Democratic Primaries

ChrisWeigant

(952 posts) Fri Nov 22, 2019, 10:51 PM Nov 2019

Friday Talking Points -- And Here We Are

{Program Note for DemocraticUnderground.com readers:
This is a weekly roundup column of what is going on in the political world. For the duration of the 2020 campaign, I've been instructed to post it under the "Democratic Primaries" category rather than the "General Discussion" category, whenever the primary race is discussed. This discussion may be a large part of the column, or a very small part. Just wanted to clarify this up front, to avoid any objections that most of the post is "off topic."}

That title comes from Fiona Hill's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings this week. When Hill confronted Gordon Sondland over the quid pro quo Trump was forcing Ukraine into, she angrily told him: "This is all going to blow up." To which she added, to the congressmen questioning her: "And here we are."

Here we are indeed. We've had a marathon week of impeachment hearings (which we personally watched from gavel to gavel, meaning also that we're now really looking forward to next week's vacation), and we've only just begun. We've seen all of the Republican excuses collapse one by one (and there have been a whole passel of them, to date). We've seen the best of the civil service this week, which is a world that the public rarely catches a glimpse of. To a person, they all appeared serious-minded and highly intelligent. Well, except for the one political appointee with no diplomatic experience, but he was actually the guy who stated unequivocally:

I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a "quid pro quo"? With regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes.

He's also the guy that admitted that "everyone was in the loop -- it was no secret" that Donald Trump was subverting American foreign policy to his own political wants and needs. On the one hand were the "three amigos" who were "involved in a domestic political errand," as Fiona Hill testified, while on the other hand there were the professionals who were "involved in national security foreign policy." Trump, obviously, didn't "give an [expletive] about Ukraine." He just cared about investigations into the Bidens and into a non-existent server.

Republicans tried desperately to cover for Trump, to no avail. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the committee, mightily tried to build a case that Ukraine was just as guilty of interfering in the 2016 election as Russia -- a talking point straight out of the mouth of Vladimir Putin. One might even say: "It sounded better in the original Russian." But this bore no relation to what Trump wanted at all, which Trump once again just proved this morning, on an almost hour-long unhinged phone call to Fox News. Here's how Trump sees it, and you'll notice that he never brings up any of the conspiracy theories Nunes was pushing all week, in favor of his own pet conspiracy theory -- which, tellingly, Nunes never even tried to defend:

[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP]: Lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine.

[HOST BRIAN KILMEADE]: But Mr. President...

[TRUMP]: You know, it's very interesting. It's very interesting. They have the server, right, from the D.N.C. -- Democratic National Committee.

[KILMEADE]: Who has the server?

[TRUMP]: Now, the F.B.I. went in and they told them: "Get out of here. You're not getting -- we're not giving it to you." They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it's called, which is a country -- which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the F.B.I. has never gotten that server. That's a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?

[HOST STEVE DOOCY]: Are you sure they did that? Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?

[TRUMP]: Well, that's what the word is. That's what I asked, actually, in my phone call, if you know. I mean, I asked it very point blank because we're looking for corruption. There's tremendous corruption. We're looking for -- why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there's this kind of corruption?

[KILMEADE]: Right.

[TRUMP]: And if you look at my call, I said, you know, corruption. I think he said it to me. He's looking. He got elected on the basis of corruption.

It's hard to even count the lies in this brief statement, but let's make the attempt. (1) The D.N.C. server was sent to CrowdStrike, which is not a country. (2) CrowdStrike turned over disc images (a bit-for-bit copy of what was on the server's hard drive) to the F.B.I., who had full access from that point on. (3) Nobody ever told the F.B.I. either: "get out of here" or: "you're not getting -- we're not giving it to you." (4) The company is not owned by a Ukrainian, wealthy or not. (5) The server was never sent to Ukraine. (6) Trump never did say the word "corruption" on either of his phone calls to the Ukrainian leader, because he did not care about corruption, he just wanted that non-existent server, which (in his mind) has all the dirt on Hillary Clinton. Period. Even the Fox News hosts were uncomfortable with Trump's insistence on this conspiracy theory, as you can see. But neither they nor Nunes will ever shake Trump from his belief in the non-existent server. To put it bluntly (sorry, Devin), Trump doesn't care about Alexandra Chalupa, he only cares about the chalupas from Taco Bell.

Or let's take another laughable attempt by Trump to explain away his actions. Trump maintains that he withheld the military aid to Ukraine as some sort of protest against the European Union not giving the Ukrainians enough aid on their own. As Trump put it: "I don't like being the sucker country."

There are only two things wrong with this, but they're both doozies. The first is that Trump is flat-out wrong (and monumentally so) about the aid levels. David Holmes testified this week that the embassy in Ukraine had researched this burden-sharing in August. Here's what they found: since 2014, the United States has provided Ukraine with about $3 billion in foreign aid. The European Union, during the same period, provided a combined $12 billion -- a full four times what we gave them.

The second thing wrong with Trump's formulation is that if he were actually telling the truth, what's astounding is that he didn't tell anybody about it. There simply was no pressure on Europe, because nobody knew why the aid was being withheld. If Trump's story were even slightly believable, then the core question would be: Why didn't Trump even tell Gordon Sondland -- his buddy and his ambassador to the European Union -- what he was doing? There is no answer to this, because Trump is not being even slightly honest with this excuse.

Where the impeachment process goes next is still up in the air at the moment. But what's interesting to us is that John Bolton seems actually to be really eager to tell his story -- even to the congressional committees. He's ostensibly ignoring their request to testify, but at the same time he has said that he'll follow the courts' lead when it comes to the fight between executive branch orders and legislative branch orders. And a federal judge has indicated that he's going to make a ruling on Monday on one of these cases -- involving Don McGahn -- which predates the impeachment inquiry. If the judge rules that the congressional subpoena is valid and overrules the White House's instructions not to testify, it might just convince Bolton that it's time to do the same. We'll have to wait and see, but if there's a bombshell "Judge Rules McGahn Has To Testify" story on Monday, we wouldn't be surprised if it is followed by a "Bolton Agrees To Testify" story soon afterwards. And Bolton knows where all the bodies are buried, when it comes to Trump. Plus, he's seriously pissed off at Trump. So it'd certainly be worth holding another few hearings in the Intelligence Committee to hear from him, don't you think?

We're going to hand out a few Honorable Mention awards before we get to the main one, because this week also contained the fifth in a series of Democratic presidential debates. We wrote up our reactions to the debate in full yesterday, so if you'd like an extended version of this, please check it out.

Every candidate who focused on beating Trump deserves recognition, to begin with. For all of the "here's what I'll do on Day One" happy talk from the candidates, some of them seem to almost have lost sight of the fact that their "Day One" is never going to happen unless and until they beat Trump in the election. This is dangerously naive, so it's good to hear some of them realize what a hard fight it's going to be. Think all of Trump's Hunter Biden attacks are bad? Just wait to see what he unloads on the eventual nominee. It's going to get really, really ugly, folks, and we'd better be well prepared for it.

Elizabeth Warren deserves an Honorable Mention for her transition plan to Medicare For All. It defused the issue to such an extent that she actually made it through her first debate without getting attacked over Medicare For All once. That's an improvement, meaning her gamble on going public with her transition plan has now handsomely paid off.

Amy Klobuchar deserves to be awarded as well, for one poignant line: "If you think a woman can't beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day."

Pete Buttigieg also gets an award for a single one-liner. He pointed out -- with pride -- that Forbes magazine had published a list of the wealth of all the Democratic candidates, and he was "literally the least wealthy person on this stage." That's a great line to use, seeing as how the contest has shaped up this time around.

And finally, Cory Booker gets an Honorable Mention, for correctly framing how the issue of marijuana legalization has now changed. He castigated Joe Biden for an earlier statement that we still needed to study whether weed was a "gateway drug." Booker took Biden on directly over the issue, with a very memorable quip: "I have a lot of respect for the vice president -- he swore me into my office, he's a hero. This week, I hear him literally say that I don't think we should legalize marijuana. I thought you might have been high when you said it."

Best stoner joke we've heard during the campaign to date.

OK, one more minor award before we get to the main event. Because Representative Patrick Maloney certainly deserves recognition for being possibly the best questioner on the Democrats' side of the Intelligence Committee during the hearings. During the questioning of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, it was Maloney who made him re-read the final paragraphs of his opening statement, where Vindman talked about speaking with his father -- who had fled the Soviet Union to provide a better life for his children. Vindman reading: "Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth," and: "This is America. This is the country I've served and defended. That all of my brothers have served. Here, right matters." were some of the most emotionally poignant moments of any of this week's hearings.

Maloney knows how to hold the audience's attention. He knows how to be righteous and emotional in making his arguments. He never got lost in the weeds, he always made broad and thought-provoking points. Although he was near the end of the long line of questioners, we began anticipating his five-minute period, because we knew it would be one of the best of the entire day. So he's definitely worthy of at least an Honorable Mention, and we hope to see more good things from him in the future in the House.

But, once again, we have to hand the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week to the committee's chairman, Adam Schiff. Schiff was absolutely brilliant all week long, turning in a performance that any normal person could only have managed with a steady supply of Xanax close at hand. Schiff was absolutely unflappable throughout, and he managed the clock brilliantly during the whole week. His lineup of witnesses was pretty flawless as well, as the Democratic storyline unfolded all week long and just got stronger and stronger, right up to the end where Fiona Hill absolutely shamed the Republican idiocy on the committee, to their faces and in no uncertain terms.

All of that is true, but the real reason we're giving Schiff another MIDOTW award is because of his closing statement on Thursday. If you haven't seen any of the actual testimony this week and only want to spend ten or twenty minutes or so watching, then this is the clip to watch. Seriously, it was that good. For the first and only time in the past two weeks, Schiff let his own emotions show through. He expressed righteous indignation over what Trump has done, and laid out a case for impeaching him using Richard Nixon and Watergate as his guide. He concluded over and over again that what Trump did was much worse than what Nixon had done.

His entire closing statement is one for the ages, in fact, which is why we so strongly recommend everyone take the time to watch it. Few saw it live, since it came at the end of three days of deposing nine witnesses for hours and hours and hours. So we imagine there weren't all that many people who stuck it out to the very end. But even if you haven't seen a single minute of anyone else's testimony, we urge you to take the time to view Schiff's closing statement.

It was so good that, on its own, it was more than worthy of the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award.

{Congratulate House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on his House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.}

Before we get to the main award, we've got to give Joe Biden a (Dis-)Honorable Mention this week, for his incredibly outdated comments on marijuana. Here's exactly what Biden said, when asked whether he supported legalizing marijuana at the federal level (he doesn't, although he is for decriminalization and letting the states decide on legalization):

The truth of the matter is there's not nearly been enough evidence that has been acquired as to whether or not it is a gateway drug. It's a debate, and I want a lot more before I legalize it nationally. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind it. It is not irrational to do more scientific investigation to determine, which we have not done significantly enough, whether or not there are any things that relate to whether it's a gateway drug or not.

The "gateway drug" propaganda has indeed been thoroughly debunked. However, Biden seems not to have gotten the memo. Biden used to be a drug warrior who complained in 1989 that: "...the war on drugs, which led to mass incarceration around the country that disproportionately affected communities of color, was 'not tough enough' or 'bold enough.' Biden called for longer prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders and demanded to 'hold every drug user accountable.' Biden wrote many of the federal laws which critics claim exacerbated mass incarceration in subsequent years."

Now, it's one thing for us to hold politicians accountable for positions they took decades ago. This is somewhat unfair, because what really should matter is how much they've "evolved" since then. But by giving credence to the "gateway drug" myth, Biden just showed that he's still got a whole bunch of evolving to do on the issue. Now, this used to be the fallback position of cautious Democrats (especially those who lived through the "Just Say No" years, where Democrats were beaten up for not being sufficiently in favor of "law and order" ), as evidenced by Hillary Clinton saying during her last campaign that she wanted "more study" of marijuana before she'd consider any legalization efforts at the federal level. "More study" is a political code-word phrase meaning: "I'm never going to do anything about this, so don't expect me to."

But the days when this dodge was acceptable should be over. Something like seventy percent of the American public want to see weed legalized now. That is not a fringe position -- that now is the mainstream political opinion. Some politicians have caught up to this movement, yet plenty of others remain mired in the past. Sadly, this still includes Joe Biden.

But this week, we're giving the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award to former mayor of Baltimore Catherine Pugh. One day after federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against her for fraud and tax evasion, Pugh decided to spare the taxpayers the cost of a trial and instead pleaded guilty to multiple counts. She had already stepped down as mayor, months ago, when the investigation was made public.

Here's the update on the story:

Pugh admitted Thursday to running a sham business dating to 2011 that she used to sell her books in schemes that involved skimming part of customers' paid orders for her own promotions and also churning sales by reselling books that already had been purchased but not delivered or that were being held in storage. The conspiracy Pugh acknowledged includes using $35,800 from book sales as illegal straw donations to her mayoral campaign. She also spent some of the money to buy and renovate a house in Baltimore. The two tax-evasion counts include underreporting thousands of dollars Pugh owed in 2015 and 2016 on sales of her "Healthy Holly" series about an African American girl, Holly, as she follows a healthy lifestyle.

. . .

Most of the books in Pugh's transactions were marketed and sold directly to nonprofit organizations and foundations, many of which did business or tried to get business with the state and city of Baltimore. Among the books diverted and resold were thousands purchased and donated for use by Baltimore public school students.

In all, court records show, Pugh took purchase orders for roughly 124,000 books but had printers produce only 63,210.

Pugh basically used her self-published book as a political slush fund. It's a creative way of laundering campaign cash and money she spent on herself, but creative as it may have been, it's still illegal. Pugh admitted as much, as she pleaded guilty to four of the 11 counts filed against her. Her sentencing is set for February, when she could get up to nine-and-a-half years in prison.

She's not a national politician, but the severity of her crimes elevated her to being the obvious choice this week for the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, for obvious reasons. Democrats can only take the high road on corruption if they consistently denounce it when it crops up within their own ranks. Which is exactly why we're doing so with ex-mayor Pugh.

{Catherine Pugh is now a private citizen, and it is our standing policy not to provide contact information for such persons, sorry.}

Volume 552 (11/22/19)

Today, we've got a rant instead of discrete talking points. It's been that kind of week, obviously.

We really don't have anything else to say about the following, other than it is our humble attempt to interject a newfound sense of shame into the Republican Party. As such, it is quite likely doomed to fail, but we felt it was worth the attempt anyway.

Oh, and one editorial note before we begin: there will be no Friday Talking Points column next week, as we'll be recovering from Turkey Day instead. Columns will return the week afterwards.

And with that, let's move on to the rant, shall we?

"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

There may be those too young to remember it, but at one time the Republican Party billed itself as the party of unshakeable bedrock morality. It and it alone was the party of "family values." Republicans stood for the rule of law, and fought for law and order against Democrats who were either "secular humanists" or "moral relativists" or just plain amoral.

Does anyone else remember those days? It doesn't seem that long ago, really.

One of the strongest lobbying groups on the right used to be the Moral Majority, whose very name was an inherent warning to politicians: Americans as a whole were so upstanding and righteous that any politician who didn't listen to their concerns did so at the peril of being tossed out of office. Later, during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Republican Party made the argument against "moral relativism," or the argument that there is no absolute right and wrong. Republicans rejected this argument and stood foursquare for immovable definitions of what was right and what was wrong. According to them, Clinton's behavior was so wrong it merited removing him from office. There were no grey areas, there was black and there was white and no nuance could be permitted.

Does any of this ring a bell? Or has everyone just plain forgotten these social wedge issues?

These days, the Republican Party has been reduced to a cult of personality built around the most immoral man to ever occupy the Oval Office. Things that the GOP moralizers of past years would have been absolutely apoplectic over are dismissed with barely a shrug. A president who was on his third wife? Well, the moralists used to be staunchly against divorce, but that ended after they fell in love with Ronald Reagan -- the first president who had ever been divorced and remarried.

Once again -- this used to be a huge political issue. Factions of Republicans swore up and down they'd never vote for someone who had divorced his wife. Until Reagan.

Now, Republicans follow a man who has cheated on his three wives, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, who has had over a dozen sexual assault complaints lodged against him, who had sex with a porn star around the time his wife was pregnant, who paid that porn star six figures of hush money to cover it up, and who has expressed sexual interest in his own daughter.

Any one of these things would have automatically disqualified any politician from consideration by the moralists of days gone by, and yet the Christian evangelicals still love Trump.

Now, they blindly follow a man who lies (on average) 13 times a day to the American public. They cheer him on as he pardons war criminals. Time was, Republicans stood up for law and order and also stood up for military honor, but both of those have been left by the wayside in their blind worship of Trump. This week, a Republican actually dishonored a serving member of the military for daring to wear his uniform in public. Some of them tried to smear him as a traitor or a double-agent just because he spent the first three years of his life in another country. Boy, that's a real sleeper agent, to get all his nefarious spy indoctrination before he was even in nursery school.

Speaking of infants, Trump also instituted a policy of ripping babies from their mothers' arms and tossing them in cages. Church leaders used to speak up against governments being cruel to any human being, but they've been noticeably silent on this one over on the right. Because fealty to Trump outweighs even the most basic humanity we all are supposed to share -- which used to be one of those bedrock morals that Republicans believed in.

Donald Trump stands next to Vladimir Putin and accepts his word that he didn't meddle in the 2016 election, even though every single intelligence agency in the United States has told Trump that they did. This week, as Fiona Hill pointed out, Republicans spouted talking points originally written by Putin in a desperate attempt to paint Ukraine as the ones who interfered in our election -- all evidence to the contrary. Hill said so in no uncertain terms: "This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services." And yet, Republicans continued parroting the lies that Russia has been sowing. Somewhere in California, that righteous Cold War fighter Ronald Reagan is spinning in his grave.

But Republicans don't care, because they seem hellbent on proving that there is absolutely no moral flip-flop that they won't engage in to explain away the indefensible actions of their Dear Leader. This goes far beyond moral relativism, folks, and enters into downright Orwellian territory. There's always an explanation, because the Dear Leader simply cannot be wrong or do anything wrong, period. Much like Mao, Stalin, and the leaders of North Korea, Trump has now become the object of worship of a cult of personality. That's all that remains of the Republican Party, in fact. They are beyond shame. They are beyond any considerations of law and order. They are so far beyond determining what is right and what is wrong that they can't even see it in their rearview mirror anymore. The new definition is: Trump is always right, and everyone else is always wrong.

I haven't heard it yet, but I don't doubt that pretty soon now we'll hear the excuse made for all of Trump's minions that they were "only following Trump's orders." This was the Nazi defense attempted at Nuremberg, of course. But, as I said, Republicans are so far beyond shame that they won't hesitate to use it -- that's my guess, anyway.

It's not just Trump, after all, it's his entire administration. How many of Trump's cronies are now behind federal bars? Five? Six? Seven? I've lost count, I have to admit. Just this week it was revealed that the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- a Trump appointee, of course -- had spent $3.3 million of taxpayer money to hire image consultants to make herself appear good in the press. During this time, she was giving speeches "about the importance of fostering individual responsibility and self-reliance among the nation's needy." That's about as immoral as can be imagined, and yet it wasn't even noticed due to all the other shocking news.

Remember when Republicans excoriated Barack Obama for not openly supporting a protest movement in Iran? "If only Obama would publicly support them," the Republicans bemoaned, "then it would have the same effect as Ronald Reagan's 'tear down this wall' speech in Berlin!" For months now, brave protesters in Hong Kong have been defying the Chinese authorities to demand democracy. Trump has been silent. This week, Congress passed a bill supporting the protesters and allowing for sanctions against China. The vote was unanimous in the Senate, and only one House member voted against it. Out of 535 members of Congress, only one voted against it. Trump has indicated that he'll probably veto the bill, because he is so desperate to cut a trade deal -- any deal, at this point -- with China that he doesn't want to risk upsetting the Chinese leader. Where are the Republican denunciations of Trump over his refusal to stand up for democracy movements? They are non-existent, because no one dare utter a discouraging word about the Dear Leader. No, not the Chinese one -- ours.

Maybe this fever will break, eventually. Maybe if Trump is defeated at the ballot box the rest of the Republican Party will come out of their daze and realize how far they've fallen on the moral scale of living. Maybe they'll all have an epiphany and realize how they've been hoodwinked into not just following, but strongly defending some of the most immoral behavior ever exhibited by any American politician, ever.

Some Republicans haven't completely lost their moral compass, even now. There's a group called Republicans For The Rule Of Law now running ads on Fox News castigating Trump for, according to the group's director: "Rather than fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution, he tried to use the power of the government to strong-arm a friendly government into interfering on his behalf in the 2020 election. If the Republican Party claims to stand for national security, law and order, the rule of law, and accountable government, they can't let this abuse stand."

Consider for just one moment what the Republicans are now defending. According to them, it is absolutely acceptable for an American president to get dirt on a political opponent from a foreign government. This means that any future president -- of either party -- will be fully allowed to either solicit or just merely accept political dirt from any country on the planet. This will doubtlessly lead to countries wanting favors from us bending over backwards to subvert their own legal systems to either provide or just manufacture such dirt. George Washington and the Founding Fathers feared exactly this type of foreign influence, and warned us all against its evils, repeatedly. And yet, according to Republicans, this is now the new normal, there's nothing wrong with it, and the rest of us should all just "get used to it."

How far the mighty have fallen.

Now, it's one thing to argue that moral relativism does exist to some degree. Ethics classes are full of such dilemmas like the father with starving children who steals a loaf of bread to feed them. There are mitigating circumstances, at times. But that's a far cry from a knee-jerk response which proclaims that one man simply cannot do anything morally wrong and then editing your own personal morality to square with whatever it is he's done or said now. That's where the Republicans now find themselves, and it's a pretty far cry from the days when they used to lecture us all on the evils of moral relativism.

Donald Trump is a cheat, a con man, a failed businessman, a bully, a woman-hater, a xenophobe, a racist, a grifter, a fraud, a serial adulterer, a blasphemer, and a consummate liar. This is painfully obvious to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. It is, in fact, inescapable. And yet this is who the party that used to ride a moral high horse has decided to worship? This is the best they can do? Really?

So much for family values. So much for morality. So much for being able to look yourself in the mirror. So much for the Republican Party's ability to make a moral case about anything, ever again. With Donald Trump, they have sown the wind, and they are now reaping the whirlwind. The moral high road is lost to them now. They have instead followed Trump into the swamps of delusion, where morality is whatever he says it is -- if he even knows the meaning of the word (or, for that matter, how to spell it).

Some day today's Republicans may look back in shame at their own actions defending the indefensible. Some day, they may repent of their behavior. Some day, they may ask for forgiveness and try to atone for the absolute loss of their own moral compass.

But we're not there yet. In fact, we're sill a long way away from it, as Republicans continue to prove, on a daily basis.

How the mighty have fallen, indeed.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com
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