[Winstonm]

I have to admit I had no strong opinion of Kavanaugh either way other than I knew him to be conservative, but today after watching just 5 minutes of the confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh was so disingenuous and so unwilling to answer questions that it was obvious he was hiding something.

Vote no on the guy.

[Chas_P]

 Winstonm, on 2018-September-06, 17:06, said:

I have to admit I had no strong opinion of Kavanaugh either way other than I knew him to be conservative, but today after watching just 5 minutes of the confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh was so disingenuous and so unwilling to answer questions that it was obvious he was hiding something.

Vote no on the guy.

I guess this just proves, once again, that we don't all see things the same way.

[johnu]

 johnu, on 2018-September-06, 11:00, said:

As a clarification, the Vice President is also part of the 25th amendment machinery. Also, the VP can't be fired by Dennison but could be kicked off the ticket in 2020.

I don't know how to classify John Barron or John Miller, but I don't think anybody can rule them out as sources of the op-ed. They haven't been heard from in recent years but may be hanging out in the White House basement or attic.

[awm]

 hrothgar, on 2018-September-06, 16:30, said:

There is documented evidence that he has lied under oath

Regardless of his academic pedigree, he shouldn't get an appointment

It may even be worse than this. It seems like while he worked for the Bush administration in the early 2000s, he was involved in both:

1. A scheme to hack into Democratic Senators' computers in order to get information about their strategy to question appointed judges.
2. The legal justifications for "enhanced interrogation" (a.k.a. torture) used by the Bush administration.

He lied about both of these when questioned extensively about them during his previous appointment as a judge, claiming he had no idea they were going on and/or was not involved. At the time (still during Bush administration), all documents that could prove his involvement were sealed, so the Senate had no proof of his duplicity and confirmed him anyway.

Now (a dozen years later) the Republican Senate is still trying to keep these records sealed (bypassing the National Records act to do so, and over objections by the Democratic Senators). However, enough of them have leaked out to show that he is (and was) lying about these matters.

It looks quite bad, but whether any Republican Senators even care at this point is uncertain.

[cherdano]

 awm, on 2018-September-07, 00:45, said:

It looks quite bad, but whether any Republican Senators even care at this point is uncertain.

Uncertain?

[awm]

 cherdano, on 2018-September-07, 01:05, said:

Uncertain?

Well there were three of them who voted against repealing the ACA. Two of those three are still in the Senate (and the Democrats gained a seat in Alabama). There’s also a Nevada Senator facing a tough campaign in November who might be swayable. So anything’s possible.

[kenberg]

As to the anon NYT piece, I have decided that they get to decide whether they publish it, they did publish it, I wouldn't have, but I imagine they will still allow me to read their paper. So I will, assuming that I say more about it, focus on the piece itself. As noted, there is overlap with Woodward.

I have a long string of things to do today so this first thought will be brief. If I understand correctly, there is a group who thought of invoking the 25th Amendment, but figured this would create a crisis. So instead of going at things in a straightforward way they decided to surreptitiously sabotage Trump's choices.
In a word or two, how stupid can they get?
It is highly likely that Trump will be president for (at least) 2+ more years. They really think they can keep up this pretense of cooperation as a cover for sabotage for that long? To borrow a phrase, Trump may be dumb but he is not stupid. Even without this NYT piece bragging about their efforts, the guy might notice. And that will also create a crisis. At least an attempt to apply the Amendment would have honesty and clarity going for it.

If this piece, as well as similar things from Fear, accurately describes their thoughts and actions, then Trump isn't the only dodo in town.
Ok, off to mow the grass and pick the raspberries before it rains, then to a club game. Oh the busy life of a retiree.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2018-September-07, 06:29, said:

I have a long string of things to do today so this first thought will be brief. If I understand correctly, there is a group who thought of invoking the 25th Amendment, but figured this would create a crisis. So instead of going at things in a straightforward way they decided to surreptitiously sabotage Trump's choices.
In a word or two, how stupid can they get?
It is highly likely that Trump will be president for (at least) 2+ more years. They really think they can keep up this pretense of cooperation as a cover for sabotage for that long? To borrow a phrase, Trump may be dumb but he is not stupid. Even without this NYT piece bragging about their efforts, the guy might notice.

Actually, I think he might be stupid enough. Or he might not care as much as you think. As long as he gets to keep being President, and gets to push through the initiatives that his base and the GOP care about, I think he'll be happy.

Of course he'll rant about this, like he does about every other betrayal. Someone might even get fired over it. But the fact that there are reasonable people reining in the worst of Trump's idiocy is the only thing saving us from total disaster.

I think they made the right decision about not trying to invoke the 25th Amendment. That's really designed for when the President is totally incapacitated, like recovering from surgery or in a coma. Trying to use it when you just think POTUS is making poor decisions is hopeless. Outside the obvious situations, removal by 25th Amendment is only slightly less difficult than removal by impeachment.

[Winstonm]

 barmar, on 2018-September-07, 09:19, said:

Actually, I think he might be stupid enough. Or he might not care as much as you think. As long as he gets to keep being President, and gets to push through the initiatives that his base and the GOP care about, I think he'll be happy.

Of course he'll rant about this, like he does about every other betrayal. Someone might even get fired over it. But the fact that there are reasonable people reining in the worst of Trump's idiocy is the only thing saving us from total disaster.

I think they made the right decision about not trying to invoke the 25th Amendment. That's really designed for when the President is totally incapacitated, like recovering from surgery or in a coma. Trying to use it when you just think POTUS is making poor decisions is hopeless. Outside the obvious situations, removal by 25th Amendment is only slightly less difficult than removal by impeachment.

The most remarkable aspect to the 25th Amendment talk was that these were his people engaged in discussions of how dangerous he was and what to do about it. It would be like an NFL football team listening to the quarterback call a pass play in the huddle, then deciding on their own to run the ball instead.

[hrothgar]

As is often the case when Trump sinks to a new low, the MAGA squad is back talking about 8 dimension chess

Question for larry and Chas and the like...

Do tweets like this give you any cause for concern?

Quote

Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......

The is the President of the United States chastising the justice department for not engaging in selective prosecution for political ends...

This in and of itself would result in impeachment under normal circumstances...

[y66]

From Let’s Cut the Anonymous Author Some Slack by Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

Everyone seems to agree on one thing about the anonymous Donald Trump administration official whose New York Times op-ed was Topic A for 36 hours, which is a pretty long time in Trump-calibrated politics: He or she deserves no applause for the action. As the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan put it, “Political commentators of all stripes have made the point that the piece itself reeks of cowardice.” I’m not so sure.

It really does appear to be a consensus. Trump called the writer “gutless.” Melania Trump used the word “cowardly.” Anti-Trumper and estranged Republican David Frum also lectured him or her for not coming forward and then resigning. Dan Drezner mocked the piece. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson, certainly no Trump fan, said, “Anyone who thinks they escape the moral and political taint of this administration by murmuring anonymous misgivings about Trump is a fool as well as a coward.”

There’s plenty more where those came from.

The column was self-serving. Welcome to Washington. No one really gets to be a “senior administration official” without a healthy sense of how to advance one’s career. And I’m willing to stipulate that there’s less courage in filing an anonymous piece than leaving one’s job and putting a name on the item, although I’m sure that plenty of people would have still seen the act as one of self-promotion anyway (and it’s quite likely they would have been correct).

So what?

Failing to show maximum courage is no political sin. Neither is finding the intersection between self-interest and the common interest.

And yes, I’m pretty confident that a New York Times op-ed from an administration insider stating that the president’s impulses are “anti-democratic” and that “his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions” advances the national interest, at least a little bit, if one believes that reining in Trump is in the national interest. No, it won’t take Trump down. But the piece stirred up plenty of attention, and among other things fully validated reporting from plenty of neutral sources, including the new book from Bob Woodward that made very similar comments.

Of course, most Trump fans will just treat all of it as fiction. Many Trump haters will be similarly unaffected. But on the margins, each tidbit adds up. A few Trump fans become less enthusiastic; a few skeptical supporters who were willing to overlook reporting from many media sources are a little more skeptical after hearing from another Trump insider; some mild Trump opponents become stronger opponents and more likely to show up to vote against Republicans; maybe even a small group of Trump haters are energized to work phone banks or make another contribution.

Meanwhile, each piece of new evidence that this presidency is not normal helps to break down the powerful bias among the neutral news media to treat Trump as basically normal. It’s not that anyone who follows politics closely learned anything new here; even books such as Woodward’s are mostly useful for filling in the details, not for painting the very obvious broad picture. But media norms don’t let reporters treat the president as someone who is so unfit for office that his own staff talked about removing him even if they believe that’s true — at least, not until the evidence is overwhelming. So everything that pushes them along is helpful.

Would I rather have seen the author acknowledge Trump’s use of bigotry instead of praising the administration’s results? Sure. Would I rather see some recognition that Trumpism has deep roots in a badly dysfunctional Republican Party, and that serious reforms are needed if it is ever going to return to being a healthy conservative party? Absolutely. The audience here seems to be everything-else-is-normal Republicans, and they’re part of the problem. Then again, if one believes that Trump as president is a particular threat to the nation over and above past Republican pathology — and I think he is — then getting some of that everything-else-is-normal crowd on board is pretty important to constraining Trump.

Frum urges those in the administration who agree with Anonymous to “Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count.” But I doubt that any single senior administration official could do all that much more than this writer already has, short of it turning out to be White House Chief of Staff John Kelly or a member of the president’s family. Maybe it helps a little on the margins, and I’m not going to discount the importance of that. But again, I’m not going to be overly critical of someone who could have done more when others did far less.

I also won’t entirely discount the possibility that the author really is doing the nation a valuable service by staying in the administration and thwarting Trump’s worst impulses. Granted, we don’t know that; it’s quite possible this is the assistant to the deputy to the official who prevented war with Venezuela or a massacre in Syria or the demise of NATO. Or, for all we know, this could be a cabinet secretary who has had little to do with Trump but is mired in his or her own scandals. But in general, I have no problem with a handful of people in key positions remaining in place to prevent disaster, even if it also might protect Trump to some extent.

So I’m not ready to throw a parade for the anonymous author, but I think overall the nation is better off with this information, no matter how self-servingly presented, than without it. And I’m not going to bash anyone for that.

[Winstonm]

 hrothgar, on 2018-September-07, 10:07, said:

As is often the case when Trump sinks to a new low, the MAGA squad is back talking about 8 dimension chess

Question for larry and Chas and the like...

Do tweets like this give you any cause for concern?



The is the President of the United States chastising the justice department for not engaging in selective prosecution for political ends...

This in and of itself would result in impeachment under normal circumstances...

I'm glad you brought up again this episode as it gets to the heart of rot; unlike Nixon, this president cares nothing about the country as he places his own interests above the law, above honor, above truth, above everything that interferes with his will. It is inconceivable that we continue to allow someone like this to hold office when it is evident that at his core he believes and flat-out states out loud that the job of those under him is to protect him from prosecution while doing his bidding to eradicate any and all who oppose him.

This is the worldview of an organized crime boss.

[Chas_P]

 hrothgar, on 2018-September-07, 10:07, said:

Question for larry and Chas and the like...

Do tweets like this give you any cause for concern?

No.

[hrothgar]

 Chas_P, on 2018-September-07, 18:30, said:

No.

Always lovely to see the right's unflinching concern for the rule of law and democratic norms...

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2018-September-07, 09:19, said:

Actually, I think he might be stupid enough. Or he might not care as much as you think. As long as he gets to keep being President, and gets to push through the initiatives that his base and the GOP care about, I think he'll be happy.

Of course he'll rant about this, like he does about every other betrayal. Someone might even get fired over it. But the fact that there are reasonable people reining in the worst of Trump's idiocy is the only thing saving us from total disaster.

I think they made the right decision about not trying to invoke the 25th Amendment. That's really designed for when the President is totally incapacitated, like recovering from surgery or in a coma. Trying to use it when you just think POTUS is making poor decisions is hopeless. Outside the obvious situations, removal by 25th Amendment is only slightly less difficult than removal by impeachment.

On this last point I may not have been clear. I also would oppose using the 25th, unless there is far more conclusive evidence of true derangement than has been presented. I was speaking favorably of the clarity and honesty of such an approach, but I think that it both would and should fail. For now, at least.
We have a bad situation. The fact that a president and his advisers do not always see things the same way is inevitable. And it's healthy. But dealing with it in the way that is being described is not at all healthy. A president, even or maybe especially a president Trump, needs to be able to trust the people close to him. I don't see anything good coming from slipping a paper off his desk (one of Woodward's examples) hoping he won't notice.
I guess the argument for the piece is that some people are unaware of how thoroughly screwed up this all is. Well, that's an argument, I'll give them that. But my view of Anonymous is that if he is a cabinet secretary I hope it is something like Secretary of the Department of Astrology.

[y66]

From Colin Kidd’s LRB review of How Democracy Ends by David Runciman:

Quote

A historian ought to know better, I suppose. But for the last decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible.

...

David Runciman argues that we are wrong to think that the 1930s or the 1970s provide any sure precedent for the current travails of democracy. It might be better, Runciman suggests, to look instead at the populist turmoil of the 1890s. In the US, William Jennings Bryan, an insurgent agrarian Democrat, managed to barnstorm his way to prominence. His speech at the 1896 party convention – ‘You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold’ – hinted at the bigotry which lay behind his homespun appeal (he ended his career as the prosecuting attorney at the trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher charged with teaching evolution in 1925). France, meanwhile, was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. Division on this scale is potentially fatal to democracy; trust, as Runciman reminds us, is its lifeblood. However, both democracies survived, with Dreyfus exonerated in 1906, and the Democrats able to domesticate Bryan’s populism.

Runciman warns us not to look for the familiar symbols of the coup d’état – tanks in the streets, generals seizing television and radio stations – as the heralds of the death of democracy. The transition is likely to be much less cartoonish, and consequently harder to detect or guard against. Indeed, the phenomenon he terms ‘zombie democracy’ might already be with us: an electorate is convinced that it is determining policy because it is asked to give its voice in referendums, not realising that the referendums are merely spectacles, carefully stage-managed by political elites who decide not only the questions, but also the meanings of the answers given. The people, Runciman argues, are easily gulled because referendums are ‘presented as the antithesis of the subversion of democracy’. The real result of the Brexit referendum was to ‘hand more control to the British executive, whose job became to deliver on what the British people wanted’. Brexit wasn’t in any straightforward sense a coup, but it points to the difficulty of distinguishing democratisation from its opposite.

Making reference to the rich variety of coup-like phenomena identified by the political scientist Nancy Bermeo, Runciman notes how many of them involve the payment of ‘lip service’ to democracy, or at least to its simulacrum, whether by way of ‘election-day vote fraud’, ‘promissory coups’ by groups that then use elections retroactively to justify their regimes, ‘strategic election manipulation’ or, less obtrusively, ‘executive aggrandisement’, where those in power incrementally and undramatically ‘chip away’ at democratic norms. These days, a coup is ‘marked by the attempt to conceal what has changed’. In Eastern Europe new forms of ‘illiberal’ democracy – best described as ‘competitive authoritarianism’ – are emerging, with elections accompanied by conspiracy theories, the scapegoating of minorities and fanfares of purportedly democratic self-congratulation. In Turkey Erdoğan has made cunning use of actual and threatened military coups against his regime to subvert democracy, in the name of democracy.[*] The seemingly quotidian category of democracy, so widely recognised that it seems to need no definition, dissolves into irony, antinomy and paradox.

The most troubling of Runciman’s paradoxes concerns our condescension to those who gave us Brexit and Trump. Are some issues simply too technical and demanding for the electorate? Surely we don’t want rule by the stupid, or worse, government by the hucksters capable of conning a bare majority of the people at least some of the time? Many of us have had these thoughts in the last couple of years. But what if we ourselves are the problem? Epistocracy, the rule of those who know best (or think they do), undoubtedly possesses a superficial appeal. In her own prescription for curing democracy’s ailments, the economist Dambisa Moyo recommends increased eligibility requirements for political candidates, including a mandatory period of non-political work experience; government-backed voter education as a means of nudging citizens towards the ‘right long-term policy choices’; and weighted voting, with three tiers of voter, ‘unqualified’, ‘standard qualified’ and ‘highly qualified’, as a means of boosting ‘the influence of the best-informed segment of the electorate’. Runciman is unpersuaded: epistocracy risks the creation of an arrogant, group-thinking ‘monster’. There is, he writes, much to be said for an untutored populace that frequently changes its mind: ‘Ignorance and foolishness don’t oppress in the same way that knowledge and wisdom do, precisely because they are incompetent.’ In any case, epistocracy always runs the danger of collapsing into undemocratic technocracy, the rule of those who actually understand the way the machinery works, and put the mechanics before democratic values.

Runciman is alert to the unknowability of the various threats we might face and, more pointedly, to the couch-potato unresponsiveness of democracy in the face of the looming disasters we do know about. We suffer from ‘apocalypse fatigue’. The ‘creeping’ threats posed by global warming, biodiversity loss and nuclear proliferation are well known, but lack political ‘bite’. It is a mistake, he says, to assume that there is a straightforwardly winnable battle in democratic life between the good people who want to save the planet and the bad people who don’t. The situation is much more ambiguous, and tinged with bleak comedy: ‘Both sides care and neither side cares. Both care because no one wants the world to end. Neither cares because this is democracy: what people really care about is who gets to tell them what to do.’

Technology poses separate challenges. Runciman discerns in twitterstorms and ‘online witch hunts’ the return of the direct democracy practised in classical antiquity, something ‘fickle, violent, empowering’, a modern version of the mob of the ancient city-state. The tyrannical majority no longer gets to kill the offender, but opportunities for newer and speedier kinds of social ostracism have opened up. All of us are one unfortunately phrased email or tweet away from public shaming. Freedom of speech is an essential and endangered ingredient of our liberal democracy; but no less important are civility, considerate reticence and, I suspect, the least hymned of democratic virtues, outright hypocrisy.

Machine politics, which in effect allowed broad-based political parties to carry out filtering roles – sifting out Trumps, extremists and uncompromising political purists – has been replaced by the echo chambers of the web. Instead of ‘capacious’ parties containing ‘significant areas of overlap’, as Runciman puts it, we now have online cultures of partisanship. In 1980, Runciman reports, only 5 per cent of the Republicans surveyed didn’t want their child to marry a Democrat; by 2010 that figure was 49 per cent. At that level a democratic way of life becomes very difficult to sustain.

The web, Runciman argues, has opened up a space for ‘supercharged expressionism’. Unfortunately, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, innocent about politics to the point of cluelessness, regard themselves as enhancers of democracy, not the problem but the solution. Here Runciman identifies a cluster of developments which might, cumulatively, destroy democracy: an arcadian nerd elite oblivious of its own technocratic tendencies; an anarchic 24/7 electronic forum which gives vent to unassuageable demands for the rectification of personal grievances; and a hollowed out democratic system whose humdrum compromises and short-term fixes provoke frustration and anger among the demanding high-speed citizenry of the net. All this, Runciman suggests, ‘makes Mark Zuckerberg a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump’.

Runciman isn’t interested in solution-mongering, but he does give his readers some reassurance, albeit inflected with grim farce: ‘Stable democracies retain their extraordinary capacity to stave off the worst that can happen without tackling the problems that threatened disaster in the first place.’ No democracy, we are told, has ever reverted to military rule once GDP rose above $8000 per head. The worst that might befall us is something like the experiences of Japan since the freezing of its economic miracle or of Greece in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Japan is elderly – half the population is over the age of 47 – and sclerotic. Its politics are simultaneously ‘venomous and toothless’: the relentless churn of politicians caught with their fingers in the till goes unpunished by violence on the streets or social dislocation. Greece has somehow ‘fallen apart without falling apart’. Here – in another elderly society – the worst is feared but never quite happens, and democracy endures in a ‘kind of frozen crouch’.

Runciman’s tone is elegiac. The historical conditions which provided democracy with a niche for a century or so are changing. As a result, it is probably ‘over the hill’, enduring a ‘midlife crisis’. He foresees a long ‘drawn-out demise’ sustained by the political equivalents of dentures and hip replacements.

A long ‘drawn-out demise’ sustained by the political equivalents of dentures and hip replacements? Yikes.

[Chas_P]

 hrothgar, on 2018-September-08, 04:21, said:

Always lovely to see the right's unflinching concern for the rule of law and democratic norms...

I have previously stated in this forum that there are many things I don't like about Trump. His tweets are one of them. Your question was did I have "cause for concern" for one specific tweet and it drew a response of "no". I should have predicated it with, "No more so than any of his other tweets. I don't like any of them". As I understand it...and I'm sure you will correct me if wrong...the investigation to which you refer is ongoing and will continue regardless of what Trump tweets about Jeff Sessions. Therefore I'm not all bent out of shape about the tweet. If those being investigated are eventually indicted, prosecuted, found guilty, and punished I'm all for it.

[hrothgar]

 Chas_P, on 2018-September-08, 18:28, said:

I have previously stated in this forum that there are many things I don't like about Trump. His tweets are one of them. Your question was did I have "cause for concern" for one specific tweet and it drew a response of "no". I should have predicated it with, "No more so than any of his other tweets. I don't like any of them".

Most of Trump's tweets are inane/stupid.

This one is a clear violation of the rule of Law and would be grounds for impeachment in any normal time...

[PassedOut]

Cutting through the fake news: Bob Woodward’s meticulous, frightening look inside the Trump White House

Quote

“Fear” is an important book, not only because it raises serious questions about the president’s basic fitness for the office but also because of who the author is. Woodward’s dogged investigative reporting led to Nixon’s resignation. He has written or co-authored 18 books, 12 of them No. 1 bestsellers; broken other major stories as a reporter and associate editor of The Washington Post; and won two Pulitzer Prizes. His work has been factually unassailable. (His judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction .)

During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein were often alone on the story. Now, the din of daily disclosure and opinion is almost deafening. But what was important about Woodward’s meticulous reporting in the 1970s is even more invaluable today: His utter devotion to “just the facts” digging and his compulsively thorough interviews, preserved on tape for this book, make him a reliable narrator. In an age of “alternative facts” and corrosive tweets about “fake news,” Woodward is truth’s gold standard.

At a moment when social media and cable television are filled with journalists spouting invective about the White House and Trump blasts the press as “the enemy of the people,” Woodward has clung to old-fashioned notions of journalistic objectivity. “My job is not to take sides,” he told a Vox interviewer in March. “I think our job is not to love or loathe people we’re trying to explain and understand. It is to tell exactly what people have done, what it might mean, what drives them, and who they are.”

In his previous books about eight presidents, Woodward has always eschewed making judgments or inserting his own analytic spin. His insistence on relying on dialogue drawn from interviews has prompted harsh assessments from various critics, including the writer Joan Didion, who famously called him a “stenographer.” (A reviewer for The Post, writing about his book “The Price of Politics,” described his style as the “literary equivalent of C-SPAN3.”) But these days Woodward’s flat, reportorial tone seems like the perfect antidote to the adversarial roar on Fox or Twitter. The authority of dogged reporting, utterly denuded of opinion, gives the book its credibility.

We don't need more drama, but we do need more facts. I'm going to read Woodward's book.

[kenberg]

 PassedOut, on 2018-September-09, 06:39, said:

Cutting through the fake news: Bob Woodward's meticulous, frightening look inside the Trump White House


We don't need more drama, but we do need more facts. I'm going to read Woodward's book.

This is what I am hearing. People trust him, they want to read his book.

I just finished Scott Turow's Testimony, a novel where a good part of the story is the immense difficulty there can be in finding the truth. Reading Woodward's Fear could be very worthwhile regardless of our beliefs regarding tariffs and immigration.