#Sidney Blumenthal

[chicinsilk]

US Vogue August 1, 1962

Deborah Dixon wears a short, fitted, silky gray coat with a clean, belted back silhouette. Coat by Modelia, in Dynel fabric and Sidney Blumenthal mohair.

Deborah Dixon porte un manteau gris court, ajusté et soyeux, avec une silhouette épurée, ceinturée dans le dos. Manteau de Modelia, en tissu Dynel et mohair Sidney Blumenthal.

Photo Louis Faurer vogue archive

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sidney Blumenthal: DeSantis was paraphrasing a social philosopher on the psychological basis of authoritarian movements. Eric Hoffer was an itinerant longshoreman whose book The True Believer, on the mentality of Naziism and Communism, published in 1951, drew praise from President Dwight Eisenhower in one of his first press conferences. Hoffer described how individuals erased their volition and critical thinking by submerging themselves into movements led by demagogues. “The fanatic,” Hoffer wrote, “is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.” The demagogue appeals to restoring the good old days. “A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present.” Through propaganda, “people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know’”. Enemies must be identified as the source of decay. “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.” But, Hoffer wrote, it would be a mistake to give too much credence to the ideas of demagogues. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

Eisenhower, who had led the armies that defeated Hitler, wrote a letter in 1958 warning against authoritarianism. Citing Hoffer, he stated that “dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions”. DeSantis, who has attempted and failed to supplant Trump by whipping up hysteria against the menace of “wokeness”, more or less got one of Hoffer’s memorable quotes right. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” In Georgia, on 14 August 2023, Trump was indicted on 41 felony counts with 18 co-defendants for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results under the state’s Rico statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The problem in applying Hoffer’s aphorism to Trump is that with him it was always a racket.

[tomorrowusa]

«[T]he Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else.

The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction.»

– Sidney Blumenthal, author and onetime senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, writing at The Guardian.

Trump frames himself as a quasi-religious figure – which is ironic given his personal lack of spirituality.

It's not at all gratuitous to refer to Trumpism as an extremist cult. Members of this cult will even flirt with death at his suggestion. We remember how large numbers of the Trump cult followed his quack medical advice during the pandemic emergency rather than observe scientific medical practices. Many became human sacrifices to the Dear Leader.

The only way this cult will end is to utterly defeat its leader. Reasoned arguments and logic won't cut it with the profoundly self-deluded. And the only way to defeat Republicans is to vote Democratic in large numbers.

[mitchipedia]

Trump is now effectively in control of the US House of Representatives. By Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardinan. “From his gilded tropical palace, he will phone dictates to Jim Jordan and other acolytes who will transform the House of Representatives into his 2024 presidential campaign committee, virtual law firm and bludgeon for revenge. The House will be his hammer.”

[darkeagleruins]

On July 4th Sidney Blumenthal wrote a “make believe” speech from Joe Biden announcing President Trump had been “eliminated”

[zvaigzdelasas]

The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.[...]

Only years [after enacting regime change] would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were “not supported by the available evidence” and that “the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element” that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.”[...]

Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts ... will be long remembered”). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi’s ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. “defeat,” and criticizing those saying Libya wasn’t a vital U.S. interest. NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”

After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.

The episode was considered a triumph. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the “success.” [...] [In October 2011], Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared “Libya’s victory” as she flashed a peace sign.

“It was the right thing to do,” Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was “proud to play a decisive role” in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having “at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities,” then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to “extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need,” citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.[...]

Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.

Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.

Things are scarcely better in “liberated” Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton’s pre-intervention fear of Libya “becoming a giant Somalia.” By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading. Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.

8 Sep 23

[deadpresidents]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN •Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Trilogy by Sidney Blumenthal: -A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 1809-1849 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856 (BOOK | KINDLE) -All the Powers of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, 1856-1860 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

ANDREW JOHNSON •Andrew Johnson: A Biography by Hans L. Trefousse (BOOK) •Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •High Crimes & Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Gene Smith (BOOK)

ULYSSES S. GRANT •Grant by Ron Chernow (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year by Charles Bracelen Flood (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition by Ulysses S. Grant, Edited by John F. Marszalek (BOOK | KINDLE)

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES •Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President by Ari Hoogenboom (BOOK) •Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr. (BOOK | KINDLE)

JAMES GARFIELD •President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman (BOOK | KINDLE) •Garfield by Allan Peskin (BOOK | KINDLE)

CHESTER A. ARTHUR •The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves (BOOK | KINDLE) •Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President by John M. Pafford (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[1americanconservative]

@AfricanHub_

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Leaked Hillary Clinton Emails Revealed NATO Killed Gaddafi to Stop the formation of a United States of Africa. #GaddafiFilesPart1

Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton's private email server in late December 2015, about a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, read in part:

[progressivepower]

Republicans have a ghoulish tactic for distracting from Trump’s criminality | Sidney Blumenthal http://dlvr.it/T8kwCN

[the-desolated-quill]

A fascinating analysis of Trump’s behaviour over the last couple of months. Definitely worth a read.

[meret118]

Interesting article!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sidney Blumenthal on the iconography of the Trump-era GOP. It's weird, but it really seems to work on the white Evangelicals who are the wellspring for MAGAdom. "All told, so far, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions. Three other elaborate trials will follow his January 6 case, if it is scheduled any time in January or February. His trial date in New York is tentatively on the calendar for 25 March 2024. In that case, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg “for falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election. During the election, Trump and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.” But Bragg has suggested he would postpone this trial to allow the January 6 federal case to be first.

Trump’s trial in the Mar-a-Lago presidential records case is on the calendar in Florida for 20 May 2024, where he is charged with the illegal and willful theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice. Even more than during the gripping performance of his various indictments, the theatre of his trials will subsume politics. There will not be another campaign, some semblance of a normal campaign of the past, a fantasy campaign, separate from Trump’s trials. The scenes from courtroom to courtroom will overlap with the primaries – the final ones taking place on 4 June 2024 – only intensifying the zeal of his base. And then Trump’s battle with the law will engulf the general election. The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).

But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else. The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction."

[the-real-zhora-salome]

Deny, attack, reverse – Trump has perfected the art of inverted victimhood | Sidney Blumenthal | The Guardian

DARVO - learn what it is and how it works so you can recognise it.

[nodynasty4us]

The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged.... Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%. -- Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian