The Conversation -- December 17, 2023
The President's Brother. Michael Kranish of the Washington Post: "President Biden's brother [James Biden] has for decades benefited financially from his proximity to his powerful sibling, a relationship that is newly relevant today as congressional Republicans investigate whether President Biden assisted his family members' business deals. During Joe Biden's 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice president and now three years as president, James Biden's private business work -- as a consultant for hire and behind-the-scenes political fixer -- has often intersected with his brother's public responsibilities.... As FBI agents circled in on [Richard] Scruggs ... -- a famed Mississippi trial attorney -- ... and his associates over a plan to deliver $40,000 in bribes to a local judge, they also secretly recorded conversations with James Biden -- who, at the same time, was trying to create a consulting firm with the Scruggs partners. Neither James Biden nor his brother was charged or accused of wrongdoing in the case, which led to prison for Scruggs and several of his associates, including James Biden's would-be partners.... Much of the material related to James Biden in the Mississippi case is not available in court files, but the recordings, transcripts and other material were collected by Curtis Wilkie, who wrote a 2010 book about Scruggs..., which reported a number of details about the Biden connections.... What emerges is a tale of money, politics and influence, stretching from Mississippi to the corridors of power in Washington...."
Alex Horton of the Washington Post: "The U.S. Army intends to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery next week as part of its ongoing work to rid Defense Department property of divisive rebel imagery, defying dozens of congressional Republicans who have vociferously protested the move.... This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial, and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year's appropriations bill.... A congressional commission had previously decided the memorial met the criteria for removal. The task will cost $3 million.... Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) ... plans to relocate it to New Market Battlefield State Park...." The AP story is here. MB: See also the stories about Donald Trump's New Hampshire rally. The stories are of a piece, demonstrating Republicans' antipathy for democratic principles and people of color as well as their sympathy for violent revolution against the United States.
A Show About Nothing Stunts. Paul Kane of the Washington Post looks at House Republicans and elaborates on how "the GOP move[d] away from its conservative policy roots to instead focus on political stunts. Rather than trying to work on policy through congressional committees and winning political support, they would find some looming fiscal deadline and threaten calamity unless their conservative demands were met. For 13 years, the House GOP has cycled between a far-right group of about 15 to 30 conservatives first holding things hostage, and then the leadership team getting ahead of the next hostage-taking by declaring that that was the preferred strategy." MB: It's a long-running show and not as funny as "Seinfeld," which ostensibly made fun of its buffoonish, nihilistic characters.
Amanda Terkel & Frank Thorp of NBC News: "Sen. Ben Cardin's office has parted ways with a staffer who conservative news outlets alleged was shown in a leaked video having sex in a Senate hearing room. 'Aidan Maese-Czeropski is no longer employed by the U.S. Senate,' the Maryland Democrat's office said in a statement to NBC News on Saturday, which was first obtained by Politico. 'We will have no further comment on this personnel matter.'... NBC News was not able to identify the staffer in the interaction." See yesterday's Conversation for a related link.
Presidential Race 2024
News from the Dictators' Club. Maggie Haberman & Michael Gold of the New York Times: "... Donald J. Trump on Saturday [at a rally in New Hampshire] invoked Vladimir V. Putin to support his case that the four criminal indictments he is facing are political payback..., [and suggesting that Mr. Putin is] a credible observer of the U.S. political system..... 'Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden's -- and this is a quote -- politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.'... There is no evidence that [President] Biden has meddled in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.... [Mr. Trump] also revived a widely condemned comment about immigrants 'poisoning the blood of our country,' noting that immigrants are coming not just from South America but also Africa and Asia. He did not mention Europe." ~~~
I don't call them prisoners, I call them hostages. They're hostages. -- Donald Trump, Saturday, describing the January 6 insurrectionists ~~~
~~~ Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post: "... Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.... Trump called [Orban] 'highly respected' and welcomed his praise as 'the man who can save the Western world.'... And he used the term 'hostages' to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol. The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump's rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.... The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement." Politico's story is here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: I hope it's clear that Donald Trump is teaching Americans to despise Western democracy and revere repressive authoritarian governments like those of Russia and Hungary. He's also teaching them to believe violence against democratic processes is justified and non-European immigrants are sub-human. And millions of American nitwits are learning his lessons. Trump is probably the most successful malignant individual in the history of the U.S. The Washington Post's newish masthead declaration that "Democracy Dies in Darkness"; is passé; it turns out democracy dies in bright light.
Marie: Last year, former prosecutor James Zirin wrote in a Hill opinion piece: "In Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito gleefully declared that any recognition of abortion was surely 'calculated to perpetuate give-it-a try litigation' before judges 'assigned an unwieldy and inappropriate task.' Continued adherence to that standard,' he said, 'would undermine, not advance, the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.' That's legalese for getting the courts out of the abortion business." But, it turns out, Alito was just kidding. He and his Supreme pals were not at all interested in "getting the courts out of the abortion business." ~~~
~~~ ** Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: "Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.... The Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court -- all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh -- could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies.... Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin. The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order." (Also linked yesterday.)
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Israel/Palestine
The Washington Post's live updates of developments Sunday in the Israel/Hamas war are here: "Thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv after the Israel Defense Forces mistakenly killed three hostages carrying a white flag in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a 'terrible tragedy.' Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin embarked on a trip to Bahrain, Qatar and Israel, where he will discuss the next 'operational milestones' with his Israeli counterparts, the Defense Department said.... British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, called for a 'sustainable cease-fire' in Gaza, signaling a shift in tone as support for Israel's offensive slips in some Western countries. 'Too many civilians' have been killed, they said. The World Health Organization said it delivered health supplies to al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza. After most of its staff and patients evacuated in the wake of the IDF's raid on the facility in November, al-Shifa 'needs to urgently resume at least basic operations' as new patients are 'arriving every minute,' the WHO said." ~~~
~~~ The New York Times' live updates for Sunday are here: "Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will visit Israel and two Persian Gulf nations this week, as Biden administration officials push Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip within weeks and transition to a more focused phase in its war against Hamas.... The fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers in Gaza of three unarmed men who turned out to be Israeli hostages could give momentum to those pushing for a new cease-fire to allow for more hostages to be released."
Aaron Boxerman, et al., of the New York Times: "The Israeli military on Saturday said three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli troops had been shirtless, unarmed and bearing a makeshift white flag.... The military, which acknowledged that the killings violated its rules of engagement, announced the deaths on Friday, hours after saying it had recovered the bodies of three other Israeli hostages in Gaza. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy, the Israeli military chief of staff, said on Saturday..., 'It is forbidden to shoot at those who raise a white flag and seek to surrender.'... Some families of the hostages seized on the shootings to urge the government to make securing the captives' freedom its highest priority.... One soldier, believing the [three] men posed a threat, opened fire, killing two of them and wounding the third, the early investigation found. The third hostage fled into the building, from which a cry in Hebrew for help could be heard, the military said. The battalion commander ordered the forces to hold their fire. But the wounded hostage later re-emerged, after which he was shot and killed, the military statement said."
Libya. Yonette Joseph of the New York Times: "More than 60 migrants drowned in a shipwreck off Libya, an international migrant agency said on Saturday, another chapter in the unrelenting toll in the Mediterranean Sea as people in Africa flee famine, conflict and other upheavals for distant shores.... The boat had set off from the Libyan city of Zwara with about 86 people, the agency said, citing survivors of the shipwreck. It was unclear exactly when it began its voyage." The article doesn't say who rescued the survivors.
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Reader Comments (15)
Dear MoDo: Please give a listen at The Professional Left with driftglass & Blue Gal The "No Fair Remembering Stuff" items should be of particular interest. In short: Both Sides Don't! Remember that puff piece you wrote about Strom Thurmond after your amiable chat with the monster who got in bed with Richard Nixon and conceived today's reactionary Republican project? I sure do. He was "happy to talk to reporters...especially the purdy ones..." A woman your age, Mo, should remember the dark days when women had no hard power. Them's the good ol' days Republicans want to restore. Republicans have made no secret of their deeply-held belief(TM) that a woman's place is for men to define. You've had a merry time of it, Ms. Mo, both-sidesing your way to a tenured slot on the NYT editorial page where David F. Brooks is now having the last laugh. Yew halped!
@mKaneJeeves: Your criticism of MoDo is right on, but when she hits the right, as she does in today's column, she often does a fine job. As for the both-siderism stuff, well, yeah. Dowd gained fame (and a Pulitzer!) for her commentary on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and her supposedly-humorous attacks on leading Democrats over the decades have no doubt contributed to the public's belief that "both sides do it." She had to strain to skewer President Obama ("Barry," to Dowd), but she did it anyway.
In fairness to Dowd, most public commentators and MSM reporters did not anticipate the danger on the right until it was nearly too late (or maybe just plain too late). They should have. Newt Gingrich was the biggest, fattest god-damned canary in the coal mine in U.S. history, even though there were still plenty of "normal" GOP reactionaries in office back when Gingrich declared his "Contract on America."
I do partially blame both-sider "journalists" for putting us where we are today, but elected Democrats -- including Joe Biden -- are at fault, too, for normalizing radicalized Republicans. There is a direct line from (a) Bill Clinton's concessions to Newt to (b) Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump. What was wrong with Bill -- as MoDo illuminated every chance she got -- now threatens the entire American experiment.
The story above about how conservative Republicans gradually abandoned policy and instead embraced a succession of stunts to gain and hold power is an acknowledgment that their conservative policies just weren't very popular and have become even less so as in the face of our changing demographics their remaining "policies" became more explicitly racist.
Yes, Clinton was a “Democrat,” an Arkansas Democrat. As Molly Ivins noted, only idiots and Republicans ever thought he was a liberal. He was as able a dismantler of the surviving vestiges of The New Deal as any Republican, like Obama a cultural liberal, but a governing conservative. Dowd et al. deserve no fairness or benefit of the doubt. McCarthy, Cohn, Goldwater, Thurmond, Nixon, St. Ronald, Lush Lumbar, hate radio, FUX, … were all very busy long before Newt came along. Newt’s Contract on America majority celebrated Lush Lumbar as the necessary being, creator of their majority. MSM journalists, opinionists, and—most importantly—anonymous editors never heard of the fat boy rousing the Republican rabble. These tribunes of the people fed readers and viewers decades of platitudes as the party of DDE, destroyer of Naziism, became the party of The Donaldo, overt fascist. They missed the biggest political story of the last 75 years. Nixon, Reagan, GHWB, and GWB played a long game right out in the open. The ladies and gentlemen of the Press buried the lede for a living and now, with above-it-all aplomb, they treat the prospect of a restored Trump regime as just another story among many. As Ann Magnuson satirized decades ago: “Soviet missiles on the way! Details at 11.
@mKaneJeeves write, "They [MSM] missed the biggest political story of the last 75 years." I'd say that's an accurate assessment.
Open letter to Supreme Ayatollah Alito:
What's the plan Sam? When you and the rest of the Opus Dei members of The Court step into your roles as Grand Inquisitors, will you be wearing the traditional black hoods, or more contemporary white hoods as you preside over the witch burnings and torture chambers? Just curious...
Who am I to judge, but I'd say we have too many for-profit judges
in the country.
Two conservative billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than
100 federal judges on 251 trips to cushy locations in the U.S, and
abroad.
A reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard line
conservative legal views.
https://democraticunderground.com/10143168813
Mitt Romney is so sad just thinking what has happened to his party.
I say, he should have thought about that a long time ago. It didn't
just happen last week, Mitt.
https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/mittssadandmad/
Here's a headline from Yahoo, picking up an NBC News article which I won't link, and which was written by Jonathan Allen and ?. (ergo, "Politico-adjacent")
" The White House says no, but questions about Joe Biden pardoning his son persist"
The height of "Just Asking Questions" quasi-journalism. Hypothetical provocative BS question asked and answered, but let's ignore the answer and keep asking so that the idea is burned into the hypothalamus of the ignorati. Because they won't read the article either, but that headline will leave a mark.
Culture warrior Ron DeSantis has picked another target. Let's change the liberal culture of the FBI: https://floridapolitics.com/archives/649471-ron-desantis-fbi-culture/
A Confederate statue the Right might actually be willing to take down.
So Donald is telling the Right that we should be more like (Eastern) Europe. Make Authoritarians Great Again. I guess when you get all your merchandise made in China that you are liable to get a few misspelled words. America and Authoritarian look pretty similar when you've gotten a conservative education.
Them durned commas agin --
"... the party of DDE, destroyer of Naziism ... "
I trust, MKan, that your intended antecedent of "destroyer" is "DDE" and not "party", because that party at that time was not entirely devoted to the "Berlin Or Bust" concept.
Also, they were not, subsequently, entirely devoted to Dwight David Eisenhower, who was supposed to start dismantling the New Deal for them, but instead realized that we could not sustain a Cold War without the social supports provided by the New Deal, plus the infrastructure investments and R&D necessary to deal with the perceived threat (of the atttraction of communism to a world flattened by WW1 + WW2). Many maintain that the Cold War was unnecessary, and perhaps so, but at the time most of our parents and grandparents thought we had no choice -- the Russkis and the Chinese had the hordes and one of them, The Bomb. Eisenhower presided over the growth of the mil-ind complex, the intelligence community mishegas, the domestic "national security" intrusiveness of the FBI and our willingness to engage in little wars in little places. The GOP establishment at the time went along with all of that, not because they were so prescient in the needs of national security but because that stuff was popular at the time. It wasn't until the Great Society that they saw big gummint as totally intolerable, and note that DDE resisted many of the social proposals (e.g. school integration, health programs, etc.) that would come around again after LBJ got the pen. Ike was all for consolidating federal power in national security, but remained a "states' rights" guy at heart. LBJ knew it was time to move ahead. JFK? Meh.
Then, everything started to wobble. Probably bad bearings.
Republicans struggle as they keep getting forced to talk about
abortion.
They feel safe because 50% of their supporters don't have a uterus.
(And I guess the other 50% just vote R out of habit?).
https://democraticunderground.com/100218531618
@Patrick: Yes, many "conservative" Americans started finding social-safety-net programs unacceptable right about the time they were expanded to include more Black people. When it was established, Social Security did not cover domestic and agricultural workers, many of whom were people of color. They -- and other workers -- were added under Truman & Ike. They also strongly opposed Medicare & Medicaid (which Johnson signed into law in 1965), which they decried as "socialized medicine." They still hate Medicaid because it goes to "poor people," i.e., minorities.
I read today's column with a bit of outrage: how has it come to this?? Reading the excerpts of Maureen Dowd's column (I quit reading her years ago since she delined to speak kindly and less cynically about Democrats--) made me sad for us, for women, that we have been abused and further abused by Pope Alito and his ilk. I don't see the dawn breaking on any of it. To be aided and abetted by the political conmen and villains must make Alito pretty happy in his lifetime gig. What a creep. What creeps they all are.