John Brennan: Resident Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash

That’s why the resident revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.

By John O. Brennan

Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017.

When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues. 

When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.

Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies present an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. 

The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms.

Having worked closely with the F.B.I. over many years on counterintelligence investigations, I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. Like Mr. Bortnikov, these Russian operatives and agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.

In my many conversations with James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in the summer of 2016, we talked about the potential for American citizens, involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands. We knew that Russian intelligence services would do all they could to achieve their objectives, which the United States intelligence community publicly assessed a few short months later were to undermine public faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr. Trump. We also publicly assessed that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services were following his orders. Director Comey and I, along with the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, pledged that our agencies would share, as appropriate, whatever information was collected, especially considering the proven ability of Russian intelligence services to suborn United States citizens. 

The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.

Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. 

The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets. A jury is about to deliberate bank and tax fraud charges against one of those people, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. 

And the campaign’s former deputy chairman, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him. Now more than ever, it is critically important that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team of investigators be allowed to complete their work without interference — from Mr. Trump or anyone else — so that all Americans can get the answers they so rightly deserve. 

John O. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017.

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A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 17, 2018, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Claims Are Hogwash. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

John O. Brennan: Resident Donald Trumps Increasing Erratic Behavior

John Brennan says that he believes the resident's increasingly erratic behavior is because special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation is closing in on the resident and people close to him. Mieke Eoyang, Ron Klain and Stuart Stevens join Lawrence.

Stephen Miller Is An Immigration Hypocrite. I Know, Because I’m His Uncle.

By DAVID S. GLOSSER

August 13, 2018

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees.

Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.

Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)

These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.

In the early 2000's, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”

Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.

Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.

Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.

Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.

Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America.

Immigration reform is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion cannot be trusted to do so. As free Americans, and descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.

 

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Dr. David S. Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist: formerly a member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351 

Stephen Miller is a hypocrite! Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. 

Omarosa Confirms The Obvious (But Trump Can't Shut Up)

Posted by Rude One

Omarosa Manilow or whatever the fuck was hired for one reason and one reason only: to be black near Donald Trump. That's it. She was hired as an accessory, a bauble that Trump could flaunt whenever anyone declared him a racist, like that gold-framed fake Renoir he insisted was real, projecting something about the man that simply wasn't true. She wasn't just a token; she was a shield. And she willingly allowed herself to play that role, which she has copped to. But, basically, fuck her. She was content to suckle at the teat of whatever fame Trump had and line her purse. Now that she was kicked out of the Big Brother: DC house, she's gonna get paid. It doesn't mean she's lying. It just means, you know, fuck her.

With that said, much of what Omarosa has revealed is the sadly standard "The President is a dumb fucking racist" shit that we've heard before. I'm pretty sure there is no one in the nation who doesn't think that Trump says, "Nigger" on a regular basis. And, frankly, some of it sounds crazy, like making a recording in the situation room of the White House.

I don't necessarily believe her when she says she walked in on Trump eating paper in order to destroy whatever was written on it. It's more believable that Trump sits at his desk in the Oval Office, staring ahead blankly, tearing off bits of intelligence reports, and devouring them mindlessly, washing them down with Diet Coke. In fact, I'd bet that Trump has to constantly be told to stop eating the paper.

Also, there's the stuff that ought to be shocking but isn't, like that Gene Simmons of KISS openly talked about fucking Ivanka in front of dear ol' dad, but Trump just laughed and egged him on. I mean, unless you've got a video of Trump boning his daughter while Jared weeps and jacks off in the corner, you've really got nothing. And even then, most of us would think, "Yeah, I totally expected to one day see Trump boning his daughter while Jared weeps and jacks off in the corner." What would be surprising? Add a goat? A shit fetish? Crucifixion? Who knows anymore? We have lost the capacity for shock.

However, what's more interesting than the Omarosa revelations (because, as mentioned above, fuck Omarosa) has been Trump's reaction to those revelations. In a few tweets, he ended up saying that Omarosa was terrible at her "job" but he kept her on "because she only said GREAT things about me," as if that makes him look good instead like the incompetent, pathetic, narcissistic goon that he is, and he confirmed that he uses non-disclosure agreements, which has gotta be a violation of every kind of open records law there is, but, you know, that would require someone checking and balancing the Executive Branch.

In a recording of a phone call, Trump acts completely fake surprised that Omarosa was fired by John Kelly. And his defense is that he's just so fucking stupid: "You know, they run a big operation, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that. Goddamn it! I don’t love you leaving at all." First off, "I don't love you leaving" is what a goddamned child says when a parent is going on a business trip. Second, if Trump legit didn't know about her firing, that means everyone in the White House knows he doesn't give a shit about what goes on there.

He just wants to eat his paper and drink his Diet Coke and watch Fox "news" and wait until he can get in front of some audience so he can pretend he's in charge.

Update: A couple of further notes here. First, if Omarosa was just begging for a job, Trump had (and, fer fuck's sake, still has) a corporation where he could have hired her. But that wouldn't have achieved the primary objective of being "my African American" while he's in the White House.

Also, Trump is obviously freaking the fuck out because he went further in attacking her, calling her a "lowlife" and a "dog," which you know was "bitch" before someone told him to change it.  Either way, it's still occasionally, in the abstract, weird to think, "Um, that's the resident of the United States saying that shit."

Always remember that should we ever hear a recording where Trump spouts racial slurs (I mean, we already heard him be sexist in the Access Hollywood pussy tape), his idiot hordes will love him for it.

It's why they voted for him in the first place.

About That Meeting

Rudy Giuliani, you need to learn how to SHUT THE FUCK UP!

After Saying Trump Asked Comey To Give Flynn ‘A Break,’ Giuliani Denies Comment

HEY, RUDY GIULIANI!

By Matt Shuham

Talk about verbal gymnastics. 

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that he definitely didn’t say what he said resident Donald Trump said last month, but that if he did say what he said Trump said — which he did — he was saying what former FBI Director James Comey said Trump said, and that he would never have said Trump said that himself.

Huh?

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, Giuliani denied ever saying that Trump had at one point asked Comey to give fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “a break.”

In fact, Giuliani did say that to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last month. Here’s a transcript (emphasis added):

GIULIANI: Comey’s testimony is hardly worth anything. And nor did he ever — James Comey never found any evidence of collusion. And [he] rules out obstruction by saying the President had a right to fire me. So all the rest of it is just politics. I mean, the reality is Comey, in some ways, ends up being a good witness for us, unless you assume they’re trying to get him into a perjury trap by, he tells his version, somebody else has a different version.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How is he a good witness for the President if he’s saying that the President was asking him — directing him, in his words — to let the Michael Flynn investigation go?
GIULIANI: He didn’t direct him to do that. What he said to him was “Can you give him a break?”
STEPHANOPOULOS: Comey says he took it as direction.
GIULIANI: Well that’s OK. I mean, taking it that way — I mean by that time, he had been fired. And he said a lot of other things, some of which have turned out to be untrue. The reality is, as a prosecutor, I was told that many times. Can you give the man a break, either by his lawyers, by his relatives, by friends. You take that into consideration but, you know, that doesn’t determine not going forward with it.

“There was no conversation about Michael Flynn,” Giuliani said at the start of the interview Sunday. 

He added, referring to Comey’s claim that Trump had confronted him about Flynn: “We maintain the resident didn’t say that.”
  
When Tapper specifically brought up Giuliani’s comments to ABC News, Giuliani protested: “I never told ABC that. That’s crazy. I’ve never said that. What I said was, ‘That is what Comey is saying Trump said.’”

But that’s simply not true. Giuliani never told ABC News that he was characterizing Comey’s version of events. In fact, Giuliani not only said last month that Trump had asked Comey to give Flynn “a break,” he justified the resident doing so by recalling times he’d been asked to do the same as a prosecutor.

Giuliani told CNN Sunday that “it’d be easier for me if the resident did say that,” because, he said, Trump asking Comey to go easy on Flynn is “hardly an obstruction.”

“So you’re saying that President Trump and James Comey never discussed Michael Flynn?” Tapper asked.

“That is what he will testify to if he is asked that question,” Giuliani responded.

Later in the interview, Tapper played the ABC News clip.

“I said it, but I also said before that I’m talking about their version of it,” Giuliani said after seeing the video. “Look, lawyers argue in the alternative. I know it’s complicated, but my goodness, we’ve been over it long enough that — I mean, why would I say something that isn’t true.”

“The resident didn’t say to him, ‘Go easy on Flynn,’ or anything about Flynn.”

Watch below:


Rudy Giuliani has a habit of saying some crazy and outlandish things about during TV interviews about his client, Donald Trump, and those claims have sparked speculation among some current and former Republicans as to whether or not Giuliani is suffering from some kind of mental decline. This weekend, Fox host Howard Kurtz asked Giuliani, in the context of a comment made by Joe Scarborough, if these claims have any merit. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

Melania Trump Is Everything Trump Claims To Hate About Immigrants

Melania Trump spent her first few weeks in the United States working illegally. Her parents were just sworn in as citizens through chain migration.

These are both items that Trump has said have to go, and under the new proposed rules for immigrants that become citizens, Melania would technically be up for having her citizenship revoked.

The rules, however, aren’t meant to target people that look like Trump, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

Hasan Piker Exposes Laura Ingraham’s Racism

Laura Ingraham goes full nazi with the same kind of bigotry her polish immigrant grandparents faced. Hasan Piker breaks down why David Duke and other nazis loved her commentary!



 #TheBreakdown #HasanPiker #TYTnetwork

See more TYT Facebook originals at http://fb.com/theyoungturks/videos

Professional liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders attacks former Trump aide Omarosa for lying

I don’t know if you heard but that terrible reality television Iago, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, has a new book out. It’s about that terrible reality television spoiled dummy Donald Trump and the misanthropic world inside of the White House.

 How does someone as unqualified as Omarosa get entrée into the White House? Well it’s a mystery, and White House hot air spewer Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants you to know that any and everything that Omarosa says is a lie! And Sanders also wants everybody to know that it’s the evil media that has given Omarosa this “platform” from which to lie.

Huckabee Sanders put this refrigerator poetry together in a statement, attacking some of the more wild—and entirely believable—claims made by Manigault-Newman in her new book UNHINGED.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1787333

A New Right Wing Veterans Donation Scam

By MineralMan

I got a couple of robo calls yesterday, and tracked them back, thanks to their lame phone number spoofing. The organization that called me is the American Veterans Honor Fund. It's new, and based in Virginia. They're just getting started in scamming people out of their hard-earned money.

Here's what they're up to: The organization claims to be funding veterans who are candidates for public office. Their website offers little information, but has a two-post blog on it. One of those candidates, who may well be behind the scam, is a right-wing militia leader from Ohio. He was thrown out of the only office he has held, but he's back in the race again. To his credit, he admits that he has never served in any branch of the military of the United States, after naming all of his medals and honors from his militia group.

Here's their website:

https://www.americanveteranshonorfund.com/

They don't say their name when they call. My guy said, "Hi! I'm Mark with the veterans." I hung up and back called him and got the organizations name and then Googled it.

Don't be taken in. It's a scam.

As a veteran, I hate this shit! 

Republicans Betray Oath, Put Donald Trump Over Country

In the MSNBC exclusive secret audio recording, Rep. Devin Nunes says Republicans need to keep the House in November to protect the resident from investigations into any unlawful activity. Lawrence O'Donnell says members of Congress have not always been willing to betray their oath of office.

DISGUSTING! Laura Ingraham Finally Goes FULL David Duke!

Jesse Dollemore addresses the disgracefully hateful rhetoric on Fox News last night from Laura Ingraham about America's shifting demographics... followed by the retweet and endorsement from former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke.



Posted by Rude One

Laura Ingraham Fears White Genocide

There are few things that are more of a bitch-ass argument than the whole "white genocide" thing that racists have been screeching about. The idea isn't that there will be concentration camps of white people being exterminated by legions of blacks and Hispanics and Asians and other scary non-white groups. Oh, no. See, white genocide is a gradual process by which a combination of demographic changes, migration, and white people not having babies will eradicate whiteness, causing white culture and beliefs and what not to disappear. See, it's like a genocide except no one is watching their family get mutilated by machetes or sent into gas showers. So it's not like a genocide at all save for in the delusional minds of white supremacists who don't fucking get that their whiteness is a construction of so many non-white forces that they wouldn't have a culture without it.

Grow the fuck up, you pussies. This is what happens. Populations move. People fuck people of other races. That shit just happens. Look at Mexico. Not because of undocumented migrants, but because of how it dealt with an influx of another race. You know that there are over a million people of Arab descent in Mexico? No, you didn't fucking know that, you stupid assholes. A whole bunch of them are Lebanese. Did you know that? No, you didn't fucking know that because you're a dumb fuck racist fuckball. And you know why you don't hear about it? Because the people from Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and elsewhere who moved to Mexico in the 1930's and 1940's married Mexicans and they have Arab Mexican kids and that's the way shit goes, man, and no one gives a single goddamn about it anymore. The best kibbeh I ever had was in Merida, Yucatan, and it was made by the Mexican wife of a Lebanese friend. How fucking great is that? The world's a goddamn miracle when you're not a total dick about shit like this.

Which gets us to Fox "news" host and noted Nazi saluter Laura Ingraham, who, you may have heard, went off about shifting racial populations in the United States last night on her show, The Ingrown Toenail. You've likely seen this quote, which sounds like something you hear before a cross is set on fire: "[I]n some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And they are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like." Does anyone vote for demographic change? How would that work? I guess she supports keeping black people out of her neighborhood. Anyways, Ingraham had been mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the self-professed socialist who won the Democratic nomination for Congress in a district in New York City.

But you may not have heard the other shit Ingraham said during her xenophobic rant last night. She continued, "From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration that of course progressives love." Then, after getting in the usual shots at undocumented migrants and bringing up the scary ones who committed crimes and scary sanctuary cities (also known as "cities"), Ingraham got to her real fear, which is not crime at all: "[T]his is a sure way over time to remake and reshape America. This is exactly what socialists like Ocasio-Cortez want. Eventually diluting and overwhelming your vote with the votes of others who aren't, let's face it, too big on Adam Smith and the Federalist Papers."

Oh, Laura, c'mon. You really think your viewers know jack shit about Adam Smith and the Federalist Papers (which, by the way, great name for a terrible band)? Most of them wouldn't know The Wealth of Nations if Smith himself was whispering it in their ears as he made sweet, sweaty love to them, fucking them in the ass while watching your show.

More important than the stupidity and pliable sphincter of the average Ingraham viewer is that Ingraham is using the threat of non-white immigrants voting in order to demonize those immigrants even more than crime and job-taking might. She's saying, "Understand this, my fellow racist shit heels. They will elect people with scary names like Ocasio-Cortez and then they will pass laws that will strip your whiteness of its privilege."

Isn't that what this all really is about? The gut-wrenching fear that whiteness won't be powerful in and of itself? Or maybe it's just that there are a bunch of white people who are scared shitless that they might get treated like they've treated non-white people for centuries.

Demographic changes are gonna happen. The pure white Aryan blood will become "diluted" (which is an interesting dog-whistle of a word). Wait until climate refugees start pouring into the country, along with the economic migrants and asylum seekers from increasingly violent places. The most hilarious, fucked up part of all this is that the way that the cowardly white conservatives could have kept the nation whiter would have been to help the rest of the world with economic incentives, climate action, and more. But it's too late now, you pasty motherfuckers. You shouldn't have been listening to people like Laura Ingraham all this time.

That said, this is the country we have. We're not going back. No matter how many immigrants the Trump administration gets rid of, the demographic shift is here, man. This is the America we have. I love it. I love this crazy richness of identities. It's fucking fascinating and fucking fun. Bring on the white genocide. It sounds like a party.

You don't like it? Well, there's always Russia.

Ted Cruz BEGS Trump For Help

Ted Cruz is America’s BIGGEST cuck. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

The Trump Administration Wants To See How Racist It Can Be

Posted by Rude One

You've heard it over and over from Republicans: they are just concerned about undocumented immigrants (or "illegal aliens," as the Justice Department has been ordered to say). If you ignore the fact that Customs and Border Protection treated asylum seekers who presented themselves as such at the proper border crossings - doing everything legally -  like they were undocumented migrants, and if you ignore the mostly-Muslim ban, well, you could maybe sort of believe Republicans if you squinted and stuck your fingers in your ears.

Of course, mistreating the undocumented was never the full plan. Because, see, White House adviser and Man Most Likely to Be Caught Eating Hamsters Whole, Stephen Miller, is a fucking ghoul, and he's getting the Trump administration to change how legal immigrants are treated. And if you're thinking, "Oh, they must be getting extra nice to documented immigrants because they've been such pricks to undocumented ones," then you're a fucking idiot who doesn't understand the level of cruelty for cruelty's sake these shit heels exist on.

What they want to do now is get rid of legal immigrants and they're gonna contort the fuckin' law to do it so they don't need congressional approval. The plan: "immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children's health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S." You got that? You have a kid who's a U.S. citizen and is on CHIP? No green card for you. You have a green card and get an Obamacare subsidy? No citizenship and, hey, we'll take that green card away. Back to the unstable visa system for you or, the real goal, deportation.

How fucked do you have to be to believe that this is in any way good for the country? You gotta be some bullshit white genocide-believing, Nazi-loving motherfucker to go along with this. Or, you know, an average Republican in this worthless age of Trump.

So you can live in this country legally for years, have kids here, and pay your taxes. But if you avail yourself of something that your taxes are helping to fund, you can go fuck off back to Mexico or whatever shit hole you came from. You're a "public charge" now, even if you're just getting the barest of help from the government.

Trumpistas also say that they are targeting people who did something else wrong at some point in their lives, like lie on a visa application. But, as is the way with Donald Trump, who never met a contract he wouldn't violate, even people who had an agreement with the government are finding that the deal has been broken by this administration.

In one example, a Haitian man who has a green card "had used a fake passport given to him by smugglers when he entered the U.S. from Haiti in 1989, but confessed to border officers and received a waiver from USCIS absolving him of his wrongdoing and allowing him to obtain a green card in 2011." Now, though? Fuck the waiver we gave you. "When he went for his citizenship interview in August 2017, the USCIS officers told him they were going to revisit the decision to waive the fake passport incident, meaning he could potentially lose his green card as well." And then he found out he was denied citizenship. The man works 80 hours a week and takes care of a disabled daughter. He's further fucked because he has used public assistance to help with his American kid. How does this make America great again? If "great" means "whiter," then, sure, goal met.

Here you go, Republicans. Another shot to stand up and say to Trump, "No. Fuck this. This is too far. Fire that Miller cockhole and act like you're a goddamned human being." Except you won't. Because it is you. It has been you for decades. You're just finally getting to be your worst selves.

Trump handed off the VA to three Mar-a-Lago fat cats who have been running it in secret

By Mark Sumner  

Daily Kos Staff

As it turns out, there are secret masters of the government, pulling the strings without the benefit of an election, nomination, or appointment. As a Propublica investigation has discovered, Donald Trump handed off control of the Department of Veterans Affairs to three members of his Mar-a-Lago golf resort. These three have been issuing orders to the people who are supposed to be running the department forming a “previously unknown triumvirate that hovered over public servants without any transparency, accountability or oversight.”

Known within the VA as “the Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” the three were Marvel Entertainment chair Ike Perlmutter, New York attorney Marc Sherman, and Bruce Moskowitz a “concierge” doctor who runs a service catering to the Palm Beach elite.

What reporter Isaac Arnsdorf discovered, through interviews and thousands of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, is that these three have been ordering members of the VA around for over a year. At the beginning of the year, Trump’s appointment of Ronny Jackson, the doctor who had proclaimed that Trump has “great genes,” as the VA secretary ran into issues when reports of both abuse and incompetence surfaced around Jackson. After leaving the position vacant for months, Trump finally nominated acting director Robert Wilkie in May. But as it turns out, little of that maneuvering matters. Because when Trump wants to talk to the man in charge, he calls Perlmutter.

The documents turned up by Pro Publica don’t just show Perlmutter issuing orders to VA, but reviewing policy, and making personnel selections. VA officials, at taxpayer expense, traveled to Mar-a-Lago to “consult” with Perlmutter and get his approval.

“Everyone has to go down and kiss the ring,” a former administration official said.

If the idea that the chairman of Marvel Entertainment is running the VA makes it sound that there at least might be an injection of creativity into the agency, that’s not this guy. Perlmutter mounted a series of hostile takeovers—Revco, Coleco, Remington—and gained control of Marvel during a series of buyouts and bankruptcies. He was paid $800 million by Disney when that company bought out Marvel, mostly to go away. The company was specifically split in half so that Perlmutter had nothing to do with the films—because he’s famously abusive and bigoted.

Perlmutter also has a history of behavior that’s distinctly odd. That includes turning a fight with a neighbor over the condition of a private tennis court—surely one of those issues that affects all Americans—into a hate mail campaign in which Perlmutter accused the neighbor of, among other things “illegally harvesting his DNA.” As the Hollywood Reporter explains, Perlmutter sent out unsigned mailings around the exclusive community attacking his neighbor, then turned his attention to the man’s workplace, where he accused the neighbor of being a Nazi and covering up sexual assault. And then … Perlmutter really did show some creativity.

One series of mailings allegedly went out to more than a thousand inmates in prisons across Florida and Ontario, Canada, in [neighbor Harold] Peerenboom’s name, with provoking statements like, "While your [sic] in jail, I am writing to your mom, telling her exactly what kind of scumbag you are."

The guy who tried to get his neighbor killed by sending provocative notes to over 1,000 inmates … that’s the guy Trump has secretly put in charge of the VA.

It was Perlmutter who put together the “troika” now running the VA. Of the other two, at least Moskowitz is a doctor, and while his specialty of finding pricey experts to pay house calls on nervous Palm Beach millionaires may be miles away from providing service for millions of veterans, at least it’s health care adjacent. Sherman is a lawyer who specializes in white collar crime. As in, defending those accused of it. That’s likely endeared him to both Perlmutter and Trump, but none of his background indicates any knowledge of health care, veterans, or running a large organization.

The troika has been in place from the beginning of Trump’s time in office. With former VA chief David Shulkin forced to fly down to Mar-a-Lago for his ring-kissing in February of 2017.

Moscowitz then nicely informed Shulkin that he didn’t have to make a monthly appearance before the three actual heads of his agency. Instead, they would “set up phone conference calls at a convenient time.”

All those stories about how Shulkin was resisting implementing Trump’s policies, really boil down to his growing reluctance to take orders from the secret masters of his agency, who were ruling on the lives of wounded and ailing veterans between tee times. And they didn’t hesitate to bypass Shulkin.

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd bombarded VA officials with demands, many of them inapt or unhelpful. On phone calls with VA officials, Perlmutter would bark at them to move faster, having no patience for bureaucratic explanations about why something has to be done a certain way or take a certain amount of time, former officials said.

Much of what the troika kicked off seemed to be generated by hearsay, antecedents picked up from TV, and cases mentioned by friends. That included one example Perlmutter was particularly keen on that originated with ... the woman in charge of the disputed tennis court.

At the moment, he doesn’t appear to have written to thousands of inmates attempting to get them to murder David Shulkin. But at least that was some out of the box thinking. If sanity is a box.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ike-perlmutter-bruce-moskowitz-marc-sherman-shadow-rulers-of-the-va

Sitting Rep’s Campaign Collected Dead Man’s Signature On Challenger’s Behalf

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sitting-reps-campaign-collected-dead-mans-signature-on-challengers-behalf

The Stupidverse

The comical myth of Abraham Lincoln Trump

By Jon Perr  

 

Conservative Rod Dreher on the Trump-as-Lincoln claim: "What kind of crackhead do you have to be to take that seriously?"

If nothing else, Donald Trump is a one-of-a-kind occupant of the Oval Office. His jaw-dropping corruption, staggering incompetence, mind-numbing policy ignorance, puerile penchant for payback, and unprecedented deceit put the Trump residency in a class by itself.

 Nevertheless, Trump’s courtiers, sycophants, and water-carriers have tried to elevate his leadership to a place among the greatest figures in human history. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. was not alone in comparing Donald Trump to King David, who “may have committed adultery and arranged the death of his mistress’s husband in battle, but despite these considerable failings he had still retained the full favor of God.”

After Trump announced his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu joined American evangelicals in declaring Trump a 21st century version of Persian King Cyrus, who 2,500 years earlier “proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon can come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem.” And no Republican president can last long without the inevitable comparison to Ronald Reagan. In Trump’s case, the task was perhaps best performed by the Rev. Robert Jeffress. Having previously accused Barack Obama of “paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist,” Jeffress explained last week that evangelicals knew that the thrice-married, serial adulterer Trump was “no altar boy.”

“The reason we supported President Reagan was not because we were supporting womanizing or divorce. We supported his policies.”

But no conservative hagiography of the current Republican resident can ever be complete without the invention of parallels to the first one. (After all, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Fox News anchor Bret Baier and Dubya himself equated President George W. Bush with President Abraham Lincoln.) Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, The Federalist offered “5 Ways Donald Trump Is Abraham Lincoln’s True Successor.” Fellow thrice-married, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich agreed, telling Sean Hannity on July 23, “I think the person whose situation is most like President Trump's was Abraham Lincoln, adding, “Lincoln is fighting to preserve the Constitution. He's fighting to preserve the union and he's having to do a lot of different things that are very bold and in some cases very radical.” Dishonest Donald himself went a step further, boasting “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.”

At the head of the “45=16” pack is pardoned campaign finance fraudster Dinesh D’Souza.

But D’Souza’s paeans portraying Trump as the new Lincoln aren’t merely an expression of gratitude for the man who voided his conviction. Donald Trump plays a vital role in D’Souza’s ongoing project to whitewash history by falsely claiming Democrats were, are, and forever will be the party of slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow and racism. (That history didn’t end in 1965 when the parties’ role-reversals on civil rights began in earnest is well-documented. Despite his repeated historical bludgeonings by Princeton’s Kevin M. Kruse, D’Souza has continued to advance his bogus claims.)

 In D’Souza’s Bizarro World in which Democrats are still the “party of slave plantations,” Donald Trump by necessity must be the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln:

Lincoln united his party and saved America from the Democrats for the first time. Can Trump—and we—come together and save America for the second time?

That is the premise of D’Souza’s new book and ersatz documentary, Death of a Nation. But reality, as Stephen Colbert famously told George W. Bush to his face in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.”

Republicans are now the party of states’ rights, nullification, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and white rage. The Democrats are the party of civil rights, equal protection of the laws, Dr. King and John Lewis. In 2018, Donald Trump is the Divider, not the Uniter. And that means the shoes Trump now fills would be more likely to fit Jefferson Davis than Abraham Lincoln.

For starters, consider the xenophobia and nativism at the heart of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeal. His diatribes against “thugs” and Mexican “rapists and drug dealers,” his disdain for those from “shithole countries” and fondness for (obviously white) immigrants from places like Norway are just the latest updates to Nixon’s 50-year old “Southern Strategy.” In stark contrast, Abraham Lincoln had little use for the “America Firsters” of his day, the Know-Nothings. As he wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

The obvious problems with the myth of Abraham Lincoln Trump hardly end there. Trump, after all, has repeatedly come to the defense of Confederate monuments and statues. In the wake of the violence triggered by white supremacists last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump tweeted that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” But those supposedly “beautiful” monuments were primarily erected in the early 1900's and again during the Civil Rights era precisely to glorify the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and to act as powerful symbols of white supremacy. In 1855, Lincoln proclaimed that “the slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you.” In 2017, Donald Trump defended those who would celebrate the leaders, fighting men and the cause of that “odious and detested class” by applying the “both sides do it” argument to the alt-right instigation in Charlottesville:

“You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too…
The other group didn't have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.”

The Great Emancipator didn’t have much patience for the “both sides do it” sham. As Lincoln reflected in September 1862:

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.

This was a central theme of President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865. As he so eloquently put it just six weeks before his assassination, slavery was the national tragedy and the Civil War the inevitable and necessary price America had to pay for its extirpation.

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [Emphasis mine.]

If Lincoln was quick to admonish both North and South for believing they each enjoyed God’s providence, the 16th president was also able to show understanding and compassion for those on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. Even as seven states has already seceded from the Union, Lincoln closed his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861 this way:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

With the war nearly won four years later, Abraham Lincoln nevertheless extended the hand of brotherhood to those who sought to destroy the country he had fought so hard to preserve:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

It is inconceivable that Donald Trump could ever imagine, let alone utter, words like these. (That goes for his son Donald Jr. as well, who co-hosted the opening of D’Souza’s fictional film.) His speeches, rallies, and tweets are designed only for the consumption of his base. On July 1, Trump told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, “I hope the other side realizes that they better just take it easy," he said. "They better just take it easy because some of the languages, some of the words you —even some of the radical ideas, I really think they’re very bad for the country." Asked what he would do to bring the country together, Abraham Lincoln Trump responded:

" Our people are so incredible. Do you know, there's probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base."

Not, at least, since Jefferson Davis’s backers in 1861.

If Trump’s base wants anything, it is to keep things the way they are. Or, rather, were. “Make American Great Again” is by definition a backward-looking worldview to a time when a white, post-war America was militarily and economically unchallenged. “Our ancestors tamed a continent,” Trump proclaimed in May, adding “We’re are not going to apologize for America.” But in the second decade of the 21st century, the United States is at a crossroads. The rise of China as a military and economic superpower, the transformation of the worldwide economy, and global challenges like climate change, international terrorism, and transnational criminal enterprises mean the United States cannot withdraw into itself. More than ever, the U.S. needs allies in Europe and the Pacific along with strong global institutions led by America. From trade policy, the withdrawals from the Paris Climate Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the threats to NATO and North American allies, Trump is doing the reverse.

In his time, Abraham Lincoln faced even more difficult choices for a nation literally at a life-and-death crossroads. Certainly no firebrand of abolitionism, he soon understood there was simply no going back to the United States of America as it had been. As President Lincoln said in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, just one month before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. [Emphasis mine.]

In the Gettysburg Address in November 1863, Lincoln explained to his countrymen not just the meaning of thinking and acting anew, but of the Civil War itself. America wasn’t merely being saved, but reborn. And the definition of “American” would necessarily and rightly include the four million slaves still held in bondage by the rebels.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

(Abraham Lincoln was successful; government of the people, by the people, for the people, did not perish from the earth. It’s no wonder that Frederick Douglass said of him in 1876, “Infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.” Such words will never be spoken about Donald Trump, even if he believes Frederick Douglass is “an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.”)

If Abraham Lincoln’s project extended the notion of the American family to include black citizens, Donald Trump’s has been its restriction. His Muslim ban, draconian immigration crackdown, his wink and a nod to foes of equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, and his campaign to limit women’s reproductive rights constitute a mockery of the 14th Amendment’s guarantees that “all persons” shall enjoy due process and equal protection of the laws. Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the U.S. military and his executive order ending protections for the 700,000 immigrants brought as children (the “Dreamers”) to the United States represent promises broken by the federal government.

While Donald Trump has double-crossed tens of thousands of people for political gain, Abraham Lincoln kept his promises to a group despised by most in both the North and the South even as America’s national survival was in doubt. In August 1863, months before he used the Gettysburg Address to declare America "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," Abraham Lincoln defended his Emancipation Proclamation as inextricably linked to the preservation of the Union. Noting reports from some of his commanders that "the emancipation policy, and use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion," Lincoln reminded his critics:

"You say you will not fight to free the negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you."

Lincoln did not waiver in his commitment to a "new birth of freedom" even as he endured the darkest days of the Civil War in the summer of 1864. With Grant stalemated in front of Petersburg after the brutal fighting that spring and summer, Lincoln's re-election seemed an impossibility. But when Northern War Democrats and some in his own party were urging him to abandon the emancipation of the slaves, Lincoln was having none of it.

"I am sure you will not, on due reflection, say the promise being made must be broken at the first opportunity...As a matter of morals, could such treachery escape the curses of Heaven or any good man? As a matter of policy, to announce such a purpose would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would cease and all colored men now in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with our full notice of our purpose to betray them?"

Were he to return black soldiers to slavery, Lincoln declared:

"I should be damned in time and eternity."

Donald Trump would do well to heed Lincoln’s warning. So, too, would Dinesh D’Souza.
Given his mugging by the reality above, D’Souza is feebly left to assert of his “provocative analogy between Lincoln and Trump” only that “not that they’re the same people, but that they’ve fallen into the same situation.” Lincoln detested slavery because, D’Souza explains, of his belief in free labor.

“As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food,” Lincoln said, “It was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth.” Et voila, Lincoln is a modern-day free-market Republican who hates big government and handouts for the undeserving just like … wait for it … Donald Trump. Unfortunately, President Abraham Lincoln also said this in his First Annual Message to Congress:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

That view was doubtless one factor in the correspondence between Karl Marx and President Lincoln in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect on January 1, 1863.

But in the bigger picture, Lincoln dramatically expanded the scope of the government in Washington.

He not only introduced the first national income tax to help pay for the war, but signed the Homestead Act in 1862. Those federal land grants to western settlers constituted one of the biggest—and most effective—handouts in American history. As Kruse put it in one his many D’Souza beat-downs:

Yes, Republicans in the 1860s *did* end slavery and promote civil rights.
They also significantly expanded the federal government, built up the income tax, funded a huge system of public colleges, embraced reparations for slavery and, um, impeached an incompetent president.

Which brings up another point in the demolition of the Trump-as-Lincoln comedy. Donald Trump has, after all, threatened to arbitrarily fire cabinet officials and given aid and comfort to white supremacists all while embracing an American adversary in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, recently detailed, once before in our history the president of the United States behaved this way. He wasn’t Abraham Lincoln, but his successor Andrew Johnson. And back then, Republicans in Congress impeached him for it.

In any event, some Trump defenders will continue to peddle the jaw-droppingly ridiculous notion that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Some, like Dinesh D’Souza, will profit from propagating that pathetic falsehood. (Apparently, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s his target market.) Mercifully, even some conservatives are red in the face over this butchery of American history for the red party. As an incredulous Rod Dreher said of D’Souza’s “right-wing porn” in the American Conservative:

What kind of crackhead do you have to be to take that seriously?
I would say that Dinesh D’Souza ought to be ashamed of himself, but you can’t shame the shameless.

Now that sounds a lot like Donald Trump.
NOTE: There is a modern American president one could more plausibly argue is Abraham Lincoln’s heir.

Why are Republicans so opposed to protecting November's election from Russian hackers?

By Joan McCarter

It's almost enough to make you think the Russian fix is already in with Republicans for November.

House Republicans have repeatedly resisted Democrats' efforts to fund election systems protection.

Russian asset Donald Trump spent less than half an hour with his national security team to discuss the issue, and now Senate Republicans are opposing the grants to states that the House Republicans blocked, as well.

Senate Democrats are trying to get $250 million in grants to states as soon as possible to upgrade their systems and make necessary fixes. Republicans say they've got enough money, ignoring the reports from the intelligence community that Russia is interfering right now. Ignoring the Russian hacker attack on Sen. Claire McCaskill's campaign. Ignoring the discovery by Facebook of a new "sophisticated" attack possible from Russia showing that they are at it again. That's not to mention the infrastructure hacking they've been doing.

That gives plenty of fodder for Democrats to turn this into a sustained floor fight, which is precisely what they intend to do.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) is sponsoring an amendment to a "minibus" spending bill the Senate is considering, a bunch of smaller, less controversial spending bills Congress hopes to dispense with before dealing with the remainder in a continuing resolution to keep government open past September 30. "The Trump budget would ZERO OUT election security funds,"  Leahy tweeted. "My Senate amendment, blocked by House GOP, would continue much-needed funding for election security grants. The Senate should be allowed to vote on it."

It's needed. A bipartisan group of 21 states attorneys general is pleading with Congress to pass this funding. "The integrity of the nation’s voting infrastructure is a bipartisan issue, and one that affects not only the national political landscape, but elections at the state, county, municipal, and local levels," they wrote in a letter to Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and Sen. Roy Blunt, Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairman.

The only reason Republicans could possibly have for opposing this is that they think they’ll need all the help they can get to win in November.

Note To Democrats: Fuck The White Working Class

Posted By Rude One

I'm a very white person. My background is so European, it's painful: Russian, Polish, Swedish, and, in the only nod to a smidge of color, Italian. And myfamily history is pure worker: My father was a trucker. Mom was a secretary. My grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother worked in a factory. I tell you this to prove my bona fides when I say, with no due respect, it's time for Democrats and the left to say, "Fuck the white working class."

That doesn't mean neglect white workers. As I said back in November (and repeated in December), "The only way to help the white working class is to abandon the white working class when it comes to trying to get votes." It means that we concentrate on uplifting all people in this country, no matter the skin color, and we stop this bullshit outreach to the very white people who don't understand that it's good for them, too.

It's just pathetic that this keeps coming up again and again, as if Trump voters and the white working class are the only goddamn prize in the electorate. Democrats, we're told, and liberals, especially, have to, got to, must try to get them on board or our victories are hollow and our policies are meaningless.

Thomas Frank, a progressive darling for his books, including What's the Matter with Kansas? (the answer he didn't get around to is the obvious one: racism), asked in his column this weekend for The Guardian, "Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class?" It offers the usual stuff we know, that Democrats should embrace a genuinely liberal platform, that they blew it by not punishing Wall Street back in 2009, and that they embrace the wealthy in ways that alienate the left.

But what's missing is a recognition that the non-white working class is firmly with the Democratic Party. In fact, it's the base that has sustained the Democrats for several elections, and if the policies of the party are accepted by the non-white working class, then you're either saying that non-whites don't know that Democrats are bad for them or you're just fucking privileging white workers as being the only representatives of a class.

Fucking hell, not a single goddamn factory worker voted for Trump because they were sad Barack Obama didn't lock up someone from Goldman Sachs. They voted for him because he was gonna chase out the Mexicans and Muslims and he was gonna teach that Hillary bitch a lesson. It's not that fucking complicated. And it's fucked up that someone as genuinely smart as Frank can't just accept that.

Then, today, in the New York Times (motto: "We will keep publishing dumb shit until someone from West Virginia subscribes"), in one of the most tragically stupid columns I've ever fucking seen (and I've been reading this shit for years), ostensibly liberal writer Margaret Renkl offers advice on "How to Talk to a Racist," subtitled, "White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong." You might look at that and think, "Oh, c'mon. That's gotta be a joke."

Nope. Renkl wants us to reason with the unreasonable: "Somehow you need to find enough common ground for a real conversation about race. Very few people are stupid or irredeemably mean. They’ll listen to what you have to say if they trust you’ll listen to what they have to say back." Look at that shit. It's like she's talking about racists like they're particularly dumb dogs, not adult humans who could, if they wanted, try to find common ground with liberals.

It gets worse. You should, she says, stop and take a breath "when you encounter a person who believes he’s merely honoring his ancestors by driving a car with an image of the Confederate battle flag on the tag [or] when a Facebook friend announces that it’s disrespectful to take a knee during the national anthem." I'll take a breath if the exhale is me saying, "Racist asshole."

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Why is it just up to liberals? Unlike writers like Renkl, I'm not gonna act like racists are children. I'm gonna treat them like fuckin' grown-ups and not fuckin' patronize them and speak gently so they don't roll on the ground in a tantrum. I'm gonna tell 'em they're fuckin' racist and that racism is objectively wrong and they should be ashamed of their ignorant selves. And if they don't like being made to feel bad for being racist, don't fucking be racist. Now, tell me whatever stupid shit you wanna say about how you have black friends.

Democrats and the left need to get over this obsession with making the white working class happy. Reaching out to them only makes them hate us more. Why do we need them all? There is already a good percentage of them that do vote Democratic because they're also not all racist morons. Those white working class members are pretty sick of the idiots in their demographic, too.

Besides, it ain't like the white working class has a monopoly on rage or morality. Holy Republicans may hammer the Bible like it's their mistress's ass, but your evangelicals haven't got shit on the black church or the enormous growth of Hispanics as part of church congregations. Go get your voters there.

And the rise of women candidates, both non-white and white, as well as LGBT candidates, demonstrates that the future sure as hell ain't the white men that still make up the vast majority of Republican elected officials. The awesome thing about these new candidates is they are coming up with ways to present that liberal, pro-worker agenda as something that is simply common sense. That goes across the board, from Beto O'Rourke in Texas, a white Congressman who is uniting constituencies (mostly not white) in a real shot to take down Ted Cruz, to Jeannine Lee Lake in Indiana, a black woman who won the Democratic nomination in a district that once had Mike Pence representing it. The DNC and the DCCC better get the fuck on board or the party is gonna leave their old asses behind.

Just think: non-white Americans, with an assist from some white Americans, could end up being responsible for changing things to actually make shit better for the white working class. That many of them won't understand it, as they didn't when Barack Obama was getting them health care, is the triumph of the GOP politics of hate and fear and ignorance.

[Note: Yes, in very white places like West Virginia, where Democrats still have a chance, you might have to pander a bit, but the basic message doesn't need to change.]

Goofball And Galahad

Donald Trump is not a traitor. It's much worse than that

By Aldous J Pennyfarthing

The Surrender Summit ended nearly two weeks ago, but something about the post-capitulation rhetoric still doesn’t sit right with me.

This notion that Donald Trump is a traitor to his country is flat-out wrong.

Treasonous? Hell, yeah. In thrall to a brutal foreign adversary? Of course.

But he’s not a traitor.

To be a traitor, one has to have been loyal to something or someone (aside from oneself) at least once, and Trump clearly doesn’t qualify. Trump is loyal to precisely two things: his rapacious id and his ravenous ego.

Apart from those cherished jewels of the Trumpian dunce cap, our resident cares about nothing and no one.

Was he loyal to our country when he failed to pay his income taxes?

Was he loyal when he took $150,000 in federal money earmarked for small businesses impacted by 9/11?

Was he loyal when he bragged, just hours after the World Trade Center towers came down, that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan?

Was he loyal when he bone spurred his way out of the military?

Was he loyal when he did business in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in defiance of strict American trade bans?

Was he loyal when he failed to learn the words to “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

Was he loyal when he failed to donate — until he was caught red-handed — the $1 million he’d promised to veterans charities?

Was he loyal when he savagely mocked a sitting senator and war hero, as well as a Gold Star family?

Was he loyal when he approved his son’s rendezvous with Russian agents in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton?

Was he loyal when he encouraged the rat fucking of our election by Russia and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks?

Was he loyal when he promoted a scam university in order to fleece his fellow citizens out of their retirement money?

And what about his loyalty to his family and employees?

Was he loyal to any of his wives?

Was he loyal to his current wife when he cheated on her with a porn star and a Playboy model?

Was he loyal to his family when he cut off his gravely ill nephew’s health insurance out of spite?

Was he loyal when he stiffed hundreds of real estate contractors, many of whom were struggling small business owners?

Was he loyal when he left investors in his public casino company in the lurch while personally making out like a bandit?

Was he loyal (you might want to grab an air-sickness bag for this one) when he blamed two former employees who had died in a helicopter crash for his own ongoing failures in the casino business?

Of course he wasn’t. Because he’s never been loyal to anyone, ever. Michael Cohen, et al., are learning that right now.

No, Donald Trump isn’t a traitor. It’s much more banal — and frightening — than that.

He’s just an evil asshole.