus far had a black man in the White House. "Come on."
It's not the first time Biden has made such comments. On May 14, Biden told reporters that once Trump was out of office, "You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends."
At a fundraiser on June 10, Biden again hit the theme of GOP rebirth.
"With Trump gone, you're going to begin to see things change," said Biden. "Because these folks know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."
Biden entered the Senate from Delaware in 1973 and remained there until assuming the office of vice president in 2009.
In that time, and this is an incomplete list, Republicans:
- elected Ronald Reagan president after he launched his campaign at Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair in a dogwhistle to white supremacists
- ran on the Southern Strategy, described here in graphic detail by Lee Atwater
- laughed at and mocked the victims of the AIDS crisis
- perpetuated the racist myth of the "welfare queen" to cut benefits for less fortunate Americans
- continued unsupportive and hostile policies toward the LGBTQ community for decades
- pardoned Iran-Contra felons who had lied to Congress
- impeached President Bill Clinton
- oversaw the implementation of a worldwide torture regime targeting Muslims
- said the party's top priority during President Obama's first term was to make the country's first black president a one-term president
- elected Donald Trump president and gave him the highest approval rating in the party for a president in history
Again, this is an incomplete list.
Reaction from progressives to Biden's comments was not positive.
The New Republic's Libby Watson looked at Biden's comments in the context of the campaign the former vice president is running.
"It's been said many times before but getting a healthcare system comparable to the rest of the fucking developed world is not more of fairy tale than the entire Republican party having an epiphany and walking away from... everything they've always been," said Watson.
Policy analyst Alexis Goldstein was flummoxed.
"Imagine living through McConnell stealing a Supreme Court seat and fighting Romneycare-turned-Obamacare to the death, and STILL somehow uttering these words," said Goldstein.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump and GOP Are Blatantly Encouraging Foreign Dictators to Hack the 2020 Election
Which is why Trump and McConnell are working as hard as they can to make sure those foreign oligarchs and autocrats know how much they’ll appreciate that help, should it be forthcoming
Jul 09, 2019
It looks like Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP are encouraging other countries to hack our upcoming 2020 election.
Donald Trump is sucking up to dictators, strongman oligarchs, and autocrats around the world, while Mitch McConnell is using political brute force to prevent individual states from hardening their election systems. Why?
Looking at the entire picture in context, consider Karl Marx's favorite question: "Who benefits?"
Who benefits when the leaders of countries with sophisticated internet hacking capabilities (North Korea, Saudi Arabia) and no democratic oversight are told by Trump that as long as he's in office he has their backs?
Might Trump and McConnell hope they'll intervene in our election to keep in power a political party that now disdains democracy and a free press, and embraces dictatorial behavior like calling for the imprisonment of Trump's political rivals, and of individuals in the intelligence agencies who have investigated him and the GOP?
Who benefits when countries with world-class internet hacking capabilities and less-than-democratic (Russia) or highly corrupted and oligarch-dependent (Netanyahu, Duterte, Modi) leaders become "good friends" of Trump and/or help Trump build or brand properties in their countries?
Might they intervene in our election directly or indirectly to keep in power an administration that both openly disdains the concept of "liberal democracy" and disrespects leaders of the largely European countries that practice it?
Why would Trump joke with Putin in front of the world about the possibility of Russians hacking American voting systems in the 2020 election? Is he expecting it, or just hoping for it?
Who benefits when mostly "red" states keep their voting systems' defenses down and continue to use 17-year-old technology running on Windows XP operating systems?
Who benefits when McConnell, Pence and Trump work together to make sure that, as CBS News reported this year, "Tens of thousands of voting machines in the United States [will continue to be] vulnerable to hacking" by refusing to fund upgrades?
Who benefits when repeated Democratic Party efforts to harden voting systems are blocked by Republican governors?
There's no ideological argument to be made for America having easily hacked voting systems; it's not something that conservatives like George Will or liberals like Robert Reich would reasonably disagree about.
So what could possibly be motivating Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate, other than the hope that hackers will produce another "red shift" miracle for them?
We already know that the GOP and their partisans on the Supreme Court have done and are doing everything they can to make it hard for Americans--particularly those with darker pigmented skin--to vote or otherwise participate in the political arena.
But that's probably not enough to guarantee the reelection of a man as reviled and unpopular as Trump, and thus keep the parade of corporatist-friendly right-wing judges moving through the Senate into lifetime appointments on the federal bench. They need more--a little help from their friends.
Republicans have been caught manipulating voter rolls; engaging in now-legalized "political" gerrymandering that magically corresponds to race; running ads in social media filled with deception and outright lies; encouraging right-wing violence; and threatening treason charges against American law enforcement officials who've investigated foreign manipulation of our elections.
But it's not working so far. Democrats--particularly progressive Democrats--were the big winners in the 2018 midterms. The GOP needs more help from their friends if they're to reelect Trump and hold the Senate.
Reagan turned the GOP into the Party of the Billionaires, complete with a phony "supply-side" and "trickle-down" story about fantasy economics to sell their merger of state and corporation. But by the end of the Clinton administration, most Americans had figured out Reagan's and the GOP's scam and, since 2002, there's been a curious "red shift" disconnect between exit poll results and the reported totals from hackable voting machines.
There aren't enough really rich Americans to win elections, so Lee Atwater and his business partners Roger Stone and Paul Manafort helped Reagan and Bush bring in the white racist vote. But even with all the American racists, Trump and McConnell must think they need foreign help again.
Jerry Falwell Jr. (and his pool boy?), Franklin Graham, and other multimillionaire "Christian" hustlers brought in the people televangelists have exploited for a generation. But are there enough religiously gullible voters to tip the election to Trump and McConnell? They seem to think not.
Add the homophobes, the xenophobes, the religious bigots, and sexually insecure white men (from incels to gun fanatics), and the GOP may have almost enough votes to win a national election--but they're still haunted by Trump losing the last election's popular vote by 3 million; plus, they no longer have Scott Walker and Rick Snyder to throw Wisconsinites and Michiganders off the voting rolls just before the election.
Trump and the GOP will still need a little help from their overseas friends, just as Trump Jr. reached out to or tried to take help from the Russians, Saudis and Emiratis in 2016. They (and Trump's American billionaire backers) benefited more from what President Carter correctly called Trump's "illegitimate" presidency than anybody else in the world.
Which is why Trump and McConnell are working as hard as they can to make sure those foreign oligarchs and autocrats know how much they'll appreciate that help, should it be forthcoming.
All they need is a little help from their friends, and they're making sure their friends know in advance who will benefit.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Return of the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend
Media present GOP left-bashing as good-faith advice
Feb 26, 2019
It's a trope that dates back more than a decade, but the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has seen a recent surge in the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend (IRPF), a specific genre of concern-trolling where a long-time Republican operative, politician or pundit offers "advice" to Democrats about how they should avoid going "too far left."
These takes--frequently featured as earnest appeals in liberal and centrist outlets--are ostensibly framed as straight-talk advice that should be accepted as objectively in the Democrats' best interest, and never presented as an ideological argument that would otherwise make sense coming from a right-winger. "Republican hates socialism" isn't that newsworthy, whereas "GOP operative identifies Democrats' best interests" somehow is.
In just the last few weeks, we've received this sage-like advice from professional Republicans:
- "Michael Bennet Could Be the Answer to the Question Every Democrat Is Asking," declared former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough (Washington Post, 2/11/19), referring to the centrist Democratic senator from Colorado.
- "GOP Pollster Warns Progressives Could Inflict Long-Term Damage to Dems" was a report in The Hill (12/3/18), highlighting Republican operative Ed Goeas' contention that "moving left" "ends up hurting the [Democratic] party."
- "As centrists, Democrats would clean up in 2020, but instead, it's leftward ho!" was National Review's promotion (Twitter (2/15/19) of an article by Michael Brendan Dougherty that counseled Dems, "Avoid talking about impeachment and stick to simple bread-and-butter issues."
- "Joe Biden is a gaffe-prone 75-year-old Washington veteran--who is exactly what Democrats need," wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry (11/20/18). "The play for Democrats should be obvious.... Go with Joe Biden or someone like him with a Midwestern or working-class sensibility."
- In "Democrats Need to Beware Their Loony Left" (Washington Post, 2/13/19), conservative columnist Max Boot warned Dems not to "turn themselves into the far-left caricatures that Trump and Fox News would like them to become."
Unsolicited advice from Republicans to the Democratic Party frequently appears on Twitter. Republican "political strategist and blogger" Patrick Ruffini (8/6/18) offered:
A good 2020 Dem would: 1) Support charter schools 2) Oppose repealing Obamacare (President Obama's signature domestic achievement) with single-payer 3) Repeal tariffs but not tax cuts.
While Lee Atwater protege Rick Wilson (2/19/19) declared:
Bernie Sanders is Trump reelection insurance. "The solution to Trumpism is a crusty 80-year-old professor of socialist poetry from Bennington Community College," said no one, ever. Why not just declare the Sanders/Gabbard ticket now and bring the doom early?
Republican lawyer Chris Truax, writing in USA Today (12/31/18), at least had the self-awareness to recognize that "progressives often get annoyed when well-meaning conservatives offer them political advice." So instead, he told Democrats, "I am speaking to you as one American to another about what our country needs." And what the United States needs, it turns out, is to not have a progressive political agenda succeed, because that would only create a "permanent political canker sore."
Why, one is compelled to ask, do longtime, diehard conservatives care so much about what's in the Democratic Party's best interests? Put differently: Which is a more likely scenario: that these Republican pundits, politicians and highly paid talking heads actually care about the future of the Democratic Party, or that their "concerns" about insurgent leftism in the party are just an ideological objection to leftist ideas themselves? Not to mention that in the event of a Sanders presidency, or a party shift where the tone and content of policy are set by the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, these pundits would be rendered superfluous.
Yet centrist and liberal media give a platform to conservatives who are presented as Just Giving Friendly Advice. On MSNBC (2/22/19), host Stephanie Ruhle entertained conservative columnist A.B. Stoddard's contention that Trump secretly wants to elevate Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that centrist habitual staff-abuser Amy Klobuchar is more likely to win in 2020. Ruhle and Stoddard would have us believe that right-wing media obsess over Ocasio-Cortez and ignore Klobuchar because they'd prefer to take on the former and secretly fear the latter.
But this makes no sense. You don't attack politicians because you prefer them; you attack them because you're scared of them. Why would Trump and the Republicans fear Klobuchar, whose "moderate" policy approach and managerial affect are 2020's closest analogue to the candidate they defeated in 2016?
The right criticizes left-wing politicians on both ideological and pragmatic grounds. They criticize them because the right, by definition, loathes the left's worldview, and because the left shakes up the neoliberal status quo that's given the right the edge for 30 years. The emerging progressive wing of the Democratic Party doesn't buy into discredited austerity logic, or the "race to the center to pick up Republicans in Fairfax, Virginia," consensus. At least on domestic issues, they offer a bold alternative vision that rejects the capitalist premises Republicans have always used to control the terms of debate. Why wouldn't the Navarros and Frums and McMullins want to discredit them?
The whole rhetorical gambit is bad-faith claptrap. And, as with most ideological scams, it only travels in one direction: leftward. One seldom hears liberals or leftists in the press give "advice" to Republicans about they ought to do to win. This isn't a posture they mimic, because they'd be laughed out of the room. Why would partisan Democrats care about what's best for the conservative agenda? Somehow the inverse isn't true. In corporate media, anti-choice, racist, warmongering, overpaid mercenary GOP "strategists" are treated like objective, neutral voices simply looking out for the best interests of the people and institutions they've spent their lives trying to destroy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Hate Unbound
Make no mistake: This lineage of cause and effect begins with Trump and his Fox News propaganda machine
Oct 30, 2018
Demagogues rarely commit violence directly. Instead, they use blame, ridicule, fear and hate - and then leave the violence to others. That way, they can always claim "it wasn't me. I don't have blood on my hands."
Of the tens of millions of Americans that the Trump-Fox News regime has made fearful, only a small percentage - say, a hundred thousand - have been moved to hate the objects of that fear.
And of those hundred thousand, only a relative handful - say, a few thousand - have been motivated to act on that hate, posting loathsome messages online, sending death threats, spray-painting swastikas.
And of that few thousand, a tiny subset, perhaps no more than a hundred or so, have been moved to violence.
But make no mistake: This lineage of cause and effect begins with Trump and his Fox News propaganda machine.
Politicians and media moguls have long understood that fear and hate sell better than hope and compassion, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise. But before Trump, no president had based his office on it. And before Fox News, no major media outlet had based its ratings on it.
Ronald Reagan stoked racism by bashing "welfare queens" and George W. Bush by airing campaign ads featuring "Willie Horton," but fear and hate weren't the centerpieces of either presidency.
The two political operatives behind these campaigns bear mention, though: Lee Atwater, who had also been chairman of the Republican National Committee and a senior partner at the political consulting firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (yes, that Manafort and that Stone); and Roger Ailes, who went on to create and run Fox News.
Atwater and Ailes premised their careers on fear and hate. Ailes's Fox News monetized fear and hate through phantom menaces like a "terror mosque" near Ground Zero, Barack Obama's alleged connections to black nationalists and Muslims, and Sarah Palin's fictitious "death panels."
Trump took Atwater and Ailes to their logical extremes - building a political base by suggesting Obama wasn't born in America; launching his presidential campaign by warning of "criminals" and "rapists" streaming across the Mexican border; and ending his campaign with an ad suggesting that prominent Jews -- billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Fed Chair Janet L. Yellen -- were in league with Hillary Clinton to control the world.
Since taking office, Trump has ramped up fear and hatred - towards immigrants, journalists, black athletes who won't stand for the anthem, major media, and prominent Democrats.
In recent weeks he suggested that criminals and terrorists from the Middle East had joined a caravan of immigrants heading toward the border, and even floated a conspiracy theory that Soros helped fund the caravan.
Fox News has magnified the fear and hate exactly as its founder would have wanted. A guest on Lou Dobbs' show claimed the caravan was being funded by the "Soros-occupied State Department."
That same week, Soros was among the targets of pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats and members of the media. A Florida man who identifies himself as a Trump supporter was arrested in connection with the attempted bombings.
Hours before a gunman entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven worshipers, he reportedly wrote that a Jewish organization for refugees "likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."
Bombs mailed to political leaders. Threats against the media. A shooting in a place of worship. None were directly ordered by Trump or his propaganda affiliate. They didn't have to be.
Trump's demagoguery inspired it. Fox News magnified it.
The hatefulness is unconstrained. Having fired the few "adults" in his Cabinet, Trump is now loose in the White House, except for a few advisors who reportedly are trying to protect the nation from him.
House and Senate Republicans are not holding him back. To the contrary, they have morphed into his sycophants. An increasing number are sounding just like him.
Atwater and Ailes are gone from this world, but their descendants - Fox News's Sean Hannity and Bill Shine, formerly Roger Ailes's deputy - have direct pipelines to Trump (Shine is now formally installed in the West Wing).
The upcoming election is not really a choice between Republicans and Democrats. Those traditional labels have lost most of their meaning, if not much of their value.
It is really a choice about the moral compass of America.
Keep ReadingShow Less
I'd Like to Offer This Sanity Quiz to All #NeverTrump Conservatives
Nicolle Wallace, David Frum, Joe Scarborough, Bill Kristol: Step right up.
Apr 15, 2018
I am told regularly by people I admire and respect to hold my cynical tongue about all the career conservatives and television flotsam from the late and unlamented Avignon Presidency who now are all over the airwaves deploring the terrible things being done to the Republic by the president* and his dwindling band of loyalists down at Camp Runamuck. Be nice, I am told. These are valuable allies.
Try not to say so loudly that, as soon as the Republican Party casts off the First Millstone, these people all will be right back to promoting the ideas and the policies that made him possible in the first place--voodoo economics, wars of choice based on deceit, ticking-bomb excuses for torture, and night sweats over the impending rise of the liberal power elite. Keep that stuff to yourself, they say.
I am nothing if not coachable, so I've laid off as best I can. But, on Thursday night, kindly Doc Maddow hosted Nicolle Wallace to talk about the Comey book and other symptoms of our current attack of virulent political botulism. Wallace has proved to be a great--not, good, but great--TV host qua TV host. She's smart and she's personable and she comes across wonderfully on camera.
That said, on Friday night, if I had a firearm, I'd have Elvis-ed my electric teevee screen over something Wallace said to KDM concerning the Trump camp's attacks on good ol' James Comey, Man of Immutable Integritude. To wit:
WALLACE: Look, I just think it's another illustration of the complete decimation of the Republican Party's standing for anything that it was supposed to stand for. And I know you've never been a fan, but I'm a former practicing member of the party, and it never stood for character assassination of a man like Jim Comey, who served Republican presidents. And you may disagree with every single policy that George W. Bush advanced, but Jim Comey was a faithful and loyal servant in the George W. Bush Justice Department. So to have today's RNC crafting a plan and staff a war room to smear him is a disgrace.
Bold face mine, indicating the exact point in the show when I had a stroke.
Instead of venting my anger, and in my usual attempt to calm the roiling political sea, I offer the following test questions to all the Republican Penitents currently d/b/a Never Trumpers. These questions are based on Wallace's remarkable assertion above as to what Republicanism is and is not, and what it has been and has not been, over the course of my life of political observation.
So, Nicolle, and Steve Schmidt, and Michael Steele, and Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough, and Butcher's Bill Kristol, and Andrew Sullivan, and David Frum, and the rest of you. Please take out your No. 2 pencils, open your test booklets and begin. We start with an easy one.
1) Many of you have expressed your dismay at how Sinclair Broadcasting forced its local anchors to read a canned statement about the curse of "fake news," divining, correctly, that this was the company's way of delegitimizing serious coverage of the many and varied corruptions of the current administration*. In 2004, when Sinclair forced its local stations to run a meretricious fake documentary slandering John Kerry's service in Vietnam, were you as offended as you are today? Were you public with your disapproval? Did you take your concerns to upper echelons in the Bush campaign and the Bush White House? To whom did you take them?
2) Please provide an example of how you pushed back against the entire Swift Boating of Kerry? Did any of you upbraid the people who were peddling Purple Heart Band-Aids at the 2004 Republican Convention?
3) Please explain in detail how you, because of your deep concern for political civility and an open marketplace of ideas, pushed back against the vicious attacks by Bush administration officials, and conservative journalists, who were critical of Americans who doubted the phony case for the invasion of Iraq. Please explain Andrew Sullivan's famous "Fifth Column" essay in light of how Donald Trump talks about his political opponents. Bonus Question: Please discuss the Bush Administration's assaults on the UN weapons inspectors in the context of the Trump Administration's assaults on the credibility of the FBI?
4) In one sentence or less, please describe the political style and impact on the nation of the following: Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Mercer family, the Koch Family, the Bradley Family. Please include details of the positive contributions of each of these to the political life of the nation.
5) True or False: Ronald Reagan was correct in referring to Michael Dukakis as a "mental patient" from a White House podium.
6) Please explain, in detail, all efforts you made within the Republican Party during election seasons, to counter the influence of radical conservative splinter Protestantism on the party's policies toward the following: reproductive rights, public schools, the rights of LGBTQ citizens. Bonus Question: Please write in detail the complaints you made when gay marriage bans were specifically targeted.
7) In 1983, Ronald Reagan told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he personally had been part of a film crew at the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe. In 2018, Donald Trump said he wished he'd have been in Parkland, Florida so he could have rushed school shooter Nikolas Cruz. Compare and contrast.
8) Ronald Reagan once said that, "Trees cause more pollution than humans do." Donald Trump once tweeted that, during a cold snap, the "East Coast could use a little of that global warming." Compare and Contrast.
9) Given your concern about ratfcking in political campaigns, please explain all the steps you took to fight the Republican party's voter-suppression campaign in Florida in 2000.
10) Please explain how close you came to resigning from the party when George W. Bush's campaign slandered John McCain's child during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.
11) Please explain in detail how you pushed back against the lies and half-truths lobbed at Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign. Please define the salience to the 2000 campaign of the following phrases: Love Canal, Internet, Fairfax Hotel, Love Story.
12) True Or False: Bill Clinton ran drugs out of a small airport in rural Arkansas.
13) True or False: Bill Clinton had two teenagers murdered along a set of railroad tracks in rural Arkansas.
14) True or False: White House counsel Vince Foster's death was "mysterious."
And, finally, write a 500-word essay on one of the following topics:
1) Donald Trump's attempted politicization of the Justice Department is different than Karl Rove's attempted politicization of the Justice Department.
2) Donald Trump's corrupt Cabinet is different than Ronald Reagan's corrupt Cabinet.
3) Michael Cohen is a thug while Karl Rove is a visionary political philosophe.
You have two hours.
Begin.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Republicans Need a Better Response Besides Quitting
First Bob Corker, now Jeff Flake. We're one away from a dangerous trend.
Oct 25, 2017
This is something of an earthquake, and the epicenter for the moment is in The Arizona Republic.
Condemning the nastiness of Republican politics in the era of President Donald Trump, Sen. Jeff Flake on Tuesday announced he will serve out the remainder of his term but will not seek re-election in 2018. The bombshell, which Flake, R-Ariz., intended to detail Tuesday afternoon on the Senate floor, will further roil Republican hopes of keeping the party's 52-seat Senate majority in the midterm elections of Trump's first term, when the president's party historically loses seats in Congress. It also likely will upend the race for Flake's seat. Flake, one of the Senate's more prominent critics of President Donald Trump, has been struggling in the polls. He told The Arizona Republic ahead of his announcement that he has become convinced "there may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican Party."
Now that last part is intriguing because, rather than duck into the warm rhetorical embrace of Our Polarized Age, Flake says flatly that the Republican Party has become so nutso bananas that there's no place for even a bog-standard Reagan conservative like himself to feel comfortable.
It is true that Flake had a long push up a dirt road to get re-elected, and it is also true that his departure, along with that of Brave Bob Corker, accelerates the process by which the Republican majority in the Senate is transforming itself into a babbling replica of the Republican majority in the House, a process that is evidence enough of the virulence and the spread of the prion disease that has been eating away at the party's higher functions for four decades.
But, still, this strikes me as a signifying event, if only because Republicans like Flake and Corker apparently see leaving office the only viable response to the fact that the president* is steering their party--and the country--over a cliff. If there ever was needed more evidence that movement conservatism, in its not-entirely-insane persona, is a spent force in American politics, watching Flake and Corker go scarpering away from public service would be it. Reaganism is long gone, and its pale progeny has been rendered irrelevant in the face of outright political thuggery. For Republican conservatives, it is Trump or the abyss.
Among Republican primary voters, there's overwhelming support for Trump's positions and "behavior," Flake said, and one of their top concerns is whether a candidate is with the president or against him. While Flake said he is with Trump on some issues, on other issues he is not. And Trump definitely views him as a foe, having denounced Flake publicly and called him "toxic" on Twitter. "Here's the bottom line: The path that I would have to travel to get the Republican nomination is a path I'm not willing to take, and that I can't in good conscience take," Flake told The Republic in a telephone interview. "It would require me to believe in positions I don't hold on such issues as trade and immigration and it would require me to condone behavior that I cannot condone."
These are noble sentiments, to be sure, although one could ask Flake in all good faith where in the hell he's been over the 40 years of Republican politics that made Trumpism inevitable. One also feels constrained to point out that, unlike his colleague from Arizona, John McCain, Flake voted to strip millions of Americans of their healthcare, and that one of his last acts before hitting the silk was to vote on a budget resolution that is as full of moonshine as any Republican budget proposal has been since the party decided to take Arthur Laffer seriously.
Besides, it's hard to parse Flake's logic as anything but abject surrender to the monster that finally chewed itself out of the lab. As he said in his speech today to the Senate:
It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret, because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership, regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our - all of our - complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.
Is he offering his career up as a blood sacrifice? Is he offering it up as an appeal to conscience? "See what you've done, you coarse and compromised moral authority, you have deprived the Republic of me, Jeff Flake." There not having been much of a conscience in the Republican Party at least since it first cut a paycheck to Lee Atwater, Flake is pretty much shouting down a well here.
"We must never regard as 'normal' the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country -- the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve. None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal.
Again, I find it hard to reconcile this existential threat to the country's politics with Flake's decision to leave office instead of fighting it. He recognizes the problem and has decided, with quite a bit of thought, that he doesn't have the belly to fight it. Fair enough, but please, spare us the anguished cri de poulet.
Here, today, I stand to say that we would better serve the country and better fulfill our obligations under the constitution by adhering to our Article 1 "old normal" - Mr. Madison's doctrine of the separation of powers. This genius innovation which affirms Madison's status as a true visionary and for which Madison argued in Federalist 51 - held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract each other when necessary. "Ambition counteracts ambition," he wrote. But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats? Of course not, and we would be wrong if we did.
As it happens, Mr. Madison practiced politics in America when American politics really was the wild kingdom. He fought through a Constitution, and he fought it through to ratification, out-arguing, among other people, Patrick Henry in Virginia along the way. The press of the time was partisan, vituperative, and truthless, and Madison gave as good as he got. And, when he was long retired, and President Andrew Jackson asked him to rebut the nullification theories of John C. Calhoun, Mr. Madison saddled up one more time.
I mention all this because, apparently, Jeff Flake believes that the way to reassert the balance of power between the national legislature and a national executive with a narcissistic crackpot at the helm is to get the hell out of Dodge before the roof caves in. Good profile, lacks courage.
Is he offering his career up as a blood sacrifice? Is he offering it up as an appeal to conscience?
His party is bound to get crazier, and the president* is completely around the bend. The most prominent Republican candidate for Jeff Flake's seat is an osteopath named Kelli Ward who, in the past, has been chemtrail curious, at least as a constituent service, and who has popped in to chat with Alex Jones from time to time, and who has flirted with nullification as regards federal gun laws, and whose candidacy has been endorsed by both the president* and Steve Bannon, last heir to House Harkonnen.
It is possible, even likely, that the Republican "establishment" will find some conventional conservative to throw in there in order to keep Ward out of the general election, but I wouldn't take odds on that succeeding. But none of that is Jeff Flake's problem any more. It's just ours.
Keep ReadingShow Less
George W. Bush & GOP Lack Standing to Bash Trump for Racism
No racism and bigotry, no Bush presidency.
Oct 20, 2017
George W. Bush gave a speech on Thursday widely interpreted as an attack on Trump in which he deplored the rise of white nationalism and bigotry in the past year. "Bigotry," he lamented, "seems emboldened."
George W. Bush may or may not personally be a nice guy. People used to say he was the sort of person you'd enjoy going for a beer with, and he has had close African-American and Arab friends.
On the other hand, he authorized the CIA to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammad practically to death. And, throughout his public career was complicit with the Republican Party dog whistle of racism and he wouldn't have been president without it.
We can't blame W. for his father's campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, when George H. W. Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater played the race card. Republican Governor Francis W. Sargent in 1972 had signed into law a furlough program for inmates in prison, and one Willie Horton was let out for a weekend on the program when Michael Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts. Horton committed assault and rape and fled, though a Muslim police officer later shot and apprehended him.
Atwater did up campaign ads trying to tie Dukakis to Horton, and very successfully so. He said, "I'm going to strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate." In 2016 mainstream Republican strategists were still talking about using a "Willie Horton" strategy. Atwater used to like to play Chicago blues, but after 1988 African-American musicians often avoided him like the plague. Atwater repented on his death bed and apologized for what he had done.
I'm not aware that W. ever criticized his father's campaign for this tactic. It was very racist. I remember the ads. Horton was a disreputable-looking fellow and Atwater paired his photo up with that of Dukakis as though they were jointly on the most wanted list. The racism virtually dripped off the tv screen and pooled on the floor below.
But W. himself also does not have the standing to bash Trump on this issue, most unfortunately. This sad fact diminishes our country. I wish it were otherwise.
Exhibit A is the 2000 Republican primary campaign. Bush was running against Senator John McCain (R-AZ). McCain's wife Cindy had visited an orphanage in Bangladesh and seen a little girl with a cleft palate who badly needed surgery. She and John adopted her and named her Bridget. Although Bridget was not raised Muslim, I think the McCains are particularly sensitive to anti-Muslim bigotry because of having a Bangladeshi in the family, and McCain refused to play the Islamophobia card in his campaign against Barack Obama in 2008.
In 2000, the McCains campaigned in South Carolina with their children, including Bridget. So Bush's mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the idea of robo-calling voters and calling into talk radio, asking the question, "If you knew McCain had an illegitimate child with a Black woman, would that affect how you felt about him." The Republican Party in South Carolina is solidly white, although the state is 1/3 African-American, and what they were pleased to call 'miscegenation' had been a crime in South Carolina until the late 1960s.
Because people had seen Bridget at the rallies, Rove's smear was widely believed, and it contributed to McCain's loss in the GOP primary. Bush winning South Carolina cemented his standing as a front runner.
No racism and bigotry, no Bush presidency. (McCain handily won South Carolina in 2008 when Rove was not calling the shots any more). Now you could say that Rove was behind all this and W. may not have backed it. But Bush never denounced Rove or dissociated himself from these tactics. The buck stops with him.
I agree with Bush that the poor response to Katrina by Bush and his FEMA was probably largely incompetence and that Kanye West was wrong to call him a racist over it (West has since apologized).
But Bush's tax cuts went overwhelmingly to rich white people, and were designed to make it more difficult for the government to continue its social welfare spending, which benefits African-Americans. Structural racism was a big part of the Bush administration even if that wasn't the lens through which W. himself saw his policies.
Moreover, Bush's FBI wrongly targeted perfectly innocent Muslims, including those at the charity, the Holy Land Foundation, producing some of the biggest travesties of American justice since the end of Jim Crow.
The GOP had been better than most Democrats on race issues in the first half of the twentieth century. But with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Nixonian "southern strategy," the party actively sought to become the mouthpiece for angry white men.
Trump is merely the logical conclusion of the Southern strategy, and until the Republican Party comes to terms with its decades of latent racism and its rather loud dog whistle, it will create more and more Trumps. Indeed, with Der Robert Mercer's billions behind him, Der Steve Bannon is planning to oust GOP merely latent mild racists, and replace them with full on Nazis. The party has to decide whether it will acquiesce in this hostile takeover. If it won't, it has to apologize for past racism and develop some other less toxic way of appealing to upper middle class voters.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Roger Ailes: No One Did More to Debase US Politics
Roger Ailes, the man who pioneered "alternative facts," is dead. During the first five years of Fox News--which was built almost single-handedly by Ailes' genius--I was a regular on-air contributor/panelist there. I dealt with his right-wing lieutenants plenty, but only met Ailes once, at a Fox News "Holiday Party." The invite did not call it a "Christmas Party." It was one of hundreds examples of hypocrisy at the TV channel that would soon launch the "War on Christmas" hoax.
May 18, 2017
Roger Ailes, the man who pioneered "alternative facts," is dead. During the first five years of Fox News--which was built almost single-handedly by Ailes' genius--I was a regular on-air contributor/panelist there. I dealt with his right-wing lieutenants plenty, but only met Ailes once, at a Fox News "Holiday Party." The invite did not call it a "Christmas Party." It was one of hundreds examples of hypocrisy at the TV channel that would soon launch the "War on Christmas" hoax.
Fox News was created in Ailes' image--a channel that preached family values while subjecting women employees to intense harassment and body-shaming. Before Ailes launched Fox News with Rupert Murdoch's millions, he was executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's syndicated TV show--which once displayed a photograph of Chelsea Clinton while Limbaugh referred to her as the "White House dog." She was 13 years old at the time.
I wrote this in my book Cable News Confidential:
I met Ailes once at a Fox News holiday party. If you knew nothing about him, this short, pudgy, balding fellow might appear cuddly, almost huggable, like a nice old uncle you'd nickname Jolly Roger.
Looks can be deceiving. Ailes was the media consultant for Bush Sr.'s vicious 1988 campaign that linked Democratic candidate Mike Dukakis to black rapist Willie Horton. "The only question," Ailes remarked, "is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it." Lee Atwater, his partner in the campaign, said that Ailes has "two speeds--attack and destroy."
So Rupert Murdoch was putting Ailes in charge of a TV network during the reign of Bill Clinton, whom Ailes scorned as "the hippie president." Given his genius with 30-second TV attack ads, imagine what Ailes could do 24/7.
What Ailes accomplished from 1996 until last year was a political/media revolution. As much as I hate to admit it, I can't think of a single individual who's had more impact on our country's politics over the last 20 years. There would have been no Trump presidency without the decades of disinformation spewed by Fox News (and talk radio allies) to millions of voters--on issues from Christmas to immigrants to abortion, from economics to "socialist" Obama to "liberal media bias."
I learned from my five years on-air at Fox News that its viewers were a fanatical bunch. Not serious readers or thinkers, but ardent voters. Years before pro-Trump "fake news" hoaxes were shared by millions on the Internet during the 2016 campaign, Ailes had reached his audience of voters with cable TV's version of fake news. It matters that millions of hardcore activists and voters are operating from a worldview where racial minorities, women, immigrants, foreigners and terrorists have the upper hand against beleaguered white males, the depleted US military and persecuted corporations (I mean, "job creators").
Perhaps Jon Stewart said it best in 2001 when The Daily Show earned a Peabody Award, given for excellence in television without any specific categories. Jon Stewart accepted the award by joking that he had won in the "News Parody" category: "There was not much competition this year. It was just us and Fox."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Building a New America, With or Without the Democratic Party
In the wake of Donald Trump's victory, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed, "When we can agree on issues, then we're going to work with him." Other leading Democrats echoed his
Nov 28, 2016
In the wake of Donald Trump's victory, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed, "When we can agree on issues, then we're going to work with him." Other leading Democrats echoed his sentiments. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders are seeking to realign the Party to "appeal to white working-class voters."
Democrats are making a mistake.
Since the election, Democratic leaders have already begun to neglect the racialized narrative anchoring Trump's dramatic rise. The President-elect ran a hateful, bigoted campaign to divide the American people along racial lines -- and it worked. Further, Dems are ignoring that Trump's victory is the logical outcome of 50 years of racial politics that helped fuel the rise of the uber-rich, wrecked the middle class, and disillusioned American workers.
The reality is this: We cannot tackle the challenges we face today -- economic insecurity, climate change, our failing institutions -- until we confront America's sordid history of racialized politics and pull our country in a new direction.
Racism has always been a strategy to justify the exploitation of land and labor to enrich the wealthy few. Since the Colonial era, racial anxieties have been created and cultivated to serve the interests of the wealthy elite.
Beginning in the 1960s, and continuing to this day, Republicans have relied heavily on strategic racism to win votes and advance a deeply conservative agenda. George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and others pioneered the "Southern Strategy," disguising segregationism in appeals to "states' rights" and "law and order." Ronald Reagan turned this strategy into a weapon against modern liberalism and the new middle class. (Recall, for example, the image of a lazy, conniving, and clearly black "welfare queen" corrupting the social safety net.) Democrats were not guiltless, either: Bill Clinton continued elements of Reagan's racialized politics. More recently, George W. Bush fueled new racial anxieties towards Arab-Muslims and Mexican immigrants following the 9/11 attacks, while Mitt Romney's "47 percent" gaffe hearkened back to these racial themes.
"We need a democracy that represents all of us. We need a new America united not by common ancestry or the trappings of wealth, but by our shared destiny. We believe that loving America means caring about all its people, regardless of how much they earn or where they were born."
The "Southern Strategy" may have been conceived as a political tool to win votes, but it had real adverse consequences. Fifty years of racialized sleight-of-hand helped drive the GOP's destructive agenda, which shattered the middle class and created stunning inequality while crippling communities of color.
Donald Trump tapped into the frustration that emerged from the demise of working-class America by -- ironically -- continuing to employ strategic racism. Trump, though, has turned racial dog-whistles into a dangerous bullhorn. His team has signaled willingness to reinstate an unethical Muslim registry and deport millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants. His Cabinet appointments bear records of white supremacy and anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and racism. Trump himself is vengeful, unpredictable, and semi-authoritarian. All the while, even though he ran on a populist platform, the President-elect is pursuing an economic agenda that will continue to benefit the wealthy elite while hurting everyday Americans.
It is an alarming situation, and begs the question: what now? Where do we go from here?
One thing is clear: we cannot continue business as usual. Fifty years of racialized politics have failed working-class Americans and imperiled our future. We must instead pursue a vision of a new America that is free from the stain of racism, grounded in connected communities, and nurtured through dignified democracy that reflects our shared destiny.
Congressional Democrats can take three steps now towards realizing this truly American dream.
First, they must vigorously reject the bigotry taking shape in Trump's Administration. Congressional Democrats are the last line of defense for communities of color, LGBTQ persons, and other threatened groups. Democrats should not "give him a chance" or promise to "work with him" on particular issues -- to do so only normalizes white nationalism and hate.
Second, Democrats should pledge to fight for all working-class Americans. Appealing exclusively to the "white working class" or to "minority" interests only invites failure. The fates of all of us -- white, black, brown, or any shade in between -- are deeply intertwined. Democrats must recognize this, and reorient the Party to represent the common interests of all working people.
That brings us to the third step: Democrats must reject the influences of Wall Street and corporate interests. They cannot represent American workers and the uber-rich at the same time. In an era of economic insecurity and deep mistrust of the political and wealthy elite, Democrats must truly become the Party of the people if they are to succeed.
And what do the people need? We need a democracy that represents all of us. We need a new America united not by common ancestry or the trappings of wealth, but by our shared destiny. We believe that loving America means caring about all its people, regardless of how much they earn or where they were born.
Whether or not Democrats choose to embrace this vision, we the people will. Together, we can create an America for all of us.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy