Monday, April 16, 2018
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Is MSNBC Becoming Conservative? The Supposedly Liberal Network Loves Anti-Trump Republicans More Than Leftists
April 15, 2018, 7:46 AM GMT
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, MSNBC had at least
two clear options: It could respond to a swelling progressive viewer
base by moving left, or it could keep playing the Beltway game and move
right, loading up with #NeverTrump Republicans, and dumping actual
progressives.
In choosing the latter — albeit with a head-fake — the news channel has significantly skewed its coverage, to the detriment of progressive politics and its own viewers.
Oh, there’s plenty of Trump-bashing to please MSNBC's booming viewer base. But it’s often a cheap thrill, giving scant or no attention to what made Trump's presidency possible in the first place, let alone the challenge of building a coherent alternative. The channel is currently riding enjoying a ratings high, despite its leadership’s centrist intentions, but that's no formula for the long haul, either for MSNBC or America.
“Without doubt, it’s Trump and his antics that have provided MSNBC’s ratings boom.” said Jeff Cohen, author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." “A President Hillary Clinton would have continued our country’s unequal and militaristic status quo, and all the apologizing for her on MSNBC would have led to boring TV and lousy ratings."
Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986 (I was an early FAIR volunteer) and later worked on-air at CNN and Fox and as a producer for Phil Donahue at MSNBC, before Donahue's show axed for political reasons on the brink of the Iraq war (more on that below). Currently director at the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, Cohen belongs to the long but sparse tradition of independent progressives who’ve spent time in the innermost bowels of the media establishment and lived to talk about it.
“There are two big problems facing our country, and they have for decades -- right-wing extremism and Democratic corporatism," Cohen said. "MSNBC gives you exactly one-half of that story. It reminds me of the old George Carlin joke: ‘Here's a partial score in from the West Coast: Los Angeles 7.’"
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy threw a harsh light on the other half of the story, which helps explain why his supporters get so little MSNBC airtime, in contrast to other venues Cohen cited.
Overtly left-oriented outlets like Democracy Now!, The Young Turks and Common Dreams continue to cover both problems, Cohen observed.
It’s not just that these conservatives or conservative-adjacent commentators associated with so many past political disasters. It's also unfair to present them as representing any significant slice of pubic opinion. In his post-election analysis published in June 2017, Lee Drutman created 12 indices to analyze voters views, which he also condensed down into two broader ones:
The large, and nearly empty, lower right quadrant represents libertarianism, broadly speaking, which is the home turf of most MSNBC-style Republicans. The dense cluster of blue dots in the lower left quadrant represent the Democratic base, which is clearly MSNBC’s core audience. But there are also many more blue dots (as well as red ones) in the upper left quadrant than in the lower right. These are, more or less, socially conservative but economically progressive voters to whom the Democrats lost much more ground to than expected in the 2016 election — exactly the folks who cost Hillary Clinton the election in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are being effectively ignored by MSNBC’s programing at the same time that the channel's core viewers are being underserved, and treated to a diet that is oversaturated with lower-right NeverTrump Republicans.
A healthy political dialogue, free of corporate dictates, would allow the dominant voices in the lower left liberal-progressive quadrant to be fully heard in their own terms, rather than constantly being "balanced" with Republicans who do not represent a significant base, even within the Republican and/or conservative coalition. Instead, it would allow liberals and progressives to engage with thoughtful representatives of the upper left quadrant, who, believe it or not, actually exist.
What’s more, that would involve a much richer, more diverse mix of progressive voices, who are now virtually invisible on MSNBC: Rural progressives like Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb, for example, or leftist women of color like Current Affairs contributing editor Briahna Joy Gray.
A striking example of what’s missing at MSNBC can be seen in how the network virtually ignored the wave of red-state teacher strikes. On March 2, FAIR published an article noting that except for "one two-minute throwaway report" on a daytime show, MSNBC had not dedicated a single segment to the West Virginia teachers' strike, including on the programs of supposed progressive stalwarts Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. Hayes did a short segment later, after the FAIR story posted, but MSNBC returned to generally ignoring the issue since then.
To say that's underselling the importance of these strikes is to put it mildly. A month later, as teachers’ strikes had spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, political scientist Corey Robin’ called them “the real midterms” and described them as epochal. Looking back to the watershed year of 1978, Robin noted that national voters re-elected "a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide margins," despite "two years of a historically unpopular Democratic president" (i.e., Jimmy Carter) with tanking approval ratings.
But those weren't the midterms that mattered most, in Robin's account. What really mattered in 1978 was "the passage of Proposition 13 in California, which radically gutted property taxes ... and made it extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future," launching a nationwide right-wing rebellion against taxes that fueled the landslide election of Ronald Reagan two years later. Now, in 2018, the wave of teacher strikes signals the beginning of a movement, Robin argued, "to confront the real governing order of the past 40 years: the Prop 13 order."
You could see the reality of this unfolding on social media, but you couldn’t hear anything close to that analysis on any MSNBC program. Indeed, you couldn’t hear any sustained discussion at all, from any side of the issue. Robin’s arguments are exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the network, given the reality of voters' views in Drutman’s chart.
I asked Robin what other issues he thought MSNBC ought to explored. “I've been fascinated by how Trump and the GOP got completely rolled on the budget, forced to adopt a budget with a lot of the spending that they hate,” he said — a subject that’s been noted in the media, but hardly explored in any depth. “I'd also love to get a lot more coverage on all these Democratic primaries: Who are these people running for office? What are their positions, their ideologies, etc.?” That, too, is largely terra incognita, with a few scattered exceptions, which is surprising given the record activity levels of campaign activity. “Last, I'd love to see good reporting on millennials,” Robin concluded — a particularly important subject, given that generation's strong progressive tilt and its obvious near-term electoral importance.
Returning to the teacher strikes, Elizabeth Catte is an on-the-ground expert who could further enrich the discussion. She’s the author of "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," which, as she puts it, “uses radical history to challenge perceptions of the region as a hub of white, working-class woe.” Catte has appeared on MSNBC, but not as the regular contributor she should be. “The lessons of the West Virginia teachers' strike are complex,” she told me. “But one takeaway for Democrats, or anyone interested in understanding our current moment, should be that people are desperate for a better range of political options,” precisely what MSNBC ought to provide.
“West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable indifference among their elected leaders to the common good, and have instead seen their futures traded away for incentives aimed at fickle corporations and their investors,” Catte continued. “Democrats who have seen their fortunes fall in so-called Trump country should prioritize righting this imbalance or face squandering any political momentum these recent collective actions might offer.”
A better range of political options necessarily calls for different perspectives on economics — another way in which MSNBC falls short. Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle, hosts of the daytime business show that bears their names, are well-intentioned but highly conventional economic reporters. To their credit, they enthusiastically debunk a lot of right-wing garbage. But there are plenty of dubious dogmas they simply accept, such as the supposed virtues of balanced budgets, or blaming the federal budget deficit on Social Security and Medicare. MSNBC hardly ever offers time to economists who dispute such claims, such as Dean Baker (defender of Social Security and Medicare and early predictor of the housing bubble crash) or Stephanie Kelton (proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and the universal job guarantee), for example.
In addition, when Resident Trump recently announced his steel and aluminum tariffs, Velshi and Ruhle pointed out some typical and obvious Trump lies and misdirections, but offered no hint that are legitimate arguments for protectionism that have a long history. In contrast, Democracy Now! featured a debate between two progressives — Lori Wallach, author of "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority," and Michael Hudson, author of "America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914" -- which cast both sides of the argument in a very different light.
Numerous other examples could be offered. As indicated above, Drutman analyzed voter views in term of 12 different issue indices. There are progressive viewpoints that never get aired on MSNBC for virtually every one of those, and of course there is never any sustained dialogue about linking those different progressive viewpoints together.
There are a great many progressive ideas with substantial public support that rarely even get mentioned. The Progressive Change Institute's Big Ideas poll in early 2015 identified 16 ideas with 70 percent support or more, plus dozens more with majority support, that are rarely if ever mentioned on MSNBC. I wrote about it that July, in a story about Bernie Sanders' alignment with popular issues.
These included:
In choosing the latter — albeit with a head-fake — the news channel has significantly skewed its coverage, to the detriment of progressive politics and its own viewers.
Oh, there’s plenty of Trump-bashing to please MSNBC's booming viewer base. But it’s often a cheap thrill, giving scant or no attention to what made Trump's presidency possible in the first place, let alone the challenge of building a coherent alternative. The channel is currently riding enjoying a ratings high, despite its leadership’s centrist intentions, but that's no formula for the long haul, either for MSNBC or America.
“Without doubt, it’s Trump and his antics that have provided MSNBC’s ratings boom.” said Jeff Cohen, author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." “A President Hillary Clinton would have continued our country’s unequal and militaristic status quo, and all the apologizing for her on MSNBC would have led to boring TV and lousy ratings."
Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986 (I was an early FAIR volunteer) and later worked on-air at CNN and Fox and as a producer for Phil Donahue at MSNBC, before Donahue's show axed for political reasons on the brink of the Iraq war (more on that below). Currently director at the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, Cohen belongs to the long but sparse tradition of independent progressives who’ve spent time in the innermost bowels of the media establishment and lived to talk about it.
“There are two big problems facing our country, and they have for decades -- right-wing extremism and Democratic corporatism," Cohen said. "MSNBC gives you exactly one-half of that story. It reminds me of the old George Carlin joke: ‘Here's a partial score in from the West Coast: Los Angeles 7.’"
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy threw a harsh light on the other half of the story, which helps explain why his supporters get so little MSNBC airtime, in contrast to other venues Cohen cited.
Overtly left-oriented outlets like Democracy Now!, The Young Turks and Common Dreams continue to cover both problems, Cohen observed.
If MSNBC wasn't devoid of strong, public Sanders supporters and other genuine progressives, you'd hear about both problems. Look at who MSNBC's heroes seem to be lately: war hawks and perjurers formerly with U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon.
Their parade of ex-military analysts have a track record of getting the facts wrong or dissembling, but that's ancient history not to be discussed as long as they're willing to even tepidly criticize Trump. I hope [Robert] Mueller puts together a strong case, but he's no hero of the left. Nor is [James] Comey. Nor is Gen. Barry McCaffrey.Sanders’ supporters weren’t the only ones squeezed out, however. Even a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter like former Salon editor Joan Walsh was recently dumped by MSNBC — and rapidly hired by CNN — as the ranks of NeverTrumper contributors continued to swell. There’s room for George Will, Bill Kristol and David Frum, and even for dogged Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt, although the logic of listening to these people is virtually nonexistent.
It’s not just that these conservatives or conservative-adjacent commentators associated with so many past political disasters. It's also unfair to present them as representing any significant slice of pubic opinion. In his post-election analysis published in June 2017, Lee Drutman created 12 indices to analyze voters views, which he also condensed down into two broader ones:
- An economic liberalism-conservatism index (which combines views on the social safety net, trade, inequality and active government)
- A social/identity liberalism-conservatism politics index (which combines the moral issues index plus views toward African-Americans, immigrants and Muslims).
The large, and nearly empty, lower right quadrant represents libertarianism, broadly speaking, which is the home turf of most MSNBC-style Republicans. The dense cluster of blue dots in the lower left quadrant represent the Democratic base, which is clearly MSNBC’s core audience. But there are also many more blue dots (as well as red ones) in the upper left quadrant than in the lower right. These are, more or less, socially conservative but economically progressive voters to whom the Democrats lost much more ground to than expected in the 2016 election — exactly the folks who cost Hillary Clinton the election in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are being effectively ignored by MSNBC’s programing at the same time that the channel's core viewers are being underserved, and treated to a diet that is oversaturated with lower-right NeverTrump Republicans.
A healthy political dialogue, free of corporate dictates, would allow the dominant voices in the lower left liberal-progressive quadrant to be fully heard in their own terms, rather than constantly being "balanced" with Republicans who do not represent a significant base, even within the Republican and/or conservative coalition. Instead, it would allow liberals and progressives to engage with thoughtful representatives of the upper left quadrant, who, believe it or not, actually exist.
What’s more, that would involve a much richer, more diverse mix of progressive voices, who are now virtually invisible on MSNBC: Rural progressives like Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb, for example, or leftist women of color like Current Affairs contributing editor Briahna Joy Gray.
A striking example of what’s missing at MSNBC can be seen in how the network virtually ignored the wave of red-state teacher strikes. On March 2, FAIR published an article noting that except for "one two-minute throwaway report" on a daytime show, MSNBC had not dedicated a single segment to the West Virginia teachers' strike, including on the programs of supposed progressive stalwarts Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. Hayes did a short segment later, after the FAIR story posted, but MSNBC returned to generally ignoring the issue since then.
To say that's underselling the importance of these strikes is to put it mildly. A month later, as teachers’ strikes had spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, political scientist Corey Robin’ called them “the real midterms” and described them as epochal. Looking back to the watershed year of 1978, Robin noted that national voters re-elected "a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide margins," despite "two years of a historically unpopular Democratic president" (i.e., Jimmy Carter) with tanking approval ratings.
But those weren't the midterms that mattered most, in Robin's account. What really mattered in 1978 was "the passage of Proposition 13 in California, which radically gutted property taxes ... and made it extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future," launching a nationwide right-wing rebellion against taxes that fueled the landslide election of Ronald Reagan two years later. Now, in 2018, the wave of teacher strikes signals the beginning of a movement, Robin argued, "to confront the real governing order of the past 40 years: the Prop 13 order."
You could see the reality of this unfolding on social media, but you couldn’t hear anything close to that analysis on any MSNBC program. Indeed, you couldn’t hear any sustained discussion at all, from any side of the issue. Robin’s arguments are exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the network, given the reality of voters' views in Drutman’s chart.
I asked Robin what other issues he thought MSNBC ought to explored. “I've been fascinated by how Trump and the GOP got completely rolled on the budget, forced to adopt a budget with a lot of the spending that they hate,” he said — a subject that’s been noted in the media, but hardly explored in any depth. “I'd also love to get a lot more coverage on all these Democratic primaries: Who are these people running for office? What are their positions, their ideologies, etc.?” That, too, is largely terra incognita, with a few scattered exceptions, which is surprising given the record activity levels of campaign activity. “Last, I'd love to see good reporting on millennials,” Robin concluded — a particularly important subject, given that generation's strong progressive tilt and its obvious near-term electoral importance.
Returning to the teacher strikes, Elizabeth Catte is an on-the-ground expert who could further enrich the discussion. She’s the author of "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," which, as she puts it, “uses radical history to challenge perceptions of the region as a hub of white, working-class woe.” Catte has appeared on MSNBC, but not as the regular contributor she should be. “The lessons of the West Virginia teachers' strike are complex,” she told me. “But one takeaway for Democrats, or anyone interested in understanding our current moment, should be that people are desperate for a better range of political options,” precisely what MSNBC ought to provide.
“West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable indifference among their elected leaders to the common good, and have instead seen their futures traded away for incentives aimed at fickle corporations and their investors,” Catte continued. “Democrats who have seen their fortunes fall in so-called Trump country should prioritize righting this imbalance or face squandering any political momentum these recent collective actions might offer.”
A better range of political options necessarily calls for different perspectives on economics — another way in which MSNBC falls short. Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle, hosts of the daytime business show that bears their names, are well-intentioned but highly conventional economic reporters. To their credit, they enthusiastically debunk a lot of right-wing garbage. But there are plenty of dubious dogmas they simply accept, such as the supposed virtues of balanced budgets, or blaming the federal budget deficit on Social Security and Medicare. MSNBC hardly ever offers time to economists who dispute such claims, such as Dean Baker (defender of Social Security and Medicare and early predictor of the housing bubble crash) or Stephanie Kelton (proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and the universal job guarantee), for example.
In addition, when Resident Trump recently announced his steel and aluminum tariffs, Velshi and Ruhle pointed out some typical and obvious Trump lies and misdirections, but offered no hint that are legitimate arguments for protectionism that have a long history. In contrast, Democracy Now! featured a debate between two progressives — Lori Wallach, author of "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority," and Michael Hudson, author of "America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914" -- which cast both sides of the argument in a very different light.
Numerous other examples could be offered. As indicated above, Drutman analyzed voter views in term of 12 different issue indices. There are progressive viewpoints that never get aired on MSNBC for virtually every one of those, and of course there is never any sustained dialogue about linking those different progressive viewpoints together.
There are a great many progressive ideas with substantial public support that rarely even get mentioned. The Progressive Change Institute's Big Ideas poll in early 2015 identified 16 ideas with 70 percent support or more, plus dozens more with majority support, that are rarely if ever mentioned on MSNBC. I wrote about it that July, in a story about Bernie Sanders' alignment with popular issues.
These included:
- Allowing the government to negotiate drug prices (supported by 79 percent)
- Offering students the same interest rates as big banks (78 percent)
- Universal pre-kindergarten (77 percent)
- Fair trade that protects workers, the environment and jobs (75 percent)
- Ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas (74 percent)
- Ending gerrymandering (73 percent)
- Letting homeowners pay down mortgages with 401k funds (72 percent)
- Debt-free college at public universities (71 percent)
- A $400 billion infrastructure jobs program (71 percent)
- Requiring the NSA to get warrants before collecting our data (71 percent)
- Disclosing corporate spending on politics and lobbying (71 percent)
- Medicare buy-in, available to all (71 percent)
- Closing offshore corporate tax loopholes (70 percent)
- A "Green New Deal," creating millions of clean energy jobs (70 percent)
- A Full Employment Act (70 percent)
- Expanding Social Security benefits (70 percent)
Instead of
seeing their representatives in policy discussions at MSNBC, we get the
same old tired mix of views that failed to excite voters enough to elect
Hillary Clinton in 2016.
There’s a simple explanation for this: Corporate control and the conceptually narrow mindset that accompanies it, especially on matters of foreign policy. This was not immediately obvious when MSNBC cancelled the Phil Donahue show, as Cohen recalls:
What really happened at MSNBC is much clearer in retrospect, Cohen said: “We now realize that in 2002 and 2003, lobbyists for GE/NBC and other media conglomerates were working hand-in-glove with George W. Bush's FCC - chaired by Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell - toward deregulation allowing these companies to get even fatter. Questioning or irritating Team Bush in any way at that juncture interfered with corporate objectives.”
In fact, the idea that MSNBC is a “liberal Fox News” fundamentally misunderstands both the media environment and recent network history. Fox News is a deliberately ideological propaganda station, conceived as such by Roger Ailes long before it ever went live. MSNBC is a commercial enterprise that stumbled into a center-left position simply because that was the available audience, given Fox News' and CNN’s prior positioning. But no one master-planned it that way.
In fact, the network has at times lurched more to the right than the left. In 1999, for example, MSNBC paired Oliver North - yes, he of the Reagan administration and the Iran-contra scandal - with former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne as co-anchors of "Equal Time." This is of course a familiar format to cable news viewers: Rabid right-wingers coupled with tepid centrists who supposedly represent the left.
That was no fluke: At the tail end of the Bill Clinton era, MSNBC was clearly experimenting with a sharp right turn. The network also added shows in 1999 that featured reactionary dinosaur John McLaughlin and the now-infamous Laura Ingraham, then a young conservative bomb-thrower.
Compared to that, today's MSNBC might not look so bad. But compared to what America both wants and needs in terms of new ideas and a new direction, the so-called liberal network is still staggering around in the dark instead of lighting the way. In all the ways touched on above, MSNBC's corporate culture is sharply at odds with the most pressing concerns of its primary audience, not to mention, the whole nation. By ignoring the voices of those who are exploring bold solutions and challenging worn-out political orthodoxy, MSNBC is only reproducing the insular outlook that led the Democrats to political disaster over the course of the last decade, culminating in the debacle of 2016. We can't afford that.
Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area.
There’s a simple explanation for this: Corporate control and the conceptually narrow mindset that accompanies it, especially on matters of foreign policy. This was not immediately obvious when MSNBC cancelled the Phil Donahue show, as Cohen recalls:
We were terminated by MSNBC because our skeptical questioning about whether it would be wise to invade Iraq and whether cause existed was so totally out of tune with the rest of the channel’s programming, which offered little debate on those questions. Internal NBC documents that leaked show that the termination was political and censorial. While we were terminated for asking the right journalistic questions, those who got it so totally wrong saw their careers at MSNBC and elsewhere flourish.Keith Olbermann, then one of the network's stars, "started asking good questions in 2006,” Cohen acknowledged, “but three years is a long time before independence was exhibited.” That was three long years during which lies were exposed and opposition grew on the ground among the anti-war movement and the progressive public, with little or no cable news encouragement.
What really happened at MSNBC is much clearer in retrospect, Cohen said: “We now realize that in 2002 and 2003, lobbyists for GE/NBC and other media conglomerates were working hand-in-glove with George W. Bush's FCC - chaired by Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell - toward deregulation allowing these companies to get even fatter. Questioning or irritating Team Bush in any way at that juncture interfered with corporate objectives.”
In fact, the idea that MSNBC is a “liberal Fox News” fundamentally misunderstands both the media environment and recent network history. Fox News is a deliberately ideological propaganda station, conceived as such by Roger Ailes long before it ever went live. MSNBC is a commercial enterprise that stumbled into a center-left position simply because that was the available audience, given Fox News' and CNN’s prior positioning. But no one master-planned it that way.
In fact, the network has at times lurched more to the right than the left. In 1999, for example, MSNBC paired Oliver North - yes, he of the Reagan administration and the Iran-contra scandal - with former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne as co-anchors of "Equal Time." This is of course a familiar format to cable news viewers: Rabid right-wingers coupled with tepid centrists who supposedly represent the left.
That was no fluke: At the tail end of the Bill Clinton era, MSNBC was clearly experimenting with a sharp right turn. The network also added shows in 1999 that featured reactionary dinosaur John McLaughlin and the now-infamous Laura Ingraham, then a young conservative bomb-thrower.
Compared to that, today's MSNBC might not look so bad. But compared to what America both wants and needs in terms of new ideas and a new direction, the so-called liberal network is still staggering around in the dark instead of lighting the way. In all the ways touched on above, MSNBC's corporate culture is sharply at odds with the most pressing concerns of its primary audience, not to mention, the whole nation. By ignoring the voices of those who are exploring bold solutions and challenging worn-out political orthodoxy, MSNBC is only reproducing the insular outlook that led the Democrats to political disaster over the course of the last decade, culminating in the debacle of 2016. We can't afford that.
Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area.
Saturday, April 14, 2018
16 tweets where Trump attacks Obama for exactly what Trump is doing in Syria now
Tonight the inevitable happened.
After reports of possibly heinous war crimes being committed by the Syrian government, after weeks and weeks of hostile propaganda coming from the United States and a completely incompetent government in perpetual disarray, Donald Trump announced that the United States would be bombing Syria.
Donald Trump’s opinions on foreign policy have not always been so … hawkish.
Let’s take a look back:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1756959
After reports of possibly heinous war crimes being committed by the Syrian government, after weeks and weeks of hostile propaganda coming from the United States and a completely incompetent government in perpetual disarray, Donald Trump announced that the United States would be bombing Syria.
Donald Trump’s opinions on foreign policy have not always been so … hawkish.
Let’s take a look back:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1756959
White supremacist blows himself up making ISIS style bombs
Friends and family say Ben Morrow was a Bible-toting lab worker. Investigators say he was a bomb-building white supremacist.
Friday, April 13, 2018
Lawmaker to Trump: Resign, it will get worse
Rep. Denny Heck (D-WA) says Resident Donald Trump should consider
resigning because it's "becoming not a question if there was a crime,
but how many."
Thursday, April 12, 2018
MSNBC’s Joe and Mika bash Trump for ‘humiliating America’ with his angry tweets
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reacted in shock and dismay
after President Donald Trump complained that he wasn't receiving enough
credit for military gains.
Birther Taps Benghazi Conspiracy Theorist As Secretary Of State
As a congressman, Mike Pompeo was aggressive in accusing the Obama
administration of negligence and a cover-up around the 2012 terrorist
attack.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pompeo-benghazi_us_5aa7e17ee4b03c9edfaffc07
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pompeo-benghazi_us_5aa7e17ee4b03c9edfaffc07
Paul Ryan Is The Worst House Speaker Ever
Lawrence O'Donnell argues Paul Ryan earned that title through
unprecedented and unrelenting cowardice and by surrendering his powers
to the Trump residency.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
The leading Republican running for Paul Ryan’s seat is a white nationalist
By Carter Sherman Apr 11, 2018
A white nationalist is now the frontrunner in the GOP primary in Paul Ryan's district.
Longshot candidate and self-described “pro-white” politician Paul Nehlen is now the leading Republican to take over Ryan’s Wisconsin seat now that Ryan, the current Speaker of the House, is not running for reelection.
Nehlen incited international outrage in February, when he tweeted a photo of Prince Harry’s fiancée Meghan Markle with an image of a dark-skinned, prehistoric human known as “Cheddar Man.”
(Markle’s mother is black.) Alongside the image, Nehlen tweeted, “Honey, does this tie make my face look pale?”
That racist tweet prompted Twitter to permanently ban Nehlen, though it wasn’t the first time he’d drawn criticism on the platform. In January, he posted a list of his critics and claimed most of them were Jewish. He’s also used the hashtag #ItsOkayToBeWhite, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which dubbed Nehlen an “outrage artist.”
Read: Paul Ryan stepping down is a gift to House Democrats ahead of the midterms
Finding Pleasure In The World Starting To Collapse On Trump
Posted by Rude One
Resident Donald Trump, an angry, rotten tangerine on top of a sack of dead hogs, spoke out yesterday about FBI raid
of the home, office, and hotel room (whuh?) of his lawyer, Michael
Cohen. You might know Cohen as "That motherfucker? Fuck him." Cohen is
like Roy Cohn except less charming in the same way that a rabid bear is
less charming than a cobra.
Speaking before he surrounded himself with military leaders to pretend to be their commander, Trump went off on Special Counsel Robert Mueller and anyone who wasn't a citizen of Trump World before the filthy swamp of Washington, DC tainted their virgin white garments. "So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys," Trump started, ignoring the fact that "they" is actually "we," as in employees of the Justice Department and thus the federal government. "I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now — and actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started," he continued. You want to tell him about the Benghazi investigations? Or that for years he accused President Obama of being born in another country? Bitch, shit's just getting good. We're not even at the climax yet.
The raid was bullshit, Trump said. "[I]t’s a disgrace. It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for." The idea that a search warrant, signed off on by a judge and handled by a Trump-appointed US Attorney, is an "attack on our country" means that Trump couldn't give a happy monkey fuck about our country except in how much l'etat c'est Trump.
He was on a ranting tear. He attacked the investigators, calling them all "Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama." He wondered why no Hillary: "[T]hey’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton — the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They’re not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about, I can tell you, from the Republican side, and I think even the independent side."
Think about that for a second. He wants to know why they're not investigating someone who isn't in government anymore, who was thoroughly investigated, and about whom an investigation is still percolating even though there isn't a goddamn thing to investigate except how stolen emails got to the Trump campaign. But, mostly, think about how disgustingly self-pitying that is. "Why aren't you looking into this thing the man on the TV told me is bad when he told me I am good?" Trump is saying. "Why you no believe man in TV? I like man in TV. And other man in TV. And pretty lady in TV."
Then the mental breakdown of the cornered rat started to occur as his brain just started to dump shit in random bursts of words. Seriously, this is theresident of the goddamn United States, and he's like a
skeevy john trying to explain to cops that they shouldn't arrest him
when there are murderers out there: "[T]hey don’t even bother looking.
And the other side is where there are crimes, and those crimes are
obvious. Lies, under oath, all over the place. Emails that are knocked
out, that are acid-washed and deleted. Nobody has ever seen — 33,000
emails are deleted after getting a subpoena for Congress, and nobody
bothers looking at that."
Goddamn, you want this to be more satisfying, doncha? Shouldn't we be rejoicing a bit, texting our friends gifs of people saying, "Nice" or "Oh, hell, yeah." Except for every little bit of celebration, we think, "But what if, after all this, the dickhole gets away with it?" For every delicious bit of schadenfreude, we wonder how long it'll take to clean up the shitpile he'll leave behind. Yeah, it's stomach-churning and hard to find pleasurable.
And yet...
"The F.B.I. agents who raided the office ofResident Trump’s personal
lawyer on Monday were looking for records about payments to two women
who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, and information related to
the publisher of The National Enquirer’s role in silencing one of the
women." That's right. According to the New York Times, the raid
was about Trump's wandering dick and everything his pathetic
thug-wannabe lawyer tried to do to shut women up about his dick.
So while Trump was ranting about "They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia. The reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion," the Southern District of New York, led by a Rudy Giuliani crony, had the FBI tear up Cohen's shit because of suspicion that Trump and Cohen were lying about something to do with Trump's adulterous dick. Russia may have little to do with this particular raid.
So Donald Trump may end up being crushed by walls made of pussy.
Michael Cohen may be wrecked by women he and his boss tried to wreck.
Ah, there it is. There's that satisfaction I was looking for.
Speaking before he surrounded himself with military leaders to pretend to be their commander, Trump went off on Special Counsel Robert Mueller and anyone who wasn't a citizen of Trump World before the filthy swamp of Washington, DC tainted their virgin white garments. "So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys," Trump started, ignoring the fact that "they" is actually "we," as in employees of the Justice Department and thus the federal government. "I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now — and actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started," he continued. You want to tell him about the Benghazi investigations? Or that for years he accused President Obama of being born in another country? Bitch, shit's just getting good. We're not even at the climax yet.
The raid was bullshit, Trump said. "[I]t’s a disgrace. It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for." The idea that a search warrant, signed off on by a judge and handled by a Trump-appointed US Attorney, is an "attack on our country" means that Trump couldn't give a happy monkey fuck about our country except in how much l'etat c'est Trump.
He was on a ranting tear. He attacked the investigators, calling them all "Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama." He wondered why no Hillary: "[T]hey’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton — the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They’re not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about, I can tell you, from the Republican side, and I think even the independent side."
Think about that for a second. He wants to know why they're not investigating someone who isn't in government anymore, who was thoroughly investigated, and about whom an investigation is still percolating even though there isn't a goddamn thing to investigate except how stolen emails got to the Trump campaign. But, mostly, think about how disgustingly self-pitying that is. "Why aren't you looking into this thing the man on the TV told me is bad when he told me I am good?" Trump is saying. "Why you no believe man in TV? I like man in TV. And other man in TV. And pretty lady in TV."
Then the mental breakdown of the cornered rat started to occur as his brain just started to dump shit in random bursts of words. Seriously, this is the
Goddamn, you want this to be more satisfying, doncha? Shouldn't we be rejoicing a bit, texting our friends gifs of people saying, "Nice" or "Oh, hell, yeah." Except for every little bit of celebration, we think, "But what if, after all this, the dickhole gets away with it?" For every delicious bit of schadenfreude, we wonder how long it'll take to clean up the shitpile he'll leave behind. Yeah, it's stomach-churning and hard to find pleasurable.
And yet...
"The F.B.I. agents who raided the office of
So while Trump was ranting about "They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia. The reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion," the Southern District of New York, led by a Rudy Giuliani crony, had the FBI tear up Cohen's shit because of suspicion that Trump and Cohen were lying about something to do with Trump's adulterous dick. Russia may have little to do with this particular raid.
So Donald Trump may end up being crushed by walls made of pussy.
Michael Cohen may be wrecked by women he and his boss tried to wreck.
Ah, there it is. There's that satisfaction I was looking for.
The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump
Why don’t we take a step back and contemplate what Americans, and the world, are witnessing?
Early Monday morning, F.B.I. agents raided the New York office,
home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the resident of the
United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes —
including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related
to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who say they had
affairs with the resident before he took office and were paid off and
intimidated into silence.
That evening the resident surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden
into a tirade against the top American law enforcement officials —
officials of his own government — accusing them of “an attack on our
country.”
Oh, also: The Times reported Monday evening
that investigators were examining a $150,000 donation to the resident’s personal foundation from a Ukrainian steel magnate, given
during the American presidential campaign in exchange for a 20 minute
video appearance.
Meanwhile,
the resident’s former campaign chairman is under indictment, and his
former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to lying to
investigators. His son-in-law and other associates are also under
investigation.
This
is your resident, ladies and gentlemen. This is how Donald Trump does
business, and these are the kinds of people he surrounds himself with.
Mr.
Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and
celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He
cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most
part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush
money and his own bravado.
Those methods may be proving to have their
limits when they are applied from the Oval Office.
Though Republican
leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has
real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen
every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal
judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence.
On
Monday, when he appeared with his national security team, Mr. Trump,
whose motto could be, “The buck stops anywhere but here,” angrily blamed
everyone he could think of for the “unfairness” of an investigation
that has already consumed the first year of his residency, yet is only
now starting to heat up. He said Attorney General Jeff Sessions made “a
very terrible mistake” by recusing himself from overseeing the
investigation — the implication being that a more loyal attorney general
would have obstructed justice and blocked the investigation. He
complained about the “horrible things” that Hillary Clinton did “and all
of the crimes that were committed.” He called the A-team of
investigators from the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller,
“the most biased group of people.” As for Mr. Mueller himself, “we’ll
see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “Many people have said, ‘You should
fire him.’”
In
fact, the raids on the premises used by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael
Cohen, were conducted by the public corruption unit of the federal
attorney’s office in Manhattan, and at the request not of the special
counsel’s team, but under a search warrant that investigators in New
York obtained following a referral by Mr. Mueller, who first consulted
with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. To sum up, a
Republican-appointed former F.B.I. director consulted with a
Republican-appointed deputy attorney general, who then authorized a
referral to an F.B.I. field office not known for its anti-Trump bias.
Deep state, indeed.
Mr.
Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into”
Mr. Cohen’s office.
“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the resident tweeted
early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time.
He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the
American legal system, but it does not protect communications in
furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big
witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why
does he care about the privilege in the first place?
The answer, of course, is that he has a lot to hide.
This
wasn’t even the first early-morning raid of a close Trump associate.
That distinction goes to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign
chairman and Russian oligarch-whisperer, who now faces a slate of
federal charges long enough to land him in prison for the rest of his
life. And what of Mr. Cohen? He’s already been cut loose by his law firm, and when the charges start rolling in, he’ll likely get the same treatment from Mr. Trump.
Among
the grotesqueries that faded into the background of Mr. Trump’s
carnival of misgovernment during the past 24 hours was that Monday’s
meeting was ostensibly called to discuss a matter of global
significance: a reported chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians.
Mr. Trump instead made it about him, with his narcissistic and
self-pitying claim that the investigation represented an attack on the
country “in a true sense.”
No,
Mr. Trump — a true attack on America is what happened on, say, Sept.
11, 2001. Remember that one? Thousands of people lost their lives. Your response was to point out that the fall of the twin towers meant your building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. Of course, that also wasn’t true.
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A racist White House doesn't want to talk about police shootings, because of course not
Her answer was, ahem, widely noted.
“Certainly, a terrible incident. This is something that is a local matter. And that's something that we feel should be left up to the local authorities at this point in time,” Sanders replied.
Then Ryan asked Sanders about the lingering case of Eric Garner, the New York man who cried out “I can't breathe” in 2014 while in a chokehold administered by New York City police despite the department prohibiting the practice. [...]
“I'm not aware of any specific action. Once again, these will be local matters that should be left up to the local authorities,” Sanders said.While this notion, that the videotaped nationwide evidence of black American men and boys facing death at the hands of police departments in situations and with a frequency that are not even remotely matched by similar incidents against white Americans, is a "local matter" for each police department and not worthy of the attention of the
To be sure, what Sanders means is that the administration is going to continue to refuse all meaningful comment on such police violence. This is to be expected.
First, Donald is a racist whose own history of demonizing non-white persons as “rapists” or guilty-no-matter-what-investigators-say is well known.
Second, his administration is a shipwreck of old, lower-tier Republican racists elevated into unexpected positions of power; each of them, like Jeff Sessions, has worked to expand police power and reduce police accountability as matter of actual policy.
Third, Donald does not want to talk about police shootings because saying anything even the slightest bit reasonable would give his core base of very shouty and distinctly white-nationalist infused supporters an election-year tummyache; the White House garbage fire faces a choice of saying what those supporters want Donald to say, which is that police should be executing more Americans for cheaper reasons, or shutting the hell up.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders and anyone else still hoping for a career after Team Garbage Fire is very, very, very much of the hope that Donald will keep his mouth shut.
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