Friday Reads: Living among Banana Republicans

Good Afternoon!

We’ve got a few days until election day and it appears that we’re on the right track to welcome Madam President!  I’m hoping the level of toxicity will go away along with certain personalities since the media will find fewer reasons to interview the losing side.  I’m not going to miss the lies of Campaign Mommy and I’m certainly ready to send Rudy G back to oblivion.  The thought of never being traumatized by a mere glimpse of a Trump rally really gives me some peace of mind.

However, whatever are we going to do with the detritus that’s been kicked up in the process? I certainly hope our Republic is resilient enough to deal with all that authoritarianism that’s sprung from the Republican Party.  How did they go from Richard Nixon to loving Putin and police states in a matter of 4 decades?  Well, the police state loving maybe, but Putin?  Russia?  WTF?

Jeet Heer–writing for TNR–suggests Steve Bannon has a long game and Trumpism is a part of it.  How are we going to deal the Alt-Right and its new found voice and muscle some of which appears to be comfortably home in our law enforcement agencies?

But there is ample reason to think that Trumpism will continue to be a powerful force in the Republican Party simply because Stephen Bannon will be around to promote it. Over the last two years, Bannon has proven himself to be a formidable figure on the right, with both the means and the ambition to alter the political landscape.

Independently wealthy thanks to his background as a Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood executive (he still collects Seinfeld royalties), bolstered by ties to hedge fund billionaires like Robert Mercer, and the head of a cutting-edge right-wing media empire, Bannon has already been instrumental in creating Trumpism. Under Bannon’s guidance, Breitbart.com has played the same role in relationship to Trump that National Review played in the rise of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, or Rush Limbaugh played in the 1990s in the rise of Newt Gingrich, or Fox News played in the rise of George W. Bush. Breitbart.com has been the essential media herald that has both anticipated and amplified Trump’s main platform of right-wing nationalism with a xenophobic bent.

As Joshua Green noted in an exceptionally shrewd profile of Bannon that ran in Bloomberg Businessweek in October of 2015, Breitbart represented only one arrow in Bannon’s political quiver. Breitbart is useful for stirring up the right-wing masses, but Bannon also realized he had to influence centrist elites. To that end, he created the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute (GAI), which has already had a massive influence on the election by giving Peter Schweizer, president of the institute, the resources to write Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

The goal of the GAI is to collect plausible opposition research on politicians Bannon opposes (which includes not just Hillary Clinton but Republicans like Jeb Bush). This oppo is explicitly designed to be so plausible it can be taken up by mainstream publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

As Bannon told Green, “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs. You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.” By pre-packing reportage that is ready to run, Green noted, Bannon has figured out “how conservatives can hack the mainstream media,” adding that “‘weaponizing’ a story onto the front page of The New York Times(‘the Left’) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com.”

Clinton Cash has been one of Bannon’s great successes. Although later subject to devastating criticism, the book made its initial splash in the Times and shaped the idea that the Clinton Foundation is corrupt. Indeed, Clinton Cash is still causing trouble: the Post reported on Thursday that FBI agents in New York relied heavily on the book in an investigation of the Clinton Foundation that the Department of Justice ended up shutting down for lack of sufficient evidence.

Stephen Bannon has everything he needs to keep Trumpism alive even if Trump himself loses the election on Tuesday. Bannon has the ideological passion, the financial resources, the media connections, and a shrewd sense of how American politics works.

Bannon plays on deep divisions.  The worst of these we’ve seen recently coming out of the FBI where agents have taken the hit piece Clinton Cash as an investigative bible.  Then, there’s the glee with which Rudy Giuliani has played his friends in the FBI.  These divisions are not going away with the election. The news now reports that there is no real investigation of either Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, but as campaign Mommy crowed on MSNBC just last night, the damage of the lies has been done.  It’s also damaged the historically iffy reputation of the FBI.

Deep divisions inside the FBI and the Justice Department over how to handle investigations dealing with Hillary Clinton will probably fester even after Tuesday’s presidential election and pose a significant test for James B. Comey’s leadership of the nation’s chief law enforcement agency.

The internal dissension has exploded into public view recently with leaks to reporters about a feud over the Clinton Foundation, an extraordinary airing of the agency’s infighting that comes as the bureau deals with an ongoing threat of terror at home and a newly aggressive posture from Russia.

Comey, meanwhile, has come under direct fire for his decision to tell Congress that agents were resuming their investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server — a revelation that put him at odds with his Justice Department bosses and influenced the presidential campaign.

“He’s got to get control of the ship again,” said Robert Anderson, a former senior official in the FBI who considers Comey a friend. “There’s a lot of tension in the organization, and there’s a lot of tension in Congress and the Senate right now, and all that counts toward how much people trust the FBI.”

Disinformation has ruled the day and it’s concerning to think that the Russians had something to do with making the Clinton Email server a story when there really is no there there.  The  true scandal over this is not coming from the server or Clinton.  It’s the press joining in to support a witch hunt and lies that have taken on a third world political coup feel all year.  It’s especially haunting given Russian  and Trump treatment of Journalists and the first amendment.  Are ratings really worth tanking a democracy?

… email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

 This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Yes.  That’s Matt Yglesias writing for VOX and succinctly identifying the real scandal.  Bolding is mine.  Even Andrew Sullivan has been pearl clutching over the rise of Trumpism and its resemblance to the political leanings of Banana Republics

I have long had faith that some version of fascism cannot come to power in America. The events of the past year suggest deep reflection on that conviction. A political hurricane has arrived, as globalization has eroded the economic power of the white working classes, as the cultural left has overplayed its hand on social and racial issues, and as a catastrophic war and a financial crisis has robbed the elites of their credibility. As always in history, you still needed the spark, the unique actor who could deploy demagogic talent to drag an advanced country into violence and barbarism. In Trump, America found one for the ages.

Maybe the worst won’t happen on Tuesday. Maybe this catastrophist possible reading of our times is massively overblown. Maybe this short essay will be ridiculed in the future, as either Clinton wins and prevails in power, or if Trump turns out to be a far different president than he has been as a candidate. I sure hope so. But the fact that we may barely avoid a very deep crisis does not mitigate my anxiety. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we live in a republic, if we can keep it. And yet, more than two centuries later, we are openly contemplating throwing it up in the air and seeing where it might land.

Do what you can.

If you haven’t read Paul Krugman today, please do so!  He discusses in detail all the Republican hissy fits that have led us to this point. It’s worth reading the lead up to this conclusion.

What was the purpose of this assault on the implicit rules and understandings that we need to make democracy work? Well, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995, he was trying to, guess what, privatize Medicare. The rage against Bill Clinton partly reflected the fact that he raised taxes modestly on the wealthy.

In other words, Republican leaders have spent the past couple of decades doing exactly what the likes of Mr. Ryan are doing now: trashing democratic norms in pursuit of economic benefits for their donor class.

So we shouldn’t really be too surprised that Mr. Comey, who turns out to be a Republican first and a public servant, well, not so much, decided to politically weaponize his position on the eve of the election; that’s what Republicans have been doing across the board. And we shouldn’t be surprised at all that Mr. Trump’s lurid personal failings haven’t caused a break with the leaders of his party’s establishment: They decided long ago that only Democrats have scandals.

Despite Mr. Comey’s abuse of power, Mrs. Clinton will probably win. But Republicans won’t accept it. When Mr. Trump rages about a “rigged election,” expect muted disagreement at best from a party establishment that in a fundamental sense never accepts the legitimacy of a Democrat in the White House. And no matter what Mrs. Clinton does, the barrage of fake scandals will continue, now with demands for impeachment.

Can anything be done to limit the damage? It would help if the media finally learned its lesson, and stopped treating Republican scandal-mongering as genuine news. And it would also help if Democrats won the Senate, so that at least some governing could get done.

I’ve saved the biggest link for last. Kurt Eichenwald has released yet another bombshell that should be news here but only appears to be causing panic and concern in our allies: “WHY VLADIMIR PUTIN’S RUSSIA IS BACKING DONALD TRUMP”.  It’s a great question with lots of good answers at the link.  Newsweek and Eichenwald are headed for Pulitzer territory again.

In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacksdesigned to interfere with the U.S. election. They fear the Republican nominee for president has emboldened the Kremlin in its unprecedented cybercampaign to disrupt elections in multiple countries in hopes of weakening Western alliances, according to intelligence, law enforcement and other government officials in the United States and Europe.

While American intelligence officers have privately briefed Trump about Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election, he has publicly dismissed that information as unreliable, instead saying this hacking of incredible sophistication and technical complexity could have been done by some 400-pound “guy sitting on their bed” or even a child.

Officials from two European countries tell Newsweek that Trump’s comments about Russia’s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official says members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia’s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump’s comments “quite disturbing” because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.

We know the Republicans gave up their heritage of fighting for the rights of African Americans decades ago in order to capture Dixiecrats.  We know they threw over GLBT and women with their explicit support of an extremist brand of American Christianity.  They’ve long supported economic policies that are totally fictional.  They’ve had two legs to stand on.  The first one is absolute law and order which is evidently the last leg standing.  The foreign policy standing that the US is good and the Russians are something else has completely gone by the wayside in this latest move towards becoming the party of Banana Republicans.

My biggest hope is that we give President Hillary Clinton a Democratic Majority in the Senate.  It’s the only way to put some kind of box around the swamp fever plaguing the Alt Right. It needs to be done this election or we may not be able to keep our Republic.

Nasty Women!  Bad Hombres!  TO THE POLLS!!!

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?