The Commentariat -- December 30, 2019

Afternoon Update:

Annie Grayer & Ryan Nobles of CNN: "Sen. Bernie Sanders is in 'good health,' nearly three months after suffering a heart attack, the attending physician at the US Capitol said in a letter released Monday. The physician, Brian Monahan, said in a summary of the Vermont senator's health that Sanders is no longer taking several of the medications initially prescribed to him after the heart attack."

Elisha Fieldstadt of NBC News: "Prosecutors on Monday filed federal hate crime charges against the 37-year-old man accused of storming a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi's home in Monsey, New York, with a machete and wounding five people.... Authorities ... discovered handwritten journals in [the suspect's] home that contained anti-Semitic writings. On one page, he had drawn a Star of David and a Swastika, and written about 'Nazi culture' and 'Adolf Hitler,' according to a federal criminal complaint filed Monday."

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: Mitch "McConnell badly needs the media's both-sidesing instincts to hold firm against the brute facts of the situation. If Republicans bear the brunt of media pressure to explain why they don't want to hear from witnesses, that risks highlighting their true rationale: They adamantly fear new revelations precisely because they know Trump is guilty -- and that this corrupt scheme is almost certainly much worse than we can currently surmise. That possibility is underscored by the Times report [linked below], a chronology of Trump's decision to withhold aid to a vulnerable ally under assault while he and his henchmen extorted Ukraine into carrying out his corrupt designs. The report demonstrates in striking detail that inside the administration, the consternation over the legality and propriety of the aid freeze -- and confusion over Trump's true motives -- ran much deeper than previously known, implicating top Cabinet officials.... We now have a much clearer glimpse into the murky depths of just how much more these officials know about the scheme -- and just how much McConnell and Trump are determined to make sure we don't ever learn."

Mac Bishop, et al., of NBC News: "Trump's attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden has ... exposed the cracks in the West's response to an emboldened Russia, inflicted permanent damage on Ukraine and heightened the risk of Moscow extending its influence in the country, according to democracy advocates and military experts."

Jesse Drucker & Jim Tankersley of the New York Times: "The overhaul of the federal tax law in 2017 was the signature legislative achievement of Donald J. Trump's presidency. The biggest change to the tax code in three decades, the law slashed taxes for big companies.... But big companies wanted more -- and, not long after the bill became law in December 2017, the Trump administration began transforming the tax package into a greater windfall for the world's largest corporations and their shareholders.... The process of writing the rules [that determine how laws are executed], conducted largely out of public view, can determine who wins and who loses. Starting in early 2018, senior officials in President Trump's Treasury Department were swarmed by lobbyists seeking to insulate companies from the few parts of the tax law that would have required them to pay more.... Thanks in part to the chaotic manner in which the bill was rushed through Congress -- a situation that gave the Treasury Department extra latitude to interpret a law that was, by all accounts, sloppily written -- the corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success."

Two Girls Chatting. Mehdi Hasan of the Intercept: "... [Margaret] Brennan's interview with Ivanka [Trump] -- which was ... pegged to the new policy of paid parental leave for federal government workers -- could be considered a low point in 'Face the Nation''s storied 65-year history.... To quote liberal writer Eric Boehlert, 'for most Sunday shows, the blueprint remains the same: book a Republican and let them talk.' When Brennan asked Ivanka to address the cruel and callous policy of family separation at the border and the '900 children who remain separated from their families,' the senior adviser to the president dodged the question, claiming 'immigration is not part of my portfolio,' before quickly changing the subject to human trafficking. Yet there was no follow-up, no pushback whatsoever, from the 'Face the Nation' host."

Julian Barnes of the New York Times: "The United States military on Sunday struck five targets in Iraq and Syria controlled by an Iranian-backed paramilitary group, the Pentagon said, a reprisal for a rocket attack on Friday that killed an American contractor." (This is an update & an expansion of a Reuters story linked below.)

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** Eric Lipton, et al., of the New York Times: "Interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials, congressional aides and others, previously undisclosed emails and documents, and a close reading of thousands of pages of impeachment testimony provide the most complete account yet of the 84 days from when Mr. Trump first inquired about the money to his decision in September to relent. What emerges is the story of how Mr. Trump's demands sent shock waves through the White House and the Pentagon, created deep rifts within the senior ranks of his administration, left key aides like [Mick] Mulvaney under intensifying scrutiny -- and ended only after Mr. Trump learned of a damning whistle-blower report and came under pressure from influential Republican lawmakers.... Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.... Mr. Mulvaney is shown to have been deeply involved as a key conduit for transmitting Mr. Trump's demands for the freeze across the administration."

Erin Banco & Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast: "In the weeks leading up to their impeachment trial, senators on Capitol Hill are actively avoiding meeting with ... Rudy Giuliani -- partly because they fear he might try to pass off Russian conspiracy theories as fact, according to interviews with more than half a dozen Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides.... When he arrived back in Washington [after a trip to Kiev last month], Giuliani updated Trump, according to two individuals with knowledge of their conversation, and said publicly the president asked him to brief Republican senators about the information he gathered.... Both Democrat and Republican senators have steered clear of the president's personal attorney over concern that the information he is trying to disseminate originated from figures in Ukraine known for spinning the truth or spreading outright lies.... 'My advice to Giuliani would be to share what he got from Ukraine with the IC [intelligence community] to make sure it's not Russia propaganda...,' [Lindsey Graham said]."

"A Hand Grenade Who's Going to Blow Everybody Up." Rosalind Helderman, et al., of the Washington Post: "... Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) ... were part of a shadow diplomatic effort, backed in part by private interests, aimed at engineering a negotiated exit to ease [Venezuela's] President Nicolás Maduro from power and reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business, according to people familiar with the endeavor...' provid[ing] another example of how Giuliani used his private role to insert himself into foreign diplomacy, alarming administration officials confused about whose interests he was representing.... Giuliani's willingness to talk with Maduro in late 2018 flew in the face of the official policy of the White House, which, under national security adviser John Bolton, was then ratcheting up sanctions and taking a harder line against the Venezuelan government. Around the time of the phone call, Giuliani met with Bolton to discuss the off-the-books plan to ease Maduro from office -- a plan Bolton vehemently rejected, two people familiar with the meeting said." Of course Lev Parnas, (allegedly) crooked Venezuelan businessmen -- at least one of whom is Giuliani's client -- & the Grand Havana Room cigar bar in Manhattan figure in. Because these are Trump people. Slate has a summary report here.

Justine Coleman of the Hill: Sen. "Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) questioned whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will 'try to rig' the impeachment trial by teaming up with President Trump. Van Hollen told Jon Karl on ABCs 'This Week' that Senate Democrats are pushing for a 'fair trial' where they are permitted to call witnesses and obtain necessary documents.... 'We keep hearing President Trump say he's going to be exonerated,' he added. 'Look, if you have a rigged trial there's no exoneration in acquittal.'"

Ah, Those "New York Values" Are the Problem. Melissa Quinn of CBS News: "Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma criticized President Trump for his tweets and language, saying he doesn't believe the president is someone who young people can look up to. 'I don't think that President Trump as a person is a role model for a lot of different youth. That's just me personally,' Lankford said on 'Face the Nation.' 'I don't like the way that he tweets, some of the things that he says, his word choices at times are not my word choices. He comes across with more New York City swagger than I do from the Midwest and definitely not the way that I'm raising my kids.'" Mrs. McC: Thanks for your insights, Jim. Blaming NYC "swagger" for Trump's behavior is lame under any circumstance, and under the circumstance that most New Yorkers despise Trump makes your argument ridiculous. (In Manhattan, Clinton beat Trump 86%-10% in 2016; of the five boroughs, only on Staten Island did Trump top Clinton.) Trump doesn't talk like a New Yorker; he talks like a mobster.

Reuters: "Russia said it had thwarted terror attacks reportedly planned in St Petersburg as the result of a tip from Washington, as President Vladimir Putin personally thanked his US counterpart Donald Trump. Russian news agencies cited the Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying that as a result of the information, two Russians had been detained on 27 December on suspicion of plotting attacks during new year festivities in St Petersburg." ~~~

     ~~~ Update. Andrew Kramer of the New York Times: "... on Sunday, the Kremlin statement said Mr. Putin had ... thanked Mr. Trump for 'information transmitted through the channels of U.S. special services.' It said the two leaders had also discussed other 'issues of mutual interest,' but did not spell them out. The White House did not respond to a request for comment."

In Keeping with Family Tradition, Ivanka Lies, Takes Credit for Legislation She Didn't Back. James Downie of the Washington Post: "Disgracefully, the United States remains one of just three countries in the world without statutory paid maternity leave. This month finally saw some small progress toward fixing this injustice when Trump's father signed a defense-spending bill that instituted 12 weeks of paid parental leave for government workers. From her CBS interview, in which [Ivanka] Trump touted '2½ years of building our coalitions of support for this policy,' you'd think this was the result of years of Trump's hard work. The truth is rather different. According to The Post, it's her father's opponents whom government workers have to thank for the new benefits: In negotiations over the defense bill, House Democrats used President Trump's desire for a Space Force to extract funding for the new paid leave policy.... The paid family leave bills that Ivanka Trump has supported don't look like the straightforward 12 week guarantee in the defense bill. In the Brennan interview, Trump touted a bill advanced by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Rather than paid leave, the Cassidy-Sinema bill would offer families a loan of up to $5,000 to cover time off, and which would be repaid by cuts to the families' child tax credits.... [But] the new parental leave benefits for government employees closely resemble those in the FAMILY Act, proposed by Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), which would provide all workers with 12 weeks of paid leave. Yet in her interview with [CBS's Margaret] Brennan, Trump dismissed the FAMILY Act as 'stale.'" Since she didn't prevaricate quite enough about family leave legislation, she also lied about how family leave was instituted at her own company -- she fought it. ~~~

~~~ David of Crooks & Liars: "... Ivanka Trump declined to criticize her father's administration over its family separation policy for immigrants. In a highly publicized interview that aired on Sunday, CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Trump about the family separations policy in light of her concern for all children. '... Homeland Security says there's still around 900 children who remain separated from their families,' Brennan told Trump. 'Is that something that you continue to remain engaged on?' 'Well, immigration is not in part of my portfolio,' Trump replied. 'Obviously, I think everyone should be engaged and the full force of the U.S. government is committed to this effort of border security, to protecting the most vulnerable.'" She went on to talk about human trafficking, which was not part of the question. Then Brennan said, "Ivanka Trump, thank you very much." ~~~

     ~~~ Mrs. McCrabbie: Great suck-up interview, Maggie; thanks for not asking any embarrassing follow-up questions like, "Whaddaya mean, 'not in my portfolio'? You're a mother, for Pete's sake. Look at you, you're getting someone to iron your damned hair while your father & his henchmen are ripping babies from their mothers' arms. And your response is 'not in my portfolio? Get out!" Please, get me a good producer & researcher & I'll show Brennan & Chuck Todd how to interview politicians.

Bonus. Especially if you are a snob (count me in!), but even if you're not, you may enjoy David Roth's "Unified Theory of the Trumps' Creepy Aesthetic" (Dec. 19) in the New Republic.

Ahmed Rashid, et al., of Reuters: "A top Iraqi militia leader warned of a strong response against U.S. forces in Iraq following air strikes in Iraq and Syria overnight that hit several bases of his Iranian-backed group and killed at least 25 people. The U.S. military carried out air strikes on Sunday against the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia group in response to the killing of a U.S. civilian contractor in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base, officials said."

Presidential Race 2020

David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "Our process for selecting presidential nominees is badly flawed.... It has come to resemble a reality television show, in which a pseudo-scientific process (polls plus donor numbers) winnows the field. The winner is then chosen by a distorted series of primaries and caucuses: The same few states always get outsize influence, and a crude, unranked voting system can produce a nominee whom most people don't want.... When voters are given the dominant role in choosing a nominee -- as with primaries here -- only an unrepresentative subset tends to participate, which skews the process." Leonhardt has some limp suggestions to improve it.... The seven candidates who made the last Democratic debate stage all have their strengths, but as a group, they offer an indictment of the nomination process. There are three candidates in their 70s -- and no African-American or Latino. There are two people who have never won an election -- and zero who have ever run a state. Of course, the biggest sign that the process is broken isn't any of those seven. It is the man in the Oval Office."

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "... Michael R. Bloomberg is ... spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught [attacking Donald Trump] that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president's vulnerabilities. The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month.... That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads.... Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online.... In swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are likely to decide whether Mr. Trump gets re-elected, the president's campaign and its allies have already been advertising on his behalf for more than a year. Mr. Bloomberg's campaign is focusing its efforts there, hoping to erode Mr. Trump's standing."~~~

     ~~~ Mrs. McCrabbie: Bloomberg is not likely to be the Democrats' nominee, but he seems to be helping the candidate who will be.

Marisa Iati of the Washington Post: "Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon known for promoting voting rights, announced Sunday that doctors diagnosed him with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which typically has a poor prognosis. Lewis (D-Ga.), who has served in Congress since 1987, said he planned to return to Washington soon to continue working and to undergo treatment over the next several weeks. He said he might miss some votes during that time." A Hill report is here.

"The Decade from Hell": New Republic Writers Condemn the Past Decade:

Alex Shephard: "The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which [Jon Stewart] hosted [in October 2010] with his then-Comedy Central colleague Stephen Colbert, was an attempt to shame a media industry addicted to theatrical conflict and shallow analysis. It was also meant to showcase common ground typically lacking in political coverage.... The rally was a huge success: 200,000 people crowded the Mall in Washington, D.C.... But it hasn't aged well. Stewart's call for Americans to transcend party lines and concentrate on their shared aspirations is embarrassing to watch in 2019.... It serves as a milestone in recent political history: a nadir in the left's years-long refusal to reckon with the extremist right."

Nick Martin: "Three days after Stewart and Colbert's rally and their call for a return to normalcy, midterm elections were held across the country. Most headlines and politics-watchers focused on the dramatic Republican gains in the House of Representatives. But the results that would most profoundly shape American politics came not at the national level, but in the state houses and senates, the chambers where state budgets are set and national policies and political movements start their journeys."

Alex Pareene: "The story of American politics over the past decade is that of a [Democratic] party on the cusp of enduring power and world-historical social reform, and how these once imaginable outcomes were methodically squandered.""

Ganesh Sitaraman: "With the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession, the ideology of neoliberalism lost its force. The approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy that defined an era led not to never-ending prosperity but utter disaster. 'Laissez-faire is finished,' declared French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in testimony before Congress that his ideology was flawed. In an extraordinary statement, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that the crash 'called into question the prevailing neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years -- the orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem which has been visited upon us.'"

Libby Watson: "The last decade's misadventures in health care reform -- the fight to pass the ACA; the unhinged response of its opponents; the efforts, successful and unsuccessful, to undermine the law; and the rapid, unprecedented rise of a movement to replace it with something far bigger and more radical --— holds a clear lesson for the future. Passing a bill crafted with industry approval and based on ideas originated with the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney -- and then insisting that it's the most progressive thing since the New Deal and we should all be grateful for it -- set the party up for the single-payer movement that's happening now. If only this had been its intention."

Otherwise, things went very well.

News Lede

AP: "A man pulled out a shotgun at a Texas church service and fired on worshippers Sunday, killing two people before he was shot to death by congregants who fired back, police said. Authorities at a Sunday evening news conference praised the two congregants who opened fire as part of a volunteer security team at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement. It was unclear if the two people who were killed were the two who shot at the gunman."

Comments

[PD Pepe]

After reading David Roth's fancy word salad–-"Unified Theory" –-I recalled that Michelle Obama had a hand in decorating their tree with ornaments made by children from all over the world and described some of them to us in a video. The optics and the messages that came from the Obama White House are in such stark contrast from the Trump's that it's like going from moderate to mayhem in a flash plus absent a dog who looks as happy as the family who loves it.

[Akhilleus]

PD,

The Roth piece was a fun read. I think one of his more salient points regarding the vacuity of the “Trumpian aesthetic” has to do with what appears, empirically at least, to be the way they are unable to see the value in any exercise that doesn’t involve beating someone (either physically or metaphorically) or humiliating them. I would add using them to that short list of Trumpian essentials. Thus the defective, mangled condition (Roth employs the Freudian descriptor uncanny) that few outside of a mental institution might recognize as any sort of genuine aesthetic sentiment that marries head and heart. What you have then is a brainless, heartless, vacuous shit show.

Sounds about right.

Alas, this is just another right-on observation of the scary psyche of the people running the country that his supporters and enablers refuse to acknowledge. Appallingly frigid Christmas decorations and the self-referential cheap, gaudy, gilded gewgaws that surround the Trumps should give anyone pause. Anyone with a brain and a heart, that is.

[Patrick]

Here is an interesting letter to the editor at WaPo, questioning the efficacy of "Love They Neighbor" as a change agent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-love-thy-neighbor-save-america/2019/12/29/c5455900-282d-11ea-9cc9-e19cfbc87e51_story.html

She seems disappointed, but the idea of "Love Thy Neighbor" is not that it is a catalyst for change. It may do that, if so, you're lucky. But it really is just a primary way to be human, and coincidentally is the 2nd Great Commandment.

[Marie Burns]

@Patrick: Yes, the letter-writer seems to think "Love thy neighbor..." is transactional. She writes, "What have I gotten for my 'love thy neighbor' efforts for five years? A sick stomach." She expects a reward; to "get something" for her efforts.

I think Nancy Pelosi does a much better job of exhibiting "love they neighbor" when she talks about "praying for the President* every day." Trump knocks her for it, asserts that her prayers are false, and she just keeps on praying, not expecting him to get it.

In the Gospel of Luke, the two greatest commandments form the frame for the parable of the good Samaritan. The name of the parable, which was imposed centuries after Luke became part of the canon, has caused most of us to read the parable from the POV of the Samaritan, and take the lesson as an explication of the Golden Rule. But some modern Biblical scholars look at the parable from the POV of the injured Jew, and in fact, when you read the parable, it is written from his POV; the Samaritan doesn't show up till halfway thru the story. In this reading, the lesson is that we should accept our neighbors even if they are different or -- as in the case of the Samaritan -- a despised outsider. The men who won't help the injured Jew are a priest & a Levite, men whom the Jew would have considered "neighbors." After telling the story, Jesus asks the lawyer-scholar to answer the question the lawyer had asked earlier: "Who is my neighbor?" The lawyer answers correctly, "The one who had mercy on him."

The Judeo-Christian ethic "love thy neighbor" or "love the stranger" (OT) is perhaps the most difficult one to follow, but it's the basis of all civil society. The American experience, because we are a nation mostly of immigrants & immigrants' descendants, is particularly dependent upon the second greatest commandment. "Making America great again," in Trump's formation, stands in nearly-perfect opposition to the commandment. To that extent, Trump is the antichrist.

[Ken Winkes]

Applaud both Patrick's and Bea's reading of the "love thy neighbor"injunction, which we have followed only intermittently in our history with a lot of painful lurchings to left and right (we killed a good portion of the population to include our black neighbors and that process is hardly complete), and in the last forty or fifty years have obviously taken a giant step backwards.

Have been reading Michael Tomasky's "If You Can Keep It," a quick account of our fractured history that goes back to our beginnings. He, I think properly, points to the Depression and WWII periods and their aftermath that ran roughly to Nixon's election (in other words the time when many of us learned our values), as the exception to the fractured rule.

Haven't gotten to the end where he promises some suggestions about how we might get back on a more human track, but as he warns they won't be easy and are not guaranteed to succeed.

The hurdle we all have to mount is, as Bea, says, is two-fold. First, thinking of someone other than ourselves and second and far more difficult, expanding our defintion of "neighbor" to include everyone, not just the white guy who lives next to us in our gated community.

An early Happy New Year to all.