Even without Donald Trump running the show, America tends to be pretty insular. We often do a very efficient job at exporting our culture and our politics, but it’s a bit of a one-way valve. The number of Americans who can quote the results in the Canadian election held last Thursday, or the top three parties engaged in the British show down coming up next month is pretty embarrassing. And those are the two countries that the U.S. media gives at least a token amount of attention.
Americans have a remarkable ability to simply ignore trends that are sweeping the planet, because we assume that any important trend starts here. We export our political ideas, thank you. We don’t …
Sorry. That sentence was crushed by an incoming wave. Because there’s something happening—happening right now mostly in the places that pop up more often on Jeopardy than they do on the U.S. news—that could very, very well land in our laps Real Soon Now. And I’m going to let Will Bunch tell you about it, because he did a really fine job this week.
Will Bunch on what Americans should be looking at what happened in Chile.
Philadelphia Inquirer
The biggest fires are always started by the tiniest spark. That was almost literally true in 2011 when an unknown street vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire to protest corruption and government harassment, and triggered the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings that roiled an entire region and inspired movements like Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street.
In 2019, as an autumn of popular uprisings erupts around the globe, the most dramatic revolution of the moment is taking place in the shadows of the towering mountains of Chile, where as many as a million people flood the streets of capital city Santiago by day, and harrowing street battles have erupted at night. What set off this political conflagration? A subway fare hike that -- converted to U.S. money -- amounts to less than 5 cents.
We spend a lot of time focused on what’s going on in House hearings and what the latest rule of law being disassembled at the Department of Justice. For very good reasons. Those things are directly affecting our lives right now, and they demand our attention. But we need to take a glance out the window now and then — it’s also important.
Americans should be paying a lot closer attention to all of this -- and not just because 50-plus years of U.S. meddling in a capital some 5,000 miles south of Washington have played a key role in getting things to this point. After taking the advice of America’s conservative economics professors for decades, Chile now has -- according to one survey -- the world’s highest level of income inequality. No. 2 on that list? The United States. No wonder this nation’s billionaire oligarchs are so worried about the 2020 elections. They ought to be terrified.
It’s not just that the billionaires should be scared. Everyone else should be learning.
Okay, let’s see what else is up this morning.
Jonathan Chait on who is really trying to undo an election.
New York Magazine
Donald Trump’s gross, overt authoritarianism has both accelerated and dramatized a much deeper hostility to democratic principles on the right that predates him. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy illustrates that tendency with a tweet denouncing impeachment as illegitimate:
In this one arresting image, McCarthy layers together a series of popular anti-democratic (small-d, not large-D) arguments on the right that are dangerous on their own, and perfectly absurd in combination.
To begin with, any elected president who is being impeached by definition has won the support of a large number of voters. There’s no way to impeach losing candidates. If you don’t think a president who won a lot of votes should be impeached, you don’t think impeachment belongs in the Constitution at all.
I have my disagreements with Chait, but I think he nails it here. And not just on addressing this one image, or the issue of impeachment.
Nancy LeTourneau on the effect of Trump on right-wing media.
Washington Monthly
When it comes to the Trump-Russia scandal, the president’s enablers have demonstrated an obsession with Christopher Steele and his dossier, despite the fact that it played a minor role in the investigation. Perhaps that is because they want to ignore all of the other evidence of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.
As I spent a good chunk of Saturday prattling on about, Trump is absolutely, positively, and aggressively out to prove a conspiracy theory that’s been kicking around since before the election — the idea that the whole Russia scandal wasn’t just a “witch hunt” but a trap laid for him by Democrats, with Ukraine pretending to be the Russians to help out Hillary Clinton. That’s theory, nuts as it seems, is exactly why Bill Barr is running around Europe at the moment. What Trump was asking Ukrainian President Zelensky is the same thing Barr is asking in London and Rome — help Trump prove the 2016 election was rigged against him.
We’re watching the same thing unfold with the Trump-Ukraine affair. Both congressional Republicans and right wing media are obsessed with the whistleblower, even as people in the administration are increasingly coming forward with evidence that backs up the original complaint.
That obsession is partly to blame for the fact that death threats are being aimed at the whistleblower, whose identity is protected by law. In addition, a case can be made that their identity is no longer relevant.
None of that stopped a report at RealClearInvestigations (a page on the RealClearPolitics web site) from identifying the person they think is the whistleblower. At this point, only right wing media outlets are picking up the story, so I’m not interested in linking to it or discussing the person they’ve outed. What is significant to know is that the author of the piece, Paul Sperry, works for RealClearPolitics, but apparently came to them after being the Washington Bureau Chief for WorldNetDaily (WND). Here is how the Southern Poverty Law Center describes that site.
WorldNetDaily is an online publication founded and run by Joseph Farah that claims to pursue truth, justice and liberty. But in fact, its pages are devoted to manipulative fear-mongering and outright fabrications designed to further the paranoid, gay-hating, conspiratorial and apocalyptic visions of Farah and his hand-picked contributors from the fringes of the far-right and fundamentalist worlds.
Southern Poverty Law Center is underselling it. WorldNetDaily is also rabidly racist and antisemitic. Pre-Trump, sites like WorldNetDaily and GatewayPundit were, rightly, looked down on by even the Breitbart and Limbaugh loving level hard-right. Now those sites are the leading sites on the right — as in, they’re the ones setting directions that the rest are hurrying to follow.
Art Cullen on Joni Ernst’s “deficit of sense.”
Storm Lake Times
Faced with a $1 trillion federal budget deficit this year, Sen. Joni Ernst came on strong by pushing a ban on advertising by federal agencies. She complained about the USDA handing out coloring books for pork month, or swag bags with pens with slogans about not smoking. The Iowa Republican is creative in her fiscal discipline.
Interest on the debt alone is $400 billion annually. That’s enough to pay for Medicaid.
The $20 billion in aid to farmers because of Trump’s trade war with China could have been used to reduce the deficit. It’s twice the size of President Obama’s auto bailout — except this bailout was self-inflicted by Trump.
Ernst voted for the $1 trillion tax cut that has not spurred the economic activity President Trump promised. The 400 richest Americans now pay as much tax as a truck driver.
...
How mu
ch more of these deficit hawks — Trump, Ernst, King, et al, who made this mess — can we stand? And, when did Republicans start treating deficits like a joke? Because, that’s what Ernst is doing.
I’m trying to think of something clever to say here, but Art just said it.
Ruth Marcus on how Republicans are not going to like the next phase of the inquiry.
Washington Post
President Trump and his Republican allies can’t seem to decide whether they want his defense to be based on substance — He did nothing wrong! It was a perfect call! — or procedure — Democrats were out to get him from the start! It’s a Soviet-style inquisition! That confusion is no surprise: Both arguments are unconvincing, and Republicans will increasingly have to figure out how to deal with that unpleasant reality.
It’s a rule of Washington that if you’re arguing over process, you’re losing. That holds especially true here, because the procedural laments are not only procedural, they’re bogus. Republicans contend that the new House rules to govern the inquiry deny Trump basic elements of due process and that the previous handling of the investigation was so flawed it taints any proceedings going forward.
All that Republicans wanted to do up to this point was leave the impression that there was “something unfair” about the start of the process. But … it’s not at all clear they managed even that much.
Now the inquiry is poised to enter what is, for Trump and Republicans, a dangerous new phase. Imagine Vindman in his dress-blue uniform testifying in public about his horror and alarm about hearing Trump ask Zelensky for help against a political foe. Imagine top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. — West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, lifelong public servant — looking out at hostile Russian-led forces across a war-damaged bridge and describing his anguish that “more Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance.” Aid that Trump was holding up for political gain. A single video is worth a thousand leaked opening-statement transcripts.
Charles Pierce and a kinda, sorta fondish farewell to Beto O’Rourke.
Esquire
I'm not entirely sure what the source of the joy on the right was the other day when Tim Morrison's deposition got leaked and it was revealed that he'd heard the famous phone call to Ukraine and that he'd heard both the quid and the quo, but that he "didn't think there was anything illegal." This is the thing on which the Trumpsters and their allies hung their hats. Rudy Giuliani even tweeted that this was a blockbuster, leaving us all to wonder how many people Giuliani had let off as a prosecutor when a fact witness told him he didn't think the stock fraud was illegal. They are the gang that couldn't cover up straight.
Okay, that wasn’t really Beto-related, but Pierce apparently wanted to get that in there.
Late Friday afternoon, Beto O'Rourke ended his quixotic campaign for the presidency. I was never really sure if he was running as a real person or as a Bobby Kennedy replicant. (More on replicants below.) I do know I wish he'd kept his ambitions tamped down enough to run against John Cornyn, but I'm glad he's decided to sit 2020 out now. There are some good candidates down there who have worked themselves silly, and they don't deserve to have this guy come parachuting back in from some green room somewhere. Take these plays off, Beto. Be a good Democrat and help where you can, but don't run for anything.
Beto O’Rourke is the first candidate to drop from the race who at one point looked like a serious contender to win the contest. It may not seem that way now, but it did when he got in. A lot of people like Beto. A lot of people still do. But a lot of those people just don’t think he’s the best candidate.
Renée Graham on how Donald Trump treated Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Boston Globe
The commander in chief is attacking a decorated member of the military. Remember that the next time he falsely accuses anyone else of disrespecting the troops.
To be fair, it’s not like this is the first time. Trump had no problem attacking veterans, prisoners of war, Gold Star families, etc, etc, while he was running for office. His people are square with this. In fact, the like it. After all, what’s being grateful to the military except another form of being “politically correct?”
For this man with no scruples, there is no lie too scurrilous in his manic scramble to save his presidency. Trump’s attempt to impugn the reputation of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, is a spectacular low in a presidency that keeps finding disturbing new depths nearly every day.
Trump is furious because Vindman did something anathema to this president — he told the truth. Vindman told House impeachment investigators that he heard firsthand Trump’s July call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. He “did not think it was proper” when Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, in exchange for military aid. Vindman also testified that the White House transcript of the call scrubbed certain words and that his efforts to restore them were thwarted.
Joan Walsh on how a woman talking about abuse, still pays more than a man committing it.
The Nation
When two women came forward to make credible accusations of sexual misconduct against Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax last February, the once-rising African American political star denied the claims and refused to resign. Many Democrats called on him to quit, while Democrats and Republicans wrangled over what to do, Ultimately, both parties did nothing.
It turns out that someone might wind up paying for Fairfax’s behavior—and that someone happens to be a woman, who is herself a sexual abuse survivor.
Virginia Beach delegate Kelly Convirs Fowler, locked in a tough race with challenger Shannon Kane, has already weathered ads and mailers that claimed she supports “infanticide” and associated her with the violent Salvadoran gang MS-13 (Fowler is of Filipino and Mexican descent). She had seen Kane twist her words about Fairfax in an earlier mailer, falsely claiming she said she was too busy to hear from his accusers, to prove that Fowler, the mother of two girls, is “bad for women.”
The ugliness of 99% of races today makes me wonder that any woman has the bravery and fortitude to withstand the months of constant abuse.
But nothing prepared Fowler for what came Monday night: a television ad that claims she has been “silent” on Fairfax’s accusers—even though she called for him to resign over the charges—featuring disturbing and vivid footage from interviews CBS conducted with both women. And again, as in earlier mailers, an out-of-context quote of Fowler saying “we really don’t have time,” supposedly to hear the two accusers, drives the narrative, when Fowler insists she was saying she didn’t have time to talk to the reporter.
I don’t know how to address these problems with political advertising. And I’m afraid no one else does, either. But rolling back Citizen’s United and strictly limiting funding would be a good start. Hey, I know, let’s listen to Leonard Pitts tackle this subject!
Leonard Pitts on the ease of lying in political ads.
Miami Herald
It may be too much. And also too little.
Meaning the recent announcement by Twitter that it is banning all political advertising over concerns that the medium gives politicians too much reach, too much power to deceive. News of the ban, which takes effect later this month, comes as that other social media giant — Facebook — struggles with fallout from its refusal to reject untrue political ads. Meaning not simply “spin,” but flat-out falsehoods. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose understanding of the First Amendment evidences all the depth of a “Schoolhouse Rock!” video, seems to feel he has some free speech obligation to provide a platform for liars to lie.
For this, he came under withering fire from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a recent congressional hearing. Meantime, hundreds of his employees have signed an open letter decrying the policy. And in California, a political activist filed to run for governor with the express purpose of placing false ads, forcing the (one hopes) chagrined company to ban him.
But while Facebook surely deserves the scorn it has received, one wonders whether Twitter’s absolute ban is not overkill. There is no particular reason politicians should be singled out for blanket exclusion. Twitter should — like the newspapers and networks whose function it is supplanting — accept responsibility for making sure ads it runs have some reasonable proximity to the truth.
Pitts, as might be expected, has it right. Any media site that runs ads, has the obligation to stand by the truthfulness of those ads. That’s true if they’re ads for hair tonic or presidents. Facebook, and Twitter, don’t need to stop carrying political ads. They just need to give them at least the scrutiny applied when people are selling siding.
Michael Tomasky on the statement that Barack Obama made this week.
Daily Beast
Well, we’ve been waiting for Barack Obama to say something. And boy, did he say something! He was being interviewed at the Obama Foundation Summit yesterday, and from the edited clip that’s out, it’s hard to say exactly what the context was. He was being interviewed by a young woman, and the topic seems to have had something to do with youth activism. Anyway, here’s what he said, in full, with just a few little edits of asides like his mention of Malia:
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff… You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.
“One danger I see among young people particular on college campuses is a sense… [that] the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough. If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cuz, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’ Get on TV. Watch my show. Watch Grown-ish.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Okay, I cut most of Tomasky’s response so I could get the statement from Obama in there for everyone to see. Now it’s your job to go read the rest. Let me give you a taste to get you started.
Let’s say Elizabeth Warren wins the nomination. And let’s say that once she does so, she starts to moderate a couple of her views. Even just around the edges.
In previous elections, the activist base would let this happen. They knew the game. They may not have liked the game, but they knew it and had a certain grudging respect for the need to play it.
Would the 2020 activist base let Warren sidle toward the center?