It should always be news, even if it's the same story every single day-- which it basically is: Trump is a goddam congenital liar. He lies about everything... small pretty things and important business of the country. He's disgusting and for those of us who never watched his wretched TV game show, we're far less happy by having his putrid visage on our TVs every night. I doubt there has ever been a White House occupant so hated as Trump. Yesterday, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted that there aren't enough Pinpcchios for Trump's CrowdStrike obsession. The garbled English of a someone who is both senile and a moron makes it hard to understand what he;'s even saying, like this idiotic quote: "The Democrats, a lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine. It’s very interesting. It’s very interesting. They have this server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee. The FBI went in and they told them, 'Get out of here. You’re not getting it. We’re not giving it to you.' They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?"Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends, whose head normally resides up Trump's ass, pulled it out long enough to ask during a November 22 interview, for a clarification: "Are you sure they did that? Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?" Trump responded "Well, that’s what the word is," whatever that's supposed to mean. The word? From? Putin? Kessler pointed out that the orange baboon "persists in pursuing a debunked conspiracy theory. Somehow, we’ve never gotten around to assigning a Pinocchio rating for this claim. Maybe that’s because there aren’t enough Pinocchios available in our system to truly do this justice. Note to the president: When even one of your strongest TV allies expresses skepticism about a claim, it’s probably time to drop it."This is a hoax hatched by Russian intelligence. No one believes it-- except Trump... and the 36% of Americans too stupid to be aware that Trump lies whenever he opens his mouth.Fiona Hill, testifying before Congress: "Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves."Trump’s GOP allies on the committee-- treasonous Republican garbage like Gym Jordan (R-OH), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), John Ratcliffe (R-TX), Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH) "reacted with some outrage at her comments, insisting that they did not deny Russian involvement. Yet just hours later, Trump once again insisted the real culprit was Ukraine.
In the space of 10 sentences, Trump told four whoppers. Ukraine does not have the server, the FBI did not need physical possession to investigate, CrowdStrike was not founded by a Ukrainian, and it is not a Ukrainian company. It is dismaying that despite all of the evidence assembled by his top aides, Trump keeps repeating debunked theories and inaccurate claims that he first raised more than two years ago.There are some days when we wish we were not limited to just Four Pinocchios. We were tempted to display 16 Pinnochios, four for each false statement. But this claim will certainly end up on our list of the Biggest Pinocchios of 2019. Four Pinocchios
The topic didn't have to be CrowdStrike or Ukraine or anything specific at all. The topic is the shit-pile the Republican Party has become. Next week's New York Review of Books has a brilliant essay-- two reviews by Joseph O'Neill, No More Nice Dems-- that gets right to the heart of the problem. The 2 books O'Neill reviewed, or rather used as his platform, are Meaghan Winters All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States and Dana Fisher's American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave. O'Neill began by noting that "In the realm of state government, the Republican Party is wiping the floor with the Democrats. The 2016 elections are remembered for the presidential race, but they also gave the GOP control of sixty-eight state legislative chambers to the Democrats’ thirty-one. Amazingly, the lives of almost half of the national population came under the sway of a Republican trifecta—that is, a state government with all three branches controlled by the GOP. Even after the 2018 Blue Wave, the score was 61–37, Republican to Democrat." The sickness of the GOP is, alas, reflected in the Democratic Party establishment. As bad as they are, do you want to surrender to the embraces of Chuck Schumer, Dan Lipinski, Cheri Bustos, Michael O'Halleran, Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rahm Emanuel, Greg Meeks, Jim Costa, Kyrsten Sinema... The worse the GOP gets, the more leeway the Democrats have to get sloppier and more corrupt and more corporate.
What’s salient here is that Republican dominance represents an extraordinary political overperformance. Republican state governments strongly align themselves with the national party leadership-- and by conventional measures, and certainly by comparison with the Clinton and Obama administrations, the national GOP has long been a disaster. Every Republican administration from Reagan onward has crashed the economy and exploded deficits. (Trump has already achieved the latter.) Their track record on health care is one of failure. Their handling of national security has been catastrophic (see the September 11 attacks, the rise of ISIS, Trump-Russia, climate change). Their criminality and corruption is scandalous: fraud, perjury, bribery, Boland Amendment violations during the Iran–contra affair, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, theft, and misuse of public funds are just some of the crimes committed by Republican administration officials and operatives-- and that’s without counting those chalked up under Nixon and Trump.And it’s not as if red-state governments have been better. For at least a quarter-century, GDP growth in blue states has exceeded that in red states. Living standards-- educational attainment, household income, life expectancy, tax equity-- tend to be distinctly higher in blue states. These disparities are mitigated by what economists call “fiscal flows”-- blue staters subsidizing red staters in the form of federal taxes. When states go all-in on Republican economic strategies, not even fiscal flows can avert disaster, as the fates of Kansas and Oklahoma have revealed. Some red states even reject fiscal flows: fourteen have refused the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, with predictable consequences. If you wanted to tank the country, or part of it, your best bet would be to get Republicans to run things.So why do they keep winning state races? To put it another way, why do Democrats-- the party of prosperity-- keep losing to them? Can this be changed? How much does it matter?Meaghan Winter’s All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States looks into these questions with remarkable clarity and tenacity. She closely inspects liberal grassroots activism in three states-- Missouri, Colorado, and Florida-- that “are not places where it is inevitable that right-wing politicians will control the narrative and agenda. Nor are they places where a progressive movement is easy to assemble.” Her method was to visit these regions repeatedly over a period of years; to intimately acquaint herself with the local issues and people and developments, which involved spending hours watching legislative committees at work; and to attempt to gain insight into what a sustainable and progressive reinvigoration of the Democratic Party might require.Winter’s starting point is that effective political engagement at the state level is not only intrinsically desirable but that, “especially ahead of redistricting, there is no way for a political party or social movement to win long-term without building strategic power in cities and states.”This might seem obvious. The maps of most congressional districts are determined by state legislatures. After the midterm election of 2010, Republicans used their state-level wins to ensure dramatic partisan overrepresentation in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, New York, and Michigan. This guaranteed a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that could be undone only by an election like the 2018 Blue Wave. Gerrymandering was also applied to statehouses. This gives the GOP a continuing advantage, in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 census.Nonetheless, the importance of regional politics hasn’t been obvious, or obvious enough, to the Democratic powers-that-be: as Winter writes, “for years, it has been an open secret in political circles that Democrats and progressive interest groups have prioritized federal candidates and policy at the expense of the states.”Winter suggests that this is because, first, there has been a generational conviction among baby boomers that federal politics is the most instrumentally effective. And second, the liberal political apparatus is “largely guided by the moral whims of rich people.” She gives the billionaire presidential candidate Tom Steyer as an example. Liberal megadonors with private foundations are reluctant to invest in uncharismatic, long-haul grassroots projects. They are typically afraid of appearing “political.”... The subject of what should be done differently by Washington Democrats, in Congress and in the national organs of the Democratic Party, is a huge one. In essence, Democratic officials are about as useless as they could be in the matter of turning, and keeping, the political map blue. They need to change how they think about their jobs and their responsibilities.They need to embrace partisan commitment. It is mystifying and demoralizing for grassroots activists that their basic assumptions (say, that the Republican Party, not just the Republican president, is unfit for power in a democracy) find no echo among their Washington representatives. When ordinary people are emptying their wallets, getting arrested, and putting their careers on hold to fight for the cause, the least they expect of the well-paid professional politicians they have worked to elect is that they will conduct themselves with equal determination and will side with them, not Republicans. Republican politicians, some Democratic officials seem not to grasp, are not guys in a bar with opinions different from your own. They are people who have chosen to devote their lives to undermining the core interests of your supporters and their families and communities. When Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island and a loud Trump fan, recently announced his retirement, he was lauded by Schumer for being “principled” and having “stood head & shoulders above everyone else.” If the Democratic Party is to remain viable, that kind of thing has to stop.Democratic officials also need to start outmaneuvering the Republicans in Congress. Here, Democrats have a couple of no-brainers. The fact that each state is allocated two Senate seats, regardless of population, means that a Republican majority will likely prevail in the Senate for at least four of every six years-- which in turn means that judicial appointments will remain largely in Republican hands. It’s essential, therefore, that Democrats at the first opportunity grant statehood, and four Senate seats, to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It surely goes without saying that they should immediately naturalize 11 million undocumented Americans, ideally with voter registration as part of the administrative process.They need to favor proactive policies that address the concerns of their grassroots base rather than the wishes of corporate donors or of mythic pipe-smoking moderates in Ohio.Finally, and very importantly, they need to use their national visibility to message effectively and develop a clear “brand.” This is another enormous subject. A powerful brand has deep structural benefits. A successfully Democratic branding strategy would involve, at a bare minimum, negatively branding the GOP, not just Trump, at every opportunity-- on the economy, on national security, on American values.This is a feasible program. It will probably require a generational overhaul of Democratic officialdom. There are promising signs. The new chairman of the Wisconsin Democrats is Ben Wikler, formerly of the progressive action group MoveOn. His up-to-date grassroots expertise has ensured that in Wisconsin, a must-flip state for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, local partisan activism is at an extraordinary level a full year before votes are cast. Wikler is thirty-eight years old. He thinks very differently from, say, Joe Biden. Biden, like so many other Democratic leaders of a certain age, possesses sensibilities, strategic instincts, and values shaped by decades of losing ground to the GOP. He asserts that, once Trump is gone, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and discover inner moral resources. You could call Biden and his ilk Charlie Brown Democrats. They believe, against all the available evidence, that Lucy van Pelt will one day let them kick the football, and eventually they hoof at the ball in the unconscious hope that Lucy will indeed whisk the ball away. This generation of whiffers views Republican dominance as natural and, ultimately, acceptable. That won’t cut it.
