Let’s start with a reminder (as if you needed one) of how rotten to the core Trump is.
Susan J Demas/Michigan Advance:
Hi, my name is Susan Demas and I’ve had a spontaneous abortion.
That’s the technical term for a miscarriage, by the way, so you can delete your hate mail. Better yet, send it to me and stop harassing women who have the right to make choices regarding their own bodies (for now, at least)…
So the vast majority of Americans, even those who are anti-abortion, know that dystopian scenario painted by a president who has lied more than 10,000 times in office just isn’t happening.
But what Trump has probably managed to do is scare some women away from hospitals with evil doctors — so babies will probably die or suffer health complications in ill-conceived home births. Years of anti-vaccine propaganda has shown us that medically inaccurate statements carry a real health cost, like the recent measles outbreak.
But there’s an alternative in 2020, and voters are aware.
Jonathan Capehart/WaPo:
I asked Twitter to choose among the 21 Democrats. Here’s what I found.
Journalists are famous for using taxis, barbershops, even cocktail parties to take the temperature of “real people” about people and issues in the news. Sure, such reporting is not terribly scientific and doesn’t really begin to tell you the full story about anything. But it is a good way to hear voices that don’t belong to you or your friends….
The interesting pattern that emerged was that for many, Harris and Warren were the top two choices. It was either Harris then Warren or Warren then Harris. More often that not, I noticed a Harris-Warren-Biden troika. And, in that, you see three strands of the Democratic contest…
Had I undertaken this exercise four months ago, former representative Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.) would have dominated the Twitter responses. Not so much today.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Be Skeptical of Biden's Sudden Surge
It’s true that the former vice president is polling well. But the 2020 race is still wide open.
So what’s not to like?
For one thing, I’d be wary of paying much attention to that polling surge, at least until it sticks for a few weeks. It’s obviously better to get an announcement bounce than not, but it may not matter much in the long run. Biden’s main asset is that most Democrats like him and probably will continue to like him. But knowing that, we should expect that he’ll do well in early trial heats against a bunch of unknowns (and Bernie Sanders, who appears to have very limited appeal). We can also expect his support to rise when he’s been in the news. That doesn’t tell us much about how voters will react when they discover that they also like Julian Castro or Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren – which will probably be the case if and when those candidates become well known.
I’m also not overwhelmed by Biden’s endorsements.
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
We Should Not Have Been Surprised About Bill Barr
William Safire had his number 27 years ago
Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general, called much of Barr’s testimony, “totally misleading.”
“If my law student summarized or described things this way,” said Katyal, “they’d get an F.”
Barr’s performance, said Katyal was “conduct totally unbecoming for the Attorney General of the United States.”
Pretty surprising stuff, no? Well, not really. Nearly three decades ago, William Safire had Barr’s number. The former Nixon speechwriter turned author and columnist wrote devastating critiques of Barr’s first turn as attorney general, labelling him repeatedly as “General Coverup.”
Reading Safire’s columns today in light of Barr’s latest undertakings is, well, illuminating.
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr
The attorney general’s theory of executive power places presidents above the law
One of the stranger aspects of the Donald Trump era is the open competition for the president’s affection. From Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs saying that Trump’s presidency is “the most accomplished … in modern history” to the president forcing his Cabinet secretaries to praise him on camera to his former fixer Michael Cohen once declaring that he would “take a bullet” for his former employer, it seems like each of the president’s myrmidons is daily attempting to outdo the others in employing Soviet-style hyperbole in praise of the president.
If there’s a comfort in this spectacle, it’s in the recognition that this is performance, that it’s a schtick, and that its ubiquity is a marker of the president’s deep insecurity. It is not a projection of strength, but one of weakness. The performativity of the spectacle suggests that at least some of these people recognize they are doing a bit. Others seem to have been corrupted by their proximity to Trump. Career civil servants such as Rod Rosenstein, who swore oaths to uphold the Constitution, have somehow been reduced to shuddering with fear at the thought of being fired in a tweet, begging the president for the opportunity to ensure that the law bends to his will.
Adam Schiff/USA Today:
William Barr lied to Congress about the Mueller report. He should resign
Notwithstanding my opposition to his confirmation, I hoped that Barr would surprise the country and demonstrate independence and integrity as he took the reins of the Department of Justice at this important moment in our nation’s history. But any hope was misplaced, and any fear more than justified: his actions have compromised public confidence in the investigation, the DOJ and the rule of law.
Renato Mariotti/Politico:
A Constitutional Showdown Between the White House and Congress Just Got Closer
Barr’s stall tactics are speeding up an inevitable court fight. Here’s how Democrats are already laying the groundwork.
But while the law is quite clear, the path to the courthouse is not. Because the stakes are so high, House Democrats will have to proceed cautiously. Move too fast and a judge could decline to grant extraordinary relief to the House because the issue is not “ripe for review.” Move too slowly and risk emboldening an already intransigent White House.
This is a showdown that could determine whether Congress can effectively check the presidency going forward, and Nadler recognizes that resolving this question is “an obligation of our office.” As he put it, “The challenge we face is that if we don’t stand up to him together today, we risk forever losing the power to stand up to any president in the future ... the system of not having a president as a dictator is very much at stake.”
Alex Pareene/Splinter:
The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
For years, the conservative movement peddled one set of talking points to the rabble, while its elites consumed a more grounded and reality-based media. The rubes listened to talk radio, read right-wing blogs, watched Fox News. They were fed apocalyptic paranoia about threats to their liberty, racial hysteria about the generalized menace posed by various groups of brown people, and hysterical lies about the criminal misdeeds of various Democratic politicians. The people in charge, meanwhile, read The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, and they tended to have a better grasp of political reality, as when those sources deceived their readers, it was mostly unintentionally, with comforting fantasies about the efficacy of conservative policies. From the Reagan era through the Bush administration, the system seemed to be performing as designed.
But if this was a reasonably useful arrangement for Republicans, who won a couple close elections with the help of their army of riled-up kooks, it was a fantastic deal for the real engine of the right-wing propaganda machine: companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions. The original strategy behind demonizing the “mainstream media” may have purely political, to steer voters away from outlets that tended to present information damaging to the conservative cause, but the creation of the conservative media was also a revenue opportunity for shameless grifters from the very start, as Rick Perlstein showed in his classic Baffler piece on the snake oil-salesmen of the right.
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