House Republicans––Stooges or Traitors?

Last night the New York Times published a remarkable op-ed written by Glenn Simpson (a former Wall Street Journal reporter) and Peter Fritsch, the clients for whom Christopher Steele, the former longtime British intelligence agent, assembled the so-called Steele Dossier.

The opening paragraph is particularly astute:

"A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

The Dossier has been targeted and rubbished by Republicans for many months because it casts their president in a bad light. Devin Nunes has recused himself from the House Committee trying to investigate the president's Russian entanglements but he has kept his hands on the wheel and he keeps pumping the brakes. He's not in the chair but is definitely running things. Nunes Recused himself unseriously, the way a film star says she doesn't want any attention. Nunes wants attention, hence the drama. He sometimes acts like he wants to be James Bond. His envy may explain why he despises Steele, who was a real James Bond.

The Republicans on the committee have been behaving strangely for over a year, sounding off like children desperate to distract Mother from their own misbehavior, blaming their playmates for the broken window. If there has been a witch hunt it has been Republicans endlessly hunting for evidence to justify burning Hillary Clinton in the public square, evidence that never emerged. They have fantasized about this auto da fé for over a decade in various committees. It is a vendetta. But the FBI doesn't go in for vendettas, so the FBI must be in the Hillary camp, or so the Republican drama queens say. There is a very large and dangerous bear loose in our country, endangering our democracy and our institutions and our national security, but the Republicans whose party spent decades hunting the Russian bear are off hunting rabbits.

It’s strange how closely one R’s agenda aligns with the agenda of the other R out there.

Republican motives and efforts and tactics and actions align very closely with Russia’s. We need to hear this stated more explicitly in news reporting. It is dangerous and disorienting when something so obvious and alarming is not stated clearly. People begin to doubt the obvious that isn't stated. Certainly we need to wait for and respect rules of evidence, but we need to stop hiding and ignoring what is staring us in the face. Distraction and obfuscation is the strategy employed by guilty parties.

Both the Russians and the Republicans want to discredit the Mueller investigation, both want to discredit witnesses testifying to serious crimes. Both Rs make perverse and inverse responses to things to which most Americans would see one clear set of responsible responses: get the truth, contact law enforcement, pay attention, take evidence, do the right thing. There is another apt term for what we need: Due Diligence.

Due Diligence is what Americans deserve from their political parties when they are putting a presidential candidate on the menu. Is he or she sound? Is he or she capable? Is he or she insane? Is he or she a criminal? Is he or she engaged in shady financial dealings with foreign enemies? During the selection process, and the convention, and the campaign, and the transition, the Republicans––notably Mike Pence who chaired the transition and Devin Nunes who worked on it––who were tasked with Due Diligence were not just undiligent, they were the opposite of diligent, they were carefully and aggressively ignoring every warning they heard and silencing the citizens who were warning them. Were they willfully blind and carefully ignorant, or were they obstructing justice?

Try to get your head around this––it isn't easy: When the Republicans in Congress heard people warning about Russian interference in our election, instead of seeking the truth they did everything they could to shut down and discredit the truth. They wanted to hide it. They wanted to shut up the witnesses. What investigators would logically see as a roadmap to finding and nailing the criminals the Republicans saw as a roadmap to protecting the criminals and nailing the people who were calling in the crime. And once the FBI took the warnings seriously they began discrediting the FBI.

The Republicans seem determined to arrest and prosecute people who are doing their civic duty to help protect our democracy from a foreign enemy... (Mr. Pence's Bible names False Witness as one of the ten gravest offenses against God.) How can being a good citizen be criminal or anything less than patriotic? But to listen to Jim Jordan and Chuck Grassley and Devin Nunes and others you would think testifying honestly about a dangerous crime you’ve witnessed is itself a crime. To listen to Republicans you would think the professional lawmen and women in the FBI were dangerous career criminals. (President Trump accuses law enforcement of crimes and accepts the reassurances of Vladimir Putin, one of the planet's most successful criminals.)

Imagine friends learned of organized criminal activity in your neighborhood and notified your elected officials and law enforcement. The law officers begin an investigation but the elected officials (Republicans) do everything they can to discredit the investigation and protect the criminals, using the evidence not as a guide to finding the criminals but a guide to help the criminals find the witnesses, your friends, and shut them up––the way criminals shut witnesses up, permanently.

How many key witnesses against Putin have died mysteriously in the months since this story began to break? We reasonably suspect the Russians are behind some or all of the mysterious deaths. We might ask: Are the Republicans also helping find and terminate or at least intimidate witnesses? Are the Republicans supplying a handy roadmap for the lawbreakers to help them cover up the evidence and derail the enforcement of our laws?

Why would they do this? It seems improbable that a major political party would actively collude with a foreign enemy, but until last year it was improbable that a major political party would nominate, run, and elect a president who our intelligence agencies and the FBI suspect might be in bed with the Russians. This improbability has been a useful cloak for what happened, the way a con man's plausibility and confidence and his nice suits and his nice offices and top public relations staff help to cloak his real business. People need to ask how genuine someone is before they hand him the keys and the nuclear codes. This is called Due Diligence and the Republicans failed to do it.

Now that they are implicated, and they are implicated beyond being plain fools, they must rearrange their mindset to justify what they have done. Republicans who once criticized Trump now praise him and protect him. Why? They have to decriminalize the dodgy things they've done ("That was his job," "Everybody would do the same thing.") They have to decriminalize the criminals they've thrown in with, and then criminalize the responsible behavior of their accusers. They need to make their treason into patriotism. Their accusers, who've done the Paul Revere bit by warning about the foreign threat, they have to recast as traitors.

The Republicans have realigned their policies and strategies and talking points to match their captors'. If you write down a list of Trump's achievements and the Republicans' achievements of the past year they could serve as a wish list for any of America's foreign rivals. Splitting alliances: check. Hollowing out America's global diplomacy: check. Alienating America's allies: check. Debasing America's standing in the world (in many western nations America's poll numbers have declined by as much as 70%): check. Cast doubt on the soundness of the dollar by loading the budget with large unnecessary debt as far as the eye can see (not to secure the prosperity of working Americans but to enrich offshore billionaires): check. Worst of all, perhaps, has been Trump's abandonment of the Paris Accords on climate change; climate change being listed as the #1 threat to American national security by the Pentagon and other agencies whose job it is to warn and prepare for threats. Check. The Republicans and the Russians appear to be working from the same set of plans to do the same kinds of harm to our country. Why would they do this? I've suggested two possible reasons: Blackmail and Bribery.

Putin is reputed to be the richest individual in the world. Most of that wealth having been looted from his own country. Putin placed these billions offshore in more covert ways than the ways American billionaires offshore their wealth. It appears Trump may have been one of his money launderers. But offshore billionaires do have shared interests and goals. This collusion would work like bribery but disguised as shared goals, shared values, simply doing business: there's so much money coming from Russia how can a rich person refuse to accept it when it's offered? Afterwards it would work like blackmail once the transactions became known and began to stink.

Regarding the Russian hacking of public comments on net neutrality and Wall Street fairness: it appears Republicans and Russian mobsters have matching agendas on these issues as well. An internet rigged to favor the very wealthy (and no one is richer than Putin) is easier for the Russians to hack. Unfair wealth markets are easier for the rich both Russian and Republican, to profit from by making the unrich easier prey. Both Rs, the Russians and the Republicans, are working against our national interests, so Americans need to be informed. Newspapers and all journalists need to report it. Connect the dots. Follow the money.

Trump May Have Put Us All Into The Cornfield

Peeksville, Ohio? Anybody been there? Anybody heard of the place?

What about Anthony Fremont? Maybe we forgot.

I keep seeing articles that remind me of Peeksville and Anthony. For instance the articles telling us how the Wall Street Journal couldn't allow its reporters to report unpleasant stories about Donald Trump, so they delayed them, and shelved them, and quietly sent the writer into the cold. The unpleasant reporting that was never published was in a carefully researched article about Trump's longtime mob connections. But reporting that would have made Donald Trump angry. And making Trump angry is a bad thing. So it wasn't reported or commented on. But the message was received. The staff at the Journal received the message loud and clear.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that employees comprehend the messages their bosses are sending... is it?

New York Magazine is reporting that five staffers at the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (which is already significantly to the right of the more objective news pages) have left in recent weeks, pushing the right wing WSJ voice from Hard Right to the Obedient Right...

But that's a good thing, isn't it? That's a VERY good thing... (Does that ring any distant bells?)

The Obedient Right is the part of the political spectrum that lives in Trump's pocket, who in turn lives in Putin's pocket. Is it safe to discuss who controls whom? Or who is whose puppet? The president has denied it but most people can see the strings if they look carefully at all. Maybe it's safest to just smile and say it's a very good thing.

There was a major tax bill passed by Congress late Wednesday night. Not a lot of Americans know what's in it because Republicans kept it a secret. A lot of them voted for it anyway because they knew what was good for them, and also what would be bad for them. But that too is a good thing, isn't it?

Then on Thursday there was a ceremony on the White House lawn (which these days feels like it is located right in Peeksville, Ohio) where President Trump* bragged about how wonderful the tax bill was, how it was a very good thing to give many billions of dollars of public money to billionaires, and how that holiday generosity would be a very good thing for regular Americans who work for a living.

Then different Republican members of Congress got up and also said it was a very good thing to give billions to billionaires. They didn't say that it was good to take healthcare away from children but they obviously felt good about it, so the atmosphere was very merry all around. Nobody said a discouraging word. They also said Donald Trump was a very good president. Orrin Hatch said Donald Trump was going to be possibly the very very best president America has ever had, and everyone there seemed to agree.

Earlier, inside the White House, there was a meeting of the cabinet. I'd say it was an unusual meeting except it's already happened like this at least once. The agenda of the meeting began with prayers. But they were unusual prayers. The president went around the table and invited his vice president and his cabinet members to take turns offering prayers to him, thanking him for being so wonderful and talking about how his presidency was a very good thing. Saying it out loud to cameras was also a very good thing, wasn't it? (John Cassidy wrote about it in The New Yorker)

Because Good is the opposite of Bad, just as very good is the opposite of very bad, and it's never a good thing to have to send someone into the cornfield, to borrow a phrase they use in Peeksville, Ohio.

Why is it so dangerous to say things about the president that he dislikes? People always say bad things about presidents. Just think of all the really awful things Republicans said about President Obama. But President Obama didn't do bad things to people just because they criticized him or maligned him or lied about him. That's because President Obama wasn't an angry child. Which is one of the reasons I can say "President Obama" without adding an asterisk.

Of course, in the current climate it's probably safest to say it's a very good thing to have an angry child as our president. Actually it's safest to not mention his childishness at all because being childish is irrelevant because he has extraordinary powers, very much like the powers of Anthony Fremont of Peeksville, Ohio. Safest because he seems inclined to use those powers against anyone who makes him angry, which is what Anthony Fremont did when anyone made him uncomfortable. But Anthony Fremont was a little boy and Donald Trump is really a grown up man; he just acts like a little boy. We don't generally give little boys extraordinary powers but what can I say? It's a good thing we did. it's a very good thing.

Anthony Fremont lived in Peeksville, Ohio, which isn't on any maps of the state because it's located in the Twilight Zone.

Anthony Fremont : No kids came over to play with me today, not a single one, and I wanted someone to play with!

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you remember the last time some kids came over to play. The little Fredricks boy and his sister.

Anthony Fremont : I had a real good time.

Mr. Fremont : Oh, sure you did, you had a real good time, and it's good that you had a good time, it's real good. It's, uh, just that...

Anthony Fremont : Just that what?

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you, uh, you wished them away into the cornfield. Their mommy and daddy were real upset.

I remember watching that episode on our old black and white TV. It scared the hell out of me to watch grown men and women behaving like this. Lying cravenly. Catering to this child's evil whims like sorry, pathetic cowards, which most Americans didn't feel like in that decade. As if this little boy was a god or something. But he was a god. The evil sort. He had extraordinary powers.

It creeped me out watching the grown ups smile falsely and talk so carefully and fearfully around this malevolent little boy, flattering him, praising him even when he'd murdered his playmates or one of the adults. Because I was a kid myself it was disturbing to watch the framework of what is right and what is wrong twisted so violently by the adults who lived with Anthony, always with a smile and a soft, kind voice because they all hoped to go on living.

Why didn't they fix this? Why didn't they assert their moral authority? They outnumbered him. They were bigger than he was.

The scariest moment came when one of the adults got fed up and told the truth...

Dan Hollis : You monster, you. You dirty little monster. You murderer. You think about me. Go ahead, Anthony. You think bad thoughts about me. And maybe some man in this room, some man with guts, somebody who's so sick to death of living in a place like this, and is willing to take a chance, will sneak up behind you and lay something heavy across your skull, and end this once and for all...

Anthony Fremont : You're a bad man! You're a very bad man!

Dan Hollis : You think that. Go ahead, Anthony. I'm a very bad man! Keep thinking that! Somebody sneak up behind him! Somebody end this now while he's thinking about me! Won't somebody take a lamp or a bottle or something and END THIS?

Anthony didn't send him into the cornfield immediately; first he tortured him, and us, and the adults all around him. He turned this "bad man" into a jack-in-the-box with his head stuck on the end of the bouncing spring. Then the other adults begged him to send the deceased adult into the cornfield. Then they all told him what a good thing it was that he had done.

We are being terrorized by a malevolent child with extraordinary powers. Which is an evil thing. It's not a good thing, it is the opposite. Why doesn't someone do something? It doesn't need to be something violent. We have legal remedies. At least we still did last time I looked. Is it too late for that? I don't think so, but maybe.

Because it isn't just Trump. Sometimes I see Anthony Fremont's smug evil in the smiling face of Paul Ryan. I see enraged faces on FoxNews that suggest the president isn't alone wishing the rest of us into the cornfield.

And I know that Mike Pence would be the first to declare that it was a very good thing if Donald Trump actually acted out one of his fantasies and shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue or Pennsylvania Avenue. Other members of the house are egging Trump on and threatening his critics. Jim Jordan, the congressman who doesn't own a suit coat, is one. He's from Ohio; is Peeksville located in his district? None of the adults in this episode of Twilight Zone were actively on Anthony's side, they were simply craven and afraid, afraid of evil and the evil that would happen to them if they acted like adults. That is its own kind of evil and we see it in Congress today, but we see a worse kind, a less passive kind, the kind that doesn't just close its eyes to atrocities but puts on the uniform and carries them out.

I see various kinds of evil in the smiling faces of the Republicans who praise Trump. Passive and overt, cowardly and bold, calculating and hypnotized. I see a genuine evil in the Republicans who every week, every day, turn on the rest of us who count on a moral authority, and on the moral rightness of things, to praise what he is doing and threatening to do and abandoning the innocent Americans he is doing these things to. The Republicans who are working every day to take Robert Mueller and the professionals at the FBI, and our security services who keep us safe from foreign enemies, and the professionals who work in areas of science and healthcare and justice, who regulate industry to keep poisons out of the water and the air, and teachers and university professors and social workers and people of color and abused women and wish them into the cornfield.

The Twilight Zone episode titled "It's a Good Life" was terrifying to watch because it was more real than Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm. It was real people in a real place. It was familiar. The idea was to shiver and enjoy the momentary fear of it, knowing it would never happen here. But now it has.

The GOP Has Begun To Act Like A Criminal Syndicate

The style and concern demonstrated by the law enforcement pros going after the Russian election began looking like a RICO investigation quite a while ago. There has been an historic deference toward major political parties and politicians because there were accepted norms, but the norms were violated decades ago. It’s been Republican administrations who have violated the law, and they’ve done it in broad and aggressive ways; look at Watergate; look at Iran Contra.

Perhaps the deference remained so long because so many law enforcement professionals are registered Republicans or at least express conservative values. That deference has been insulted for decades. So many of the FBI’s and other law enforcement investigations have been directed at the major financial crimes enabled by the legal latitudes given to major financial criminals by Republican legislation; these professionals have to feel insulted and demoralized that the Republicans not only ensure that violent criminals have easy access to more weapons but also that major financial crooks have easy ways of evading justice. Not only have the Republicans enabled major crime but they and their allies and operatives have begun to resemble major criminal organizations. Which may be why we are hearing more discussion of RICO strategies being used by the various investigations into the Russian election hack to put Trump in office. (Trump has been cozy with criminal gangs his whole career. No doubt he feels very much at home.)

Now the efforts to neutralize criminal investigations is being pushed and directed by White House appointees. This is one of the abuses of power that forced Nixon from office: his willingness to handicap our national security and investigative agencies in order to keep himself in power.

Has the White House neutered our counterintelligence agencies to protect Putin and Trump and the Republican Party? Is there more concern for their own Republican security than National Security? (Note NYMag story below on how the GOP keeps redirecting investigations away from Russia and Trump.)

This from Lawfareblog:

"Pompeo is not the first politician to lead the CIA, but his relentless brand of politics and close ties to Trump have led to fears that he cannot remain impartial about the Russia probe. In particular, critics worry that he will inhibit the work of the Agency’s Mission Center for Counterintelligence, which may possess damaging information about Russia’s role in last year’s election. The Center is the Agency’s hub for tracking foreign intelligence efforts in the United States, and according to the Post, a conduit to the FBI. Pompeo reportedly ordered the Center to report to him directly, which makes sense given his commitment to track down leakers and the sensitivity of the issue. But some within the Agency worry that he could use his position to discourage it from pursuing the investigation at all.”

Did the White House settle a big Russia case in NY to protect Putin and Trump? Is this why they decided to fire Preet Bharara?

This reported by BusinessInsider:

"Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected attorney in an attempt to obtain information 'that would incriminate Hillary,'" the Democrats wrote, citing the emails he published. "Earlier this year, on May 12, 2017, the Department of Justice made an abrupt decision to settle a money laundering case being handled by that same attorney in the Southern District of New York.

"We write with some concern that the two events may be connected — and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts."

The Prevezon case garnered high-profile attention, given its ties to a $230 million Russian tax-fraud scheme and the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose suspicious death aroused international media attention and spurred the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Denis Katsyv and Veselnitskaya have become the face of Moscow's lobbying efforts against the Magnitsky Act in recent years.

Democrats now want to know whether Veselnitskaya was "involved at any point in the settlement negotiations," and they have asked Sessions to provide the committee "with the prosecution files and any other explanatory materials related to the settlement."


It appears Facebook created a huge and powerful weapon and made it available for use by the Russians––or anyone who wanted to corrupt our democracy. The only thing FB cared about was whether the trolls and bots and foreign spies and domestic fascists and racists paid for everything they wanted FB to do.

This, again, from BusinessInsider:

FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly obtained a search warrant for records of the "inauthentic" accounts Facebook shut down earlier this month and the targeted ads these accounts purchased during the 2016 election.

The warrant was first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on Friday night and the news was later confirmed by CNN.

Legal experts say the revelation has enormous implications for the trajectory of Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference, and whether Moscow had any help from President Donald Trump's campaign team.

"This is big news — and potentially bad news for the Russian election interference 'deniers,'" said Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to aim law enforcement back at the people who reported the crime and putting our counterintelligence agencies to work protecting and assisting the Russian spy agencies. Remember when Trump announced a plan to team up with Russia to find out the truth? It begins to appear the entire Republican apparatus is with the Russians.

From NYMagazine

Donald Trump’s Republican allies have always sought to discredit the Russia investigation by going on offense. (It’s impossible to defend a president who’s constantly beset by written emails by his associates accepting invitations from Russians offering election help and cackling “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” and other comically incriminating revelations.) Their first attempt at offense focused on Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, who Republicans spent days attacking as a sinister “unmasker,” until the charges against Rice quietly collapsed earlier this month.

They have found a new target: the famous dossier on Donald Trump compiled by British intelligence agent turned private investigator Christopher Steele, which they hope to use to discredit former FBI director James Comey.


If Trump is removed from office, Pence becomes president. Mike Pence, Trump’s wingman. Mike Pence, Trump’s solid defender and helpful liar. Pence has his own Russia problems, beginning with his saying last summer that Putin is “inarguably a better leader than Obama.” For Pence, the Russian dictator is “inarguably” preferable to an elected U.S. president of the other party (and a different race.)

From Bill Moyers: a timeline of Pence's culpability

Newsweek describes VP Pence's adjacence to worst things Trump people are alleged to have done.

While Pence and his office keep evading questions, his only defense appears to be cluelessness. That appears unlikely.

A White House Run By Remote Control

New from the Daily Beast: an article about National Security Advisor McMaster's efforts to rid the White House of a dangerous infestation. It started me thinking.

Imagine a personal enemy had a remote control device so he could get you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, like walking up to a stranger and picking a fight or phoning your most important friend and accusing him of things, destroying the friendship, or behaving irrationally in public causing a loss of confidence and trust.

I worry that Russia has a whole array of remote control devices they’ve implanted in our collective brain, in our national Republican leadership, in our White House, and implanted by White House appointment in various other top strategic posts.

Reading this DailyBeast article this morning suggests this concern may be shared by some of the national security professionals, including General McMaster, who is trying to remove people put in place by General Michael Flynn, who was himself removed once his ties to Russia were revealed. What ties might Flynn’s appointees have with Russia, or with Russian proxies? How did these White House officials land where they did? Who put them there? Who are they loyal to? Who pulls their strings? People being manipulated from outside should not get into top White House posts.

There is a lot we don’t know, but we are the public, it’s not our job to know. We trust the government to do this. The vetting and clearing of key national security appointees is a serious task, and it appears that it was not done fully and responsibly. Who was in charge of this? Who ran the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration? Whose job was it to check the new people out? That means not accepting the word of some friend of the president who gave a million dollars or was hired to run his campaign. Several people ran Trump’s campaign. One of them is now the focus of a grand jury investigation, possibly two, as is the former general who was Trump’s global strategic mastermind. Who vetted these people? Nobody, apparently. They came in on the nod.

The person charged with taking resumés and deciding who filled what role in the new administration was Vice President Mike Pence. Pence has spent the past year looking interviewers in the eye and praising the expertise and trustworthiness and honesty of the president and everyone around him, and the president and staff have mostly turned out to be dishonest, non-expert stumblebums no sane person would trust with anything. (This embarrassing incompetence may be separate from the apparent manipulation by the Russians, but they might be part of the same thing. One thing the Russians would like is for us to malfunction. We are malfunctioning in a major way now.)

Mike Pence is like the upright, square-jawed, white haired, cardboard figure we've seen in hundreds of corruption scandals, the handsome plausible stooge the crooks put in place to mollify the shareholders while they loot the operation. The role President Warren G. Harding served during the Teapot Dome Scandal.

There are indications that Pence is being positioned as the hero who will ride in and replace Trump when he resigns or is removed. He’s been touring our eastern European allies reassuring them that the U.S. is not as unreliable as President Trump is. However disastrous Trump has been for our alliances and our global security, Pence has been part of that, enabling him, defending him, fending off questions which should have been answered months ago but weren’t because the Republican Party in control, if they didn’t feel entirely comfortable with Trump, did feel comfortable with Mike Pence, the plausible white-haired square-jawed cardboard former governor who stumbled out of that job into this one because nobody else wanted it.

Does the White House have a dangerous rat infestation? Maybe the word mole should be used here instead. Echoes of LeCarré novels and the Burgess/Philby/McClean/Blunt/Blake infestation the Brits didn’t figure out for decades. The Brits also had a serious vetting flaw. I can hear Pence saying the same thing about the applicants for various jobs in the White House security staff: “He’s O.K. He’s 'one of us.’”

There are those who trust Mike Pence to deal with any succession plan like he dealt with the serious work of vetting the Trump team. I’m guessing Pence did this by praying about it. Praying didn’t work so well. And I don’t think you can pray away an infestation like the one they’ve set in place. First of all, moles pray to a different god entirely.

The mindset of the entire Republican apparatus in Washington has been the old familiar one that always fails: If they ignore it and keep people from mentioning it, maybe the problem will just go away. Rather than expending any diligent effort on it, they pray over it. But it won’t work. Trump and his GOP have made the U.S. unreliable and unlikable and a laughingstock around the world. If an enemy of ours had implanted a remote control device to make our government malfunction they probably hoped it would turn out this way but they didn’t expect it to turn out so well.

Putin's Useful Idiot

Then this happened.

First the Washington Post broke the story about how Trump blurted out top top secret national security information in a meeting with the Russians. Then others verified the story. Buzzfeed, then Reuters, and others.

Here’s some useful analysis of what it might mean, the harm it has done. From The Atlantic.

The blindly loyal Republican chain-of-command is full of enablers and explainers. The line of succession is full of them: Pence, Ryan, and down the line, all bound by ties of loyalty and fealty to Trump as Trump appears to be bound to Putin and our worst global enemy. The Republican Party is like malware that has infected and corrupted our democratic systems and put our security at risk.

"When history holds its trial to account for the Donald Trump presidency, Trump himself will be acquitted on grounds of madness. History will look at his behavior, his erratic and childish lying and his flamboyant ignorance of history itself and pronounce the man, like George III, a cuckoo for whom restraint, but not punishment, was necessary. Such will not be the case for Mike Pence, the toady vice president and the personification of much that has gone wrong in Washington.”

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post and NYDailyNews.

The club of Trump enablers includes many talking heads in the news media. One of them being Mara Liasson, a terrific normalizer of the abnormal. There was this exchange recently on NPR:

Garcia-Navarro: What about the left? I see a whole political spectrum mobilized by Comey's firing. You know, you look on social media and cable news, they're calling for Trump's impeachment. What do you think when you hear calls like that? Is it feasible?

Liasson: No. I don't. I think there's a lot of magical thinking on both ends of the political spectrum. You know, his supporters think he's rewritten the rules, and they'll tell me, “It doesn't matter what he does, it doesn't matter what his approval ratings are.” Remember during the campaign he said he could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. On the left, I think they are in the grip—many people, critics of him—are in the grip of this delusion that he's going to be impeached, or that we're in a full-fledged constitutional crisis. So this is a phenomenon of our very tribalized politics. (Shared by blogger Erik Lundegaard)

We’ve been doing various kinds of magical thinking. On the right and in business circles they’ve been imagining magical ways this might turn out all right, how making a nincompoop/criminal/traitor president might benefit them personally. This is the default of many Americans: "This might not hurt me. How can I profit from this?” Millions of Germans went along with the Nuremberg Laws that confiscated property, positions, businesses and finally gold fillings from the mouths of Jews because it didn’t hurt them personally and they actually profited from it by accepting their share of the confiscations.

Republicans are cynically calculating how much they can confiscate from the American economy and from working Americans before this White House drops us in the soup. The White House has been dropping us in the soup for 100+ days now and most of what we hear from the Republicans is about how nice and warm the soup feels and how nourishing it is.

Sometimes you need a lawyer to sort the sense from the nonsense in the damage control pronouncements the White House makes on a daily basis. Yesterday’s bombshell had officials of ascending importance marching out of the White House to try to discredit and deflect and spin the catastrophic news story. Just like the bogus “certified letter” that Trump’s Russian lawyer wrote to say "he had not had relations with that Russian”, the letter and these announcements certified nothing and said nothing. From LawFare Blog

Conservative icons like David Brooks and Erick Erickson and The Economist are beginning to shout fire. It’s a shame they waited this long, but of course they were calculating how they might profit from President Trump and the damage he was bound to do, assuming the damage wouldn’t be to them personally. Because what damages others might wind up being personally very profitable. (Tax cuts. Deregulation. Big spending aimed at profiting loyal Republicans.)

The Economist compares the Trump White House to a medieval court.

The useful idiot explanation is the least incriminating one Trump’s enablers can offer and White House insiders are suggesting that is the case. We don’t have a Chief Executive at the helm of our executive branch, we have a clown, a naif, a fool, a useful idiot. Republicans thought he would be useful to them, but mostly it appears he is useful to Russia and Russian mobsters and probably a coterie of American criminal counterparts.

From Politico:

“…Several advisers and others close to Trump said they wouldn't be surprised if Trump gave information he shouldn't have. One adviser who often speaks to the president said the conversation was likely freewheeling in the Oval Office, and he probably wanted to impress the officials."
"He doesn't really know any boundaries. He doesn't think in those terms," this adviser said. "He doesn't sometimes realize the implications of what he's saying. I don't think it was his intention in any way to share any classified information. He wouldn't want to do that."

Some of the White House staff play a game where they troll the president, playing tricks on him to see how gullible he is. They are constantly amused. He is very very gullible.

Politico on Trump's suppliers of fake news.

But who’s laughing?

Look at the photos the Russian spy agency photographers provided from inside the Oval Office meeting. The meeting American journalists were barred from. They show Trump, red-faced and bloated, laughing with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador, both known intelligence operatives at a high level, but are the Russians laughing with him or at him? Or at us?

Trump has in just over 100 days not only compromised our national security and turned the White House into a chaotic mess, but he has made us a global laughingstock.

Eight years ago President Obama had managed to steady a collapsing U.S. and global economy. He was admired by the world. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize. Not only was Obama admired, we were admired. I miss that. I don’t like being made a fool of but many conservatives are comfortable with that.

There's a phrase from WW2. Everybody's heard it. "Loose lips sink ships." The concern was that a GI or a dock worker or a worker in a munitions factory or a clerk would get talking in a bar and get the urge to brag about how important they were. Knowing something other people don't know makes little people feel important, so they brag. There were instances during WW2 when loose lips did sink ships. This sort of foolish pathetic treason was never the sort of thing that occurred in the Oval Office. We never had to worry that the sad, boastful, little person was the President of the United States.

The Triumph of Make Believe

“Lying” is such an ugly word. We are told not to say “The Republicans won by lying.” Even if it’s true (and fact checkers say it is) it’s so unpleasant.

Let’s say it another way. Republicans are very good at Magical Thinking. (Prime example: Trickle Down Economics) They won by Pretending. They have ushered in a new era of Make Believe.

The first bit of Let’s Pretend that turned this election cycle was when Chief Justice John Roberts announced that racism and prejudice was over and done with in the South where it had been so bad that (at least in some history books) white people owned black people as slaves. After slavery went away white Southerners spent another hundred years keeping their black brothers and sisters down by not letting them vote or sit at soda fountains or work at various jobs or walk on a sidewalk a white woman might want to use. An ugly time… if you believe those darn history books. But that was over and done, said John Roberts. So it was with joy and pride that he announced the Voting Rights Act no longer needed to be upheld in the South. No more protection of black and minority voters was necessary. Hurrah! He said it with such a convincing smile a lot of people applauded.

The response was immediate. Republicans quickly and gleefully reinstated exactly the kind of voter suppression laws that the Voting Rights Act’s supervision had prevented. Some even boasted about the achievement. Job done. The Chief Justice is very good at Make Believe and didn’t even notice the mockery of what he had said. Maybe someone close to him saw him wink.

PBS/Frontline reported the rapid surge in voter suppression that followed this Supreme Court ruling. As did ProPublica and McClatchy news service. The fair and reliable framework for our democracy was sent back into the kind of corruptions that existed during Jim Crow.

This voter suppression is not confined to the South, though it’s history is more outrageous there. Northern states Republicans have been emboldened by the Supreme Court to propose cynical, racist and antidemocratic laws in many states. They’re on the books in some key swing states. One of their tricks is to demand all voters purchase a special photo ID and then to make it hard to obtain them, placing the ID centers far from historically black or Democratic areas. A conservative judge skilled at Make Believe can pretend that none of this has anything to do with bigotry or Republican bias and the laws remain. In Wisconsin it’s estimated that 300,000 voters were barred from voting by not being able to produce the magic ID or having their ID challenged. Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes adding to his Electoral College total.

This was reported by a Wisconsin NBC affiliate.

Did this make the difference? Several reliable sources say No, it was not the deciding factor. (VOX, who I cite very often is one of these.) That the suppressed voter was less likely to vote anyway. I point out that the surge among the rural Republican voters was also unlikely. Who would have expected devout rural people and respectable suburbanites to vote for a man who boasts of groping women, who mocks the handicapped, who encourages mob violence, a man who faces charges this month of defrauding thousands of ordinary people like themselves? It required magical thinking.

I suspect that a clear public rejection of one candidate’s lies and bigotry would help suppress his turnout even among people who believed the lies and the bigotry. That did not happen this year. For most of the year mass media broadcast hours and hours of Donald Trump’s outright lies… excuse me, Make Believe… and his downright bigotry without comment or criticism. While they were giving free air time to this ugly demagogue they were aggressively reporting the endless investigation of unsubstantiated charges against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Those two factors gave Trump a major updraft and Hillary a major downdraft. It was not enough to explain what happened but it contributed to it, it gave it a boost.

We look to our news media for truth. When they promote Make Believe and give lengthy air time to bogus accusations they make us doubt what is real. They make us more receptive to Magical Thinking and Make Believe. (And Lies.)

Donald Trump’s entire career has been flim-flam. When he had catastrophic setbacks in real estate he turned to what’s called Reality TV. Reality TV is not reality at all. It is Make Believe. But it’s label is persuasive. The networks broadcasting it knows it is a total fabrication, a lie, but it is good for ratings and good for profits. If you promote falsehood as truth, truth is degraded and falsehood becomes part of conventional thinking. Here I could go into the teachings of Joseph Goebbels on this topic, the uses and execution of the Big Lie, but conventional thinking has barred that from any modern day discussion. Supposedly because Trump voters are not wearing brown shirts while attacking Jews and immigrants and people of color they are not the same as Hitler’s mob. Hitler is He Who Must Not Be Named. We mustn’t speak of these things. They are history and nobody cares about history anymore. Pretend those things didn’t happen. It makes it easier to pretend they won’t happen again.

But let’s get back to Make Believe.

Let’s pretend for a minute that Donald Trump is a Man of the People. That has been the media narrative, and you know how authentic that is. His followers have spent the past year believing this myth. The Man of the People is a man who lives in marble halls with gilt furniture and large oil paintings of himself in gilt frames. (Hillary’s credibility has been endlessly attacked because she sides with working class interests from an expensive home in Westchester. Trump doesn’t pretend to embrace the laboring classes at all. (He’s famously phobic about touching regular people unless they are sufficiently young, female and “hot”.) He does not embrace their interests. He only embraces their resentments and hatreds. He is an America First hero who builds his exclusive towers with imported steel and imports his flash neckties and Trump label suits from Mexico. He refuses to pay the builders and tradesmen he hires to do work on his properties. He is bogus from his ludicrous hair to the manicured fingernails on his tiny hands. He has contempt for the working classes and their mundane unglamorous lives. But he does voice their anger. He has replanted the idea that outright bigotry is OK and All American, a sad notion that many in the working classes are receptive to. The bogus reality star has legitimized our ugliest tendencies and television has turned him into a hero. We spent a century and a half since Lincoln slowly repudiating this lie of white superiority and in one election year Trump has relegitimized it, with the eager collaboration of popular media. It’s ironic that such an inferior specimen is now the show pony of white supremacy. He isn’t even white, he’s orange.

So Donald Trump is a make believe business success, a make believe Man of the People. The picture we have of him is a television fairy tale. He is a creature of the media he pretends to despise. But we are here. The package has arrived. We have opened it. No returns allowed. Does it belong to us, or do we belong to it?

I won’t spend a lot of time sorting out the empty promises he’s made. He’s already walked back some of them. The wall he promised to build was another piece of make believe. The swamp of lobbyist influence he promised to drain he is now stocking with more lobbyists, ones who owed their new status to him. He only pretended to want to end the influence of the big bankers. They are now in his posse.

The most dangerous promise he made remains. He said he’d end all efforts to combat Climate Change, because he says Climate Change is a Chinese hoax, and his transition and cabinet have a strong odor of oil and coal, not mine workers or oil field workers but lobbyists and PR geniuses. The authors of Big Oil’s successful campaign to discredit the science are all for Trump because they know his millions of devotees will believe whatever they say. We have come to a dangerous point in our history when the most powerful person in our nation is a con man, facing significant indictment this month for a massive fraud related to his bogus Trump University scheme, and the scientists, the people we trust to find out the essential truths about our world, are accused of fraud. And the news media collaborated with this inversion by giving his falsehoods equal credence and equal time. The fact checking sites found her statements mostly honest (are any of us completely honest?) and Trump’s mostly false, and mostly very very false. He thinks science is bunk. Millions of his followers who presumably passed their science classes in schools have now endorsed this dangerous idea. They cannot pretend they haven’t. So millions of others who didn’t really know or don’t fully understand are now convinced that science is something we vote on. That it isn’t true if we decide to not believe it.

Science doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It will happen whether we believe it or not.

We may think we are hostages to Trump now. But Trump has made us hostages to the horrible scientific consequences that are now going to unfold. We could have wished Trump away by voting more emphatically against him, by not trusting the cozy belief that Americans would reject something like this without every single person voting against it. But we cannot keep climate change from unfolding unless we enact and keep in place key policies which Trump has promised to oppose and reverse. This is an insane kind of make believe. Like a person who steps out of a 15 story window believing he can fly, or that angels will rescue him.

As delusions go this is not as much of an outlier as you might think. There are millions of devout right wing Christians who honestly believe that if we screw up this planet badly enough that Jesus will come. They long for this to happen.

This was reported recently in The Atlantic.

We pass these people on the street and they seem like other people we know, until they begin to discuss their beliefs. Stepping politely away from them is the safest social response but it is not going to keep us safe from the final ascension of their kind to power. Donald Trump is not a churchgoing religious zealot but his Vice President is. Mike Pence is an intense believer in Christian fairy tales and magical thinking. He not only believes the proven climate science is a hoax, he believes that the whole science of evolution from Darwin to the present day is a hoax and a lie. (In terms of ethics and morals, the New Testament is a very useful and humane document, but the superChristians evade the humane elements and prefer the more dubiously interpreted bits, the ones that provoked holy wars and inquisitions down through the Christian era. The Biblical fragments that seem to endorse slavery and oppression of women seem particularly popular among superChristians.) Mike Pence firmly believes the earth is exactly as old as the Bible says it is and that everything that is in the Bible happened exactly as written. He does not like to go into the hundreds of huge contradictions in the Bible any more than he likes to address Trump’s own almost daily contradictions because he is a Man of Faith. To him science is myth and the Bible is fact. If scientific evidence is worth anything at all today he is evidence that we have returned to the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, before Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Crick. The Nazis burned thousands of books in their era. In our era we don’t need to burn them because the vast majority of people aren’t aware that books exist, except the one they clutch on Sunday. They have made us a near twin of the Sharia Law extremist Islam they profess to despise. Anti-modern, anti-toleration, out of the reach of questions and proofs.

Kids used to play a particular game of Make Believe. “Let’s pretend Diane doesn’t exist,” they’d say, and Diane would find people she knew walking past her in the school hallway and not hearing the things she said. It was a fun game and very popular. Kids were very good at it in junior high and then outgrew it. Gay teenagers experienced this in an earlier time, as did teenagers of color. Each new wave of immigrants experienced this, Italians, Swedes, Irish, eastern Europeans included. They were treated like they didn’t exist. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it disappear.

Recently, there was a woman in Montana interviewed by a reporter on NPR. She was opposed to the settling of Syrian and other refugees in Montana. The reporter asked her if this was racist. She replied that there couldn’t possibly be any racism in Montana because there weren’t any black people there. A GOP chairwoman in Ohio said to a reporter that there was no racism in this country until Obama became president. For millions of Americans this is absolutely true, because they believe it is true. If they never saw any other races they didn’t despise them. It was those other races coming within their range of vision that caused the racism, impinging on their lives, breathing white people’s air, walking on white people’s sidewalks and demanding to eat at their lunch counters. This uppityness is what caused racism. It wasn’t their fault. Racism was not their problem, it was the problem of the other races. The problem with this is that those other races are a majority of people on this earth and white people are a diminishing minority. This magical thinking about race is a dangerous self-deception but it is now the norm because the Trump presidency has validated it. It is very difficult to change people’s beliefs.

Mike Pence believes no one is born gay, despite the clear science on this. Mike Pence says science is bunk and his beliefs are true and he is the Vice President elect, and his frank, polite Indiana way of looking at you convinces you that he has no interest in hearing otherwise. He is firm in his bigotry. If Trump has as short an attention span as he has demonstrated up to now Mike Pence will be the acting president the way Dick Cheney was for eight years. And we know how well that went. At least Dick Cheney was able to understand the difference between science and fairy tales but he exploited this vulnerability in others. We are now led by a fake with no center and a true believer in magical thinking.

Was it our own magical thinking that allowed it to happen? At crucial moments in history the worst possible reaction is to doubt the science and the truth. The failure of the polling experts to predict the late Trump surge has undermined our trust in all experts. How did they fail to see this? They failed to see this outcome because they underestimated the likelihood that America might fall for nonsense this evident and this dangerous. They trusted us. In fact more Americans voted for science and honesty and trustworthiness than voted for fraud and deception and fairy tales. The fact that a lot of Americans were uncertain might be explained by the news media’s dangerous habit of always presenting both sides as equally true. As if it’s biased to say truth is more honest than falsehood or safety is no better than clear danger and enormous corruption is no worse than petty indiscretion. The American public was poorly served. We were delivered to this place. Magical thinkers believe we can shape things to suit our private fantasies, but the universe doesn't care about our private fantasies. We may soon reach a point where mankind cannot walk back the harm we have done. The scientists do not deal in fairy tales, and they have warned us. Covering our ears and chanting USA! USA! or Trump! Trump! Trump! will not keep the oceans from flooding our ports and shorelines. Prayer will not keep the crop growing regions we depend on for food from drying up or washing away or civilization from collapsing around us. If you believe in the teachings of the Bible, heed the part where we are instructed to be good stewards of this creation, to choose truth over lies, to oppose bullies and aid the poor in their struggles rather than falling in with the rich. Over thousands of years our wisest teachers have taught us what to do, how to make wise humane choices, and we seem poised to do the opposite.