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thaliberator · 4 years

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The Clownish Way to Doom A Generation

By following Colin Kaepernick’s “they’re both the same, why vote” philosophy and skipping the 2016 election, progressives and Black abstainers opened the door for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to reshape the federal judiciary in a way that’s set to have dire consequences for Black people and progressives for the next 30 years.

Late in August 2016 as the American National Anthem blared through the Levi’s Stadium loudspeakers, reporter Jennifer Lee Chan tweeted a relatively innocuous photo shot from high above the field where the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers were set to engage in a preseason contest.

A then minor detail captured in the picture confirmed the impetus for a story Chan’s colleague Steve Wyche had been keeping his eye on for the past couple of weeks. What it showed was 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick sitting during the playing of the anthem while everyone else in view of the lens stood. In and of itself, standing for the playing of the national anthem before a sporting event is a peculiar ceremonial ritual so boring that it only makes it to the TV broadcast for title games and big-time celebrity performances.

But once Kaepernick explained his rationale for not standing, and eventually kneeling, during the anthem, suddenly those two minutes of pre-kickoff pomp and circumstance became the biggest thing in sports.

As he would later go on to explain many times across multiple platforms, Kaepernick’s decision came in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Oscar Grant, and the ongoing systemic oppression faced by Black people in America.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick told Wyche. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

From the moment Kaepernick made known the reason for his protests the backlash was as predictable as the outcome, and thus his fate as an NFL quarterback was sealed in such a way that only an MVP-caliber performance could have extended his run. That didn’t happen and he hasn’t played another down in the NFL in nearly four years.

Kaepernick’s on-field performance in 2016 and 2017 left a lot to be desired. After being relegated to backup quarterback he was thrust back into the starting role after the team got off to a 1-4 start. His presence under center didn’t really change 49er-fortune as the team won only one of its remaining 11 games.

While statistics suggest Kaepernick’s performance wasn’t atrocious, it wasn’t good enough for the 49ers to make a long-term investment in him either. At the end of the season, the 29-year-old decided to opt-out of his contract and try his hand as a free agent, a designation that would allow any interested team to add him to their roster.

But despite having guided his team to a Super Bowl appearance just four years earlier and having declining but decent stats, not one of the NFL’s 32 teams took a serious look at Kaepernick. A few coaches and front office people made statements that someone should definitely pick up Kaepernick, just not their teams.

Was his performance poor? Yes. Was his performance so poor that 31 other teams couldn’t find a spot for him even as a third-string quarterback? No. Clearly the controversy-averse NFL owners, even if not overtly expressed, were in cahoots to ensure Kaepernick never received another shot in the league — a theory born out by the fact that in 2019 the NFL and Kaepernick reached a confidential monetary settlement regarding his claims that owners colluded to keep him unemployed.

But that part of the story we know.

They're All The Same?

As the Kaepernick controversy ballooned in 2016, the quarterback became the avatar for everything from the opposition of systemic racial oppression, the opposition of police brutality, and opposition of institutional racism to disrespect of the flag, disrespect of the country, and even (bizarrely) disrespect of the military.

The opportunity to drive a golf wedge into America’s racial fissures and exploit the emerging culture war wasn’t missed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump who infamously said to an approving crowd of hootin’ n hollerin’ red state whites, “Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when someone disrespects our flag to say, 'get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired. He's fired!”

With the presidential campaign coming to a head, football season well underway, and the pro and anti-kneeling camps firmly entrenched, reporters asked Kaepernick to weigh in on the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Kaepernick, clearly the most prominent voice in professional sports at the moment surprised many when he said he didn’t plan to vote because essentially all politicians are the same, including Clinton and Trump.

Specifically, he said, “Both are proven liars and it almost seems like they’re trying to debate who’s less racist. At this point, in talking to one of my friends, you have to pick the lesser of two evils, but the end is still evil.

"I think the two presidential candidates that we currently have also represent the issues that we have in this country right now," Kaepernick said. "You have Hillary, who has called Black teens or Black kids super predators. You have Donald Trump, who is openly racist.

"He always says, 'Make America Great Again.' Well, America's never been great for people of color," Kaepernick said. "And that's something that needs to be addressed. Let's make America great for the first time."

And that was the gist of his abstinence rationale —they’re all the same, so I’m not voting.

It’s a relatively juvenile argument most often posited by people who don’t want to do the work required to actually change the reality of their political choices. And not only was Kaepernick not going to vote, turns out he never even registered to vote in 2016 or ever as far as any records show.

However, to his credit, Kaepernick is not your average apathetic abstainer. In the years that he has been out of football, he has become a high-profile activist, highlighting the issues that led to his anthem protest, held forums on a variety of social justice-related topics, and raised and donated millions of dollars for various causes.

He even started the Know Your Rights Camp, a non-profit organization that holds seminars for young people across the country to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.”

He even managed to get one of America’s most beloved brands, Nike, to side with his efforts. According to various financial news outlets, Kaepernick’s partnership with Nike for their 30th Anniversary “Just Do it” campaign resulted in $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales, which includes the $50 t-shirts and $150 jerseys that routinely sell out in hours, with a portion of proceeds going to charity.

But corporate sales numbers aren’t really the ones that matter.

Inside The Numbers

When the dust settled on the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton received 65,853,516 votes to Donald Trump’s 62,984,825 but lost the election thanks to the Electoral College, a holdover from a bygone era that lifted two of the last three presidents who received fewer actual votes than their opponent (George W. Bush and Donald Trump) into the White House.

Having long outlived its usefulness and practicality as a means to ensure less populous states have a voice in the election outcome, the Electoral College process has shifted focus away from states with the most people and onto a handful of smaller “swing states” whose election-day results typically determine who becomes president.

In 2016 it didn’t matter that Hillary received nearly three million more votes than Trump because Trump received 306 of the possible 538 electoral votes to Hillary’s 232.

Despite the electoral vote total, a closer look at the numbers shows just how close America was to avoiding the four-year national nightmare/embarrassment/sideshow that has been the Trump presidency.

In Pennsylvania, Hillary lost the popular vote 2,970,733 to 2,926,441, a difference of 44,292 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 20 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, Hillary lost the popular vote 1,405,284 to 1,382,536, a difference of 22,748 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 10 electoral votes.

In Michigan, Hillary lost the popular vote 2,279,543 to 2,268,839, a difference of 10,704 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Had Hillary Clinton won these three states, she would have won the presidency, leaving “shithole countries” and kids in cages for the next Mad Max movie instead of the front page of The Washington Post.

A Midwest trifecta for Hillary was plausible because it’s not as if these three states are deep Republican strongholds. Barack Obama won all three in 2008 and 2012.

Exit Stage Right and Not College-educated … and White

Exit polling showed that Donald Trump was able to pull off the biggest political upset since Truman defeated Dewey in 1948 by turning out trailer-loads of Rust Belt whites without college degrees, many of whom had never voted or previously voted for the Democratic candidate.

This so-called silent majority of disaffected white people bought into Trump’s sales pitch and promise to save them from the murderous, marauding hordes of Brown people threatening to rush the border and sack their suburban enclaves while he would simultaneously rewind the hands of time, bringing back jobs technology and environmental regulation had long-since shipped off to the Third World and China. And most importantly, he would “Make America Great Again” — a curious phrase that simultaneously causes his white followers to well up with star-spangled pride, while Black people, women, immigrants, the entire LGBT community, Muslims, and many more wonder just what great period he’s referring to because America has only very recently begun to consider treating us relatively civilly.

And while pundits point to some questionable campaign decisions made by Hillary and the underestimation of her unfavorability among the electorate, Trump’s ability to turn out record numbers of white voters without a college degree was the biggest factor in his victory.

However, an argument can be made that the biggest reason that Hillary lost is that she was unable to turn out voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania at the same level as Barack Obama.

In fact, Hillary wouldn’t have needed to worry about the white voters that jumped ship to the Republicans had she reached the Obama threshold with Black voters.

Analysis of the polling data shows that Black voters who previously voted for Obama didn’t cast a vote for Trump, instead a large percentage simply didn’t vote at all — a critical mistake.

Turning Out and Falling Off

According to the Pew Research Center, overall Black voter turnout fell from 66.6% in 2012 to 59.6% in 2016. The 7% drop might not seem like much but it represented the largest turnout decline of any racial or ethnic group in 30 years and was the first time in 20 years the Black voter turnout rate declined. 2016’s numbers represented the lowest Black turnout rate since 2000.

Even among Millennials, voter turnout increased for every single racial group except Black Millennials. The general Millennial turnout percentage increased from 46.4% in 2012 to 50.8% in 2016. The Black Millennial turnout decreased from 55% in 2012 to 50.6% in 2016.

A Slate article analyzing the 2016 election results cited a study by researchers from the University of Massachusetts and Indiana University that found the Black voter drop-off was sharpest in states where Trump’s margin of victory was less than 10 points. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Black turnout dropped by more than 12 points.

The combination of rises in white votes combined with declines for Blacks set the table for Trump to claim the electoral victories in those key states and thus win the presidency.

With all else remaining the same, had Black voters turned out in the same numbers like 2012, Hillary would have won Michigan. If white voter turnout remained at its 2012 level instead of going up, Hillary would have won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, the turnout rate among Black voters dropped 19% from 74% in 2012 to 55% percent in 2016. Turnout for Asians and Latinos also dropped by 6%. Coincidentally, the 2016 presidential election was the first time Wisconsin’s new voter ID requirement was in effect. Critics of the requirement and multiple studies have found that minority voters are less likely to have a driver’s license or another form of ID that satisfies the eligibility requirement. And this could be the reason Black voter turnout was disproportionately low in the state, allowing Trump to be the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to win Wisconsin.

A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that nearly 17,000 potential voters in Milwaukee and Dane counties did not cast votes due to the voter ID requirement put in place by Republican Governor Scott Walker and backed by the majority of Republicans in the State Legislature. Hillary lost Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes by less than 23,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, where Black voters comprise 10% of the electorate, the .2% decline in Black voter turnout wasn’t as sharp as it was in other key states, but it was the only turnout decline recorded among the voting groups identified in the Center for American Progress study of 2016 voter trends. Had Black voter turnout matched its 2012 levels, with all other factors remaining the same, Hilary would still have lost the state because of a 4% increase among white voters without a college degree.

The election outcome proved Trump’s effectiveness at weaponizing white grievance to drive up uneducated white turnout — gains that were not offset by a necessary increase in minority voters and were assisted by the low Black turnout, even though even more Blacks were eligible to vote than in 2012.

All-Star Influencer

In terms of the pro-athlete social activist hierarchy, in late 2016, Kaepernick was king. Even four years later he remains 1 or 1A with LeBron James despite their nearly 116 million combined Twitter and Instagram follower gap. While LeBron is famous for his willingness to tackle topics and causes of importance beyond the basketball court, his legendary basketball feats remain the primary draw. With Kaepernick’s NFL days increasingly far behind him, the activism is the draw.

According to sports marketing and data analytics firm Hookit, in the months before the Green Bay game, Kaepernick was gaining approximately 50 followers per day on his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.

In two weeks just after his protest and the rationale behind it were revealed, Kaepernick began gaining approximately 18,000 followers a day — an increase of 35,394%.

According to Hookit, from Jan. 1 to Aug. 25, Kaepernick gained 40,372 followers on Twitter. Between August 26 and September 8, he added 98,730 Twitter followers.

In the same two-week period Kaepernick had seven unique social media posts that were liked, commented on, or shared an average of 46,553 times per post — nearly four times more activity than his posts received prior to kneeling.

His mentions were also way up, with Kaepernick’s name tagged or mentioned 235,549 on various platforms during the two weeks — nearly 10 times more mentions than in the previous eight months.

And those numbers have only increased with Kaepernick possessing 3.9 and 2.4 million followers on Instagram and Twitter respectively.

But in November 2016, long before reporters rushed to LeBron for comment on the latest racial injustice, Kaepernick was the man at the center of the storm.

With his profile, his voice, his exposure, his activism, and his traditional and social media presence increasing exponentially in short order, it’s even more baffling that Kaepernick would choose not only to not endorse a candidate but to simply not vote at all.

In hindsight, it is a move that was counterproductive and best and wildly irresponsible at worst.

Woke Dummies and The Big Problem

The so-called Woke community of activists, to whom Kaepernick and Bernie Sanders are probably patron saints, is looking to push American society far to the left concerning all aspects of public policy and social life. The progressive agenda includes defunding police departments, abolishing prisons, criminal justice reform, ending fossil fuel usage, free college, healthcare for all, universal basic income, etc.

Depending on where you stand on the political spectrum, these moves can be viewed as either necessary steps to achieve social equity and justice or pipe dreams from people disconnected with theories related to practical application.

The problem for supporters of these issues aren’t the issues themselves, but the fact that enactment of any of them requires a political solution, and when challenged, a legal outcome favorable to the proponents.

By adopting the Kaepernick, “I’m not going to vote because they’re all the same” position, abstaining progressives ceded critical political and legal ground to the Republicans who, in the past four years, have plowed ahead making moves that will entrench their policy positions as law to be upheld by the conservative judges they’ve helped install — for decades to come.

If we reverse engineer the Republican masterplan, we can start with the U.S. Supreme Court, where President Trump has successfully appointed three justices to life terms. With his latest appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, who replaces liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the balance of the court has shifted 6-3 in favor of the conservative and ultra-conservative wings.

What this means for progressives like Kaepernick is that any law that seeks to fundamentally change or challenge the status quo or anything not rubber-stamped by a conservative think tank is likely to be struck down by a court packed with justices who believe the words written by slaveholding, sexist, landowning, rich white men in frilly tops, writing with quills, are still the standard by which rulings should be made almost 250 years later.

And again, Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, with most serving well into their 80s. The three Trump-appointed justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are 53, 55, and 48 years old respectively, meaning they will likely be ruling against progressive interests for the next 20-30 years, dooming a generation.

But that presumes the cases even reach the high court. The path to the Supreme Court winds through federal courts where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hard at work for the past six years working to ensure his insidious plan to put a conservative stranglehold on the federal judiciary came to fruition.

When Donald Trump began his presidency 105 empty federal judgeships had not been filled by President Obama — and that was by Republican design.

When Republicans won back control of the Senate in 2014 they obtained the final say on who got to fill or not fill the federal court vacancies.

In the two years before Republicans took the Senate, nearly 90% of Obama’s nominees were confirmed. After McConnell and the Republicans took over, that rate fell to 28%.

To achieve this result Republican senators used various tactics to either obstruct or delay the confirmation process. A Democrat-sponsored effort in 2013 removed the filibuster, a classic delay tactic often used by the minority party to continue debating an issue to prevent a vote, as it pertained to nominations to executive branch positions and federal judgeships.

This led to the Senate confirming more of Obama’s nominees at a higher rate because they only needed a majority of senators to vote to end debate and move on to the confirmation vote. While Senate Democrats confirmed many of Obama’s nominees, many judgeships were left vacant because a backlog of potential federal judges was created by the Republican stall tactics.

However, in 2014, when Republicans gained control of the Senate, it became clear that the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster was going to come back and bite Democrats in the ass — and boy did it ever.

When McConnell became majority leader confirmation of Obama nominees ground to a near halt, culminating in the prevention of a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who died in February 2016.

In what would turn out to be perhaps the millennium’s boldest act of hypocrisy, McConnell justified holding no hearings for Garland claiming that in an election year the American people should have the chance to weigh in on the decision by allowing the next president to fill the vacancy — despite the election being nine months away.

Once Trump was elected McConnell shifted his plans for the federal judiciary into high gear and the Senate began moving to fill every vacancy with what Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee member Diane Feinstein called, “young conservative ideologues, many of whom lack basic judicial qualifications.”

From expressed opposition to everything from the Affordable Care Act to Abortion Rights to equal rights for LGBT Americans to environmental regulations to voting rights, and much much more, Trump appointees check nearly all of the boxes the religious right, conservative fringe, and a sizable number of racists have been waiting for generations to see reflected in the federal courts.

And in the off chance some progressive policy enacted into law in a blue state gets challenged and lands before the Supreme Court, McConnell’s machinations will likely result in the court striking it down with the approval of the six conservative justices, including Barrett, who McConnell saw sworn in just days before the 2020 election, forgoing all that stuff he said in 2016 about not confirming nominees in an election year.

Do you Really Care?

It would be one thing if Kaepernick didn’t care about social justice or Black people or right and wrong. But the fact that he clearly cares about those things makes his “I don’t vote, they’re all the same” position even more infuriating because, again, every progressive idea he supports requires a political and legal solution to be put into effect.

And once they’re put in place, they aren’t necessarily safe from political or legal processes.

For example:

The Affordable Care Act — The Supreme Court full of conservative justices will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act as Republicans seek to strip away the means through which millions of Americans are able to receive health care during a deadly global pandemic.

Police Abuse — The decision to bring criminal charges against police officers who abuse and murder Black people or any people is made by the district attorney, an elected official, or, as in the case of the killing of George Floyd, the state attorney general, also an elected official.

Elimination of Qualified Immunity — Qualified immunity is the doctrine that prevents government officials, police officers in particular, from being held personally liable for misconduct on the job that would get the average person locked up for life or paying a huge monetary settlement. In 1982 the Supreme Court expanded the definition of qualified immunity ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/800/ ) and police unions and prosecutors have used it for decades to justify a lack of criminal accountability in scores of cases involving claims of police abuse.

A Reuters investigation examined how qualified immunity has made it extremely difficult to hold police officers accountable for misconduct and abusive behavior.

In one incident, qualified immunity was invoked after a police officer in Utah gave an unarmed man brain damage after slamming him to the ground during a traffic stop.

In 2010 a Houston officer shot Ricardo Salazar-Limon in the back during a traffic stop after claiming he thought the man was reaching for a gun. There was no gun.

Salazar-Limon claimed his constitutional rights were violated and sued the city of Houston and the officer who shot him. In federal court, the defense argued that the officer was protected by qualified immunity, the courts agreed, a summary judgment was entered, and the matter never went before a jury.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, a majority of justices agreed with the granting of qualified immunity to the officer.

In the dissenting opinion Justice Sonia Sotomayor was joined by Ginsburg in stating, “Only Thompson and Salazar-Limon know what happened on that overpass on October 29, 2010 … What is clear is that our legal system does not entrust the resolution of this dispute to a judge faced with competing affidavits. The evenhanded administration of justice does not permit such a shortcut.

“Our failure to correct the error made by the courts below leaves in place a judgment that accepts the word of one party over the word of another. We have not hesitated to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity in cases involving the use of force. But we rarely intervene where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases.”

Restrictions to the application of qualified immunity would require the Supreme Court to hear a related case and come to a different conclusion, thereby setting a precedent for lower court rulings.

Voting Rights — Efforts to suppress the votes of Black people in particular and people of color generally have deep roots in America. In recent years Republicans across the country have led efforts critics have said are specifically aimed at suppressing or denying the votes of African-Americans. The reduction of the number of polling places in predominantly Black communities leads to hours-long waits to vote. Voter ID laws disproportionately impact minority voters who are statistically less likely to have the necessary documentation. The attempt to reduce the number of ballot drop-off locations in densely populated urban areas disproportionately impacts minority voters. Solutions and corrections to all of these issues require a political or legal solution and sometimes both.

Gerrymandering — Gerrymandering is the process by which politicians draw voting district lines to create districts in which one party is all but guaranteed to hold power indefinitely and doesn’t need to be responsive to anyone other than members of their own party. This has been a crucial tactic for Republicans looking to maintain power even as political shifts show more people moving away from their party. Bringing an end to gerrymandering or even drawing districts in a more logical, straightforward fashion requires a political solution that will almost certainly be challenged in federal court.

Abortion — This is the Holy Grail for conservatives who have been waiting for nearly 50 years to get enough right-leaning justices on the court to reverse the landmark ruling that protected a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. With a court now full of conservative Catholics, that dream is closer to fruition than ever.

The Census — Conducted once a decade, the U.S. government uses the census to count the number of people living in the country. The census results determine how many representatives each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, how an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal funding is distributed for the next 10 years, and how many electoral college votes each state is allocated. The Trump administration made repeated attempts to undermine the census, most notably by trying to add a citizenship question to the census intended to scare undocumented people away from participating, thus driving down the population totals in key Democratic states such as California and New York, diminishing their political power. Even though COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions made collecting census data more difficult the Trump administration successfully fought to cut the count short. That decision was upheld by the Supreme Court despite the argument that the decision will prevent a fair and accurate count.

Felons Voting — In 2018, Florida voters passed Amendment A that restored voting rights to people convicted of a felony who served their sentences. Many expected that a large portion of the 1.4 million newly eligible voters would vote Democratic but we may never know because the Republican governor and lawmakers quickly passed a law in response to Amendment A requiring people convicted of felonies to fully pay back fines and fees to the courts before they become eligible to vote. Depending on the person, the cost could range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars — effectively nullifying their voting rights.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit claiming the new law was unconstitutional because it created a financial barrier for people attempting to exercise their right to vote. In 2019 a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and agreed that the law amounted to a poll tax and was unconstitutional.

But in September 2020, just two months before the presidential election, a federal appeals court overturned the previous ruling that will prevent any former felons who have not paid all of their back fines and fees from voting. Five of the six votes to overturn the ruling came from federal judges appointed to the court by President Trump.

Republicans know that Florida is arguably the most crucial state in their bid to capture the presidency. If Joe Biden or any other Democratic presidential candidate were to win Florida, the handwringing over states like Michigan and Wisconsin goes away because of the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost Florida by 112,911 votes, a number that seems minuscule if you consider a pool of 1.4 million new voters, a majority of whom may lean Democratic.

Good intentions Meet Reality

While Colin Kaepernick is clearly well-meaning and puts his time, energy, and effort behind the causes he supports, it was unimaginably negligent of him to brag and boldly promote the fact that he does not vote, didn’t intend to vote, and voting doesn't matter because all the candidates were the same.

The margin of victory was so narrow for Donald Trump that there is no reason to think Kaepernick couldn't have moved the needle by choosing to use the soapbox upon which he stood in 2016 and the social media megaphone he wielded to push and encourage his hundreds of thousands of supporters to vote.

Is it improbable to think that the most prominent and popular politically active Black athlete could not have convinced a large number of Black people to cast a vote instead of sitting the election out?

And if you still think voting doesn’t matter, consider this as we continue to live altered lives under the cloud of a deadly global pandemic: In 2009, after multiple recounts and legal challenges, Al Franken became the certified winner of the Minnesota Senate election by 312 votes and became the 60th Democratic senator, a key number that allowed Democrats to end the Republican filibuster and vote to pass the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare aka the only reason many millions of Americans have healthcare access.

Every single progressive cause Kaepernick advocates for can be broken down to a simple equation:

Progressive Idea + Progressive Activism + Progressive Political Action + Progressive Legal Victories = Progressive Laws that move America closer to the fair, just, and equal society we should all be aspiring to.

Remove one part of the equation and things fall apart.

The idea that voting doesn’t matter and all politicians are the same is a position that is factually wrong, strategically incompetent, and downright imbecilic. That position makes Kaepernick and the abstainers just as responsible for Trump’s 220 judges and the decades of judicial beatings liberals and progressives will face as the MAGA hat-wearing racist Proud Boy.

Do not make the same mistake twice.

Do not be that stupid.

Go vote!

0 notes

politicaltheatre · 7 years

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Pass Fail

In two very short days those of us who believe we must all be accountable to each other in all things will find ourselves on the outside looking in. The right wing, convinced that they should not have to be held accountable, will control the White House and Congress, with Supreme Court and other judicial vacancies soon to be filled.

Some things are simple. They're either all one thing or a choice between two. Inside or outside. Up or down. Right or left. Right or wrong. Yes or no. Pass or fail. We like simple. It gives us certainty, or at least the illusion of it which feels almost as good.

At times like these simple is indeed very attractive. That attraction, of course, is strongest when things aren't simple, something we must always take pains to remember. We must resist the urge - and even more so, the urging - to accept seemingly simple answers and to ignore the complexity both of those situations and of the people seeming to drive them. Above all, we must resist the temptation to reduce our options to those simple, single or binary, choices.

The challenge for most of, of course, is that we have too many things we have to focus on in our everyday lives. We have jobs, we have families, we have debts, and we have distractions both good and bad that we can't and often don't want to avoid. What we need is help. Failing that, what we need is representation, someone to step up and pay attention and make sense of what is going on for the rest of us. We need that representative to protect us and to be accountable to us. It isn't an easy job but we've never lacked for volunteers, especially when that job comes with a paycheck.

Obviously, we rely on our elected political representatives - and presidents, senators, assembly members, council members, union directors, etc. - to recognize threats and protect us, and to value accountability for all including themselves. In a perfect world, that's what they'd do. This, however, isn't that world.

In this world, the job of protecting us from those we've hired to represent us belongs, for better and worse, to the journalist. Journalists, if they're doing their jobs, keep an eye on things and recognize bullshit when they see it. They then write or talk about it, not merely the act of it but the amount and quality of the bullshit it has been steeped in. In a perfect world, this is what a journalist does. Again, this is not a perfect world.

If this electoral cycle has taught anything, it isn't even close. Many journalists, too many, reduce their work to mere reporting, relaying what was said and done with no judgment. Well, they say "no judgment". Saying that makes things simple for them, or seems to; the truth is that it doesn't because nothing can. Having no judgment is, in fact, literally impossible. At some point a decision is made to stop looking at the consequences of things said and done. This is a big part of the effort to simplify the task. The problem is that decision, the effort to stop, to look away, is a judgment, one of value, one of moral responsibility, and always one of self interest.

To the best journalists, maintaining judgment, value, and moral responsibility requires maintaining their own objectivity. This means hesitating to treat anything as fact. This means accepting that the world is uncertain. This means being fully accountable to everyone. When something is fact, a certainty, they say so objectively, without regard or fear of whomever it is about. They measure who could be hurt by such a revelation and weigh that against who could be hurt by going no further. To them, this is what "ethics" means.

The trouble for us in relying on journalists is that they are just people like the rest of us, and most of them are not the best. Take NBC (please). Talking heads at MSNBC aside, the news division is something of a joke, reluctant to call bullshit on anyone and dominated by the parent network's infotainment franchises, The Today Show and Access Hollywood. Over the past few administrations, the network has gone out of its way to curry favor by hiring or offering to hire relatives of the president.

Billy Bush, grandson of one former president and nephew of another, was fired by NBC back in October for encouraging Donald Trump's boasts of sexual assault when he was host of Access Hollywood back in 2005. Before that came to light, though, he had actually presided over another now-forgotten scandal back in August, as newly anointed host of The Today Show, when he credulously allowed Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte to lie to him about trashing a gas station, smearing their Brazilian hosts in the process, and then tried to give Lochte a pass after the lies were exposed. Al Roker, apoplectic at Bush's defense of Lochte, was soon made to apologize to Bush for calling bullshit.

Such are the journalistic standards of morning television, standards which dominate NBC and other broadcasters and which twist the word "ethics" into something resembling a form of etiquette. One must be polite not from respect to the person as a human being but respect to the power the person is believed to hold. If one wishes to be invited to the best occasions, if one wishes to have access, one must not offend the ones perceived to be in power. One must not, in fact, offend anyone. In following this form of journalistic etiquette, always ready to give a pass, one is always at a disadvantage, something those looking to lie or otherwise escape accountability know all too well.

The challenge NBC and other news organizations face, and always will face, is one of access. They face competition for every interview, every "get". Accommodation, many journalists are told, means access, and access is everything. Just ask Access Hollywood. Politics is packaged like entertainment these days for that very reason. Celebrities lie all the time, usually about the quality of their latest project; politicians and business leaders have grown comfortable lying, too, and for much the same reason, they want to sell something. They expect a pass on it. That's what access buys.

The challenge some of us face, though, in denying one person or group a pass is that we may end up giving another, possibly worse one a pass in order to do it. Those who would not and could not trust Hillary Clinton, for instance, voted for Donald Trump in droves, this despite the fact that much of what he said and continues to say is lies. And racist. And misogynist. And…well, we know. We know. He promised to "drain the swamp" and poured in toxic waste. His nominees lie and bullshit their way through Senate confirmations knowing they don't have to mean anything they say. No one's going to charge them lying to Congress, right? Of course, not.

The funny thing about the two reports released this month suggesting that Russia hacked the election and has compromising videos of Trump - funny in an ironic way, not a pee-pee way - is how unnecessary both were to understanding who Trump is and what he'll do as president. The official report, the one about Russian "interference", doesn't actually show Russia doing anything different than Fox News or Breitbart.

Arguably, Russia didn't have to do anything because the American right wing was already doing it and had been for decades. Fake news on Facebook? It's been there for years. A cable news channel with coverage slanted towards the right wing and against progressives and labor? Are you kidding?! Seriously?!!

The most damning part of the official report suggested that Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had worked closely with Russia to orchestrate the leaks of embarrassing emails from Clinton campaign workers and damage the Democratic party. That Assange chose to give an exclusive interview to Fox News' Sean Hannity(!!!) didn't exactly make the case that he wasn't using Wikileaks to help one political party over another. Actually, if you wanted to destroy whatever credibility Wikileaks ever had as an impartial medium for casting light into the dark corners of the "Deep State", giving that interview pretty much killed it.

What Assange currently has at his and his highest bidder's disposal is the means to harm and apply pressure on enemies while protecting allies. That corruption of what Wikileaks seemed to have been, an indiscriminate, non-partisan medium for leaking secret documents, is what should scare everyone, which is what makes Glenn Greenwald's strident defense of Assange so strange.

It was Greenwald whose unquestioned integrity led Edward Snowden to seek him out when Snowden was intent on leaking NSA documents. Everything Snowden and Greenwald tell us to fear about unaccountable clandestine agencies pulling strings from those dark corners is credible and genuinely worth fearing. And yet, Greenwald's defense of Assange, in which he lumps Fox News' latest special friend with the likes of Snowden and Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg, is just bizarre.

Greenwald is so insistent on attacking the agencies accusing Assange of collaborating with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he willfully abandons the evidence of his and the rest of the world's own eyes about what Putin has done and what kind of person he is. In the past two decades Putin has made it his purpose to make The Soviet Union Russia great again, and he hasn't been shy about it.

Would Putin prefer Trump over Clinton or any Democrat (or any other Republican)? Of course, he would. Does Putin's government engage in the very same invasive, destructive behavior as the agencies Greenwald tells us to fear? Hell, yes. Has the Putin regime committed war crimes in eastern Ukraine and Syria? They've committed atrocities that should shame us all.

And yet there's Glenn Greenwald telling us our own clandestine agencies are inflating the threat posed to us by Putin in order to achieve their own nefarious purposes. He suggests that the entire campaign against Putin and Assange is to distract from Clinton's own corruption. Bunk. Greenwald may well be right that Hillary Clinton and everyone associated with her, including soon to be former President Barack Obama, are involved in heinous things and responsible for much of the misery that led to Trump being elected, but none of that - NONE OF THAT - justifies giving Putin or his regime or anyone associating with that regime a pass. People who hated the Nazis gave Joseph Stalin a pass. They were idiots.

Yes, everyone, even a corrupt liar such as Donald Trump, even a murderous thug such as Vladimir Putin, deserves protection from lies and abuse, from slander and libel, but failing to call out their lies and abuse, and their slander and libel, in the name of ethics or anything else is just that, a failure.

When Trump, in his usual style, rejected all accusations against him as "lies" and all those reporting those accusations as "fake". He and his staff openly bullied CNN's White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, in retaliation for the network breaking the story on, but not revealing, the dossier. On the face of it, it was just Trump being Trump, bullying a person or an organization in a flash of anger. When Trump attacked Georgia Representative and Civil Rights icon John Lewis days later, it seemed the same.

Both instances were widely reported that way. Trump the bully had struck again. He did not seem to understand the consequences of his actions. He did not understand the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships, not just with the press and legislators but with his own intelligence agencies. The scarier answer is that he understands perfectly.

At the press conference, the message to Acosta and CNN, and, more important, the other journalists in the room and their employers, was clear: "Behave or you will lose your access to the White House". His racism-infused tweets against Lewis had another message: "Know your place or lose access to the money for your district in the budget". His repeated attacks at the competence of the intelligence agencies had yet another message: "Shut your mouths or find yourselves replaced with those who will". It isn't that Trump doesn't want to hear what they all have to say, he merely wants to control it.

What we need to do, in these next two days, in these next four years, is call bullshit for what it is. Our representatives need us to support them, but they need us to hold them to account, too. Our journalists may rise to the occasion, even at a network as weak and unreliable as NBC, but they won't do so without us demanding a higher standard from them. We can't let them give the Trump administration or Congress a pass. To do that, we can't give them a pass, or ourselves. It's a lot to ask, but the stakes are high and we can't afford to fail.

- Daniel Ward

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The Man Trump Trusts for News on Ukraine https://nyti.ms/2QcQNGn

The Man Trump Trusts for News on Ukraine

Who is John Solomon? His name popped up frequently in closed-door testimony in the impeachment query. He is a regular on Hannity. And his work helps shape how millions of Americans understand this moment.

By Jeremy W. Peters and Kenneth P. Vogel | Published Nov. 12, 2019 Updated Nov. 13, 2019, 3:28 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

WASHINGTON — In weeks of closed-door testimony, American officials who worked in Ukraine kept circling back to the work of one journalist, John Solomon, whose articles they said appeared to have considerable currency with President Trump’s inner circle.

They had never known Mr. Solomon to be an authority on Ukrainian politics before, and certainly not someone with particular insights into the American ambassador to Ukraine who was a frequent target of his. So when Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr. and the president himself started talking about his stories, those officials began closely following what he wrote.

Asked how she first learned of Mr. Giuliani’s interest in Ukraine, Fiona Hill, Mr. Trump’s former adviser on Russia and Europe, replied, in part, “John Solomon.”

Mr. Solomon has been a surprisingly central figure in the impeachment proceedings so far. But the glare has not been so kind.

One witness testified to Congress that an article of his was full of “non-truths and non sequiturs.” Another witness said that he could not recall a single thing that was correct in one of Mr. Solomon’s stories, then added sarcastically, “His grammar might have been right.”

So who exactly is John Solomon? A Washington-based reporter and Fox News personality who had until recently been working at the politics outlet The Hill, Mr. Solomon, 52, is not well known outside conservative media. But, according to interviews and testimony, his writing and commentary helped trigger the chain of events that are now the subject of the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.

Though he worked for years at The Associated Press and briefly at The Washington Post, he moved on from mainstream outlets and now sits at the center of a network of conservative journalists, radio hosts, cable news pundits and activists whose work reaches millions of Americans every day, and shapes the way a large swath of the country sees this pivotal moment.

Understanding their work is key to explaining how Mr. Trump’s approval ratings remain so durable with his base — and why, as some polls suggest, far more direct and damaging evidence would have to emerge from the impeachment hearings that begin their public phase on Wednesday for that support to crack.

According to transcripts released last week, Mr. Solomon and his pieces for The Hill are a focus for congressional investigators as they look into Mr. Trump’s efforts to push Ukrainian officials to investigate his rivals. One particular area of interest for Democrats, the transcripts show, is Mr. Solomon’s role in advancing claims by Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family deserved to be investigated for their own dealings in Ukraine.

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said he turned to Mr. Solomon earlier this year with a cache of information he believed contained damaging details about Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I had no other choice,” he added, asserting that Obama-era officials still “infected” the Justice Department and wouldn’t have diligently investigated the information he had compiled.

“So I said here’s the way to do it — I’m going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate,” he said.

‘The Woodward and Bernsteins of our time’

Mr. Solomon’s work has been endorsed by some of the most influential figures on the right like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and the president, who has highlighted Mr. Solomon’s articles on Twitter.

Mark Levin, the radio and Fox host, recently said that Mr. Solomon and Sara Carter, a journalist with whom he frequently appears on television, were “like the Woodward and Bernsteins of our time.”

Media scholars describe the environment that has elevated Mr. Solomon’s stories as an information ecosystem entirely sealed off from other news coverage.

Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Columbia University who studies the conservative media, said people often mistakenly refer to the Fox News-talk radio world as an “echo chamber” of opinion when in fact it is more like “an interconnected set of authorities.”

“Sean Hannity talks about John Solomon,” she said, “and then that gets picked up on Rush and Levin.” The effect, she added, is that his reporting carries weight with conservative audiences. “That gives it an authority when they’re hearing it from multiple sources every day.”

When Mr. Solomon appears on television and the radio, Mr. Hannity and other conservative hosts often identify him as an investigative reporter and cite his decades of experience at news organizations like The A.P. But his critics see this as a sleight of hand to give his writing a veneer of nonpartisan objectivity.

“Part of the issue is that for years he was identified with the mainstream media,” said James Manley, a former aide to Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader who tangled with Mr. Solomon in the 2000s over stories insinuating Mr. Reid had benefited inappropriately from his office. The Columbia Journalism Review later singled out Mr. Solomon’s reporting, saying it was “much ado about very little.”

An examination of Mr. Solomon’s reporting methods and interviews with people who have worked with him during his decades-long career in Washington show that his techniques blur the boundaries meant to keep journalist-source relationships at an arm’s length. And for some of his biggest stories on Ukraine, he has relied on a prosecutor with a history of making inconsistent statements who is now under criminal investigation.

At one point while he was employed as a columnist for The Hill and publishing regular pieces favorable to the president, Mr. Solomon discussed with colleagues a proposal to create a transparency office in the Trump White House. Some colleagues believed he might have wanted to run this office, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

(Unlike Fox, The Hill put a disclaimer over Mr. Solomon’s writing indicating that it was opinion starting in May of 2018 after complaints from colleagues about what they saw as one-sidedness in his work, The Post reported at the time.)

Mr. Solomon denied that he has ever sought work in any administration and said the transparency office proposal had “nothing to do with seeking a job.” He added, “It had to do with fostering an idea for more transparency.” As for the attacks on his work from the impeachment witnesses, he said, “The N.S.C. and State officials are entitled to their opinions of my reporting.”

A close look at one piece by Mr. Solomon shows how far one of his assertions, later called into doubt, can reverberate at the highest levels of the government.

In late March, Mr. Solomon and his team published pieces in The Hill making sensational claims of misconduct at the State Department: The American ambassador to Ukraine, a career foreign service officer who assumed her post during the Obama administration, had privately bad-mouthed Mr. Trump and, separately, had previously provided to Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, a list of individuals that Mr. Lutsenko should not prosecute. In conservative circles, where suspicion of anti-Trump officials working inside the government runs high, the allegation fit with the narrative that institutions like the State Department are rife with bad actors.

But there was less to the do-not-prosecute list than it appeared. The State Department dismissed it as “an outright fabrication.” Mr. Lutsenko changed his story and acknowledged that what he is quoted describing in Mr. Solomon’s report — “a list of people whom we should not prosecute” given to him by the ambassador — did not actually exist.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Lutsenko blamed the confusion on the interpreter who handled his interview with The Hill. But he insisted that the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, had in fact asked him not to target certain politicians and activists who worked with the embassy on its anti-corruption efforts.

But among Mr. Trump’s allies and media boosters, the story line was set: A corrupt ambassador who did not like the president was misusing her authority to protect her friends. In the whistle-blower complaint that set off the impeachment inquiry, those articles and others by Mr. Solomon are cited as among the key events leading up to Mr. Trump’s demand that the Ukranians do him “a favor” and investigate the Bidens.

Mr. Solomon said in an email that Mr. Lutsenko was adamant he had not changed his story when the two spoke for a follow-up interview. The back-and-forth over the existence of a formal list, he said, is a “classic he-said, she-said dispute,” which he believes his coverage accurately reflected. “The idea I should have some regret for accurately quoting a major news figure in Ukraine is preposterous,” he said.

The “don’t prosecute” story gained considerable traction in conservative media. It drew the attention of the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who in March tweeted that Ms. Yovanovitch was a “joker” who shouldn’t be in the job. In May, the Trump administration recalled her from her position.

In his testimony, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, seemed alarmed at how quickly Mr. Solomon’s story was amplified by high-profile figures like Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump’s son. He testified that the entire thing “smelled really rotten.”

‘Reporting truth’ with unusual methods

Mr. Solomon grew up in Connecticut where his father was a police officer and later served as chief of police for the town of Easton. Before working for conservative outlets, he held senior reporting jobs at a number of mainstream organizations, including The A.P., where he worked for almost 20 years, and The Post, where he pursued investigative projects that often focused on federal law enforcement.

Mr. Solomon won an award in 2002 for coordinating the A.P.’s investigations into the law enforcement failures that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. He joined The Post in 2007 but stayed only a short period before leaving for the Washington Times, telling his bosses that he could not pass up the large salary the conservative paper was offering.

His work at The Hill since 2017 has generated the most notice and controversy of his career. His reporting was of considerable value to the outlet’s publisher, James Finkelstein, who has been friends with Mr. Trump for decades and saw Mr. Solomon as a high-profile hire whose frequent Fox News appearances could help generate buzz and traffic for the website.

While Mr. Solomon was at The Hill, his relationships with sources were sometimes closer than reporters typically get with the people they cover. In March, according to documents uncovered as part of the impeachment inquiry, he shared a draft of one of his stories before publication with a noteworthy group: people who had helped gather the information that Mr. Giuliani had provided to Mr. Solomon.

They included Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, two lawyers who have been working with Mr. Giuliani to undermine the investigations into Mr. Trump, and Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who helped connect Mr. Giuliani to Mr. Lutsenko. Mr. Solomon said “I do go over stories in advance” with sources for accuracy, not to tip them off to the content.

Mr. Solomon left The Hill in September under circumstances that neither he nor the paper have fully described. He has not said what his new venture will be — or how it is being funded — other than to describe it to former colleagues as a media start-up. For the time being, he is publishing his work on his personal website. His slogan is “Reporting Truth.”

______

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Trump’s Contempt for True Professionals

It’s driving the impeachment inquiry. It’s dooming his presidency.

By Frank Bruni, Opinion Columnist | Published Nov. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019 |

The impeachment inquiry and the events that led to it tell many stories. One, obviously, is about the abuse of power. Another illuminates the foul mash of mendacity and paranoia at the core of Donald Trump.

But this week, as several longtime civil servants testify at the inquiry’s first public hearings, a third narrative demands notice, because it explains the entire tragedy of the Trump administration: the larger scandals, the lesser disgraces and the current moment of reckoning.

That story is the collision of a president who has absolutely no regard for professionalism and those who try to embody it, the battle between an arrogant, unscrupulous yahoo and his humble, principled opposites.

Right now the opposites have the microphone.

I mean William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, who is, tellingly, the first impeachment witness to testify on live television. Stephanie Grisham, the White House’s peerlessly nasty press secretary, has sought to discredit Taylor’s account of the pressure on Ukraine’s new president by saying that he belonged to a cabal of “radical unelected bureaucrats.”

Hardly. He’s a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran with a half-century career that’s devoid of obvious partisanship and entirely about the public good. He took the Ukraine post despite profound qualms because he felt he owed his country his expertise. He’s a creature of duty and discipline and earnestly accrued knowledge — all precious commodities that are worthless in Trump’s eyes. In other words, he’s a true professional, and it was as such that he recoiled from what Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the wretched rest of them were up to.

Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, has a diplomatic résumé that’s three decades long and includes three ambassadorships, an unusual feat. The fault that Giuliani and Trump found in her was her respect for correct procedure, her resistance to corrupt politics and her reluctance to tweet out dopey praise for the president. They quibbled with her professionalism, which had no place in their schemes.

Trump’s disregard — no, contempt — for professionalism is in some ways an anagram of his aversion to norms, to tradition, to simple courtesy. Or at least these attitudes exist as a Venn diagram with enormous overlap. They’re hostile to any set of values that places personal glory below other ideals.

But Trump’s war on professionalism and professionals is also its own distinct theme in his business career, which is rife with cheating, and his political life, which is greased with lies.

Go back to his initial staffing of senior posts and recall how shoddy the vetting process was. Also notice two prominent classes of recruits: people who had profoundly questionable preparation for the jobs that he nonetheless gave them (Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Stephen Miller, Javanka) and genuine professionals who wagered that their skills would be critically necessary — and thus highly valued — and that Trump would surely rise to the established codes and expected conduct of his office.

Now look at how many of those professionals (James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn, Dan Coats) are gone. And tell me whether Trump has ever had the epiphany that the presidency is, in fact, a profession.

A crisis of professionalism defines his administration, in which backstabbing is the new glad-handing, firings are cruel, exits are ugly, the turnover is jaw-dropping, the number of unfilled positions is mind-boggling, and many officials have titles that are prefaced with “acting” — a modifier with multiple meanings in this case.

Trump slyly markets his anti-professionalism as anti-elitism and a rejection of staid, cautious thinking. But it’s really his way of excusing his ignorance, costuming his incompetence and greenlighting his hooliganism.

He rejects professionalism because it tempers self-promotion and forbids such grandiose claims as his insistence that he knows more about the Islamic State than any military general. “I alone can fix it,” he boasted at the Republican convention in 2016. “I’m the only one that matters,” he said the following year when dismissing any concerns about job vacancies. A true professional would have trouble uttering those words. They roll easily off a true huckster’s tongue.

Professionalism involves credentials, benchmarks, all sorts of yardsticks by which a person can be judged, sometimes unkindly. Trump wants only affirmation. And professionalism is a reality-based enterprise. Trump prefers fiction: The Ukraine call was “perfect.” “Read the transcript” because it exonerates him. His critics are partisan hacks. He’s the target of an interminable “witch hunt.”

But Robert Mueller was no more hunting witches than Bill Taylor is an agent of the deep state. In fact Mueller stands out as a consummate professional, so much so that he politically neutered himself, and “deep state” is Trump’s deeply cynical pejorative for “seasoned professionals.”

It’s the professionals who keep pushing back at him, whether at the Federal Reserve, the Birmingham, Ala., office of the National Weather Service or the State Department, which is where Taylor, Yovanovitch and this week’s other impeachment witness, George Kent, worked.

Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote about Taylor and Yovanovitch recently in an essay for The New York Review of Books titled “The Deeply Dedicated State,” observing: “Both always have struck me as first-rate government servants, singularly focused on advancing American national interests. Both have served Republican and Democratic presidents, and even after decades of interacting with them both, I could not guess how either of them votes.”

He characterized them as “accidental heroes” who aren’t “likely to seek the limelight.” “They are extremely well trained, competent, and highly regarded professionals,” he summarized.

That’s why they bucked Trump. And that’s why he can’t bear them.

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What Trump Is Hiding From the Impeachment Hearings

The president’s efforts to prevent the House from doing its job are just as worrisome as the Ukraine scandal.

By Neal K. Katyal, Mr. Katyal is a former acting solicitor general and a law professor. | Published Nov. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

The public impeachment hearings this week will be at least as important for what is not said as for what is. Congress will no doubt focus a lot on President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and his secret plan to get that government to announce a public investigation of the man he considered his chief political rival, Joe Biden.

But think about what the president is trying to hide in the hearings. He has been blocking government officials from testifying before Congress, invoking specious claims of constitutional privilege. And while the Ukraine allegations have rightly captured the attention of Congress and much of the public, Mr. Trump’s effort to hinder the House investigation of him is at least as great a threat to the rule of law. It strikes at the heart of American democracy — and it is itself the essence of an impeachable offense.

President Trump has categorically refused to cooperate with the impeachment investigation. He has declined to turn over documents related to the inquiry and has instructed all members of his administration not to testify before Congress. Every member of the executive branch who has gone to tell the truth to the House impeachment investigators — like Marie Yovanovich and Alexander Vindman (and maybe Gordon Sondland, too, at least the second time around) — has done so in defiance of the president’s instructions. President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has refused to testify. Secretary of Defense Mike Esper, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have ignored congressional subpoenas related to the investigation.

Mr. Trump’s stonewalling is a grave problem because it means there is no way to police executive branch wrongdoing. The attorney general, William Barr, has said a sitting president cannot be indicted. The president’s lawyers have gone so far as to say, in light of that principle, that he cannot even be criminally investigated. But every serious scholar who adheres to the view that a sitting president cannot be indicted combines that view with the belief that the impeachment process is the way to deal with a lawless president. Indeed, the very Justice Department opinions that Mr. Barr relied on to “clear” the president say exactly that. Otherwise a president could engage in extreme wrongdoing, and the American people would have no remedy.

But for impeachment to have meaning in our constitutional system, there must be a way for Congress to ferret out the facts. Presidents don’t engage in open wrongdoing. They try to hide it — as Mr. Trump did here by using a shadow foreign policy channel led by Mr. Giuliani and making a secret phone call whose details were hustled by White House staff onto a highly classified server. We saw the damning memo of the phone call, with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, only because of a complaint by a whistle-blower.

The president now claims that, despite the call memo and other evidence, he never intended to do anything wrong. But the only way to test that claim is to permit witnesses to testify about what the president said at the time, and what he knew and asked about.

To take one obvious example, John Bolton, his former national security adviser, has said that he “was personally involved in” many “relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed in the testimonies thus far.” What kind of system would permit an impeachment investigation to proceed without hearing what Mr. Bolton has to say because the target of the inquiry orders his silence? How could a system that allows the subject of an investigation to block all the witnesses from testifying be consistent with the rule of law?

Just think about President Richard Nixon. He, too, tried to block White House officials from testifying in Congress. “Under the doctrine of separation of powers,” Nixon declared on March 12, 1973, “the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.”

But the Senate Select Watergate Committee held firm and insisted on the witnesses appearing, going so far as to say it would jail any witness who invoked executive privilege. That led Nixon to throw in the towel, saying he would not invoke privilege and would let the aides testify.

“Executive privilege,” Nixon declared, “will not be invoked as to any testimony concerning possible criminal conduct, or discussions of possible criminal conduct, in the matters presently under investigation, including the Watergate affair and the alleged cover-up.”

Witnesses have to be able to tell the truth to Congress. We are hearing what we are hearing only because brave government officials, including people in Mr. Trump’s White House, have defied the president’s orders. But what we don’t know is at least as important as what we do know.

The stonewalling is particularly pernicious here because Mr. Trump’s party controls the Senate. It would be one thing if the Senate had 67 Democrats, and the president could claim, cynically or not, that impeachment was some sort of political coup. But why is the president afraid of letting his own White House officials tell the truth in a process ultimately controlled by Senate Republicans?

The bottom line is that President Trump is out-Nixoning Nixon. And while the Ukraine allegations will take center stage in the coming days, the actors offstage are at least as important as the ones on it. The American people deserve answers. Any claim by the president to hide the truth is itself a grave wrong and an impeachable offense.

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To Exonerate Trump, Republicans Embrace Russian Disinformation

In this week’s impeachment hearings, expect a lot of G.O.P. conspiracy theorizing.

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist | Published Nov. 11, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

On Friday, House investigators released the transcript of the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s testimony from last month. It showed a Republican staff member trying and failing to get Hill to concede that there might be some validity to the conspiracy theories underlying Donald Trump’s demands of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

“Are you familiar with the, you know, the allegation about Serhiy Leshchenko?” asked the Republican aide, Steve Castor. He added, “You know, relating to publicizing Manafort’s role in the Ukraine?”

Leshchenko, whom I interviewed in October, is a former member of Parliament in Ukraine and probably the most famous investigative journalist in the country. He helped expose the so-called black ledger that listed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, from his client Viktor Yanukovych, the wildly corrupt Russian-aligned oligarch who ruled Ukraine until 2014. Manafort is in federal prison in part for failing to disclose or pay taxes on the millions he sucked out of Ukraine. Nevertheless, to make Trump’s demands of Zelensky seem just and rational, some Republicans have started painting Manafort as the victim of Leshchenko’s plotting.

Hill, a Russia expert and co-author of a psychological study of Vladimir Putin, tried to shut down this line of questioning. “The Ukrainian government did not interfere in the U.S. election,” she said, adding, “The Ukrainian Special Services also did not interfere in our election.” As the Republican questions continued, Hill seems to have grown almost indignant. “I’m really worried about these conspiracy theories, and I’m worried that all of you are going to go down a rabbit hole, you know, looking for things that are not going to be at all helpful to the American people or to our future election in 2020,” she said.

She is right to be concerned. This week, as part of its impeachment inquiry, the House begins public hearings into Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine’s president into starting bogus investigations to benefit Trump politically. Republicans have telegraphed several possible defenses of the president.

The Washington Post reported that House Republicans may try to throw the hapless Trump lackeys Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney and Gordon Sondland under the bus, suggesting they “could have acted on their own to influence Ukraine policy.” Other Republicans have settled on calling Trump’s actions “inappropriate” but not impeachable. But the House Republicans who are actually involved in the hearings seem set to go all in on the fantasy of Ukrainian election interference. To exonerate Trump, they are ready to help cover for Russia.

On Saturday, Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, sent the committee’s chairman, Adam Schiff, a list of people Republicans want to call to testify. To understand the significance of some of the names, you’d have to plunge into the very rabbit holes Hill warned of. Luckily, Nunes made his intention clear, writing of Trump’s “documented belief that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election,” which “forms the basis for a reasonable desire for Ukraine to investigate the circumstances surrounding the election.”

The conspiracy theories that undergird the president’s “documented belief” aren’t really coherent, but they don’t have to be to serve their purpose, which is sowing confusion about the well-established fact that Russia assisted Trump’s campaign. They posit not just that Manafort was set up, but also that Democrats worked with Ukraine to frame Russia for hacking Democrats’ emails, a dastardly Democratic plot that led to Trump’s election. Naturally, George Soros, perennial scapegoat for the far right, is also involved.

“George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it,” Giuliani said on ABC in September, spinning tales of Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Ukraine. Speaking to The Post, Giuliani accused Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, of “working for Soros.” Indeed, Hill in her testimony suggested that a sort of Infowars-era McCarthyism has been loosed on the national security bureaucracy, with “frankly an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros” used to “target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well.”

Some of these lies seem to have originated in Russia; documents from the Mueller investigation recently obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Manafort was blaming Ukraine for the Democratic National Committee hack back in 2016, a story he apparently got from one of his associates, a former Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik. (Hill testified that she’d encountered Kilimnik in a previous job, and “all of my staff thought he was a Russian spy.”)

A few of Trump’s more responsible aides have reportedly tried to disabuse him of Ukraine conspiracy theories, to no avail. Instead it appears that House Republicans, out of slavish fealty to the president, are going to use high-profile hearings to amplify them.

In her testimony, Hill seemed to warn Republicans off their current path. She mentioned the report issued last month by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee about how Russia used online propaganda to boost Trump in 2016. “If we have people running around chasing rabbit holes because Rudy Giuliani or others have been feeding information to The Hill, Politico, we are not going to be prepared as a country to push back on this again,” she said. “The Russians thrive on misinformation and disinformation.” Unfortunately, so do Trump’s defenders.

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dwestfieldblog · 6 years

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2018 - NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

(Solve et coagula)

Untying the Not and Never Was...back from Britain...Hello pagan heathens, welcome to the 14thyear of the blog and variations on the theme of transcendental dystopia in the key of F sharp. Feeling positivelypriapic today...with a private new list of ancient sins that would make even a priest blush...in joyous celebration of Bacchus, Aphrodite and Apollo... I have my own morals, but morals they are and are followed as such. I don't remember what I am taught, I remember what I learn.

Within two minutes of walking past airport customs into the English speaking world, see a display of Newsweek magazines with the front cover blarting 'Putin is preparing for World War 3 -is Trump?' So good to be back so fast into the feculant nightmare. Great to hear the baldhead is running for yet another presidential term and barring his most serious rival from taking part in the lip-service of democratic process. And threatening him with imprisonment for daring to suggest the polls be boycotted. Wonder who will win? Here's hoping today's pig is tomorrow's bacon.

I watched no TV news at all but of course read the Daily Horrors with my breakfast every morning for three weeks...The Golden Reptile in the mickey mouse white house...he doesn't believe in exercise because it is unhealthy for the body and has a Very busy working day from 11am to 5pm...with 'executive time' between the hours.... a separate bedroom with 3 TV screens and cheeseburgers to lull him to sleep until he awakes to tweet his dawn chorus of mindless excremental bilge. Direct quotes from his twitter feed –'My two greatest assets have been mental stability andbeing, like, really smart'... 'a very stable genius...' America....truly serving as a genuine example to the world. How does it feel to be pitied by those you despise and despised by those you pity?

Trump has a 'much bigger and powerful' nuclear button on his desk than Cheese Boy in North Korea... 'and my Button works!'. (How would he know? Hard to test.) Penis measuring across continents. Mentally unstable is a very generous description of these child presidents....And speaking of dumber than paint leaders with bad hair (nice segway eh?) I heard a wonderful description of the lying wannabe UK prime minister Boris Johnson... 'like an arsonist pretending to be a fireman', returning to the Brexit crime scene to save the day...

Another foul/fowl pretender to the throne of PM in the UK, Mr Gove, coming out in sudden favour of chlorinated chicken from the USA and GM crops via the ever popular Monsanto corporation. Follow the lobbyists, follow the money trail. Ignore (or defenestrate) those who speak for corporate interests until you have checked whether their words are actually an opinion based on long running verifiable tests of good health or sound bites paid for by a wedge of serious wonga/moolah/cash into their bank accounts... and/or a future job when they leave politics. Shameless filth. Eg. David Cameron now accepting a role with the Chinese government's one and a half billion pound infrastructure programme.

China said recently that the 1989 British ambassador's claim that 10,000 students were murdered in Beijing is a little extreme. Well it was. Running tanks over unarmed students cannot said to be anything else. 200 has been given as a more realistic death toll. It took them 28 years to come up with this number.

'Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous'. (Voltaire) Thank you lord...thank you lord.Hallelujah, to coin a phrase...

Pope Francis used his Christmas message to advise his masses to drop 'all sorts of useless baggage'...'the banality of consumerism, the blareof commercials, the stream of empty words and the overpowering waves of empty chatter and loud shouting'. This is the sort of stuff which should indeed be spoken by spiritual leaders but shame he didn't mention talking snakes, pregnant virgins, burning bushes, self inflicted guilt over original sin or the endlessly Unchristian behaviour by his flock. (And there is a special circle in Hell for priests of any faith who rape children.) 'Useless baggage' almost covers it all. As Francis said; '...rediscover what really matters'... Or discover what reality matter is made of..

.'A cross on every hill, a star, a minaret, so many graves to fill, Oh love, aren't you tired yet?'Cohen, The Faith. Why not not eat pigs together?

The same evil government shit as ever after a massive storm destroying homes... Hurricane Irma wiped out almost every home on Barbuda (Caribbean) and as in New Orleans and dozens of similar cases after a force of nature, the greedpigs move in fast. Deals between the politicians and land developers overpower the rights of those who lived there, such is the freedom of a life without morality. Rebuild and replace communally owned land with dwellings for the wealthy and push aside all former residents. If ever a group of men deserved the force of nature/an act of the Goddess against them and their property, it is these swinefeed.

The West and the East, the East and West, condemning each others' subversions... What came first, the pot or the kettle?

Demonstrations in Iran by the lower classes of all generations across more than 100 cities and towns against the endless drift of power upwards to Khameni and the mullahs...and money outwards to various non charitable organisations (fill in the blanks with live ammunition, missiles, rocket launchers, suicide bombers etc.) the lack of hospitals and social support, the lack of aid after natural disasters, corruption and price rises. 40 percent of young people are unemployed and starting to wonder where the billions are going...or else knowing where. Most, if not all of the above bullet points (ha) are strong factors in the West too...but in America the tension implodes and is directed against ethnicitiesrather than those actually responsible.. and in Britain/ Europe... hmm...Civil unrest is contained in blaming foreigners, thus encouraging Nazi opportunist populists to manipulate the easily persuaded angry mass into voting for them. And the suckers fall for it everybloody time.

Issues of utterly irrelevant social media opinion, autistic entertainment saturating the global human mind to applaud the lowest common denominator, rocking back and forth with glee at the latest exploits of the hollow kardashians and their foul ego stroking ilk, famous only for being famous...a mass debate on the meaningless, billions of people being trained to focus their tiny, blurred attention deficit spans on a multitude of soul numbing emptiness. All looking in the absolute wrong directions while meanwhile....

The strong and immoral arise and laugh their arses off, stirring, provoking, initiating... and they prepare...America and Europe are weaker and weaker. A few computer viruses here and there, shared passwords, blackmail via disinformation, man made disasters, plenty of random shocks, a constant underlying panic, threats and needling rhetoric result in.....on one side, an aggressive focused mobilisation of forces with intent and on the other, half a billion people with the spiritual bravery and intelligence of a pillow. At some Rubicon of a breakpoint, paranoia becomes common sense. The clock is now at two minutes to midnight. Be aware.

BE AWARE.

'The universe is a total construction of waves and vibrations whose inner content is 'Meaning', and Man is a micro system of the same vibratory nature, floating at some depth in the universal and meaningful wave system. The universal wave system is qualitative or value structured according to its vibration rate spectrum (faster frequencies have more informational capacity).David Foster

'Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music, music is the best'.... speaking of which...Sufferers of schizophrenia with audio and visual hallucinations could be aided by learning an instrument or by listening to music, says new research... Musical aptitude has a strong effect on 'the white matter integrity of the corpus callosum', which protects against the disorder. Quite tempting to comment on the plethora of musicians of all creeds who are obviously unbalanced, unstable and dangerous to themselves and others. Maybe too much music eh? Arf. Never. Anyway, Love IS music and music IS love Sorry Frank.

'All lovers young, all lovers must, consign to thee and come to dust'. Shakespeare -Cymbeline.

'Micro dosing' is one of the 'new' trend things...(as opposed to non functioning overdose situations) brought to you all the way from Silicon valley. That's right... just one tenth of 150 micrograms of LSD will aid you in your chosen field (no pun intended, almost) to break through, focus, go within, go OUT and open neural pathways blocked by the mundane and logical. I have not tripped on acid since 1985 (and that last trip was just over 21 hours long before I took sleeping pills to make the galaxies stop flowing through my brain.) Have been very tempted over the years but truly didn't want or need such an eternity of multidimensional senses while still in flesh...(once the doorway is opened, it stays opened.) This micro dosing is highly interesting however and I will do this this as soon as the first possibility appears. Still think I prefer October mushrooms....Where the Heart Is, in a Halo of Stars.

Picked up a leaflet yesterday...Non stop erotic massages and hotel escorts in Prague... 'Your imagination has no limits'...ermmm...ahhh..hmmm...probably not, but there are laws and only so much available cash this evening..Or, as Alien Sex Fiend sang, 'Everybody's got what everybody wants and everybody wants what everybody's got.' Well, almost.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' So sayeth (saideth?) George Orwell. Doesn't seem to apply to British and American universities where the mind fecking 'Safe Space' ethic is rigidly enforced by the twenty something brain police. Anything which could be offensive or disagreed with, is banned.....That comedian who once made a joke ridiculing transgenders... REMOVE him from the list of those who should speak... that woman who said the holy land is bollocks because the old testament was just some non verifiable book which told the Hebrews what they wanted to hear? No platform for her, no stage for them unless it has a gallows pole upon it. (Yeah, self fulfilling propaganda works like a dream every time. Bullshit is half of the charm.) You university morons. You MORONS, working for the enemy, for ones who seek to bring YOU down. Who seek to cage and contain thee. To limit the horizons of creative expression and put a sterile tank around truth. Poor little fragile youth, too delicate to be offended, WHY AREN'T YOU ANGRY? The ancient schools of Sumeria and Greece would be disgusted at your level of human intelligence.

You cannot make up your own mind until you have exposed yourself to all shades of opinion and distilled all. Read what you disagree with with, it is a fascinating comedy...and very often reveals that what you thought you know, you do not Feel.

The man of the crowd is a weakling; people who need people are the stupidest people in the world. Evolution requires individuals, a union of outsiders working in random harmony...or...'Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see'. Schopenhauer. I know some of this may seem like nonsense. But it's a discipline and I do it with purpose.

Meanwhile, remaining emotional attachments to the socially acceptable drugs...I Want a cigarette or a Strong Drink, or at least, at long last, a painkiller that actually works. Arnica Montana and DL-Phenylalanine don't quite cut the mustard. Thirty minute pause while I go for a walk in the cold dark park, come back home and cut my own hair for the second time in my life. (Not bad at all, just as good as all my last cuts by semi professionals...) One side is half an inch longer but WT actual F? Who cares? Fate is gonna find you with a glass of champagne? Make it a triple espresso and half a bottle of good whisky and then we can talk. And a cigarette...my lack of smoking is making me want to claw and bite this wood table into splinters. There...a normal paragraph of usual life...just in time for the end of a page.

Favourite depressing headline from the new year...'Couple who left son to drown in lake were poor parents, judge concludes.' The wisdom of Solomon. My favourite headline from last month has to be ;A fried egg has no place in the nativity, say 77 percent of parents”\ My first thought was, uff, so 33 percent think it is ok?? My second thought was, well, why not eh? Makes as much sense as anything else in that twisted story....I read a useful column in a newspaper last month, called 'Failsafe ways to spot a Liar'. Glad to see my instincts were right according to researchers and clinical psychologists. Some humans are bereft of as much emotional intelligence and morality as AI machines. Blame it on childhood trauma,always an easy way out. How was the first year of your life? Use trance hypnotism recall, recall and release.

'The key task of a muse is to allow the artist to see his own feminine aspect that is otherwise invisible to him and to be a screen that fits the artist's projections. What completes the artist isn't the intrinsic qualities of the romantic interest but the artist's own feminine archetype. So, to the extent that the artist's projections dominate or replace the muse's own qualities, the muse's soul is dissipated.' Allan Showalter, psychiatrist.

Time to go back to being oblivious to the 'news' again, in the two minutes which are left, there is space to become plenty of nothing and locate your Will. See you in a few weeks after my probable final birthday, which falls upon an Easter Monday this year. Too late for a resurrection (well, there are pills for that anyway) but in time for the beauty of rising Spring with the binary healing of cabala chakras...every man and woman is a star...Stay well....

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Man Trump Trusts for News on Ukraine https://nyti.ms/2QcQNGn

The Man Trump Trusts for News on Ukraine

By Jeremy W. Peters and Kenneth P. Vogel | Published Nov. 12, 2019 Updated Nov. 13, 2019, 3:28 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

Asked how she first learned of Mr. Giuliani’s interest in Ukraine, Fiona Hill, Mr. Trump’s former adviser on Russia and Europe, replied, in part, “John Solomon.”

Mr. Solomon has been a surprisingly central figure in the impeachment proceedings so far. But the glare has not been so kind.

“So I said here’s the way to do it — I’m going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate,” he said.

‘The Woodward and Bernsteins of our time’

Mark Levin, the radio and Fox host, recently said that Mr. Solomon and Sara Carter, a journalist with whom he frequently appears on television, were “like the Woodward and Bernsteins of our time.”

Media scholars describe the environment that has elevated Mr. Solomon’s stories as an information ecosystem entirely sealed off from other news coverage.

A close look at one piece by Mr. Solomon shows how far one of his assertions, later called into doubt, can reverberate at the highest levels of the government.

‘Reporting truth’ with unusual methods

______

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Trump’s Contempt for True Professionals

It’s driving the impeachment inquiry. It’s dooming his presidency.

By Frank Bruni, Opinion Columnist | Published Nov. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019 |

Right now the opposites have the microphone.

But Trump’s war on professionalism and professionals is also its own distinct theme in his business career, which is rife with cheating, and his political life, which is greased with lies.

He characterized them as “accidental heroes” who aren’t “likely to seek the limelight.” “They are extremely well trained, competent, and highly regarded professionals,” he summarized.

That’s why they bucked Trump. And that’s why he can’t bear them.

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What Trump Is Hiding From the Impeachment Hearings

The president’s efforts to prevent the House from doing its job are just as worrisome as the Ukraine scandal.

By Neal K. Katyal, Mr. Katyal is a former acting solicitor general and a law professor. | Published Nov. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

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To Exonerate Trump, Republicans Embrace Russian Disinformation

In this week’s impeachment hearings, expect a lot of G.O.P. conspiracy theorizing.

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist | Published Nov. 11, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov. 13, 2019

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump keeps dismissing Syria as just ‘sand.’ Experts say that’s wrong — ‘and just sad.’

By Miriam Berger | Published October 17 at 1:04 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 17, 2019

President Trump has a penchant for referring to Syria as simply “sand.”

He did so Wednesday when he dismissed the significance of the United States’ pulling out troops from northeastern Syria, a move that enabled Turkish troops to march in and unleash a domino effect of political and humanitarian crises while reducing U.S. influence in the region.

Syria has “got a lot of sand over there,” Trump said. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”

He’s used similar language before.

“We’re talking about sand and death, that’s what we’re talking about,” Trump told reporters in January.

To be precise: Syria has dusty — not sandy — deserts. (And the area, once widely known as part of the Fertile Crescent, also has a rich history of agriculture.)

While about two-thirds of Syria is classified as desert, it’s more of a dusty semidesert than the stereotypical rolling-sand-dunes-style desert, according to experts.

“Syria is a dry country,” said Syrian environmental journalist Muhammad Fares. “It has fertile areas in other ways.”

Fares distinguished between Syria’s dusty and dry semidesert (called badia in Arabic) with the sandy sahara (which means desert in Arabic) found in other Middle Eastern and North African countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.

“There’s been plenty of opportunity for successful agriculture [in Syria] over a long period of time,” noted Colin Kelley of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. “Even though we know that the area is aridifying due to climate change, it’s certainly not only desert.”

The disputed Golan Heights — which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and the Trump administration controversially recognized as annexed Israeli territory in April — is particularly renowned for its lush, rolling green hills and apple and grape orchards.

There is one area where Trump could find his sand: western Syria, where there are two mountainous coastal cities, Latakia and Tartus, home to sandy beaches and nearby Russian military bases.

Moreover, northeastern Syria, which borders Turkey and was the direct target of Trump’s latest comments, is in fact one of the least desert-y parts of Syria. This area is historically part of the Fertile Crescent, where scientists say agricultural and herding society began 12,000 years ago.

“The real significance of the Kurdish-controlled northeast is that that’s the traditionally wheat and cotton basket of Syria, as well as the part of the country that has a significant chunk of the oil,” said Peter Schwartzstein, a journalist and fellow with the Center for Climate & Security.

There is a connection between Syria’s climate and conflict, just not the Orientalist Arabs-fighting-in-sand image that Trump’s word choice may conjure up, experts said.

Kelley was part of a team of scientists that published a report in 2015 analyzing how decades of Syrian agricultural policies forced an overuse of groundwater that led to a major drought in 2006. They argued that the drought then destabilized the country’s economy and society, setting the stage for much of the dissatisfaction that drove people to the streets in 2011.

“President Bashar al-Assad’s liberal economic policies increased destabilization by removing fuel and food subsidies that many rural families depend on for their livelihoods,” the study concluded. “These policies continued despite the drought, making agricultural work unsustainable, thus inducing mass migration of rural families to cities.”

Fares, the Syrian journalist, said he sometimes laughs when he hears Westerners describing Syria as just a country of sand and camels. But more often, “it’s really just sad,” he said.

In addition to its human cost, the Syrian conflict, now in its eighth year, has worsened many of the country’s already dire environmental issues, such as desertification and deforestation.

Fares said Trump’s comments upset him most because it felt “as if there are no people” in Syria. He likened the mind-set to how the Syrian government, which has been accused of committing war crimes, sees Syria’s people and environment.

“It’s the same way the Syrian regime looks at the country,” he said, as just “resources to exploit.”

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Trump’s puerile letter to Erdogan should give every American the chills

By Henry Olsen | Published October 17 at 2:40 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 17, 2019 |

I rarely comment upon President Trump’s communications style, preferring instead to focus on his policies or political standing. But I’m making an exception for his letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is puerile and insipid — an excellent example of why so many people in Washington think Trump is not up to the job.

Let’s start with his opening sentence: “Let’s work out a good deal!” Trump’s view of human nature is famously transactional, and he doesn’t disappoint here. For him, it seems there is nothing but the art of the deal. He apparently views politics as nothing more than a series of ad hoc deals, strung together with no glue binding them together other than the momentary advantage each dealmaker gains from the pact. That might be the way businesspersons think, but it is certainly not the way serious politicians and statesmen behave.

Political leaders always have some aim in mind beyond the deal itself. For some, it is keeping or extending power. For others, it is the accomplishment of some task consistent with a set of articulated principles. But for all, any deal must be seen as consistent with those larger aims. Trump’s letter ignores this basic political instinct.

Look at the world from Erdogan’s point of view. Turkey has a long, troubled relationship with the Kurds living in its own country. It has suppressed the Kurdish language; sporadically carried on a guerrilla war against Kurdish separatists within its borders and beyond; and views the Syrian Kurds as in league with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a group it considers a terrorist organization. A man focused on wiping out a threat to Turkish territorial sovereignty isn’t worried about what Trump calls the “slaughtering” of “thousands of people”; he might actually welcome it.

A nationalistic war against a longtime enemy could also shore up Erdogan’s flagging political standing at home. His party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, lost control of many major cities in local elections this year, including the capital, Ankara, and Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul. His own job approval ratings are also in decline, dropping to only 44 percent by early September, and both he and the AKP had seen support drop below 40 percent by early October. A military victory against the Syrian Kurds, then, might be exactly what Erdogan wants.

Trump’s letter shows no understanding of any of this. Instead, he tries to persuade the Turkish strongman to negotiate by alternating insults — saying Erdogan could be viewed as “the devil” and is merely playing “a tough guy” — with platitudes such as “history will look upon you favorably.” Serious political men, and Erdogan is certainly that, look at a such jejune mishmash incredulously. It is mind-boggling that the president of the United States thinks Erdogan could be deterred by name-calling or attracted by an ego massage.

It is also beyond comprehension that Trump thinks empty threats could do the trick. Trump conflates his own ego and U.S. interests when he vastly exaggerates U.S. power and tells Erdogan that he could destroy the Turkish economy. According to the World Bank, Turkey’s exports to the United States were only about 5 percent of its total in 2017.. It also imported much more from Russia and China than it did from the United States. Trump would have to get international cooperation to make sanctions or tariffs really hurt the Turks, something he will likely find difficult in light of all of the other conflicts he has instigated with many of the countries whose cooperation he would need.

The letter damningly confirms many of the traits that the president’s critics have long assumed: It shows Trump to be uninformed, narcissistic and naive. It shows him as obsessed with process and uninterested in substance, craving the applause of a multitude whose identities he does not know. It is the sort of note one could imagine coming from a clique leader in a movie about high-school angst, such as “Mean Girls” or “Heathers,” not a man who has access to the nuclear button.

The announcement of a five-day cease-fire could lead Trump backers to say the letter worked, but it’s hard to make that claim stick. The letter is dated Oct. 9, more than a week ago. It was clearly intended to forestall exactly what we have seen over the past week. Even if that argument were correct, it would still reveal disturbing things about how the president views politics and American power.

Trump’s instincts have sometimes produced great success, such as when his threats of tariffs shocked Mexico into assisting the United States to reduce illegal border crossings. He has also been successful taking the advice of competent aides, such as during the negotiations that produced the 2017 tax cut or in his decision in February to walk away from a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a deal. But this letter shows what can happen when Trump acts on his own without counsel. That sight should give every American the chills.

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