Drawing most likely from the time of Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel, 1910-12, though the city had two more of them, from 1916 to 1940 and 1948 to 1960. ViaMilwaukee Independent.
Six weeks ago there was presidential candidate-flirt Michael Bloomberg:
Speaking with reporters after a second New Hampshire event, Bloomberg was asked about the wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. He said the presidential contender's plan was potentially unconstitutional, and compared it to socialism. "It's called Venezuela," he added.
Then around the same time there was Mr. Bret Stephens, economic theologian, laying down the catechism of orthodox socialism ("Yes, Venezuela is a Socialist Catastrophe"):
some of Chávez’s erstwhile defenders... would prefer to forget just how closely Venezuela followed the orthodox socialist script. Government spending on social programs? Check: From 2000 to 2013, spending rose to 40 percent of G.D.P., from 28 percent. Raising the minimum wage? Check. Nicolás Maduro, the current president, raised it no fewer than six times last year (though it makes no difference in the face of hyperinflation). An economy based on co-ops, not corporations? Check again. As Naomi Klein wrote in her fawning 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine,” “Chávez has made the co-ops a top political priority … By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers.”
I have no contact with the socialist archimandrites, protopresbyters, and patriarchs who decide, so all I really know about orthodox socialism is that they celebrate Christmas at the wrong time, right?
But back during the Cold War, when I was in 11th grade and Mr. Gallucci gave us our anti-communism lectures, he taught us that socialism is an economic system where the state owns the means of industrial production. Co-ops, where the workers own the means of production themselves, are communism, like the dairy co-ops up where I was raised, although those farmers, fiercely Republican, did not recognize themselves as communists, which just goes to show you. The Soviet Union had cooperatives, though they only began to grow beyond the manufacture of tourist tchotchkes during the late perestroika period starting 1988, but there were extremely mixed feelings about whether they were socialist or not, by 1990:
Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?
But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.
Then he calms down a bit. He's got the theological idea, which I really do, no snark, appreciate, that systemic racism is a sin, for which white society needs to atone, but he's more interested in Christian confession and absolution for himself than Jewish atonement and repair for the victims: looks like it's not the money that he expects to do the job, but the process of talking about it:
Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.
It'll make him feel all tingly, as David Brooks might say. So that's nice, and better than what his friends have done with the Universal Basic Income idea (used it as an excuse for planning the devastation of the social safety net), but it's pretty Brooksish in the end, and I'm not swooning.
Also it occurs to me that at the beginning of the week he seems to have read something about the Sanders "Medicare for All" proposal with "mild disagreement" and "all sorts of practical objections" and concluded that it was an "impossible dream". Does this mean that sometime in 2024 he's going to decide that it needs to be done, or at least discussed, after he has a conversation with an elderly diabetic who's been condemned to death by the price of insulin?
Come to think of it, wasn't it around 2008 that Brooks decided George W. Bush had made some "bad calls" at the beginning of the Iraq war? (He was applauding the "courageous and astute" 2007 surge)? Is Brooks installed with some kind of five-year rightness lag?
I have to laugh at Judge Ellis remarking that Paul Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" except for the period between 2004 and 2018 when he committed all the crimes he's charged with in the Virginia and DC cases. Does he believe Manafort went to Ukraine and suddenly became a professional criminal at the age of 55?
I have my doubts, above all over his work for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, reported by Ken Vogel in Politico Magazine back in June 2016, not long before Manafort's promotion from convention manager to campaign manager (the article was published literally the day after the meeting in Trump Tower with the anti-sanctions campaigner Natalia Veselnitskaya where he was reported to have fallen asleep, seemed later to have been taking desultory notes on his phone, and possibly, as Emptywheel pointed out, recorded the whole thing, which would now be in the hands of the Special Counsel, with Manafort's other electronic devices):
One example, according to documents, including some published here for the first time: Marcos earmarked huge sums of cash for Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns — as much as $57 million, according to one claim made to Philippine investigators. There’s no evidence that any cash ever made it into Reagan’s coffers, which would have been illegal since U.S. election laws ban donations from foreigners. And, despite extensive government investigations on both sides of the Pacific into the freewheeling spending of the Marcos regime, there’s never before been much serious inquiry of what ultimately happened to the cash intended for political contributions. The lack of a transparent paper trail — combined with the larger than life personas of Marcos and Manafort — spawned a swirl of theories.
"An otherwise blameless life"--Now that we know how Manafort laundered his millions from Yanukovych and Party of Regions, do we really want to believe him when he said this on his work in 80s for Ferdinand Marcos? https://t.co/4qIKvNQ4WOpic.twitter.com/uKf1DjekNO
Theories, in June 2016, but by that August, when the black book accounts began to emerge of the extravagant secret payments Manafort had been taking from his Ukrainian clients, getting him bounced from the Trump job, the Philippines story should have been taking on a different resonance.
Knowing Manafort as we do now, I think we can make a few good guesses as to where that money went. And while I'm not finding rumors like that involving his other unsavory clients, I'm wondering, especially about Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi, who paid him $600,000 a year from 1985 to 1992 to craft his image as a "freedom fighter" to appeal to the Reagan administration (and the governments of South Africa and Israel), as Sébastien Roblin explained—
Savimbi flew to Washington, where he gave speeches at Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. At the latter, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi as “a linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”
—because Savimbi financed his operations through his control of the Angolan diamond fields, and diamonds are a classic way of making untraceable payments, which he used to grease all sorts of palms:
Undercover payments are a way of life for everybody Manafort works with, from Mobutu Sese Seko to Putin and Deripaska and Donald J. Trump. I think when the history of these times is really written Manafort and Stone will turn out to have been criminals all their lives, going back to those College Republican campaigns in the late 1970s.
I'm skipping out for a long weekend. I'll be back on Monday, but while I'm away, your favorite guest bloggers will be here to entertain and edify. See you in a few days.
In his marathon speech to a gathering of conservative activists last weekend, Donald Trump ... may have synthesized the essence of his reelection strategy in just three words toward the back end of his two-hour harangue: “I’ll protect you.”
... That dark and martial message shows that Trump continues to prioritize energizing his core supporters—blue-collar, older, and nonurban whites uneasy about demographic, cultural, and economic change—even at the price of further alienating voters dismayed or disgusted by his behavior as president. It also shows that, even as an incumbent, Trump is drawn far more toward running on fear than on hope.
"Trump continues to prioritize energizing his core supporters"? Gosh, and I was so certain he intended to reach out to suburban women, millennials, and non-whites! "Trump is drawn far more toward running on fear than on hope"? Who knew!
Here's another shocker:
As a preview of 2020, Trump’s CPAC speech once again showed how closely he is likely to echo the central arguments of conservative populists, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace to Pat Buchanan.
And another:
Trump didn’t define “the American way of life” in his speech, but he’s left little doubt that he identifies it with the attributes of his own followers: overwhelmingly white and Christian and mostly living outside major cities.
And just in case you were so gobsmacked the first time Brownstein said this that you couldn't quite take it in, he repeats himself:
Trump’s disjointed, angry, boastful, vulgar, and divisive speech at CPAC was the clearest indication yet that he remains almost entirely uninterested in reaching out to the groups resisting him.
If that's not enough insight for one day, let's turn to The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan, who wants to point out something truly alarming: Fox News is really, really bad.
It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously
... The network ... specializes in fearmongering and unrelenting alarmism. Remember “the caravan”?
At crucial times, it does not observe basic standards of journalistic practice: as with its eventually retracted, false reporting in 2017 on Seth Rich, which fueled conspiracy theories that Hillary Clinton had the former Democratic National Committee staffer killed because he was a source of campaign leaks.
Fox, you might recall, was a welcoming haven for “birtherism” — the racist lies about President Barack Obama’s birthplace. For years, it has constantly, unfairly and inaccurately bashed Hillary Clinton.
... What Fox News has become is destructive. To state the obvious: Democracy, if it’s going to function, needs to be based on a shared set of facts, and the news media’s role is to seek out and deliver those facts.
Most news organizations take that seriously, though they may flounder badly at times. When they do, they generally try to correct themselves — that’s why you see editor’s notes, lengthy corrections, on-air acknowledgments, suspensions and even firings of errant news people.
Not at Fox News.
... everyone ought to see it for what it is: Not a normal news organization with inevitable screw-ups, flaws and commercial interests, which sometimes fail to serve the public interest.
But a shameless propaganda outfit, which makes billions of dollars a year as it chips away at the core democratic values we ought to hold dear: truth, accountability and the rule of law.
Sullivan acknowledges that "Anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention knew all of this long before Jane Mayer’s 11,000-word investigation in the New Yorker magazine was published a few days ago." But I don't recall hearing this from her before.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fine article. Go read it if you like. But it is also maddening in that it is the one millionth example of someone in the "respectable" media finally, breathlessly reporting something that we dirty hippies have been saying for literally decades....
...Fox News is not a news organization. It is -- quite openly and unapologetically -- the propaganda wing of the American fascist movement.
It is performance art on a global scale, designed to constantly push-push-push a radical political agenda and lie to the American people by extruding a hard-right-flavored news-looking product 24/7/365 directly into the skulls of the Republican Base.
Think about that for a minute: every single fucking day, the agenda for the entire media-political-economic engine of the last superpower on Earth is prodded along by a single corporation dedicated to perpetrating one, massive, toxic lie after another.
And everybody knows it.
That's the thing. That's what makes it so sickening; the simple, observable fact that, deep down, the Big Murdoch Lie Machine really fools no one at all but hardcore meatsticks of the Republican Party base.
Alas, everybody doesn't know it, and some people who say they've known it for a while have rarely if ever acknowledged it. The Murdoch machine is fooling plenty of people -- not Sullivan, maybe, but certainly the readers she's addressing, and the media colleagues who still believe that the Democratic Party's decision to cancel a Fox News debate was an undeserved slight.
And it may have finally dawned on Ronald Brownstein that Trump will pursue a base-only strategy in the 2020 campaign, but I guarantee that many A-list pundits still believe Trump's future might include a pivot to "expanding his base" and "being presidential"
President Trump proclaimed in a freewheeling speech to a conference of conservatives last weekend that “America is winning again.” But his administration has been on a pronounced losing streak over the past week.
... Late last week, Trump flew home empty-handed from a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi — and, within days, new satellite images appeared to show that the North was secretly rebuilding a rocket-launching site.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that unauthorized border crossings have spiked to the highest pace in 12 years — despite Trump’s hard-line rhetoric and new policies aimed at deterring migrants.
And on Wednesday, the Commerce Department said that the nation’s trade deficit is at a record high — in part due to punitive tariffs Trump imposed on allies and adversaries. Trump vowed throughout his 2016 campaign and during his presidency to shrink the trade deficit....
Trump opponents in Congress pursue evidence that he's a criminal and a pro-Russian fifth columnist. Commentators and online snarkers note that Trump is lazy and addicted to TV and golf. Democrats on the campaign trail downplay Trump, talking instead about the agendas they'd like to enact.
All that is appropriate -- but as a result, there's very little discussion of whether Trump is succeeding on his own terms. No, wait, that's not accurate -- conservatives regularly proclaim that Trump is winning spectacularly in everything he attempts. That message isn't being effectively rebutted by the left and center, which would rather talk about Russian collusion and Stormy Daniels payouts.
Many Democrats who want to win back the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are focused on whether the party should nominate a moderate, a male, a white person. They're concerned with rebuking Ilhan Omar and shushing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Maybe they should try pointing out -- to the white heartlanders who tell pollsters they "somewhat support" Trump rather than "strongly support him," or the ones who warily voted for him in 2016 and are now on the fence -- that Trump is not doing what they were rooting for him to do if elected. He's breaking promise after promise. We keep saying that Trump is a larger-than-life grotesque monster. Maybe we should be saying he's simply a lousy president.
Our portrayal of Trump as an outsize villain elevates him. Saying he just plain sucks at his job would bring him down to size.
CNN'S Chris Cillizza thinks President Trump is preparing to contest the legitimacy of the 2020 election results:
"The Democrats in Congress yesterday were vicious and totally showed their cards for everyone to see," Trump tweeted Tuesday, referring to House Democrats' launching of a broad-scale investigation into him. "When the Republicans had the Majority they never acted with such hatred and scorn! The Dems are trying to win an election in 2020 that they know they cannot legitimately win!"
Trump 2020 campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany echoed that sentiment in a statement on the Democratic investigations. "These desperate Democrats know they cannot beat President Trump in 2020, so instead they have embarked on a disgraceful witch hunt with one singular aim: topple the will of the American people and seize the power that they have zero chance at winning legitimately," she said.
And asked Wednesday about the Democratic investigations, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said this: "They continue to be a group totally taken by small radical leftist fringe of their party and they're completely controlled by it, they know that's not enough to beat this President so they're going to look for other ways to do that."
All of that rhetoric fits into a very clear pattern: Convince the Trump base that it is not possible for him to lose a fair and legitimate election in 2020. Thus, if he loses, it must be, by definition, illegitimate.
Consider this scenario: On the morning of November 3, 2020, it becomes clear that Trump has lost both the electoral college and the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, whoever they may be. The president, however, rather than calling his Democratic opponent to concede, holds a rally with his supporters at which he declares himself the winner, tells the crowd “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” slams the “fake news” media, and claims “millions and millions” of people voted illegally for the Democrats. He denounces a “deep state” coup and warns of “violence.”
Do you really think this isn’t possible? That this potential scenario shouldn’t make us all very afraid?
It's possible -- but it's not Trump's pronouncements that worry me. He'll go to his grave never admitting he lost in 2020, even if it's a blowout. In a healthy system, we could shrug that off once he's been defeated.
But I worry about the rest of the political establishment. Hasan thinks congressional Republicans will be supine:
Could we rely on congressional Republicans to rediscover their backbones and insist he stand down? Don’t. Be. Silly.
I worry about a scenario in which Mitch McConnell and company don't just stand idly by while Trump presses his case -- they actively join Trump's campaign, knowing that contradicting Trump means endangering their political careers as Republicans. I imagine them buttressing Trump's arguments by pointing to trivial (and imaginary) irregularities in the voting. They'll claim to have identified pockets of unprecedented voter fraud, probably in big cities. They'll do this with the fake gravitas Trump isn't capable of.
Hasan worries about Fox News -- "Why wouldn’t they demand Trump hang on, and tell their viewers to back the (defeated) president?" Fox will do that, and more, advancing elaborate narratives of electoral fakery.
But it's the rest of the news media I worry about. As I write this, Democrats have just announced that they won't hold a presidential primary debate on Fox News in this cycle, citing "the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and Fox News," as reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. They argue that Fox can't possibly be "host a fair and neutral debate."
The relationship between Fox and the White House is so symbiotic that this decision should be completely uncontroversial. Yet mainstream journalists -- journalists Fox hates -- are taking Fox's side:
Whether it’s the case or not, it sends a message of being afraid of something. Which is what Trump feeds off in opponents. https://t.co/GqD9kgxN6c
If enough Republicans second the president's allegations -- and they will -- can we count on the media to treat them as the nonsense they are? Or will the press begin to bothsides the issue, arguing that Democrats spent years effectively trying to nullify the 2016 election (never mind that it was in response to crimes and traitorousness), so we need to take Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ronna McDaniel, and the rest seriously when they talk about irregularities in the voting? It's possible that the mainstream media will legitimize the conspiracy theories, or perhaps just remain neutral on issues of fact, treating the battle as a sporting event. Who's winning? Who's losing? Which side looks cooler? (In 2000, the MSM agreed that Republicans defending George W. Bush's Florida "win" were impressively slick, while the Democrats were dorky.)
We can deal with Trump crying foul after a loss. I'm not so sure about any force multipliers he might have.
In the race to be the Democrats' 2020 presidential nominee, Joe Biden is leading in national polls, leading in Iowa, and leading in New Hampshire -- yet smart people don't think he's really the front-runner. They ascribe his lead to name recognition, and assume he'll be a bad presidential candidate in this race because he's been a bad presidential candidate in his past races. They assume his actions and positions as a senator will sink him.
But what if he really is the front-runner? Here's an alternate scenario. As I'll note below, there's some evidence to back this up:
I really don't have better than 20% odds on any 2020 candidate right now, but if there's one scenario I wonder about a lot these days it's Biden consolidating the normie vote early on and just never losing it en route to the nomination
The evidence comes from a political pro working in South Carolina:
So, I’m working with a client today to conduct a focus group of black women who are likely to vote in the South Carolina Democratic Presidential primary. I have the client’s permission to tweet out anecdotes and observations, but they’d prefer not to be named.
Here's what happens when the focus group of South Carolina black Democratic women is asked about Biden:
Now we’re on to Biden. One woman says it’s the closest we can get to a 3rd term for Obama w/o electing Michelle. Lots of chuckles but also lots of heads nodding in agreement. Another says she would vote for him today but isn’t sure if he’s too “old” or “sloppy” to take on Trump.
Yeah…most of these hits just aren’t landing. In response to a short description of Biden’s opposition to integration efforts one woman asks if we’re honestly asking her to believe he is a segregationist. https://t.co/yoAxPHBa4J
The Anita Hill hit is better. [After being shown a quick explainer] When asked if Biden owes her an apology the room is unanimous that he does. A few people haven’t heard of Anita Hill.
Basically, Anita Hill is the only thing that modestly resonates. Calling out some of his more conservative positions is falling flat. These participants like Biden. I think he’s probably (unfortunately, at least IMHO) a stronger front runner than the CW.
Above, NBC's Benjy Sarlin imagines that Biden could win a plurality of "normie" voters while the rest of the field remains split. By "normie," I imagine Sarlin means voters who aren't deeply engaged politics obsessives, i.e., folks who watch MSNBC every evening and log a lot of hours on political Twitter. He may be thinking of older white moderate Rust Belt Democrats -- the voters most identified with Biden.
I think Biden will do well with those voters -- but he's also well liked by these black women from South Carolina. It might be appropriate to think of them as "normies," too, assuming they're not politics junkies or tireless campaign volunteers. (Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party in the South, but it's not clear whether these are regular volunteers or just ordinary voters.)
Barefoot goes on to note that, despite what you might imagine, Biden is soundly beating Kamala Harris among these voters so far:
Now Kamala. Not everyone knows how to say her name. Quick raise of hands shows a 70-30 split in favor of Biden if it were 1 on 1. 60% of the Biden people say they’re open to changing their mind. Only 30% of the (much) smaller Kamala group says they would be opening to changing.
That may not mean much -- at this stage of the 2008 contest, Hillary Clinton was trouncing Barack Obama among black voters. Allegiances can change. But what this does suggest is that Biden has a deep reservoir of goodwill among these voters.
In 2016, it was difficult to sell GOP voters on the notion that Donald Trump was a bad man because they'd seen him for a decade and a half on The Apprentice and they were comfortable with him. For Democratic voters, Biden's eight years as Obama's VP might be his Apprentice.
I realize that CNN recently had its own six-member focus group that rejected Biden outright. I'm not saying for certain that Biden will retain his lead in the polls.
But he might. We shouldn't write him off as a relic.
The Democratic resolution written in response to comments from Representative Ilhan Omar is being revised. The Washington Examinersays it will now also include language condemning bigotry against Muslims:
House Democrats will add language to resolution condemning anti-Semitism so that it also rejects anti-Muslim prejudice.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Tuesday the resolution is still being written. A Democratic aide said a vote is likely Thursday, a day later than initially planned, and said some language condemning anti-Muslim bias would also be added, without specifying what it would say.
“There will be a vote this week, and you will see what it is when we are finished writing it,” Pelosi said Tuesday night.
The Washington Post also says that the resolution is being revised, but is less certain about the nature of the revisions:
Two Democratic aides said language would be added to condemn anti-Muslim bias specifically, while another said it could condemn religious hatred generally.
Here's my question: If the resolution condemns only anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias, won't some Republicans refuse to vote for it? I think some will refuse, passing up a chance to join the Ilhan Omar pile-on, because they're actually in favor of anti-Muslim bias.
If the resolution mentions only Jews and Muslims, Republicans may also vote no for another reason. Check out some of the comments in a Free Republic thread on the resolution:
And anti-Christian bias?
****
I knew if anyone could screw this resolution up it would be the Socialist “democRATS”. The maggots should have added in language on anti-Caucasian and anti-Christian bias.
****
Well then, what about anti-Hindu, and anti-Buddhism, or anti-Taoism, or anti-Sikhism...…….,or (shudder) Anti-Christian?
I don't think the last comment is sincere, except about Christians. There's a near-universal belief on the right that the most common form of bigotry worldwide is anti-Christian prejudice. Anti-white prejudice is believed by many to run a close second.
On the other hand, if, after the rewrite, the measure is a non-specific condemnation of religious prejudice, Republicans will probably vote for it, but they'll complain that Christians and Jews aren't singled out as victims. I don't think they'll be fully satisfied unless the resolution suggests that other groups are less justified in their complaints. They don't believe anyone other than Christians and (maybe) Jews deserves first-class citizenship (and top-shelf victim status) in America, so of course they'll complain.
The House passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred on Thursday following days of debate over comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., that some lawmakers said were anti-Semitic.
The vote was 427 in favor, with 23 against and one member, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, voting "present." The 23 lawmakers who opposed the resolution were all Republicans, many of whom wanted a measure that focused solely on anti-Semitism.
Liz CHENEY explains no vote: “While I stand whole heartedly against discrimination outlined in this resolution, the language before the House today did not address the issue that is front and center.”
Read the revised resolution here. I think it strikes a good balance between the concerns of Omar's critics and those of her supporters. But it focused on anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias, while condemning other prejudices, and that wasn't good enough for 24 Republicans.
AND: As I predicted....
There's the Cheney/Zeldin reason for opposing the watered-down anti-hate bill.
And there's Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks' reaction. Subject line: "BROOKS VOTES AGAINST RESOLUTION THAT CONDEMNS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST VIRTUALLY EVERYONE . . . EXCEPT CAUCASIANS AND CHRISTIANS!"
In the latest round of controversy, Omar said during a town hall, regarding U.S. policy toward Israel, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” This comment was roundly condemned....
So let’s talk about this idea of “dual loyalty,” and how it does and doesn’t relate to Omar’s comments. For many years, Jews were routinely accused of having dual loyalty, to both the United States and Israel, as a way of questioning whether they were truly American and could be trusted to do things such as serve in sensitive national security positions.
That charge was anti-Semitic, because it was used to allege that every Jew was suspect, no matter what they thought about Israel, and that they could not be fully American because they were assumed to have too much affection for another country. It wasn’t about the particulars of U.S. policy or what Jews at the time were advocating; it was about who they (allegedly) were, their identity.
Now, back to Omar. Here’s the truth: The whole purpose of the Democrats’ resolution is to enforce dual loyalty not among Jews, but among members of Congress, to make sure that criticism of Israel is punished in the most visible way possible. This, of course, includes Omar....
You may have noticed that almost no one uses “dual loyalty” as a way of questioning whether Jews are loyal to the United States anymore. Why has it almost disappeared as an anti-Semitic slur? Because, over the last three decades, support for Israel has become increasingly associated with conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party....
Ilhan Omar certainly didn’t say that Jews have dual loyalty. For instance, in one of the tweets that got people so worked up, Omar said, “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.” You’ll notice she didn’t say or even imply anything at all about Jews. She said that she was being asked to support Israel in order to have the privilege of serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was true.... Her argument, to repeat, isn’t about how Jews feel about Israel, it’s about what is being demanded of her.
In the past, accusing a Jew of "dual loyalty" was a way of questioning his or her patriotism. But as Waldman makes clear, "dual loyalty" is now a test of patriotism -- AIPAC, evangelicals, most Republicans, and quite a few Democrats believe you simply aren't a loyal American unless you have "dual loyalty."
Whatever you think of Omar, this is what she was protesting.
There is a small but non-zero chance that your only choices for president in the 2020 general election will be billionaire CEOs: Donald Trump (assuming he actually is a billionaire), Mike Bloomberg (in the unlikely event that he wins the Democratic nomination), Howard Schultz (who seems determined to run just to spite left-wing haters) ... and, if that's not enough wealthy white male self-regard, possibly this guy:
Mark Cuban is strongly considering running for President of the United States in 2020 as a third-party candidate....
“I haven’t decided anything yet. We’ll see what happens. It all comes down to how things play out,” Cuban said....
“But it’s something that if circumstances were right I would do.” ...
Cuban said getting on the ballot in all 50 states would not be a problem, and he said he would reject any political contributions that did not come from individual donors. He has not formed a Political Action Committee.
When asked exactly what circumstances would have to take place in order for him to run, he refused to answer.
But his insight into the viability of an independent candidate was something he has clearly thought long and hard about.
The interest of Schultz and Cuban in the presidency suggests that America isn't a country anymore -- it's a trophy wife, something you acquire as a visible signifier of your alpha state. As such, Americans have agency, but only to the extent that rich men's playthings have agency. We get to choose which Master of the Universe treats us as arm candy, like Wendi Deng (ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch who's reportedly been the girlfriend of Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin) or Jerry Hall (ex-wife of Mick Jagger and Murdoch's current wife). That's as much freedom as we have.
In the recent past, we were at least allowed to choose candidates who represented the interests of multiple billionaires, and who made at least a token effort to conceal the puppet strings. That era appears to be over.
Seriously, though: If Schultz and Cuban run, the Democrats shouldn't even bother fielding a candidate -- Trump will win, because his cultists, along with the right-wingers who don't like Trump but would vote for Charles Manson's reanimated corpse if it promised reductions in upper-bracket taxes or corporatist/theocrat judges, will outpoll any of the other candidates in the split anti-Trump field.
The New York Times and The Washington Post have now run nearly identical stories about the possible fallout from HBO's broadcast of the Michael Jackson pedophilia documentary Leaving Neverland. The two stories have a shared hook: How bad is this financially for Michael Jackson industry?
... Now, nearly 10 years after his death, the dark side of Mr. Jackson’s legend has returned through a documentary that rocked the Sundance Film Festival and is being championed by Oprah Winfrey. In addition to delivering a hit to his mended reputation, the film poses a significant risk to the Jackson estate, which has engineered a thriving posthumous career, including a Broadway-bound jukebox musical.
... “There has always been this shadow or cloud about Michael,” said Charles Koppelman, a longtime music executive who once served as a financial adviser to Mr. Jackson. “With this documentary about to be shown to millions and millions of people, and all the notoriety that it’s now getting, I think it will have a detrimental effect to the legacy and the estate.”
... [After Jackson's death, h]is estate, led by John G. Branca, Mr. Jackson’s longtime lawyer and deal maker, and John McClain, a music executive, struck an array of lucrative deals, including film and record contracts. It also approved two Jackson-related shows by the dance-theater troupe Cirque du Soleil. One of those, “Michael Jackson: One,” has been a Las Vegas staple since 2013.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, the singer had hit a low point, dogged by personal scandals and diminishing star power that paled in comparison to the rarefied heights he achieved in his record-setting career. But the decade since his death has seen a wholesale rehabilitation of his image, returning the King of Pop to prominence as both a cultural icon and financial powerhouse whose afterlife became a billion-dollar brand.
Now, a documentary detailing graphic allegations of child sexual abuse has created a new wave of public outrage against Jackson, imperiling his legacy as a music superstar — and the business that his estate has rebuilt into an empire.
The entertainer’s estate, once roiled by hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, has flourished remarkably since his death from an overdose, pulling in a reported $2 billion through posthumous deals, including the forthcoming Broadway musical “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” a Cirque du Soleil tribute spectacle performed five nights a week in Las Vegas, and the $287.5 million Sony paid for Jackson’s share of EMI Music Publishing.
Both stories note that the Jackson estate is suing HBO for $100 million. The Post:
The $100 million is “putting a price tag on what they think these allegations are going to do,” said Adam Streisand, a Los Angeles-based trial lawyer specializing in celebrity estates. “If people are turning away in droves from other very famous people and their work, is the same thing going to happen to Michael Jackson? Clearly the estate thinks so.”
I could regard this as a story about relatives rising to Jackson's defense less out of family loyalty than out of concern about a revenue stream -- but I've been reading the elite press for too long to think what's really going on here. Elite news organizations produce a lot of voyeuristic stories about money, aimed at people who care what happens to their own investments. I strongly suspect that as we read these stories we're meant to have a pang in our hearts, vicariously imagining all the lost revenues if Jackson's fan base begins to reject him.
Since at least the Reagan era, we've been conditioned to watch financial fluctuations and think not who cares what happens to those rich bastards? but rather: My 401(k)! What will this do to my 401(k)? We're so well trained that many of us are prepared to root for Amazon against Queens activists, health insurers against single-payer advocates, or team owners against striking players.
The surviving Jacksons are wealthy people. I won't shed a tear if they don't get wealthier. Why am I supposed to care?
Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
Mayer continues:
Hemmer argues that Fox ... acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” ... The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.”
Mayer strongly suggests that Fox has changed in the years since Trump was elected and Roger Ailes was fired. She approvingly quotes Paul Manafort and Roger Stone's ex-lobbying partner ...
“I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.”
... and former Fox host Greta Van Susteren:
Greta Van Susteren believes that Ailes’s departure posed a huge challenge for his successors: “It’s like what happens when a dictator falls. If you look historically, when you get rid of a Saddam in Iraq, or a Qaddafi in Libya, the place falls apart.” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
Obviously, Fox was never going to be state TV during the Obama years. But it was Tea Party TV starting in Obama's first year. Mayer gets this part of the story wrong:
At the height of the Tea Party rebellion, Ailes reprimanded Hannity for violating the line between journalism and politics. Hannity had arranged to tape his evening Fox show at a Tea Party fund-raiser in Ohio. When Ailes learned of the plan, only hours before the event, he demanded that Hannity cancel his appearance. According to a former Fox executive, Ailes then blew up at Bill Shine, who had authorized Hannity’s trip. “Roger was livid, and ripped the shit out of Shine,” the former executive says, recalling that Ailes yelled, “No one at Fox is shilling for the Tea Party!” Afterward, Shine released a statement criticizing Hannity’s actions. And Murdoch, at a panel about the news, expressed a similar view, saying, “I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party.”
“No one at Fox is shilling for the Tea Party”? That would be news to Media Matters, which reported on Fox's flackery in real time:
... Fox News has in dozens of instances provided attendance and organizing information for future protests, such as protest dates, locations and website URLs. Fox News websites have also posted information and publicity material for protests. Fox News hosts have repeatedly encouraged viewers to join them at several April 15 protests that they are attending and covering; during the April 6 edition of Glenn Beck, on-screen text characterized these events as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." Tea-party organizers have used the planned attendance of the Fox News hosts to promote their protests. Fox News has also aired numerous interviews with protest organizers. Moreover, Fox News contributors are listed as "Tea Party Sponsor[s]" on TaxDayTeaParty.com.
A few screenshots from that Media Matters report:
Fox wasn't "state TV" then -- it was "government-in-exile TV." Mayer correctly notes the escalation of pro-birther coverage on Fox starting in 2011 (the most prominent birther being the newly hired Fox & Friends commentator Donald Trump). She doesn't mention this four-minute anti-Obama attack ad, which appeared unannounced in the middle of a Fox & Friends episode in the spring of 2012:
Prior to the Obama years, Fox ews was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and the principal source of publicity for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in their campaign to take down John Kerry. (And I don't think we need to go into Fox's role in the battle to unseat Bill Clinton).
I'll admit that, during the George W. Bush years, Fox wasn't "state TV" in this sense:
Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. ... Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff.
But has Fox changed, or has the White House? In the Bush era, and later when Republicans lost and then regained power during the Obama years, Fox was seen as an effective tool for catapulting GOP propaganda, but the Bush team and congressional Republicans didn't turn Fox employees into advisers -- party members developed the messages and relied on Fox to retransmit them. This administration gets messages from Fox. The old guard, some of whom are still around, produced content for Fox; the Trump administration is a consumer of that content.
That's what's changed. Fox is what it always was. It always shilled for the GOP, or at least the wing of the GOP that was the least conciliatory. It always used fear to radicalize its viewers and to win viewer loyalty. The only difference is that now one of those loyal marathon viewers is president.
To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”
Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it's not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.
When I asked Townsend about his e-mails to Guilfoyle, he said, “Mind your own business. I’m just a Fox fan. I’m a keyboard warrior. I’m a nobody.” He said, “I’ve sent stuff to various people at Fox for years, and I don’t get a penny for it,” and added, “I don’t know what tree you’re barking up but you better be careful.”
I believe this is Townsend's Gab feed; he posts as @pog.
But by online wingnut standards, his posts are mostly middle of the road. He's just a standard-issue right-wing grievance collector.
He also has an Instagram feed with three posts, two of which are photos of Guilfoyle.
Should it surprise us that Guilfoyle would prepare for what purports to be a news program by consulting with a conservative Internet troll? Not really, since she's dating a conservative Internet troll, Donald Trump Jr.
Don Junior is @pog if @pog was born rich and was the son and namesake of a celebrity billionaire. Junior is also a right-wing grievance collector, and also spends his days retransmitting stories and memes from what we naively regard as fringe websites. (In 2019, when nothing said on the right is too extreme to go mainstream, there's really no such thing as a fringe.) Junior is, if anything, more willing to make idle threats than @pog (as is Junior's father). It's almost as if Guilfoyle's information-exchange relationship with @pog was a warm-up for her intimate relationship with Junior.
I have mixed feelings about the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. On the one hand, it suggests that President Trump will have trouble winning reelection:
A year and a half before the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump faces formidable obstacles in his bid for re-election, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Just four in 10 voters say they would re-elect him next year; 58 percent don’t think he’s been honest and truthful regarding the Russia probe; and 60 percent disapprove of his recent national emergency declaration to build a border wall.
On the other hand, Trump's job approval/disapproval numbers are disturbingly high -- 46%/52%. And while his reelect numbers are low, they're comparable to Bill Clinton's, if not Barack Obama's:
Forty-one percent of registered voters say they will “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump in 2020, versus 48 percent who say they will “definitely” or “probably” vote for the Democratic candidate.
Those numbers for Trump are worse than what Barack Obama faced at this same point in time in the 2012 cycle, when 45 percent said they’d vote for him, while 40 percent would vote for the Republican opponent.
But they’re on par with Bill Clinton’s numbers in January 1995, when 38 percent said they’d vote for Clinton, versus 42 percent who said they’d pick the generic Republican candidate.
Also, the poll gives us a look at voters' comfort level with certain candidate attributes. Note the ones at the bottom of the list:
This is at a time when elderly socialist Bernie Sanders is one of the Democrats' two front-runners. Sanders is also the most popular second choice of supporters of the other front-runner, Joe Biden (who, of course, is also elderly).
But here's some good news in the poll: Voters see the GOP for what it is, and (so far) haven't been swayed by Republican attempts to portray Democrats as dangerous radicals.
At a time when Republicans are working harder than usual to portray Democrats as environmental wackaloons, 56% of respondents say that Democratic ideas about climate change are in the mainstream, and only 35% say Democrats are outside mainstream. For Republicans, the numbers are reversed: 29% mainstream, 63% outside.
The same is true on abortion. Republicans have spend the last few weeks misstating the standard Democratic position on late-term abortion and tarring Democrats as the party of infanticide. So far it's not working: Democrats are seen as being in the mainstream on abortion by a 51%-41% margin, while Republicans are seen as outside the mainstream, 38%/54%.
Democrats also score clear wins on health care and immigration, while (alas) the parties are at rough parity on taxes and fiscal policy. I'd like the Democratic numbers to be better on that issue and the Republican numbers to be worse, but it's clear that the GOP stereotype of Democrats as people with crazy ideas about money is rejected by half of America.
The poll suggests that Democrats should continue talking about the economy -- respondents think it's good, but they don't think it's good for them:
As for views on the economy, 53 percent of Americans say they believe the United States won’t be in a recession in the next 12 months, compared with 33 percent who disagree.
But when asked about their own economic situation, 59 percent say 2019 will be a year to hold back and save because harder times are ahead, while 34 percent think it will be a time of expansion and opportunity.
I don't know whether the Democrats' good numbers can withstand the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of propaganda Republicans will unleash in the next year and a half. But for now, Americans don't seem to regard the Democratic Party as extreme on the issues.
The rollicking two-hour-plus appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland offered the president a brief respite from an otherwise miserable week in which his much-touted summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ended in failure and his former personal lawyer delivered explosive testimony to Congress.
Come Saturday afternoon, President Donald Trump had endured a long week of failure and embarrassment. His high-profile summit with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam didn’t result in any discernible breakthrough in denuclearization efforts—though he did manage to outrage the family of an American university student who the North Korean dictator’s regime essentially tortured to death.
Stateside, Trump’s lawyers and surrogates were left to run damage control over the congressional testimony of the president’s former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, who spent Wednesday publicly accusing his old boss of rampant corruption, racism, and destruction of the republic.
And the president’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill telegraphed increasing signs of a coming defection on Trump’s declared national emergency in a strong-arm effort to build his promised wall on the southern border.
But on Saturday, President Trump and his motorcade arrived at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference to spin the past week, and the last two years, as an unqualified triumph, greeted by attendees and adoring fans as a hero and titan political operator.
In fact, the president is doing just fine. His poll numbers have recovered from a brief dip during the government shutdown. Only 37% of poll respondents think Michael Cohen's congressional testimony was credible (25% don't, 39% aren't sure). And, as The Washington Post's Robert Costa notes, Republicans in Congress remain unswervingly loyal to Trump, which means he has ironclad impeachment insurance:
When President Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen testified last week that his former boss was a “racist” and “con man” who routinely skirts the law, Republicans showed little interest in following up on his claims.
They shrugged when Trump called murderous dictator Kim Jong Un a “real leader” and once again elevated the North Korean leader on the world stage.
And faced with a vote on Trump’s legally contested declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, just 13 of 197 House Republicans opposed him.
Acquiescence to Trump is now the defining trait of the Republican Party more than two years into his presidency — overwhelming and at times erasing principles that conservatives viewed as the foundation of the party for more than a half century.
Trump still has reason to fear the Mueller report, the Southern District of New York, and a number of committees in the House. But for now, he's doing fine -- but he got bad press this week and that irks him.
Today's speech was a Festivus-style airing of grievances, partly tethered to the latest trends in liberal-bashing. You know Cleek's Law: "Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily." To some extent, that's what Trump delivered:
Trump, mocking the Green New Deal, acts out a husband peering up at the sky as he attempts to watch TV but can't because it is not windy. He says, "Darling, is the wind blowing today? I'd like to watch television, darling." There is raucous laughter and applause.
Trump, back on script, says the future does not belong to socialists, it belongs to believers in freedom. He says "America will never be a socialist country," prompting loud cheers and a U-S-A chant.
At CPAC, President Donald Trump claimed that New York lawmakers cheered after passing a bill that legalized post-birth abortions. (see video at link) https://t.co/1FkJDahVOQ
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) March 2, 2019
But Trump mostly grumbled about everything he's ever grumbled about as president: press scrutiny of his inaugural crowd size, the recusal decision by Jeff Sessions, and, of course, "the fake news."
And that's his superpower: He has a bottomless well of right-wing grievance. Nobody does grievance better on the right. He hasn't had a terrible week -- he's had a typicxal Trump week, which means a lot of terrible things happened and 45% of the country, at minimum, doesn't believe they were terrible. And then today he had an excellent day, by his measure.
I wish I agreed with BooMan -- and many others -- that the corrupt process of obtaining a security clearance for Jared Kushner will become a big problem for the president.
If Kushner is exposed in a very serious way, that will reflect badly on Trump in two ways. The first is that the Kushner/Trump relationship is not just a marriage, but also a family alliance coming out of the shady world of New York real estate. It’s unlikely that there any business reasons for denying a Kushner a security clearance that wouldn’t equally apply to a Trump.
But the sleaziness of Trump's business career has never seemed to bother the public. Trump's dishonest business practices and ties to unsavory characters were widely reported, even during 2016, and the stories never took hold. The Trump University scandal came and went without leaving a mark. A recent massive New York Times report on Trump family corruption disappeared without a trace. It seems obvious that Trump supporters -- even his "soft" supporters -- assume thst you've got to be tough, and a bit unsavory, if you want to make it in sinful, decadent New York. Trump's ignorance, laziness, bigotry, sexism, and political extremism seem to turn voters against him much more than the corrupt way he's run his life.
The second problem is that Trump has given Kushner such a big portfolio, including the responsibility of trying to negotiate a Middle East peace plan. If Kushner is discredited, it’s going to bleed over into Trump’s foreign policy and call into question how responsible he has been in conducting the nation’s business abroad.
I don't think most voters understand who's doing what in the Trump administration -- Cabinet members come and go, Trump personalizes certain issues (e.g., North Korea), and while there don't seem to be any foreign policy successes, a casual observer might assume that everything's being managed adequately, because no real crisis has touched America yet on Trump's watch. The Khashoggi murder seemed bad, but it's a remote issue for most people. There's no peace in the Middle East, but no administration succeeds at that. The Saudis seem shady, but they always do, yet most presidents have been deferential to them. Until there's another 9/11 or a Trump war that turns into a debacle, I can't imagine public outrage at Kushner as pseudo-secretary of state.
There's also this:
My son-in-law has to pass an FBI security check for his contracting work and believe me, it's not a cakewalk. He's so scrupulous and careful and honest-- Kushner's clearance truly is an insult to sincere folks who dot their i's and cross their t's. https://t.co/FxLuid4sG2
But that's unlikely to appall the public. There's rampant unfairness in most of our workplaces -- some people have have it easy while too much is demanded of others. The boss's son-in-law got special treatment -- what could be more of a cliché?
The Kushner story is bad, but I think it means more to government workers, and to the journalists who cover them and know them, than it means to the public at large.
The president thinks he's caught Michael Cohen in a lie:
President Donald Trump on Friday launched a new line of attack on his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, demanding that Congress obtain a manuscript of Cohen’s scrapped book about his relationship with Trump.
In a series of morning tweets, the president alleged that the manuscript would show his former personal lawyer and fixer lied to Congress this week....
Trump tweeted:
Wow, just revealed that Michael Cohen wrote a “love letter to Trump” manuscript for a new book that he was pushing. Written and submitted long after Charlottesville and Helsinki, his phony reasons for going rogue. Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which now is a lie!
In his congressional testimony on Wednseday, Cohen said he began to be disillusioned with Trump after witnessing Trump's reaction to the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march in August 2017 and Trump's coziness with Vladimir Putin at the summit meeting in Helsinki in July 2018. Cohen shopped around his book proposal in early 2018 -- before Helsinki, but after Charlottesville.
The proposal was very favorable to Trump, as a Daily Mail report makes clear:
'Everything he wanted to say about Trump was positive,' added [an] executive who discussed the deal with Cohen.
'Even in our meeting he was glowing with praise for the president.'
... He started his proposal with a list of unflattering barbs that have been thrown at Trump since he became Commander-in-Chief. 'Crazy'; 'Dumb'; 'Paranoid'; 'In Over His Head'; 'Liar'; 'Addicted to TV'; 'Hates the Media'.
'All of these things have been said about my longtime boss, Donald J. Trump,' Cohen added. 'None of it is true. Except maybe that last one – about the media. Trump does believe that reporters are out to get him, and for a very good reason. Many of them are.
'That doesn't make him paranoid,' wrote Cohen. 'That makes him a realist.'
Cohen ... explains away Trump’s erratic tendencies, saying the president is just a wily strategist who pretends to be crazy to create “an incredibly effective smoke machine,” fooling even formerly close allies like ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
“There truly is a method to his madness, to quote that old saw, and people who think otherwise can quickly get buried,” Cohen said. “Steve Bannon comes to mind, but there are plenty of others who are now six-feet under due to this basic miscalculation. I’ll also be talking about this in some detail.”
But when exactly was this proposal submitted? The Mail story tells us:
Cohen wrote his proposal on January 24, 2018, less than three weeks after the publication of the first critical book about the Trump presidency, Michael Wolff's 'Fire And Fury,' which claimed the White House was a chaotic place where '100% of the people around him' believe Trump is unfit for office.
There was quite a bit of money in it for Cohen if the book was published, and the Beast story says that "a good amount of the book [would] be dedicated to Cohen’s own personal gripes about his interactions with the media" -- but if Cohen had a pro-Trump book proposal ready to go weeks after the publication of the first book to truly damage the Trump presidency -- remember, Cohen was still Trump's lawyer at the time, and would be until May 2018 -- then the proposal was, at least in part, an effort by Cohen to be a fixer for Trump in print. He was doing damage control. He was on the clock for Trump.
Center Street, a division of Hachette that publishes a lot of conservative books (Michael Savage, Jeanine Pirro, Steve Scalise, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie), dumped the Cohen book in May 2018, just about the time Trump cut Cohen loose. There was probably no manuscript at the time, though portions might have existed in draft form. But we can't expect anything Cohen may have written then to be the truth because Trump was still his boss. Cohen was still a professional liar for Trump.
FoxNews.com had this as the lead item until a short while ago, and irony died a little:
So wait -- Fox is now in favor of bipartisanship, and against ideologically cohesive parties? Did I miss a memo?
At times it seems as if Republicans hate Ocasio-Cortez because she's stolen their playbook. For years, the right has had a publicity engine that makes stars out of anyone with a usable backstory (Dan Crenshaw) or possibly just a taste for the theatrical (Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz). For years, Democrats seemed to have nothing comparable.
Ocasio-Cortez knows how to work the media and knows how to get her name in the headlines. In part, she's doing this with ideology -- hey, that's the GOP's trick! Republicans invented "constitutional conservatism" and the Tea Party and several other formulations, which allowed them to posture as members of "the party of ideas" once the right's star-maker machinery got them in front of the cameras. Now Ocasio-Cortez is operating along similar lines, and they don't like it.
I think they're jealous. She's stealing their act.
