Category Politics

Hey America—Russia attacked you, why don’t you care?

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

If we can put aside, for a moment, the question of Trump campaign cooperation with agents of or working for the government of Russia to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, we are left with this undeniable fact: the government of Russia waged an on-going attack on the United States to influence the outcome of that election.

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office.

(snip)

“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”

I say “undeniable” despite the fact that our president denies the findings of our own nation’s intelligence services, and those of every other honest broker of information out there; none of that is not good enough to satisfy the Crybaby in Chief when he feels dissed.  Now, the Washington Post reports on research being delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee that states plainly the evidence leading to the conclusion that the Russians worked against Hillary Clinton.

The report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House. Democrats and Republicans on the panel previously studied the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 finding that Moscow aimed to assist Trump, and in July, they said investigators had come to the correct conclusion. Despite their work, some Republicans on Capitol Hill continue to doubt the nature of Russia’s interference in the last presidential election.

[Sen. Mark] Warner said the reports should serve as “a wake up call,” resulting in “some much-needed and long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media.” [Sen. Richard] Burr said the reports are “proof positive that one of the most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyze them.”

The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups — Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans — got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

Even if—if—no one in the Trump campaign was in on the deal, or encouraged it or cooperated with it in any way at all, or even said a small silent prayer to their god that the Russian actions would help their guy win, we are left with this: the Russian attacked America.  And they had help.

I don’t mean Wikileaks, although it seemed to be in on the con, too.  I’m talking about the National Enquirer.  The same National Enquirer which just admitted in court documents that it helped Trump bury Karen McDougal’s story about the affair she claimed to have had with Trump (which he denies having had) so that it wouldn’t hurt him in the election was devoted to helping Trump throughout the campaign.  The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg put the Enquirer’s contribution in perspective.

The Enquirer’s racks, under the current chief, David J. Pecker, were given over to the Trump campaign. This was a political gift even more valuable than the $150,000 that The Enquirer paid in a “catch-and-kill” deal with the former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of an affair with Mr. Trump.

Wondering what The Enquirer’s covers were worth to the Trump campaign, I called Regis Maher, a co-founder of Do It Outdoors, the national mobile and digital billboard company. He said a campaign with that level of national prominence would cost $2.5 million to $3 million a month.

And like the payoff to McDougal, that could be looked at as another effective campaign contribution that Trump never reported, but we probably can’t avoid that being classified as “journalism,” sad to say.

Now that federal prosecutors have cleared away some of the fog that shrouded the 2016 campaign, it’s easy to see that The Enquirer was more than just a publication that puffed up Mr. Trump while going after his rivals.

It was the real-world embodiment of the fantasy online world of trolls, Russian and domestic, who polluted the political discourse. From its perches at Publix and Safeway, it was often doing the same job as Alex Jones, of the conspiracy site Infowars, and the more strident Trump campaign surrogates on Twitter and Facebook.

The Enquirer spread false stories about Hillary Clinton — illnesses concealed, child prostitution, bribery, treason. Each cover trumpeting these tales was arguably more powerful than a tweet from an account with millions of followers.

The Republicans who’ve been taking up space in the current Congress—the one that turned a blind eye to every crazy and questionable thing Trump has done and which may let parts of our government shut down at the end of the week for lack of funds since they can’t pass a budget—have proved plainly that they’re not concerned enough about a foreign attack on our country to take any action in response.  Sad…Republicans used to claim to be the party of a strong national defense.  In two and a half weeks we’ll see another party take control of the House of Representatives, and I’m putting those folks on the clock to show Russia and the rest of the world that the America that’s been sleeping the last two years is mad as hell and is not going to take this any more.

Almost halfway

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Two years…really?  Is that an eternity, or does it seem like no time at all?  It seems like…it seems like I’ve been on a merry-go-round that not only hasn’t slowed down in almost two years but occasionally cranks up to “dizzying,” and it feels like we all could use a rest.

Let’s see how smart I was two years ago (“Eyes Open, moving ahead” Nov. 11, 2016): I said, we owe it to the new president to give him a chance to perform in office, to get up to speed and be the best he can be and live up to the responsibilities of the office, blah blah blah…something like that.  I still think that was the only right attitude to take at the time; so, where are we now?

Well, the only real “important legislation” I can think of that this president has passed was the ill-considered December 2017 tax cut, and last month it was reported that it has contributed to the fact that today we have a $779 billion federal budget deficit, exactly the thing Republicans used to cry about—when Democrats were in power. (Now, not so much?  Nope; now, not at all.  E.J. Dionne likens today’s GOP “tax policy” to an artful scam pulled by some high-end grifters.)  Anything more recent?

BFD Trump (big freakin’ dealmaker), who campaigned on stopping the bleeding in the American car industry and promised to save the steel industry, has pretty much watched dumbfounded as there’s been no resurrection in steel and, this week, General Motors announced plans for plant closings and more than 14,000 layoffs to prepare for the future in sight of a present in which Trump tariffs have raised its costs.  (Yours and mine, too.)  And when he talked to the Wall Street Journal, long-time friend to Republican presidents, Trump demonstrated he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

(That extends beyond economics: he displayed the breadth of his ignorance warped view of the world when he talked to the Washington Post on several topics, including his pals in Russia and Saudi Arabia and his own Fed chairman.)

Thirteen federal government agencies released the latest report on the on-going investigation into climate change, in which they find many previously-predicted negative results of the climate changes that have already resulted from human activity are coming true and warn of “a profound threat to Americans’ well being.”  But Trump says he doesn’t believe the report, so, that’s that—nothing to worry about here, everybody, go about your business.

(Not so fast, conservatives: S.E. Cupp writes that it’s “both willfully ignorant and negligent not to acknowledge that there is in fact a scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and man is responsible for much of it” and suggests we get about doing something.)

Of course, there’s endless amusement in watching Trump twist helplessly in the wind waiting for another shoe to drop in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which has been moving along pretty briskly, thank you very much.  It just secured a second guilty plea from Trump’s former personal and business attorney, Michael Cohen, who now admits he lied to Congress about the ongoing effort of the Trump Organization to arrange a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow, an effort (he now concedes) that was still active even during the latter stages of the 2016 presidential campaign—a time during which the candidate himself repeatedly denied he had any business dealings with the Russian government or Russian businessmen, because, you know, people would have frowned at that.

(The Mueller investigation is not a witch hunt, unless you count as witches all the people on the list of “Trump people who have admitted criminal activity.”  Also, I read an interesting piece in Wired that argues the Mueller investigation could be close to an end, and has been leaving its conclusions strewn along the way in various court filings that no hack political appointee acting attorney general can ever hide from us even if he succeeds in firing Mueller himself.)

Wow.  And all of that…all of that is just some of what has happened in the past week.  Doesn’t even touch on the constant and inveterate lying from Trump and his press secretary and other subordinates and acolytes.  Gotta tell you, I know that what he says matters since he’s the president of the USA and all, but I don’t understand why anyone ever believes anything that comes out of his mouth.  He says what he wants to be true, or needs to be true, at the time he’s saying it; there’s seems to be no positive correlation between any statement made and discernible factual truth, nor any need even for niggling and inconvenient consistency between what he said today and anything he said before.  Ever.

I look forward to a beginning of some checks and balances of the Executive branch from the House of Representatives in the new year, and I will say that I hope the Republicans who serve in the current Congress are ashamed of the way they have blown off their constitutional responsibility and rolled over for this guy.  I have no doubt that Trump is deserving of being removed from office, but I don’t know that in the current circumstance that an impeachment effort would be worthwhile, what with Republicans still controlling the Senate and the alternate-facts-Fox-universe unlikely to see the light.  But Democrats could take a lesson from history:

The president of the United States was both a racist and a very difficult man to get along with.

He routinely called blacks inferior. He bluntly stated that no matter how much progress they made, they must remain so. He openly called critics disloyal, even treasonous. He liberally threw insults like candy during public speeches. He rudely ignored answers he didn’t like. He regularly put other people into positions they didn’t want to be in, then blamed them when things went sour. His own bodyguard later called him “destined to conflict,” a man who “found it impossible to conciliate or temporize.”

But the nation’s politicians simply had to interact with Andrew Johnson, for he had become the legitimate, constitutionally ordained chief executive upon Abraham Lincoln’s death by assassination.

Their path for managing this choleric man reveals that a president need not be kicked out of office to be removed from holding a firm grip on the reins of power. It also shows that people around the president, from Congress to the Cabinet, have many more tools at their disposal than, say, writing an anonymous New York Times op-ed to stop a leader they consider reckless or dangerous.

Read how they did it in this terrific piece by David Priess in Politico.  And get ready for the second half.

Submitted for your consideration

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The Congressional election just two weeks away will lead us down one of only a few possible paths.  If the Republicans who control the House and the Senate maintain their majorities in both chambers, there’s no reason to think that they will then choose to start exerting more constitutional authority as a counterweight to President Trump’s apparent on-going violations of constitutionally-mandated behavior of a government official, or have any new political reason to begin to seriously challenge or even oppose their party’s leader.  If they lose control of both houses, the Democrats would take command of the constitutional machinery that could restrict the president’s future activities and investigate or prosecute some of his apparent past crimes.  If the GOP loses control of just one chamber, life will get more confusing…more confusing than it already is, and that’s saying something.  Despite polling which shows less than half of the country approves of the president’s performance in office, the outcome for November 6 is unclear.

It’s no great pronouncement to say that American politics is polarized today, which by the way is not the same as having two major political parties with different opinions about the means to achieve goals…or which have completely different goals.  As they say on the Internet, I’m old enough to remember when having opposing beliefs or values from other people did not mean that I was good and pure and true and a Real Loyal Patriotic American and that they were stupid and evil and dishonest and corrupt and traitorous.  How’d we get from there to here?

Submitted for your consideration: the October 25th edition of The Daily, the podcast of the New York Times, which explores the premise that the 1994 midterm elections—in which the Republicans gained 54 seats in the House of Representatives to take control for the first time in 40 years—holds the seeds to the political divisiveness that rules the day today.  Give it a listen: host Michael Barbaro talks with opinion writer Jennifer Senior about the 1994 midterm elections, which she covered as a reporter, and she interviews former congressman Vin Weber, a Republican from Minnesota who left Congress in 1993 but whose friendship and political alliance with Newt Gingrich made him a behind-the-scenes force in the 1994 elections which resulted in Gingrich becoming speaker of the House.

Without question, Gingrich and the GOP played a clever political game to maximize the party’s gain of seats beyond what is usual for the party out of the White House.  They focused on wedge issues—they created the term “wedge issues,” I think—which were successful that day, and which have been driving wedges in our lives ever since.  Whether or not the politicians were sincere in their stated belief in the positions they advocated can be argued, but as a tactic it worked beyond their expectations.

Was it a good thing to have done?  Did Republicans of 1994 do the country a disservice in opening a rift in civil society that’s only gotten worse in the years since?  Good questions to consider, I think…

To accuse is not proof of the truth

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The flurry of accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the attendant surge in the past few days of the #MeToo and #WhyIDidntReport hashtags has resurfaced for me a topic I’ve wanted to discuss, and on this day I’m happy to say that it is a topic which has nothing to do, at least not directly, with the president we cannot shake from the headlines for even one stinking day.  (Today he had to suffer the indignity of having the United Nations General Assembly laugh at him; I admit I enjoyed that very much.)  I’ve had this thought in the past year or so as events have forced the issue of sexual violence against women into public discussion, which is for the good, but now I’m hearing a drumbeat more loudly, more certain and more forcefully stated: the belief that all right-thinking Americans must accept all accusations by women of sexual harassment or sexual assault or rape at face value, without exception and without the need of corroborating evidence.  I’ve got a problem with that.  Let me risk stirring up multiple hornet’s nests all at once.

I have no problem with the protesters who argue Black Lives Matter, because I think I understand what they mean.  They do not mean black lives matter more than white lives (or the lives of any other color), despite the counterargument from some mostly disingenuous people who are trying to diminish the BLM effort.  The protesters are trying to persuade their fellow Americans that despite our country’s clear history of treating black people as less than people—even writing it into our Constitution—an inequitable, ignorant, hateful behavior that continues today, they are appealing to our better angels to persuade us that black lives matter, too.  At least that’s how I understand it.

They’re not saying that white lives don’t matter; they’re not saying that white lives matter less than black lives.  They’re calling attention to the recent string of deaths of black people, mostly young black men, at the hands of law enforcement across the country, in questionable circumstances, to try to make us all see the unfairness which they recognize as part of their daily lives.  The protests grow out of their personal experience, and they’re arguing for a commitment on behalf of all of us to the American ideal of fair treatment for all.  That’s also what the athletes are saying when they demonstrate during the national anthem: they aren’t protesting the song, or the flag, or the military, or the country in general, despite what you hear from the president (listen instead to the many many veterans who acknowledge that the right to this protest is exactly the thing they went to war to protect).  The players are taking advantage of their position in the public eye at that moment to do the thoroughly American thing of exercising their freedom of speech.  We each of us is free to disagree with their methods if we choose.

Now, I’m not saying that women in America have been treated the same way that black people have been treated.  (To any commenters who would criticize me for saying just such a thing, I refer you now to the previous sentence where I say quite plainly that I am not saying that.)  But I think it’s clear that women have been, and still are, treated differently from men in American society—there’s a Constitution thing there, too, of course—and that today they are making another push on behalf of their equality as Americans.  Specifically, they are speaking up on the subject of how, historically and contemporaneously, they have been and still are the victims of sexual violence.

In a society devised primarily by men with laws written primarily by men, in a society in which women were not considered equal citizens to the men, it should not be surprising that the men in charge protected themselves from accusations of sexual assault by women.  We can be ashamed of it, but not surprised.  Women were treated as property, as live-in baby-makers and babysitters and household help, and as “things” to be used by a man for his pleasure.  The men of those times turned a deaf ear to any woman’s protest of mistreatment, knowing that the woman would not be taken seriously and that even if her complaint were believed, well, so what.  The women of the time came to know the likely result of speaking up, and so they didn’t.

In more modern times we like to think that we’ve become enlightened enough not to behave in that way toward women; recent examples abound that prove how wrong we have been to think that.  Even as women became more financially independent of the men in their lives and more able to sustain a public accusation, they knew that the default response of male-dominated society remained to disbelieve and to dismiss accusations, and to find ways to punish the accusers for having accused.

What is changing now—for the good, I believe—is that the public airing of accusations of sexual assault has caused the scales to fall from more men’s eyes, for us all to recognize that this is real and pervasive, and to feel at least a little sick to our stomachs that we’ve closed our eyes to this reality for so long and allowed the women in our lives to suffer.  We’re coming around, as a society, to having our default response to these accusations be to search for the truth rather than to dismiss the charge out of hand.  Yea, America!

What concerns me is those who are filled with the fervor of the rising tide of righteousness who go a step too far and treat any accusation of sexual assault as proof of the truth of the charge.  It’s the right response to take an accusation seriously, and to investigate as we do when any crime is alleged; but it’s not right to assess a guilty verdict and hand out punishment solely on the basis of an unproved accusation.

Some of the accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh seem more believable than others; inasmuch as they are being made against a nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, who proclaims his innocence of the charges, they deserve to be investigated to try to determine if they are true or false, and to learn what we can about the nominee in the process.  (BTW, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee: that’s exactly what the FBI does; that’s what it’s there for…put it to work).   Let the system work; there is no reason to rush a vote on this nomination…well, no good reason, anyway.  The GOP proved quite clearly, thank you, when refusing to take any action at all on the nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, that the Supreme Court can get along nicely with one seat vacant.

America’s growing recognition of the ways in which our country has not lived up to the lofty goals of our Founders, and our continuing efforts to make those wrongs right, must continue.  Reaching the ideals of equal treatment under the law and providing a level playing field for all Americans, of being the open and welcoming society of our dreams, will take longer than we would like it to but we’ve got to keep going, keep our eyes on the prize.  But we won’t get there by trashing our belief in innocence until proven otherwise.

Try this at home, it’s fun

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

I didn’t mean for it to happen, I swear…but I was driving home and had the radio on—yes, terrestrial radio; sue me—and before I could think to change the station or to flip over to the music on my phone, there it was.  Like a regularly scheduled feature, I became conscious to the news report on what I think of as the president’s outrage of the day: the thing about which the president is feigning outrage and saying words that clankle off the ear as one tries to parse sense from nonsense.  In today’s case he was accusing Google and other Internet sites of intentionally skewing their search results to feature news articles which cast him in a negative light.  (It’s what we old guys in the news business would refer to as “bad news” from his point of view, and something that most people who live in the public eye know is coming their way, can’t be avoided entirely; Trump refers to this as “fake news” or sometimes “Fake News” or some other times “FAKE NEWS!”)  What’s more, he was promising to “address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.”  Put that down as the shock of the day, right?

And it occurred to me, what would I find if I Googled “what the hell did Trump say today” and so when I got home I did just that.

I haven’t been keeping track of all of the surprising, strange, unusual, odd, bewildering, outrageous, incorrect, untrue, misleading, ridiculous, self-centered, tone deaf, racist, ill-intentioned things he has said…initially it didn’t seem like it was something that would happen very frequently, but then because I got so woefully behind the curve so goddamn fast it was pointless to try to catch up.  But I don’t have to, because Matt Kiser’s already doing it.  When I Googled “what the hell did Trump say today” the first entry returned was a link to What the Fuck Just Happened Today?, a selection of news headlines from Trump’s America with links to the source stories.  (Click on the audio embed at the top of that page today and listen to a bit of Shep Smith’s incredulosity on the “Google story” du jour.)

Other fun stuff for sharing today:

https://twitter.com/mileskahn/status/1033736771287351296

…and this, which isn’t fun but is important to pass around to as many as we all can, since we live in Trump’s America: