Political Irony

As usual, Jen Sorensen backs up her comics with facts:

Facebook recently sponsored a Federalist Society event at which Brett Kavanaugh was the keynote speaker, despite objections from its own employees and public protests. The speech was understood by many to be an attempt to rehabilitate Kavanaugh’s image in the wake of credible sexual assault allegations. This comes on the heels of Facebook saying it would not vet political ads for accuracy and making white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart a “trusted” news source. Indeed, Facebook clearly seems to have chosen to cozy up to the authoritarian right rather than use its influence to defend democratic norms (or sexual assault survivors, for that matter).

Steve Jobs and internet developers of the early computing era came out of a sixties counterculture that saw decentralized communication and individual expression as a bulwark against totalitarianism. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the famous MacIntosh “1984” ad that appeared during the Super Bowl. In the commercial, Big Brother gets smashed by the power of personal computing. In real life, we can see how Jobs’ utopian vision ultimately failed (with some exceptions in the area of social media activism). Increasingly, as massive technology companies like Facebook partner with the present-day, Russia-corrupted, disinformation-sowing GOP, they’ve become the very Orwellian entities that the Cold War-era developers thought they were rebelling against.

As much as I dislike Facebook, I have to admit that they are more of a symptom than a cause. But the result of Facebook’s bad behavior (including monopolistic goals) is that the entire internet will likely soon be regulated. I hope this regulation will intelligently prevent many of the excesses of the past wild-west Internet, while not killing the good things about it.

It seems like the Republicans were indeed blowing smoke when they claimed they had internal polls showing that impeachment was increasing Donald Trump’s popularity. Because the only polls that actually matter are the ones that happen on an election day, like the one yesterday.

On Monday, the day before the election, Trump held a rally in Kentucky in support of the current Republican governor, Matt Bevin. Trump even begged the attendees to vote for Bevin, saying “You can’t let that happen to me!” because it would mean “Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world.” After all, in 2016 Trump won Kentucky by a huge 30 points.

It didn’t work. And of course, after Tuesday’s loss of Bevin to Democrat Andy Beshear, the GOP tried to blame it on problems with Bevin’s campaign.

But the reality is that impeachment did not fire up Trump’s base. In fact, it did the opposite, it fired up suburban voters to vote Democratic. This is like 2018, when suburban voters turned on the GOP and handed the House of Representatives to the Democrats.

Has Trump even tried to solve this problem? No, he keeps doing things to fire up is base, but his base isn’t growing, it appears to be fixed. In order to win next year, Trump will need to expand to suburban voters, like he did in 2016. But it seems that Trump is too dumb to realize that. Does Trump need attention so bad that he is incapable of stopping pulling the stunts that are now starting to piss off the voters he truly needs?

We’ll see.

Do not underestimate the power of propaganda promulgated by right-wing “news” sources. As Sorensen says in her commentary to this comic, “The fact that Facebook is bending the knee and promoting Breitbart as a legitimate news source should send chills down everyone’s spine.”

Facebook has also decided that they will run any ad from a politician, no matter how clearly false it is. This will clearly help Donald Trump and the GOP. I guess ad revenue is more important to Facebook than avoiding spreading lies and destroying our democracy.

This would not be the first time that overconfidence backfired. We must remember that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump called the top Democrats to the White House, supposedly to talk about Syria and Turkey. But just before the meeting, the House voted to rebuke Donald Trump about his decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria and allow Turkey to invade. In a surprising display of anger against the leader of their party, 129 House Republicans voted against Trump (out of 197 GOP representatives total), along with all of the Democrats. Making it a stunning rebuke.

Of course, when Trump gets attacked, he always fires back. But this time he pretty much had a meltdown, raining insults not only at the Democrats (for example, calling Nancy Pelosi a “a third-rate politician” to her face), but also railing against his own former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who said on TV that Trump’s actions in Syria opened the door for ISIS to return, and that “It’s absolutely a given that they will come back.” In response, Trump interrupted and said that Mattis was “the world’s most overrated general.”

Trump also claimed that his move did not put any US soldiers “in harm’s way”. However, a senior Department of Defense official later said that Trump’s claim was not true.

The Democrats ended up walking out of the meeting, but Trump wasn’t done. He took to Twitter and posted a photo from the meeting attacking Nancy Pelosi, saying “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”.

Here’s when magic happened. Instead of engaging Trump, Pelosi took the photo and made it her Twitter cover shot. One of her staff tweeted “Thanks for the new cover photo @realDonaldTrump!” Here’s the photo on her Twitter profile:

I have to say that I am very impressed by Pelosi’s response.

This has been a very significant week in the “war on Trump” (hey, I can get away with saying “war on Trump” since Donald Trump accused a completely constitutional impeachment inquiry of being a “coup”).

So many important things happened this week, you may have been a bit overwhelmed and become insensitive to their significance. So Politico asked five reporters to say what stood out as “the biggest development of a crazy week”. Interestingly, they came up with five different things. Here they are (with my commentary):

Natasha Bertrand, national security reporter: Definitely that two associates of Rudy Giuliani who are in many ways at the heart of this Ukraine scandal — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — were indicted on campaign finance charges. The indictment could shed more light on the pair’s campaign, alongside Giuliani, to discredit former Vice President Joe Biden and remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Masha Yovanovitch. It also signals an intensifying crackdown on illicit campaign contributions, at a moment when Trump’s inaugural committee is under criminal investigation for potentially receiving donations from illegal foreign sources. Parnas and Fruman, born outside the U.S., are alleged to have funneled up to a million dollars in foreign cash into political action committees and campaigns, including Trump’s.

I really wish people would stop referring to their crimes as “campaign finance violations”. I don’t care if that is the technical name for it. What these two foreign nationals did, with the knowledge of Rudy Giuliani and the involvement of Donald Trump, was funnel around a million dollars from a Ukrainian government official and a Russian businessman into Republican political action committees (PACs) and directly into a Republican congressman’s campaign (both are illegal) in order to buy political influence (which is corruption).

UPDATE: Note that accepting money (or soliciting campaign dirt) from a foreign entity is illegal, so if a politician does it and the foreign entity asks for a favor, the foreign entity could blackmail the politician if they don’t deliver. So the politician is in serious debt to a foreign entity, when the politician’s allegiance should be to their country. So the politician isn’t just violating some obscure campaign rule, they have become a security risk in order to win an election that they don’t believe they could win fairly.

These two also ran a successful campaign (under Giuliani’s direction) to get Trump to remove the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, because (according to her sworn testimony) she was trying to stop their corrupt activities. In an ironic twist, this campaign seems to have been started by the corrupt prosecutor that Joe Biden got removed (with the support of our European allies). Oh, and these two were also working with Giuliani to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden (also illegal).

One tries to avoid the word “treason” but what else can this be called?

Darren Samuelsohn, senior White House reporter: The news about the Giuliani associates was definitely big. But I’ll throw a curveball here and go with someone we hadn’t been thinking much about of late: Robert Mueller. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s questions and commentary during a hearing Tuesday suggested she’s leaning toward ordering the release of the special counsel’s grand jury materials. If that happens, she’d be handing House Democrats a bounty of new information in their impeachment inquiry — the kind of stuff that would become ammunition in an expanding probe beyond Ukraine. The Justice Department would also be all but certain to appeal a ruling from Howell that goes against them, thereby setting up a much bigger fight that seems headed to the Supreme Court.

Robert Mueller declined to indict a sitting president, but he also made it clear that the proper alternative to indictment of a president was impeachment. Therefore, his grand jury materials should be handed over to the impeachment inquiry. I hope this happens.

Andrew Desiderio, congressional reporter: The biggest development of the week, in my book, came at the tail end when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld House Democrats’ subpoena for eight years of Trump’s financial records from his accounting firm, Mazars. It’s a huge loss for the president, after having lost a bid to quash the subpoena in a lower court. Trump has done everything he possibly can to avoid his financial records and tax returns from getting into the hands of his political enemies — and he may have no further recourse this time. But even beyond this specific battle, Friday’s ruling from a three-judge panel gives a big boost to congressional oversight authority. “Contrary to the president’s arguments, the committee possesses authority under both the House Rules and the Constitution to issue the subpoena,” one of the judges wrote.

I would vote for this one to be the most significant of the week, for two reasons. First, the appeals court reached their decision in just a few days (the lower court ruling happened earlier this week!). That kind of blazing judicial speed can happen only when when a decision is pretty obvious. As I have already pointed out, Trump is claiming that he is above the law and cannot be even investigated, let alone indicted or impeached.

Second, if they appeal this to the Supreme Court, it will be very interesting to see what happens. Trump has been able to stack the Supreme Court in his favor, and my guess is that he will pressure them to rule in his favor (which would move our country from a constitutional democracy toward a dictatorship). That will definitely be a constitutional crisis.

Consequently, SCOTUS will likely decline to take the case, which means that Trump’s financial records will be released to Congress. At that point, Trump will become even more unhinged and will probably try to discredit the courts, including his own stacked Supreme Court. Which itself is something of a constitutional crisis.

Kyle Cheney, congressional reporter: In a week of big developments, the one I think will be most consequential is former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s decision to defy the State Department to testify in the House’s impeachment investigation. With her decision, she set a template for other witnesses to come forward even if they’ve been ordered not to — and already a second State Department ambassador, Gordon Sondland, is preparing to follow suit. Yovanovitch’s testimony itself was significant, too. She obliterated some of the conspiracy theories that led Trump to oust her and revealed that she was given a word of support from John Sullivan, the deputy secretary of state, even as Trump pulled her from her post in Ukraine.

There are reports that other whistleblowers are starting to come forward (with at least one confirmed). With any luck, this will become an avalanche that sweeps Trump away. Remember that Nixon’s fall and resignation happened over the course of only a few weeks when everyone, including his Republican allies, deserted him.

In addition, the testimony of Yovanovitch to congress was pretty devastating.

Josh Gerstein, legal affairs reporter: I’m going to go off the board (is that allowed?) and say that the most significant impeachment development of the week was Trump’s decision to have U.S. troops stand aside as Turkey invades Syria. Of course, it has nothing directly to do with the current grounds Democrats have asserted for impeachment, but the move shook many of Trump’s key supporters to their core.

People who have stridently defended Trump at some cost to their own reputations, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), were caught completely off guard by the president’s decision to abandon the Kurds — longtime U.S. allies. Other Trump backers even popped up in unexpected places like MSNBC to denounce the move. Why anyone in the political fight of his life would piss off his closest friends is hard to fathom. The impulsive, widely criticized move and the scramble to clean it up also undercuts arguments from Trump that that his unorthodox telephone diplomacy is as consistently “perfect” as he maintains.

This item seems very significant, because if there is anything that unites Republican politicians it is support for our military. Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis says that Trump has guaranteed that “ISIS will resurge. It’s absolutely a given that they will come back.” Will more Republicans turn against Trump because of this?

Unfortunately, I do have some doubts. After all, Republicans have totally abandoned fiscal responsibility (and their claimed hatred of deficit spending, which they were only too happy to use repeatedly as a weapon against Barack Obama). They also seem to have abandoned their religious morals when they embraced a liar, cheat, and philanderer as their president. Indeed, some conservatives believe that the Republicans have abandoned conservatism. Will abandonment of the Constitution be that difficult for them?

The point of this post is that in just under a week, there have been (at least) five things, any one of which could bring down the Trump crime syndicate administration.

What will next week bring? The same article asked the same reporters this question as well (along with others), and the reporters had some interesting answers. It is worth a read.

And finally, a humorous look at this: