The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

Setting It Off as trump's Followers Cross One More Line (w/ Update)

Update 8/16: Many thanks again to Tengrain for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please take some time to review the other stuff that's got me ranting all week long...

Just noting for the record, I feel sympathy for the poor guy who has to manage the Wikipedia page on donald trump's ongoing civil matters. It is interesting to note the web encyclopedia made all the criminal investigations into separate pages, but still at any moment the way things are going there's bound to be two to three new civil court filings by now.

Speaking of, if you're looking for the stuff on "trump espionage" it's actually under "FBI Search of Mar-A-Lago," have fun.

In the meanwhile, this weekend post-warranted search has seen a bit of uneasy response from the Far Right regarding donald trump's pending troubles involving the theft of Presidential Records (18 USC 2071), destruction / obstruction of records involving federal investigations (18 USC 1519), and possible espionage (18 USC 793).

In that acts of violence took place, committed by likely MAGA true believers triggered by the news that their Lord and Savior donald trump is facing serious legal trouble he can't lie his way out of.

On Thursday, a gunman attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with both a nail gun and an AR-15 rifle, then fled the scene and chased into another county before one last shootout killed him. More details from Elisha Fieldstadt, Ken Dilanian, Tim Stelloh and Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News:

Officers fatally shot the suspect (Walter Shiffer) after failing to negotiate with him, an Ohio State Highway Patrol spokesman, Lt. Nathan Dennis, told reporters.

The man raised a gun and officers opened fire, Dennis said.

It wasn't clear whether he fired, Dennis said, nor was it clear who fired the fatal shot. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, which Dennis described as a rural area off Interstate 71.

No officers were injured, and a motive is still under investigation, Dennis said.

The two officials said Shiffer appeared to have posted in recent days about his desire to kill FBI agents after former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence was searched...

Shiffer was seen at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although it's unclear whether he breached the building, said three people aiding law enforcement who saw him in photos. Shiffer frequently posted about going to the Capitol on social media.

In the days after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump's compound in Palm Beach, Florida, he appeared to post multiple times on Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.

In one comment, he appeared to call on people to prepare for "combat." In another, his apparent account said users should kill FBI agents "on sight..."

Brian Murphy, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI who’s now an executive at the open source intelligence firm Logically, said Wednesday that his company has observed a big rise in threats against FBI personnel and facilities on social media platforms since the FBI searched Trump's home...

And there's the doxxing attempts by media agitators especially Breitbart's media outlet - which received an unredacted copy of the search warrant from trump's people that included the names of the FBI agents overseeing the search - and a former aide to trump Garrett Ziegler who named those agents and issued threats bad enough that trump's own version of Twitter (Truth Social) had to delete his posts (via Alia Shoaib at Business Insider):

"This is one of the two feds who signed the 'Receipt for Property' form, which detailed—at a very high level—the fishing expedition that the FBI performed at Mar-a-Lago," Ziegler wrote on both Truth Social and Telegram, per the outlet.

Along with the message, Ziegler shared the FBI agents' date of birth, work emails, and supposed links to family members' social media accounts, according to the outlet...

As anyone who pays attention to domestic terrorism activity, what Ziegler did crosses into the threshold of stochastic terrorism. Ziegler claims he's providing "transparency" about "illegal FBI actions" but why the hell drag those agents' families into this mess?

(Saturday night, there was a suicidal car driver who slammed into a Capitol building barricade and shot himself as his car burst into flames. Until the police can find out if the guy had a motive, this is as much as should be said about it)

Not to mention the armed people protesting outside of an Arizona FBI field office on Saturday.

Also: Kind of need to mention the reports of how "The Dark Web" of Far Right secret Internet servers are on fire with talk of civil war.

In short: Yeah, the pro-trump violence is ticking upward.

I almost saw this coming, barely a month ago. I wrote back then the reality we're in the early stages of a second civil war. I knew it was going to be something involving trump getting held to account for any number of his misdeeds surrounding the 2020 elections, the January 6th insurrection, or maybe even one of the big civil lawsuits like the one in New York (where trump had to testify in person and ended up pleading the Fifth Amendment over 440 times). Here's what I wrote:

You can feel it: We are one final step from the "Cannons Firing on Fort Sumter" point of no return. The battle lines are drawn over the January 6th Insurrection and the recent extremist Supreme Court rulings. All it's going to take is one more nudge from the goddamn wingnuts and we will be quoting Fred Thompson's "We will be lucky to live through it" line until the shooting stops, and either the United States remains intact but with the conservatives shattered for 100 years or with the nation broken under an authoritarian bootheel...

I'd bet good money - okay, 50 bucks, I'm a librarian I'm not rich - it's going to involve donald trump freaking out in some way, and most likely over criminal charges that would interfere with his plans to retake the White House in 2024. Thing is, there's a number of separate criminal charges he's still facing...

In that article, I gambled on the likely trigger being the Georgia grand jury investigation into trump's attempt to bully the state's Secretary of State - who oversaw the election results - into throwing the votes out for Biden and giving trump (falsely) the state's Electoral votes.

I honestly didn't even think about the simmering situation surrounding trump's failure to turn over Presidential Records until this February as the possible trigger. To be fair, the Justice Department had kept a tight lid on their investigations into - even in June when they pursued the remaining boxes of classified materials trump STILL hadn't turned over - the possibility trump violated the Presidential Records Act.

Who knew - other than the DOJ - that the case would also involve even more serious allegations of espionage?

As it stands, among all the other possible criminal matters trump is facing - in Georgia, in Arizona and Wisconsin involving "fake electors", with the January 6th investigations into various legal violations the House Committee has already uncovered - this one right here revolving around trump's illicit hoarding of national security/classified documents could well be the first big criminal charge trump will face between now and the end of the year.

And as I noted in my previous article, the minute trump gets charged with actual criminal felonies, his followers will erupt in violent madness. As Zach Beauchamp notes at Vox:

What we are seeing is shocking, but it’s part of an established pattern. Trump engages in some kind of egregious misbehavior, prompting official scrutiny and condemnation of his actions. He treats these actions as unjustified persecution, proof that the “deep state” is out to get him, a claim that the Republican Party and conservative press dutifully echo. His most radical supporters become even more radical, even contemplating violence.

None of these investigations is a witch hunt. In each case, there are serious reasons to believe that the president violated the law. If prosecutors chose not to even investigate Trump, that itself would be politically motivated — a tacit admission that if a political figure is popular enough, he is above the law.

But the result of prosecutors doing their job is predictable: Trump reacts by casting it as proof that he is under attack by nefarious forces...

The litany of grievances, the sense that Trump has been forever persecuted by the government, the unfounded implication that the FBI was “planting information” at his house — all of it screams victimization, that Trump is the target of a vast and shadowy conspiracy pulling the FBI’s strings.

The fact that a Truth Social user had just been radicalized by such talk — posting violent threats on the site before attempting an armed breach of an FBI building — isn’t deterring Trump at all. He is, as the political scientist Julia Azari puts it, a nationalist who has no concept of a nation; a narcissist who abuses the language of patriotism without any commitment to the underlying idea that he has some responsibility to preserve order and cohesion in the polity. In fact, he does the opposite — sowing division and stoking violent distrust if it helps him.

Perhaps Trump’s talk wouldn’t be so dangerous if the rest of the GOP would work to tamp it down. Yet it’s become excruciatingly clear in the wake of his emergence as the GOP’s standard-bearer that Republicans are not taking Trump’s transgressions and troubles as opportunities to dump him, but rather to dig in, right by his side, in similarly radical terms...

The Far Right cannot cut themselves off from trump because trump has given the Far Right everything they've ever wanted and still left them angry and violent for more.

If there's any good news, it's that the rabid trumpian fanbase won't attack the rest of America in large numbers. For all the millions of "true Americans" they think have their back, most Americans - even among the 74 million who voted for trump in 2020 - will not rise to violence when the call goes out. The simple fact is that a lot of them - even the ones yelling and screaming the most - have obligations in the real world that would not allow them to go off and live out the militant cosplay some of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers revel in. Most people are not that violent.

The bad news, obviously, is that in this day it doesn't take a lot of people to commit enough violence to cause grief. Even one gun nut with an AR-15 and MAGA outrage can ruin a small town's entire day.

Like it or not, we're facing dark days ahead. If the Justice Department pursues criminal charges on trump, it will escalate the current civil strife we're in to the next level of open warfare. If Justice is not pursued, all it will do is encourage trump to keep violating more laws, safe with the knowledge his mob rule overrides the rule of law.

Best to hold trump accountable. Let justice be done though the heavens fall. Best to face facts: trump is proving himself a clear and present danger to the safety of the United States itself, and the sooner he faces jail for his crimes the better it will be... in spite of the violence his followers will unleash on the rest of us.

Just be ready for when the day comes, America.

The Far Right Boiling Of the National Mood

Told you I had an alibi:

Before he was arrested for mailing more than a dozen pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Donald Trump — some of which included pictures of the intended targets with a red “X” over their faces — Cesar Sayoc lived a scattered and bizarre life in South Florida.

He was an avid bodybuilder who trained in mixed martial arts and a former exotic dancer and strip club manager who held a string of odd jobs, among them a Papa John’s pizza deliveryman and a DJ. He bought a house in Fort Lauderdale, which was foreclosed on in 2009, lived with his parents in an Aventura condo, and most recently slept in a white van papered with pro-Trump and right-wing stickers.

Along the way, Sayoc racked up a long rap sheet for everything from grand theft and battery to making a bomb threat against Florida Power & Light. He was also accused of domestic violence by a woman who appears to have been his grandmother.

So of course it HAD to be a Florida Man. But it gets funkier:

But of all of his diverse interests, 56-year-old Sayoc’s fervent support for Trump appears to have been his greatest passion in recent years. Sayoc’s social media accounts were filled with photos of him wearing a red Make American Great Again baseball cap, videos of a Trump rally he attended in 2016 and pro-Trump news stories. He also shared racist memes and spouted conspiracy theories.

His Twitter timeline was a greatest-hits collection of right-wing conspiracy theories: that Parkland survivor David Hogg is a government plant, that Oprah Winfrey wants “this whole generation of white people” to die and that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is secretly Adolf Hitler’s daughter...

He lives in a world of Far Right Narrative, a comfort zone for Angry Guys who just happen to angry at minorities, women, libruls, moderates, gays, lesbians, Sportos, Motorheads, Geeks, Sluts, Bloods, Waistoids, and Dweebies (just not the Dickheads, because that's who the Angry Guys are).

It's the same kind of fantasy world that argued WMDs existed in Iraq, that tax cuts can raise wages and create jobs, that Hillary killed a whole list of victims and that Obama was secretly born a Muslim in Kenya. The fantasy world of Fox News and Breitbart and Drudge and Rush and Coulter and D'Souza and Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and Hannity and Newsmax and more. A veritable industry of conspiracy theory that feeds on itself, with each dollar encouraging a greater lie requiring more members of the Far Right to repeat that lie until it becomes a foundation on which more lies can grow.

It's the same industry that's right now trying desperately to wash their hands of any responsibility for the MAGABomber's reign of error. Either blaming the Libruls for making the Far Right go all bomb-happy, or claiming it's a Lone Wolf who has NOTHING to do with being a red-hat-wearing trumpster (even though the guy is happily posing in pictures at trump rallies and shouting "LOCK HER UP" on videoclips).

But the bomber is NOT a Lone Wolf. There's a string of Far Right actors committing violent act after violent act all tied into that Far Right Narrative of "WE are under Attack From the Dread Other," with the WE being proud Whites of the Sacred Patriarchy (if there are women in this, they support that Patriarchy because it grants only them any power).

That Far Right Narrative is not just sitting there, like a novel on a reading table. It is actively prodding a willing and eager audience to pursue these paths of violence.

If I can link to Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice:

...We also need to realize that what we’re dealing with is social learning driving terrorism and low intensity political violence. While Tom Nichols, who has been working through his own theory in regard to radicalization where he refers to these types of terrorists as Lost Boys, identified Sayoc’s domestic terrorism campaign without explicitly referring to it, it is actually the social learning and social behavioral drivers of terrorism.  This includes the normal four components of learning: 1) Primary associations, 2) Definitions favorable, unfavorable, and neutralizing to behavior, 3) Imitation, and 4) Reinforcement. It also includes the social learning components of neutralization (of definitions unfavorable to behavior) and drift...

What we have seen this week with Sayoc’s terrorism campaign, as well as with conservative and/or Republican elites and notables (elected officials, appointed officials, pundits, and commenters) and just supporters of the President who continue to toss around the idea that this is all a false flag or a hoax or somehow actually perpetrated by the intended targets to harm the President or the GOP’s electoral chances in two weeks, are perfect examples of social learning in general and neutralization and drift in specific. We can clearly observe:

1. Primary associations in regard to being an objective or subjective supporter of the President.
2. Learning definitions favorable, unfavorable, and neutralizing of behavior. Sayoc clearly learned from the President, as well as other Republican and conservative authority figures, that it is okay to target and vilify former and current Democratic officials or officials appointed by them, center left to left of center funders of liberal and progressive causes, CNN and other news media outlets that the President doesn’t like and often denigrates, and outspoken elite and notable critics of the President. We can also see this at play in the attempts to wave away this terrorist campaign by claiming it is fake news or a hoax perpetrated by the victims.
3. Reinforcement is also clearly present. Specifically, Sayoc received reinforcement from conservative news media and conservative social media as current and former Republican officials, news media figures, commenters, and pundits, as well as just a large number of the President’s supporters talked about and magnified Sayoc’s actions through the attempt to dismiss it with whataboutism and bothsiderism, as well as calling it fake news or a hoax or denying the legitimacy of the victimization of the actual targets.
4. While we haven’t specifically seen imitation yet, it will, unfortunately, likely appear in copycat actions over the next couple of weeks. And potential copycats do not necessarily have to copy the method of trying to make and use pipe bombs sent through the mail.

Both in the run up to today’s arrest and since Sayoc was taken into custody, all five elements of neutralization and drift that I delineated above are clearly explicitly observable. The Republican Party, especially its base membership, realigned to the perspective of the President, as well as conservative news media and conservative social media are all now a tool for radicalization. We can expect to see more Cesar Sayocs until conservative and Republican elites and notables make a stand...

The Republicans never will. They are profiting from this radicalization, and are doubling down with it - alongside voter suppression of minorities and youth voters who lean Democratic - to ensure they retain political power (because with it they can continue to shift wealth from the middle class to the rich (including themselves)).

The Republicans profit from a toxic and boiling stew of hatred, turning up the heat over the last 25 years of post-Cold-War politics to keep themselves at the top of the hill. As Silverman notes:

There are more Cesar Sayocs out there. Just as there were more Dylan Roofs as we saw in Kentucky on Wednesday (a white gunman starting shooting innocent Blacks and even tried to shoot up a Black church during services). And they’re marinating in the President’s and other elite and notable conservatives’ and Republicans’ toxic rhetoric. At some point they’ll reach the point where they have learned both enough of the definitions favorable to neutralize the prohibition against attacking other people, as well as who is an acceptable target from the President, from Republican elected and appointed officials, from Fox News, or from Rush Limbaugh or Hugh Hewitt or others on right wing talk radio, or from conservative social media across a variety of platforms, and when that happens they’ll take action. We can’t predict who the next Cesar Sayoc will be, nor can we predict who he or she, though it is most likely to be a he, will target, nor can we predict when it will happen. But unless something changes and soon, it will happen. And it will happen again and again and again...

The wingnut base of the GOP is just waiting for a sign. All trump has to do is send out the one tweet that says exactly what they want to hear - IT'S OKAY TO KILL OUR ENEMIES - and there will be blood in every street.

This is not guesswork. This has been seen in history again and again. It's been happening right now in real time in places like the Philippines. It is happening with every Angry White Guy yelling at Blacks on airplanes and in cars and at public parks and everywhere else. The anger is boiling. The mindset of violence is right there.

It is only a matter of time before the real bombs go off.

Gods help us.

We're Over the Cliff. This Is Now a Matter of How Steep the Fall Will Be

So this thought has popped up again:

I think I've argued before about the unlikely scenario of the United States splitting into civil war, especially the disastrous economic implications of such an event. Very few states can stand on their own, and too many Red states - the likely culprits in a secession movement - are too dependent on federal aid to pull it off. Back in 2009, this kind of argument didn't make any sense to me.

But the thought is still out there, we ARE as a nation in the middle of an Honest-to-God Constitutional Crisis, and as the signs of irrevocable differences among Americans are growing this is getting too serious to ignore.

Just yesterday, Balloon Juice had two different articles about this issue, and as I take the commentary there serious then these arguments need to be considered. First, to Anne Laurie marking the Twitter war between Megan McArdle and Reality:

I tweeted McArdle back directly after that "twee cosmopolitan" putdown:

As Sam Houston and William Sherman tried to warn the hard Conservative wingnuts that were pressing for a regressive and racially-motivated war in 1860, the more Liberal left-wingers that made up the Union side of things had the numbers and the willpower to save the nation, give it a month or give it five years. Those same Liberal-leaning types - urban surely, educated most likely - may look weak or indecisive but in truth they have conviction and patriotic devotion (they're just trying to remain polite about it).

Ahem. Back to BJ:

Megan's thinking of "letting go" would be easy to understand except for the facts that 1) our cultural divisions are not geographic ones (even Texas and Florida and Alabama and yes South Carolina will be split internally by Right and Left factions), 2) such "letting go" will not resolve half the arguments we have, and 3) The side spoiling for a fight (hint: it's the pro-gun anti-gay racist trumpshirts) won't let it go and will turn violent no matter what.

And now Adam L. Silverman's piece, with analysis and insight (aptly titled Megan McArdle Knows Absolutely Nothing About Any Form Of War And Wouldn’t Even If A Member Of The Military Bit Her!):

What McArdle doesn’t understand, because she knows nothing about war – theoretically, conceptually, and/or experientially (sic) – is that there has been a low level insurgency in the US going back decades. We sometimes call this the Culture War. Sometimes it’s referred to as the Southern Strategy, but it involves one of the two major political parties and its supporting movements, including religious movements, in the US refusing to accept the legitimacy of any other ones. It includes frequent use of dehumanizing language and threats of violence ranging from legislatively and regulatorily (sic) directing the power of the state, utilizing lawfare, and actually threatening and sometimes undertaking violence against their opponents or the objects of their dehumanization campaigns when the insurgents don’t get their way. And these people – elected, appointed, voters, supporters, pundits, etc – are McArdle’s fellow travelers! They are part of the larger political, ideological, dogmatic religious, and sub-cultural groups and movements that McArdle has been marinating in since she was an undergraduate.

They also make the mistake that they are the only ones that get to define patriotism and to actually care about the US and its ideals. They have convinced themselves that they are the only ones who can properly interpret the Constitution when in fact they are the poorest of linguistic and political historians of the late 18th Century, which leads to constantly misunderstanding and misapplying the Constitution. And they have deluded themselves into thinking that because their opponents believe in civility that their opponents are also unwilling to actually defend themselves in the political, ideological, social, religious, economic, and/or legal arenas. And those delusions include the mistaken belief that they don’t have the means to do so.

Right now the US is experiencing one of its periodic bouts of growing pains. As was the case in the 1780s and 1790s, the 1830s and 1840s, the 1860s, the late 1870s through the 1890s, during WW I, in the mid to late 1930s, and in the middle 1960s through the early 1970s, a period of imperfect progress is being met with a backlash against it. It is ugly. It is unpleasant. It is damaging. People who do not deserve to be hurt are being hurt. The real question that McArdle should have asked, yet is incapable because she is as the one who does not know how to ask, is what does it really mean to form a more perfect union? And what are the best ways to go about perfecting the union? Those are the real questions of American civic life. Not whether Democrats in urban areas know how to use guns...

With all that as my background, what's MY take on the current downward spiral?

This all depends on the response to the most likely trigger to cause the "civil war": Mueller's investigation into trump's criminal ties to Russia and to Russia's interference with the 2016 elections.

The Far Right (pro-trump) have clearly marked out their line in the sand that Mueller's work is "illegal" and part of a "spygate" conspiracy hatched by the Obama-Hillary Left to steal the election (which, logically, meant Obama-Hillary should have done a better job of actually stealing it back when they needed to). If Mueller completes his Special Counsel investigations finding serious charges - serious enough to warrant directly arresting trump (which would mean breaking a gentleman's agreement to not arrest sitting Presidents Losers of the Popular Vote) - this side will freak out and rage against the "Deep State" that makes up the federal government.

The other side - made up of Never-trumpers, "Rule of Law" conservatives and moderates, progressives, essentially the 65 million who voted Hillary and believe Russia stole enough states to fuck with the Electoral College - have marked out their line: Anything trump does to shut down Mueller's work is full-on Obstruction and that the entire Republican Party will be guilty of selling the nation out to Putin.

From where we're at right now, Mueller and other investigators have found so much criminal misdeeds before, during AND after the 2016 campaigns that trump is going to shut it down as best he can: However, he's noticeably run out of legal means of doing so and he's bound to simply break existing laws to complete his journey to complete Obstruction and dismantling of the Rule of Law.

This all depends entirely on how the Federal agencies and how the U.S. Military responds.

Right now, most of the agencies - getting shredded by trump's corruption and mismanagement - are likely going to oppose trump right out of the gate. The Intel communities in particular - fully aware of how badly Russia hacked us and hurt us - will refuse to back any attempt by trump to shut down Mueller or the Justice Department.

The military is the big wild card here. Granted, most soldiers and officers are personally conservative: However, they are trained and expected to abide by the Constitution and Rule of Law (that is, they answer to their oaths to defend the nation, they do not take loyalty oaths to any one man the way trump expects). The military is also one of our more diverse institutions, with a lot of soldiers and officers made of the minorities - Black, Latino, women, and now LGBT - that would suffer under a trump rule that's unbound by Constitutional limits. If trump does go full Authoritarian by shutting down Mueller and violating the Rule of Law, there is a good chance the military will refuse to obey any further orders from that White House. At which point shit gets really real.

This is where the wingnut fantasies of their pro-gun militias taking out Army units come into play. This is also where those fantasies will get taken out pretty quickly because 1) those Far Right militias do not have the numbers, 2) those Far Right militias do not have air support, 3) we've seen these Far Right militias in action before, and they are so disorganized it's laughable. They only lasted as long as they did during their hissy fits because the Feds wanted to avoid another Waco tragedy.

Still, the military is expected to answer to the presidency as Commander-in-Chief. They could just as easily side with him as the "lesser of two evils" and just wait him out for "saner" leadership to replace trump (he's NOT going to live forever). If the military sides with trump and the Far Right, any resistance by the Progressive/Center Left will not last long either.

Congress, being what it is - owned by cowardly Republicans who refuse to rein in trump's worst behaviors - will likely collapse into factions when trump acts against Mueller. There are signs of rifts in the House already especially over immigration (and the dawning realization that the replacement Speaker following Ryan will be too wingnut even for them). If trump tries to play dictator, there's a chance enough Republicans will flip to Independent/Democrat to give Dems control of the House (and even the Senate): At that point, trump will be the one in serious trouble. If the GOP remains united, then trump remains unchallenged and key Democratic figures - Pelosi, Schumer, Harris, Warren - will find themselves targets of arrests.

If things do break down into civil war, the dividing lines are going to be messy, mixed-up, and all over the map. Where the first civil war was easier to map out with clear North-South boundaries, this coming fight isn't as geographically fixed. Yes, there may be solid Red (conservative) states and solid Blue (liberal) states, but within each state there are splits between the urban, suburban, and rural areas. Big states like Texas and Florida may be dominated politically by Far Right Republicans, but they've only achieved that thanks to rigged gerrymandering that ignored actual demographics. Any attempt to secede (if trump fails to stop Mueller) or to enforce their rule (if trump succeeds) will cause mass protests and chaos across every major city and then some. On the same argument, any attempt by California or Illinois or New York to secede (if trump wins) or enforce (if trump fails) will get rioting from the Red parts of their states in the rural and suburban regions (such as New York's Long Island or California's southern coastal Far Right communities).

There are very few regions that are decidedly in favor of one side over the other. If I had to say it, the only solid Red states that would ally with trump if he goes Full Dictator would be West Virginia, Idaho, Oklahoma, and maybe one of the Dakotas. The rest would have serious internal strife issues (yes, even South Carolina and Utah and Alaska). If there were any solid Blue states that would oppose trump, I'd go with Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont.

There will be no true safe havens. We will find that out right quick.

Actual civil war will be messy at the street level. Pro-trump forces - being gun-nuts evangelicals - will target what they hate most: Minorities, women, health clinics, gays, schools and colleges. They won't hit military sites - in some respects they won't even really fight to protect trump - because they'll know that's suicide: Instead they'll hit civilians the same way all terrorists would. THIS is why they don't want to give up the military-grade firepower they currently have to wipe out entire unarmed gatherings.

Pro-Constitutional forces - being legal-minded - will target the ones backing trump: Every Far Right media talking head and deep-pocket SuperPAC funder. Given how much of trump's support is based on lying and media manipulation, shutting down the likes of Fox Not-News, Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Drudge, Jones, Coulter, and others would be a necessity. After that, targeting every goddamned coal-roller truck in the nation. Eliminating trump's base of support because honestly there are few places trump can truly hide.

Changes to our nation's habits will be immediate. The electrical grid is vulnerable, our communication network is vulnerable, our transportation systems - highway, trains, airports - are vulnerable. Either side will disrupt each of these things to their advantages. Our schools will close, most places of business may close due to supply cutoffs, most of our common resources available through utilities will be shut down. Not every location will be hit hard - some states and cities obviously will be hurt more than others - but everyone will feel some kind of pinch.

Even the rich will be affected. Our financial systems and markets would have early days of downturn as chaos makes things unpredictable. Foreign trade and business deals will suffer at first, maybe prolonged by any drawn-out fighting. Breakdown of intrastate trade definitely will hurt local and regional business.

If the U.S. divides into civil war, our foreign allies - and enemies - will get disrupted themselves. Without trump to hold them back, Western European nations may reform NATO into a more aggressive front against Putin's meddling into Eastern Europe. Asia will likely slide further under China's influence. Israel may suddenly find that a distracted and divided United States leaves them alone with few allies just as their war against Gaza Palestinians and Iran/Syria gets serious.

All of the problems that led to this moment - immigration, trade, global terrorism - will remain unresolved or actually worsen.

If there's any good news in a trump-fueled civil war, it's that his overseas properties will fall completely to shit and file for bankruptcy.

Everything else will be a bloody mess, and none of us will be able to avoid it.

I thought once we could, that we were going to evolve past the cultural divisions pushed by an increasingly angry Far Right, that we were going to listen to the better angels of our nature.

But the goddamn Far Right doubled down on their madness, dug deeper into their re-enforced Narrative, and rallied around a person in trump who brought them a fake victory, ignoring all the signs that trump is NOT someone you want leading your war effort.

I have been saying for the past few years this was not going to end well. We're at Phase Two of the madness right now, and from what I see - what too many other people are starting to see - the end is more and more looking to be bloody and crazy and terrifying.

This is already out of control. And we will be lucky to live through this. But not all of us are that lucky...

Go Tell That Long-Tongued Liar

Media manipulator, nation destroyer, obscene form of life Roger Ailes is dead.

I know if you're not able to say anything nice about anybody you shouldn't say anything at all.

But Ailes has many sins to answer for.

Much of the Far Right Noise Machine is his fault. Granted, there were Right Wing pundits for decades. Rush Limbaugh existed years before Fox Not-News did. But what Ailes brought to that whole side of the journalistic spectrum was a foundation and focal point. He gave the Far Right extremists a platform to vent, he hired pundits to corral and promote that extremism, he pitched a safe haven where the Conservative viewpoint could flourish and expand.

There may be the likes of Drudge, and Rush, and Breitbart (his remnant empire), and Coulter, and there are other conservative outlets like National Review and Newsmax. But Fox Not-News made itself the sun around which all others orbit.

He'd been a major player in the media for years, ever since helping Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. The Selling of the President should be on everyone's reading list: it's where our modern political world got its ugly baptism. And it's where Roger Ailes appeared on the stage.

Ailes' influence reached far. Political campaigns and elected officials knew to bow in his general direction, and cower when he got angry. Rather than report the news, Ailes tilted his channel to focus on the opinion, filling the cable signals with pundit after pundit pushing agendas instead of the facts. Troubling enough, his approach worked: it appealed to the white and male audience Ailes wanted to reach, injecting them with anger and aiming that rage towards the Democrats and Liberal Left.

Where Ailes could not argue with conviction, he pushed with false narratives. His network would offer up half-baked conspiracies, twist reports to accent the negatives, confuse the issues by denying facts. He perfected the act of malicious reporting while avoiding the hazards of Libel and Defamation laws, by skirting the edge of fuzzy journalism to where if anyone fought back they would get attacked for "destroying free speech."

Ailes is the reason why most of our nation's attention towards political and social issues is driven by vitriol.

Ailes is one big reason (out of several) why we have trump in the White House.

There is no pit of hell deep enough for Roger Ailes.

You may throw a rock, hide your hand
Work in the dark against your fellow man
But sure as God has made the day and the night
What you do in the dark will be brought to light

You may run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
You may run home for for a long time
But let me tell you God Almighty's gonna cut you down

Go tell that long-tongued liar
Go tell that midnight rider
Tell the gambler, rambler, backbiter
Tell them God Almighty's gonna cut him down...

-- Written by Willie T. Johnson, Henry L. Jr. Owens, Clyde Riddick, and Orlandus Wilson (with thanks to Johnny Cash for a brilliant cover version)

The Bully's Need to Make Enemies and Scapegoats

So, trump (lower-case from now on) threw a hissy fit on Twitter again, this time accusing Obama of "illegal" wiretapping of trump Tower to SPY ON him and make him cry.

So, just a couple of quick observations here:

1) trump believes everything he reads in Breitbart and not the daily briefings.

2) The "wiretap" trump is likely worried about was legally obtained via a warrant. trump has no grasp of how FISA warrants actually work. According to reports, the FISA court actually denied the warrant twice because the FBI was focusing too much on trump's US associates, so the FBI re-worded the request to focus on the Russian contacts instead.

3) trump has clearly been the focus of some kind of investigation for months into his ties with foreign financial groups, specifically with Russia. trump's biggest problem the past month - alongside his administration's complete ineptitude - has been the nagging accusations of collusion with Russia to rig the 2016 elections to trump's favor.

4) if trump is complaining about anything, he's complaining about an official, legally processed investigation that's still outside of his control. a lot of which was happening without Obama giving specific orders to spy on trump.

And yet, trump went there in his accusations: Blaming Obama and accusing him of illegal misdeeds that trump can't prove.

So why even go there?

Other than the obvious blow to the ego trump has to be suffering with this Sword of Damocles hanging over his throne, trump is doing what all bullies do. He's trying to game the refs into seeing things his way.

And by refs I mean Congress.

The weekend tweets were a large red flag (no pun intended) signalling to trump's wingnut supporters to stir up a shitstorm against Obama and scream to their congressional puppies to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT RADICAL KENYAN MOOSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE now on vacation. That part has worked, as the Far Right tweeters and pundits are all up in arms about Obama's "illegal wiretapping" that "should land him in jail".

What trump seems to be doing is two-fold: Get Congress to force the FBI and the rest of the Intelligence Community to stop investigating his ties to Russia (because he can't do it himself: that would be Obstruction), and to get Congress to force a faux investigation on Obama as a means of keeping their coalition - fraying under the struggles to repeal Obamacare - rallying around an external focus of anger and outrage.

Nothing kept the Far Right focused like their hatred of Hillary and their ability to investigate her over and over - like, 11 times wasn't it? - for Benghazi and her emails and her servers and her poor choice in MP3 players. Nothing kept the Far Right riled up like having Obama in the White House for eight years serving the public trust.

So here's trump, railing against a perceived injustice that is an actual legal investigation into his sins, trying to turn the focus away by faking an injustice that doesn't exist.

Makes himself the victim and everybody else the fools.

I wish more Americans would see that.

Who Is In Charge in the Trump White House? The Worst People

Just in case we were all distracted by how Trump and the Republicans are behaving towards refugees and immigrants, there's this little tidbit to make you run screaming for the fallout shelters (via Raw Story):

In another series of executive orders on Saturday, Pres. Donald Trump restructured the National Security Council (NSC) and created a position on it for senior aide and former Breitbart.com CEO Stephen K. Bannon...

...The Post reported that Bannon has been given a regular seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee, which will include the nation’s highest ranking security officials, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State.

Unlike previous presidential administrations, Trump’s Saturday memo specified that the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will only attend principals committee meetings that pertain to their specific “responsibilities and expertise...”

In short: Trump is letting a known media wingnut participate in a key council dedicated to our national security... all the while kicking out the actual military and intelligence officials whose job it is to provide such national security.

And who is Bannon? If the connection to that wingnut rag Breitbart News doesn't tip you off, this interview about him from Ronald Radosh at Daily Beast should give you nightmares:

Then we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.

Shocked, I asked him what he meant.

“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon was employing Lenin’s strategy for Tea Party populist goals. He included in that group the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as the traditional conservative press...

As much as he's a documented anti-Semite, Bannon is the Far Right version of the bomb-throwing anarchist, eager to destroy every last piece of government and lawful institutions just to have his fun. He's not only out to wreck things to piss off liberals, he's keen on breaking apart conservative institutions just so he can recover and rebuild everything to HIS design.

And Bannon is not some ineffective guy standing on the sidelines basking in the glow. When this whole recent Muslim Ban executive order dropped this past Friday, Bannon was deep in the shit on making that go:

It wasn’t until after Trump had signed his name on the dotted line that DHS really got a chance to sit down and try to determine if the order was even legal. A person with knowledge of the matter said that homeland security staff didn’t even get to lay eyes on the order until Friday. Even Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Department of Homeland Security leadership didn’t get to see the document until just before Trump signed it into law. The administration also chose not to allow the Office of Legal Counsel to provide legal guidance on the matter.

After they were finally allowed to review the order, DHS reportedly decided that the ban could not apply to green card holders, who are legal residents of the U.S., but Trump’s Bannon overruled them. CNN reports:

Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen — did not apply to people who with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green card holders.

The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the President’s inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Their decision held that, on a case by case basis, DHS could allow green card holders to enter the US...

This is the man who's essentially in charge at the White House. When it comes to the Presidency, you look at his key aides, who he relies on to do the dirty work on a day-by-day basis. In this administration, it's not the Chief of Staff (Reince Priebus) and it's not a key Cabinet figure and it's not the head of the Intel or security agencies and it's not the Vice President (like Cheney was to Dubya).

It's a guy whose previous work experience was creating fake news, with no experience in public administration and with every intent to abuse his authority to wreak havoc on the nation.

Here's your Kakistocracy in action, boys and girls.

We will be lucky to survive all this.

In Brief: Some Questions I Have for Steve Bannon

So in case you don't get your news from Fark.com you might have missed another Florida Man story:

Florida Man caught registered to vote at an address he doesn't live at, hilarity ensues.

It seems Steve Bannon, recently put in charge of Trump's off-the-rails Presidential campaign, has his voter registration at an abandoned property due for demolition, that there's no evidence he ever really lived there, and that he's been living at places in three different locations - Los Angeles CA, Washington DC (and THAT's got its own questionable issues), and yet another property in Florida - bringing up a question of which place is his real place of residence.

(Note: one reason a lot of well-off people own and claim residency in Florida is that we have very relaxed Homestead Exemptions property laws that make it REAL friendly for tax-dodging Far Right types, so for a guy who does a lot of business in DC and LA, I'm not surprised he calls Florida home... and never shows up here...)

'Cause you see, voter laws may be set by state but even the states agree you can really only call one place home (and have that as a place of voter registration). Voting in one town - even within the same state - but really being a primary resident in another is a form of voter fraud (why hello HYPOCRISY cough cough).

Maybe the reason why Republicans run around claiming Blacks and Latinos commit in-person voter fraud so often is because they seem to do a lot of it themselves.

So I got a few questions for Mr. Bannon if time allows:

1) Which state among your various property holdings is your real primary residence?

2) Have you registered to vote in the other states where you claim home ownership / rental properties? Have you voted in other states while claiming to reside at the address in Miami that you never really lived in?

3) How soon can you go to jail for lying on your voter registration forms (Florida Statutes Title IX, Chapter 104.011(2) covers it) about your address?

I expect a reply within the hour... of hell freezing over. Still, the effort counts.

What If: The Democrats Ran the Best, Cleanest Candidate They Could Ever Have?

Just a thought:

Once upon a time, there is this young man Steve Yancy Luck growing up in Findlay, Ohio. His father is a man of good standing in the community, owner of a hardware store, his mom a faithful volunteer at the family's Presbyterian church. He's got a younger sister, and an adopted cousin whose parents (from his mom's side) died in a tragic incident involving three cars full of nuns, a runaway train carrying needed medical supplies to Canada, and an innocent free-range giraffe.

Steve does well at sports, lettering in shot put and discus - where he sets the county record at discus his senior year - serves as President of the school's French Club, and graduates in the top ten percent of his class. He considers going to his mom's alma mater of Wittenberg U., but accepts a scholarship for the Naval Academy in Annapolis MD.

He's 24 when September 11, 2001 happens. Steve immediately switches from a promising Navy Surface track to train as a Marine officer, knowing that is where the nation is going to need battlefield leaders. It's another year before he's a lieutenant, but doesn't get deployed until 2004 into the thick of the Iraqi occupation.

By April 2005, Steve's patrolling with his rifle platoon near a good-sized village in the Kurdish hills when insurgents attack with 160 men. He loses two men during the first minute of the firefight but leads the surviving forty men and women into the village - mothers and children, as most of the men are already dead or missing - for a concerted defense. Lacking communications, they can't call for air support or rescue. For nearly 12 hours into the night Steve leads his Marines with an effective defense using trapping engagements to pull the more reckless insurgents into kill zones. But he does lose half his troops to wounds by the break of next day. Luckily, a Kurdish-led unit patrolling those hills find out about the battle and join in, creating a flanking attack that catches the insurgents off-guard. They also help call in an A-10 strike that buzzes the area and spooks the bad guys into fleeing back into the desert, leaving behind 74 of their own dead or dying.

Angered up by the situation, Steve decides on a reckless pursuit of the fleeing insurgents. Taking only volunteers - two Kurdish brothers, a rifle squad sergeant name of Lafayette Washington (no relation), a female Marine Amy Wolfe who's half-Plains Apache and the platoon's best sniper, a third-generation Japanese-American Naval Medical Corpsman Joey Yagachuchi who promised his girlfriend he'd make it home okay, and a young Black kid name of Lionel (nobody can remember his last name) from the Chicago slums who lied about his age when he signed up six months ago for the Corps and is really fifteen years old - they chase after the bad guys.

Turns out the Marines recovered a cell phone from one of the dead insurgents that they could use to track the surviving evildoers back to their hideout. Steve leads his team of seven into an improvised yet cunning assault, taking out not only the rest of the attackers but also 80 more insurgents including the region's warlord, which reduces the level of violence to almost nothing in that part of Iraq for the rest of the year. However, during the battle one of the Kurdish brothers dies heroically throwing himself on a grenade meant for Lionel, and Steve himself takes a bullet from the warlord while protecting Joey who was busy tending to a half-blinded Amy. (Amy kills the warlord with a headshot without hesitation using her keen sense of hearing)

Steve's wound isn't severe - Joey gets him back on his feet soon enough - and by crushing a key insurgency force and saving that village the entire platoon earns praise across the U.S. and the world. Joey makes it home to Newport Beach like he promised by 2006 and finds out his girlfriend ran off with an Air Force Academy grad to live in Alaska. Amy regains most of her eyesight (she can never serve as a sniper again) and stays on with the Marines, performing other heroic deeds - including stealing a ISIL warlord's motorcycle in 2011 - that earns her enough Coup points to become War Chief of her tribe (she and Joey hook up in 2012 and have a daughter by 2014). Washington gets wounded in a later firefight but survives to return home to Chesapeake VA by 2009 to open a French bakery. Lionel stays in with the Marines another six months but disappears into the Kurdish countryside, joining the surviving Kurdish brother's family as an act of atonement and marrying one of the brothers' youngest sisters (who looks surprisingly like Rihanna). By 2016 Lionel (now known as the Lion of the Great Lake among the tribes) is a major leader of Kurdish forces fighting Da'esh in northern Iraq.

Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, right, setting up the main character...

Steve Luck gets promoted to Captain and moves up the chain of command within the Marine Corps until 2007, when he is falsely accused of insubordination by a Marine Colonel trying to cover up his own crimes of raping a female Naval officer: Steve had found out and was following the procedures to report it. The Corps keeps the entire situation under wraps during the conflicting investigations, which exonerates Steve and implicates the Colonel in other bad acts (involving military contract kickbacks). However, the Colonel is an older brother to a Republican Congressman from California who happens to serve on the Armed Services committee and who makes it clear that he will make the Marines suffer if any of this gets out. So both the Colonel and Steve are issued honorable discharges, and Steve is told to keep his mouth shut.

However, Steve is pissed at the injustice of it all. His family had been apolitical - his mom is a registered voter but considers herself No-Party-Affiliate - but when he makes it back to Ohio in 2007 he registers as a Democrat and signs up to run for Congress in 2008. With his war record, and the overall Republican failures weakening the GOP incumbent that election cycle, Steve Luck wins his hometown's district. As revenge, he makes sure he gets placed on the Armed Services committee to fill the spot of the Republican Congressman responsible for driving him out of the service, who by the by "retired" that election year rather than lose to an openly lesbian Latina (who wins that CA district by 20 points).

Steve goes on to serve the committee with distinction, uncovering various kickbacks scandals from the Iraqi occupation that leads to several key arrests and reforms in the Pentagon procurement process. Steve wins re-election in 2010 despite a heavy-handed attempt by the "Tea Party" faction to drive him out, but gets removed from the Armed Services committee when the GOP wins control of the House. He is able to secure a minority leadership spot on the Veterans Affairs committee and does what he can to keep their funding going during Republican obstructionism, and stays there well into 2016.

In 2012 he returns to Iraq as part of a fact-finding tour, reunites with Lionel in the Kurdish regions, and helps clear up Lionel's "desertion" through the legal channels (pointing out the U.S. needs him now as a liaison within the Kurdish community fighting the bad guys ISIL/Da'esh). Steve also meets the Kurdish brothers' sister Aida - a few years younger than he is - who had fled Iraq in 1999 for France in order to avoid getting raped by Uday Hussein. She had studied to become a doctor while in exile and had returned in 2010 to help set up hospitals across the region to improve the pediatric care. Aida and Steve hit it off - he speaks French from high school, remember? - and she travels three weeks later to the United States to continue the relationship, getting a visa through the proper channels. They marry in a joint Presbyterian-Zoroastrian marriage (they agree to an interfaith family) by 2013 at the National Cathedral with the Obama family in attendance.

He's 38 years old in 2015, now an established Congressman with a strong center-left voting record. He has no financial ties to Wall Street, no scandalous history (even his dating life before marriage was civil with few hard feelings from the exes), and his war record makes him a popular national hero (there are constant calls to award him the Medal of Honor although Steve keeps advising against it since he's now a member of the Congress that would award it). Aida gave birth to a healthy boy named Nebez for his heroic dead uncle, and she's hoping for a girl next. He's got a perfect family life and a perfect political career. Oh, and he looks like Chris Hemsworth (except for the insane muscle tone Hemsworth has to work on to play Thor in the Marvel series).

The Presidential field is made up of Hillary, Bernie, and Martin O'Malley, but some of the party leadership visit with Steve often to suggest he could do well with the deep-pocket supporters. Aida knows it could be hard on her and their newborn son, but she agrees to a campaign as long as Steve promises her he'll push for better child health care services and better wages for poor families.

Steve Luck throws his hat into the ring by April 2015, and picks up enough support to where he's got 20 percent of the polling to Hillary's 38 and Bernie's 19 (O'Malley's still at zero). Suddenly, Hillary drops out in August when a leaked e-mail from a Russian hacker reveals she had received illegal campaign contributions from Martin Shkreli. Support for both Steve and Bernie jumps up into the 40s, and it becomes a spirited campaign into Philadelphia where Steve wins over enough superdelegates to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. In order to appease Bernie's factions, Steve backs a fully progressive platform (except for universal healthcare, supporting the Public Option instead), and selects a fervently progressive Latina Congresswoman Unity Seguin-Roberts (descended from THIS guy) from Texas (and who looks suspiciously like Salma Hayek) as Vice President.

Steve Luck gets out of the gate with 55 percent of the general electorate polling. He's hugely popular among all key Democratic demographics and the ability to speak well to the interests of the Independent voters. He's got no secrets, no dark history, no corrupt habits (well, okay, he plays way too much Star Trek Online), nothing that would scare away voters in any circumstance.

Now, here's the question: How will the Republicans handle Steve Luck as the Democratic opponent?

Do you think the GOP will treat Luck with any respect? As a Marine war hero? As a good husband and father to a wife and son? Coming from the mythical Midwest of Ohio and home of MOM APPLE PIE AND TRUE AMERICAN VALUES? Someone with not one legit scandal in his closet?

...

There's no way. Not these Republicans.

From Day One they will mock Steve's military service the same way they've mocked so many other Democrats who served our armed forces. They'll break out those Purple Heart band-aids they made during Kerry's 2004 campaign. That Marine Colonel who got drummed out to avoid getting charged with rape and fraud will pop up from the fringes, accuse Steve again of that false insubordination charge, and get invited to camp out at Fox Not-News sound stages 24 hours a day 7 days a week (the show hosts will start promoting the ex-Colonel as the best possible Secretary of Homeland Security the Republicans should pick when Trump "wins"). The Far Right Noise Machine will even drop "hints" that Steve was the one who raped that Navy officer, forcing the poor woman to go public with her horror story about the real culprit (and then that woman will get attacked by the Far Right of conspiring with Steve to falsely accuse the former Colonel).

The Far Right media will go after Steve for being too young and inexperienced, as they'd do to anyone who's under the age of 50 60 running for the Presidency (this same media will remain silent on Donald Trump's utter lack of experience as an elected official).

Trump and the more Islamophobic GOP will insult Steve's wife Aida for being "a raghead," a subversive secret Muslim (that her true faith Zoroastrianism is older than Islam, and is a key influence of Judaism and Christianity, will be lost on them) whispering Sharia law into Steve's ear, that she married Steve to sneak into the country "to steal our jobz," that she was really Uday's mistress, that she set up terror camps and not hospitals, that she's part of the dreaded Islamic takeover of the United States ZOMG. They'll accuse Steve of "working with a terrorist," mistaking Lionel for a hardened mountain warlord fighting WITH Da'esh instead of against them. They'll even mock Steve's son Nebez for having a "weird" name, and claim he's not really Steve's son ("he doesn't have his father's fingerprint patterns! Oh noes! Who could Knee-bees' real father be?").

Rush Limbaugh will attack Steve for failing to protect all of his rifle platoon during that big battle ("He just let those two men die on his watch!"), and will invite onto his show one of the dead men's parents who will be told off-mic that Steve intentionally shot their boy because he was "drunk" when the patrol was ambushed, and tricking them into repeating that false tale on-air.

At Trump's rallies, they will wave signs that read "Fuck Luck" and scream that they should "hang the traitor" for failing to secure victory in Iraq (even as a lowly Lieutenant/Captain).

Stories about Steve's adopted cousin will accuse the poor man of having caused that giraffe-train-nun incident even though he was three at the time. He'll try to file a libel suit against the whisperers but the lawyers tell him it's an impossible fight to win. He'll lose his job at a financial firm in Chicago and suffer a nervous breakdown, fleeing his pregnant wife to hide in the mountains of Oregon, refusing to answer to his real name and claiming he's Fox Mulder hunting more UFOs.

The more fringe Far Right "news" sources will drum up some woman who's never even been to Ohio to claim she's an ex-girlfriend telling stories about Steve being a pothead alcoholic meth user who would beat her and send her out onto the streets like he was a pimp. Her timeline will be so out-of-touch with actual facts (she'll have him hanging out in a trailer park in north Florida during the time he's stationed in Iraq) that it should provoke ridicule by every legit news agency on the planet... and yet CNN will invite her on "to discuss the controversy." It gets bad enough that two of Steve's real ex-girlfriends have to sue the fake ex for defamation.

Trump will make unsubtle hints about how pretty the Veep candidate Unity is and how he'd "do her" even though she's "an illegal Mexican" (ignoring the fact she can trace her bloodline all the way back to when Texas beat Santa Anna to become a Republic, and that her ancestors have more history as Americans than Trump's). Trump at one rally will claim Steve only picked Unity as Veep because - as she's as young and pretty as Steve is - he's hoping to have a threesome with Unity and Aida in the Oval Office. He will later claim this is "a joke." And yet he will keep talking about how Unity "just needs to get laid by a guy who knows how. Maybe Princess Jasmine does too. I'm just saying."

I may be making this up as a thought exercise, but for a moment take a good long look at the Real World. We're watching the Republicans do exactly this sort of bullshit to a real candidate in a real election for the Presidency in a real-life situation that has dire consequences for the entire world.

Here's the Red Pill, America.

The Republicans are going to campaign with the Politics of Personal Destruction on ANYONE the Democrats would put up as a candidate. We've seen them attack Bill Clinton in 1992 with "bimbo eruptions", they went after Al Gore for being a tree-hugger in 2000, they went after John Kerry's military service and wealthy wife in 2004, they went after Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 for exactly who he is (an intelligent Black man) as though that were a crime.

That Hillary isn't the perfect candidate should not condemn her. Try to remember nearly every accusation against her has been investigated again and again for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, and the most the Far Right can find on her is a questionable email server when she was Secretary of State, her firing of a travel agency in the White House back in 1993, and questionable billing practices at her Arkansas law firm back in the 1980s. That's it. Even Benghazi can't be placed at her feet because that had more to do with Congressional failure to fund embassy security.

Even so, Republicans are going to attack her: not so much with any facts, but with half-lies and outright bullshit, innuendo and rumor, unproven accusation placed atop sneering disdain.

They are not going to play nice campaigning against Hillary (they wouldn't have played nice against Bernie either). Trump bringing in Breitbart people to run his campaign now is just a sign of moving up the attacks to Defcon Level 2 instead of being at Defcon 3.

Democrats could run the cleanest, best possible person - educated, civil, experienced, married, well-spoken, sociable, a leader of others - and the Republicans would STILL call for his/her impeachment and execution.

Just never be surprised by this, America. This is all the Republicans have left to campaign on.

Some Trumps Just Want to Watch the Party Burn

So I go to sleep to Trump giving a really bad speech in Milwaukee and wake up to Trump's campaign in full meltdown mode.

Trump shuffled his campaign office - AGAIN - this time demoting the likes of Manafort - whose growing scandalous ties to corrupt Ukrainians was proving to be a legitimate foreign policy/national security matter - and bringing in this Steve Bannon to take charge. Via the Atlantic:

Donald Trump has hired a senior executive from Breitbart News and promoted a campaign adviser to a top position in an effort to jump-start his presidential campaign, which has been foundering in recent days.

Under the changes announced Wednesday, Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, will become chief executive of the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign, and Kellyanne Conway, the Republican strategist and pollster, who currently is a senior adviser on the campaign, will become the campaign manager. Paul Manafort, who has come under scrutiny for his reported ties to Ukraine’s former Moscow-backed leader, will retain his title as campaign chairman, though it’s unclear whether he will continue to wield the same kind of influence in the new regime.

I actually wasn't aware of who Bannon was... but then the Internet - like the Atlantic article above - kindly let me know that he's essentially the guy who took over Breitbart's slime machine and kept it going as a conspiracy-hawking, librul-bashing, RINO-hunting monstrosity.

Bloomberg had this back in 2015 (article by Joshua Green):

As befits someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he's two things at once. And he’s devised a method to influence politics that marries the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart.com, which helped drive out Boehner, with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, that builds rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians, then partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience.

He's basically an attack dog for the Far Right: shredding political opponents without a care for consequences or facts (despite Green's claims, this is a guy in charge of one of the most fact-free media outlets out there), and pushing a purity purge among the Republican ranks to enforce message discipline.

Putting a guy like Bannon in charge of Trump's campaign is a clear signal that Trump wants to increase the attacks not only on Hillary and Democrats but also on fellow Republicans who are failing to support the Trump brand.

It's still a risky move on three points:

• Bannon's never run a political campaign before, if I've read the articles about him right. Trump's campaign is still a disorganized mess that barely had no ground game and no ad spending (something that eagle-eyed observers are watching)
• Going even more negative than the previous year, at this stage of the general election, can just as easily backfire on Trump. Being negative during the primaries work because that's what your voting base feeds off of. Being super-negative with the mudslinging during the general election will only depress voter turnout among the moderate/independent voters who hate that negativity... and Trump - whose own party support is the lowest any Republican candidate ever had - needs the moderate votes more than Hillary does.
• It still doesn't resolve the internal scandals involving Manafort - whose still on the campaign - and other lackeys with serious (almost criminal) baggage.

This is less Schadenfreude than Oh Crap. Not that Bannon is suddenly going to turn Trump into a winning campaigner, but that Bannon is going to nuke everything from orbit... just to make sure the Narrative stays pure.

The Republicans Had a Choice

They chose... poorly.

Update: Thank you again for the link, Infidel753!

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic wrote today about The Party Decides - a book about the electoral process and how the political parties wielded all this power in making certain their chosen candidates were accepted by their respective bases - in an attempt to explain what the hell happened with this election cycle's Republican Party. He was trying to describe how this supposedly powerful organization with political savvy allowed an amateur demagogue like Donald Trump to outflank them and subvert the old ways.

...The authors argue that political parties convince voters to ratify their choices in primary elections by sending cues or signals. Crucially, when they say that “political parties” sway voters with these signals, they don’t just mean prominent elected officials and insiders at the RNC and DNC. As they see it, “the party encompasses interest groups, issue-advocacy groups, ideological activists chatting over beers, pundits aligned with “the party,” even bloggers who belong to its coalition...

So essentially there are all the guardian factions at play here. For the Republicans, it would be the deep-pocket SuperPACs sending out mailers as much as Fox Not-News and Rush Limbaugh alongside Grover Norquist and maybe even Drudge and Breitbart's old ghost. So blaming just the RNC itself for the rise of Trump to nominee is too simple. We basically gotta blame everybody...

“The party,” defined as broadly as it is in the book, includes a lot of voices that either support Trump or regard him as acceptable. And many members of “the party” who abhor Trump sent mixed signals and cues to voters. The contents of those signals help to explain why so many primary voters see Trump as the best choice...

The mixed signals that Conor is talking about is how the RNC and all those guardian factions (mis)handled Trump from the beginning. The party itself early on considered Trump unserious, that he wouldn't really follow through on the actual process of the primary season. As a result, they overlooked the impact of Trump's essential message to the GOP voting base: not just the open hostility towards immigrants and Muslims, but the growing resentment of a Far Right base that kept getting told through all their media sources one thing (The economy is bad because "they" took our jobs, Obama is selling us out to China and Muslims, "they" are coming to tax you for Obamacare Death Panels and take your guns) but kept getting betrayed by the people they elected to office (2010, 2012 and 2014) who did none of the things they promised (Obama's still not impeached, right?).

When it was too late to stop him from joining the primaries, both the party Establishment and their media allies suddenly found it difficult to push him out. Trump threatened early and often that if he wasn't being treated fairly, he'd jump out and start an independent campaign. Everyone else knew what that meant: a repeat of the 1992 election when Ross Perot's third-party vanity run doomed Bush the Elder - who lost too many voters from the split - in what could have been a close race against Democrat Bill Clinton.

That meant nobody else dared challenge Trump to where he could flee with his (stunningly large) Far Right faction, but that left the fights all one-sided where Trump could pummel the Establishment ranks - Jeb Bush in particular was mocked early and often - and get away with it.

Worse, as Conor notes, some of the other candidates looked to profit from Trump's wrecking-ball tactics, thinking - poorly - that once Trump imploded or fled the election cycle, they would be there to pick up the pieces and win out. In particular, the Last Opponent Standing:

Ted Cruz is a perfect illustration. He is the last man standing, barely, between Trump and the delegates he needs to win on the first ballot at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

At this point, Cruz has savaged Trump’s character.  “We wouldn’t tolerate these values in our children,” one Cruz ad says. “Why would we want them in a president?” Another ad accuses Trump of “a pattern of sleaze going back decades.”

These attacks are, I think, accurate.

But it isn’t surprising that Cruz’s attacks rang hollow to many Republican primary voters who can’t help but remember the many months when Cruz lavished extravagant praise on Trump, stating outright that his candidacy was a boon, not a bane to the GOP. Cruz even proclaimed himself “grateful” that the celebrity billionaire was in the race because it ostensibly forced the media to talk about illegal immigration...

...But Cruz saw that Trump was popular with a faction of the Republican base, so he cozied up to the demagogue, became a mendacious apologist for his egregious misbehavior, and brazenly misled the public about Trump’s character. Cruz did this because he thought that he could co-opt Trump’s popularity and win over a lot of his populist supporters. Instead, he helped to legitimate Trump, ratified the narrative that Trump alone forces the media to pay attention to the issues most important to a faction of Republican voters, and sapped some of the strongest critiques of Trump—the ones that Cruz would later used in his own attack ads—of their potency...

There's the "mixed message" that Conor talked about. But it wasn't just Cruz. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, Trump hasn't always been the hated unwanted member of this particular clown car campaign. A sizable faction of Republicans were just fine with Trump when it suited their purpose of stirring up their base...

...The elements of “the party” that sent pro-Trump cues or “Trump is at least acceptable” signals to primary voters—Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, The New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Rick Scott, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio—are simply more powerful, relative to National Review, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and other “Trump is unacceptable” forces, than previously thought...

...They just wish it wasn't so blatantly racist, sexist, ignorant, ill-informed, lazy, and nonsensical to where it threatens the entire party with destruction.

Even Conor notes that Trump does not exist in a vacuum. For all his demagoguery, Trump is running on an existing Republican message of mistrust and anger. Conor lists each point:

• Career politicians cannot be trusted. This widespread conceit in “the party” has effectively made it impossible for candidates with governing records and public sector experience to be accepted by large swaths of GOP primary voters.
• When the base doesn’t get what it wants, it is because of betrayal by party elites, never because a majority of Americans disagree with what the base wants.
• Rhetorical stridency is a better heuristic for loyalty than core principles or governing record—and there is nothing disqualifying about extreme incivility (hence, for example, a buttoned up think tank giving a statesmanship award to Rush Limbaugh, a gleeful purveyor of bombastic insults).
• Complaints about racism and sexism are always cynical fabrications, intended be used as cudgels against conservatives.
• Political correctness in governance is one of the biggest problems facing America.
• Illegal immigration poses an existential threat to America.
• President Obama has deliberately made bad deals with foreign countries to weaken America.

If any movement conservatives in the #NeverTrump crowd doubt that “the party” has sent all of those signals or cues, I’ll gladly expound on any of them. Taken together, it’s easy to see why a majority of an electorate that bought into those premises would be more attracted to Trump than to anyone else in the GOP field...

If Trump is thriving in this wingnut environment, it's because the Republican Party in total - the elected officials, the media elites, the fringe rabble-rousers - created and nurtured that environment for decades.

This is where the Republicans had a choice, but it was one they made years ago. Actually, they had a series of choices they made, and each one has led to this moment.

• The Republicans had a choice whether or not to court the social conservatives of the Deep South back in the 1960s, when the Democratic leadership went all-in on Civil Rights that alienated the Dixiecrat faction. The GOP saw a solid, growing voter base of resentful Whites and forged their Southern Strategy. This is why the modern Republicans are no longer the Party of Lincoln but the Party of John C. Calhoun.
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the Republicans had a choice whether or not to court the Religious Right into a more active role in politics. The party saw the means to solidify their conservative ideology and control their messaging using God as a banner. The trade-off was that they allowed evangelicals and strident cultural warriors who refuse to compromise on their faith transmit such refusal of compromise to any political dealings at all.
• The Republicans had a choice after Bill Clinton's win in 1992 to regroup from a shaky loss and retain some high ground on governance and competency. Instead, they doubled down on both a Culture War called by Pat Buchanan to purge their own party of RINO moderates as well as an open media campaign against Clinton using the Politics of Personal Destruction to hound him and weaken his administration. It did weaken Clinton and exposed his more sordid habits, but it backfired by exposing a lot of the Republican leadership as hypocrites... and it gave too much power to the Far Right media - especially Limbaugh and Fox News - to dictate what elected officials had to do in office.
• The Republicans had a choice after George W. Bush's administration - at least from 2006 onward - to admit the failures of that administration across the board: mismanaged war efforts, a botched economy, deregulation disasters, etc. Instead they pretend to this very day that none of that really happened, or wasn't as bad as it looked, or that it was all someone else's - Bill Clinton first, Barack Obama later - fault. Which means the party leadership is perfectly willing to repeat the same mistakes, something that terrifies many voters.
• The Republicans had a choice after Barack Obama's inauguration over whether or not to work with this Democrat in the White House. The call for bipartisan efforts were rather high, the belief that the Republicans ought to provide some input in order to keep a stake in the political arena and keep Obama from pursuing a more strident Progressive agenda. Instead, the party leadership chose full-out obstruction to deny Obama "any victory" of legislative success. While it prevented that Progressive agenda, it also painted the Republicans into a corner where they can't actively pursue any legislative agenda of their own (we are currently seeing this session of Congress be the least-active of all time... out of the last two sessions of Congress that were just as barren). And it underscores an irony in that Obama was - as an Active-Positive based on Barber's Character traits - someone who could compromise with Republicans as long as it meant effective legislation. Instead, the Republicans insisted on harsh concessions that no Democratic President would accept.
• The Republicans had a choice in their philosophical outlook on politics: they could have retained the core Conservative value of restraint in policies, in opposition to the Liberal impulse of charging into massive reforms that could be reckless in the long-term. Instead, the party pushed their own reckless and uncompromising agendas to where the Liberals are now the sane and cautious ones.

Time and again, the Republican Party had to choose between immediate, short-term gratification over long-term survival. Each time, they chose to win in the moment and revel in such victories without accepting the consequences those victories entailed. Each time, the modern Republicans chose poorly.

And now the bill's come due.