Trump Gets Praise For Passing "The Gravest Test Of His Presidency" (CNN); After Talking Tough, The Cowardly Trump Backs Down (But Only After Killing Seven People); Democrats Are "Stunned" By A War Crime They Encouraged

Joan Summers, Jezebel, January 8, 2020:

This morning, Trump delivered an address in which he claimed Iran is "standing down" after last night's missile strike. ... In covering this statement, CNN led with this sentence: "President Donald Trump, facing the gravest test of his presidency, signaled a de-escalation of tensions with Iran."

See what's happening here? Instead of framing it for what it is, the warmongering of a power-mad pig with his sweaty hands firmly gripped around the launch codes, this is a "test." A test of what, though? By this logic, certainly a test of the U.S.'s ability to beat the world into submission around it. Or of our military's "strength," which plays into the first point. ... [T]his harkening to Trump's "test," whether intentionally or not, falls completely in line with what happened the last time the aspiring fascists in the U.S. government launched the country into an endless war, predicated on lies and war crimes and corporate greed.

Of course, it's intentional. One of CNN's core missions is to unquestioningly support US imperialism and dutifully disseminate the necessary propaganda. Its essential mandate is far larger and more important than any president, who are mere placeholders.

That's why the only "experts" you will ever see booked on CNN (and MSNBC, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.) are former military generals, rabidly pro-war politicians, blood-thirsty think-tank members, and manufacturers of weapons?

Zachary B. Wolf and Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN, January 8, 2020:

When the US government killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was first announced, officials from the Pentagon up to President Donald Trump were careful to make clear the strike was meant to head off an imminent attack on Americans. ...

Since those first public announcements about the strike, officials have refused to provide evidence of an imminent attack and instead have argued that Soleimani's previous actions meant he would continue to act the same way and that eliminating him was part of a larger strategy.

On January 2, the Pentagon says the assassination was to deter "future Iranian attack plans".

On January 3, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentions "imminent threats". Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley says an attack was "absolutely" imminent, but can't say if it was days or weeks away.

On January 5, Pompeo is no longer talking about a specific threat, adding that any time frame (imminent?) is irrelevant.

On January 6, The US knew what Soleimani would do in the future, because of his past. Milley: "Did [the intelligence] exactly say who, what, when, where? No." Milley then immediately contradicts himself, saying he knows "who" (US military forces), "what" (significant combat operations), "when" (imminent), and "where" (in the region).

On January 7, Trump says the attack was an act of retaliation. Also that day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tells reporters that Soleimani's time was due.

Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, January 8, 2020:

Starting almost 30 minutes late for his press conference, President Trump—surrounded by a bevy of white men (literally everyone behind him made up the evolution of white men) ... soften[ed] his tone against Iran, which was vastly different than the Twitter tone he had a few days ago.

The president finally addressed Iran's Tuesday night attacks on Iraqi bases that housed U.S. soldiers on Wednesday morning ...

When the president finally spoke, he did three moves that I used to do when asked in elementary school why I didn't have a girlfriend: lie, deflect, and then stand down but kick it like I'm not standing down.

From the president's perspective, it looked like this: This is all Obama's fault (lie). This wouldn't be an issue if Obama would have handled it (deflect) and, We've got some big guns but be thankful that I believe in peace...Oh, and Obama.

The president completely bitched out. In fact, before the president stepped to the podium, Managing Editor Genetta Adams called it ...

"He's going to pussy out like he did with [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi and the [government] shutdown. He's really a chicken when someone punches back."

Albert Burneko, The Outline, January 6, 2020:

The popular media narrative about the Iraq War holds, in its broad strokes, that the war was a near-universally popular idea at its outset even among otherwise reasonable and not ideologically pro-war people, who supported it based on what later turned out to be misinformation, from the tragic results of which everybody learned valuable lessons. It isn't true, though the broad class of centrist media types who beat the drum for that war back in 2002 — which is to say, nearly all of them — would like you to believe it is, both to exonerate their cheerleading for that war and to prop up their flattering (and phony) self-presentation as cool, level-headed skeptics who merely pass along facts about foreign affairs and public will, rather than enthusiastically parroting lies about the former for the express purpose of shaping the latter. ...

Which, all in all, makes it pretty fucking incredible to see, in 2020, none other than former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and senior advisor Karl Rove, two of the most brazenly dishonest and thoroughly discredited mouthpieces for that disastrous war effort, appearing on TV news to offer authoritative analysis and justification for the country's latest doomed and ruinous misadventure in slaughtering people in the Middle East — in this case, the assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general Qasem Soleimani, reportedly carried out last week via an unmanned drone airstrike against his convoy of vehicles outside Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. To see performatively evenhanded NPR turn for sober expert commentary to the executive of a company that sells hardware to the military. To hear the addled, flamboyantly dishonest president and his hilariously discredited goons justify their act of aggression by hinting vaguely about having thwarted plans to kill Americans, and to see the New York Times pass these claims along with only the mildest of challenges. To see a discredited Iraq War cheerleader granted space in Friday morning's Times to predict, yet again, that yet another act of American imperial violence in the Middle East will yield no adverse consequences. To hear establishment Democratic leaders, including some of those vying for the party’s presidential nomination, once more raising toothless procedural qualms about whose signatures must be sought before the United States may project its mechanized death-dealing might 6,000 miles across the surface of the Earth to single out and kill whichever faraway people it deems unworthy of life, while simultaneously signalling broad agreement with both the broader concept and the specific choice of target. To read that thousands of American troops will be deployed to the region, but to be told by the same class of Knowers as before that this is at most a limited and well-defined engagement and not the red dawn of yet another hopeless, endless, pointless mass bloodletting.

Do you feel like you're going fucking crazy? Like everybody knows exactly what is happening right now but everybody is finding reasons to pretend it's something else? Like it suddenly seems alarmingly necessary to point out that wars are bad and that it's bad to start wars if you have the option of not starting wars? This is what it was like in 2002 [or 1990]! ... Only it's worse this time, because this time it has already happened, and already happened again, and I already know how it goes, and so do the people making it happen all over again but bigger and somehow more catastrophically than before.

Gareth Porter, Anti-War.com, July 9, 2019:

One of the many myths that have been used to justify the push for war with Iran led by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is that Tehran is responsible for the killing of more than 600 U.S. troops during the Iraq War.

Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, whose job is to round up international support for the Trump administration's campaign of "maximum pressure" on Iran, presented the charge at a State Department press briefing on April 2. "I can announce today, based on declassified U.S. military reports," Hook said, "that Iran is responsible for the deaths of 608 American service members. This accounts for 17 percent of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011."

Navy Commander Sean Robertson followed up with an email to media outlets pushing that same line. When this writer asked Robertson for further clarification of the origins of that figure, however, he acknowledged that the Pentagon doesn't have any study, documentation, or data to provide journalists that would support such a figure.

In fact, the myth that Tehran is responsible for killing over 600 U.S. troops in the Iraq War is merely a new variant of a propaganda line that former Vice President Dick Cheney used to attempt to justify a war against Iran more than a decade ago. Reviewing the history of that earlier effort is necessary to understand why the new myth is a palpable lie. ...

When officials of the Trump administration claim that Iran is responsible for U.S. deaths in Iraq, they are following Dick Cheney's playbook. As the Bolton-Pompeo team tries to steer the U.S. toward attacking Iran, it is important to draw that parallel to Cheney's strategy, and understand the history behind this push for war.

Paul Street, CounterPunch, January 6, 2020:

Top Democrats are "stunned" that Trump impulsively ordered the killing of "the commanding general of a sovereign government" (New York Times) – Iran's Maj. Gen. Qassim Soliemani – on the sovereign territory of Iraq without the permission of Iraq's government. The imperial assassination of Soliemani is a criminal act of war guaranteed to provoke a reaction that could produce a regional war involving U.S. forces in the Middle East. ...

But there's no basis for establishment shock and surprise. Trump is an amoral militarist and faux-isolationist who opened his presidency by going to the CIA's headquarters to complain that the United States had gone too long without "winning wars" and to say that the U.S. might have another chance to invade Iraq and "get the oil." ...

At the same time, Democrats and their media allies have little moral ground to stand on when it comes to criticizing Trump's action. From the beginning of Trump's anti-Iran and Teheran-provoking- and punishing presidency (replete with previous war-scares and a brutal sanctions regime imposed after Trump pulled out of Obama's nuclear deal with Iran) and before, Democrats and the "liberal" media have fully participated in advancing the ludicrous imperial notion that Iran is a uniquely evil, dangerous, belligerent, destabilizing, and terrorist actor in the Middle East – the region's top malign aggressor.

It's an absurd narrative. The most truly aggressive, destructive, and malevolent state actor in the Middle East beyond the racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel (a U.S. ally and the region's preeminent military power) and Superpower itself (the U.S. has murdered well more than a million Iraqis since 1990 and is the sponsor of Saudi Arabia and Israel) – is the U.S.-backed Saudi kingdom. ...

The main problem with Trump's action as depicted in much of the "liberal" media isn't that it was an imperial war crime. It's that it was ordered by the wrong president, an irresponsible narcissist who lacks the proper imperial credentials and credentials for carrying out such a deadly, provocative, and sensitive transgression. The message is clear: it would have been fine for Obama to kill Soliemani. It would be okay for Joe Biden or former U.S. Army intelligence officer Pete Butiggieg to commit the crime.

It is reflexively taken for doctrinal granted by "liberal" Democrats no less than Republicans that the United States possesses the right to maintain a massive and lethal military and political presence in and around the oil-rich Middle East. It's okay because, as the liberal imperialist Bill Clinton's liberal imperialist Secretary of State Madeline Albright once said, "we [the United States] are good."

Remember Albright? She's the former Madame Secretary who worries about fascism and who once told CBS News that the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S. economic sanctions was a "price worth paying" for the advance of Washington's inherently noble foreign policy goals.

David Roth, being asked about Trump being "somewhat of a muse", -30-, January 2018:

I grew up in New Jersey and saw the dude in the tabloids all through my youth, showing his ass and posturing and posing and generally fucking every possible thing up as badly as possible. It never occurred to me that he could be anything but the joke that he always was to people from around here—this sad horny dipshit who kept duffing shit and had a lot of publicists working for him, but who was dumb enough that he wound up tanking Atlantic City's economy, more or less by himself, forever. Not many people can crush a whole city's economy via sheer bluff-o jagoffery and then just jog on like it didn't happen.

Which is to say that I really don't like the dude, but there is something in the infected nightmare he is that… I don't really think "inspires" is the right word here. But given my fixation on a certain set of toxic national neuroses, and given how fulsomely Trump himself performs them every day, he just lines up perfectly as a lodestar for me. Trump is every unchecked and unexamined national delusion about Success come to life, as well as a whole bunch of less-explicit but equally toxic ones about race and power and gender relations, and some active if more latent ones about authoritarianism and its various attendant cruelties. It's a rare thing to say that someone is truly Everything You Hate, but, man, I am struggling to come up with a phrase that's more accurate here.

Trump on Nov. 16, 2011:

“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective. So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected — and as sure as you're sitting there — is to start a war with Iran.” pic.twitter.com/usZFLiHnBw

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) January 3, 2020

The Climate Of Hatred And Fear Produced By Both Political Parties Is The 21st Century's Most Important Bipartisan Achievement

n+1, A #NoWarInIran Reading List, January 3, 2020:

[On January 3] the Trump Administration assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad. This attack represents not only an illegal escalation of the US's long conflict with Iran, but also, inevitably, another chapter in the Global War on Terror, begun by George W. Bush in 2001. ... [Since 2004] n+1 has sought to chronicle America's wars in the Middle East as they unfolded, as well as their impact on daily life and culture in the US and throughout the world. This week, we've put some of the best pieces from the archives in front of the paywall. ...

Why Are We in the Middle East? by Richard Beck (from Issue 26)

As a style of foreign policy thinking, humanitarian interventionism can only be reactive ... This persistent panic and desperation prevents humanitarian interventionists from thinking about the fact that after the emergency has been averted, the intervention will have consequences requiring humanitarian solutions of their own. Meanwhile, the traditional hawks to whom the humanitarians must make their case simply do whatever they were going to do in the first place.

Which Country Shall We Bomb Today? by Nikil Saval

It is a feature of America's unyielding narcissism that much "news analysis" has been devoted to how these attacks affect the standing of this dangerously entitled country and its vile President. There is no other country in the world whose citizens wake up wondering which country their leader will bomb next—and what those bombs will do for said leader's approval rating. ...

Coalition of the Willing by the Editors (from Issue 34)

When Trump took power, he inherited a rationale for global war that had been worked out and institutionalized by the two Presidents who preceded him and that had the full support of both political parties. All of Washington has spent the past eighteen years working to expand the set of circumstances under which it's acceptable for white people to observe and harass and kill Muslims, and to minimize the justifications that are required to do so. To date, the climate of hatred and fear they have produced is the 21st century's most important bipartisan achievement.

The Drone Philosopher by Marco Roth (from Issue 17)

My fantasies are fed by the same logic and apparatus that authorizes the drone strikes and maintains the torture prisons: namely, the desire to distinguish good from evil, friend from enemy, without allowing the objects of our attention to speak to us for themselves. ... Our very language of precision and protocol, our military planners' analogies to surgery, and our government's invocations of secret "intelligence," all this licenses the continuation of perpetual warfare as though it were some chronic illness, manageable only by skilled doctors committed to the care of our vulnerable bodies.

Special Journey to Our Bottom Line by Elizabeth Schambelan (from Issue 34)

In 2016, Eric Trump said that "waterboarding is no different to [sic] hazing." Like his father, Eric has the moral intellect of a tapeworm, and so he intended his remark as a defense of waterboarding, not as an indictment of hazing. But his basic point was sound. It should be noted that of the twelve enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA asked the Department of Justice to approve in early 2002, the only one deemed too extreme to green-light, mock burial, has long been a recurrent feature of frat initiations.

Bringing the War Home by the Editors (from Issue 31)

Soon after September 11, 2001, Americans made a collective decision that in response to a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe, an event whose scale and devastation were unrepeatable, large swaths of American life, as well as the country's relationship to most of the world, would be militarized on a permanent basis. Since then, the ways in which politicians and journalists have responded to terrorist attacks and school shootings have been so consistently similar that it seems foolish not to think of the shootings as extensions of the war we are waging around the world ...

2020: Democrats Would Rather Lose To Apocalyptic, Neo-Fascist Republicans Than Win With The Mildly Progressive Faction Of Its Own Party

Paul Street, Counterpunch, January 3, 2020:

The Democratic Party's Campaign to Re-Elect President Trump

Anyone who hoped that the terrible experience of a neofascistic presidency might jolt the Democratic Party media and politics establishment into embracing the basic lesson of the 2016 election – that running a dismal, dollar-drenched centrist well to the right of the citizenry for president just guarantees right-wing control of the United States' executive branch – is certain to be disappointed.

In the 2020 election cycle as in the last one, the establishment corporate neo-"liberal" Democrats and their many media outlets have alternately disdained, disregarded, and downplayed Bernie Sanders' progressive-populist neo-New Deal campaign. ... When he isn't largely or (in some cases) completely ignored, the mildly social-democratish Sanders is absurdly discussed as some kind of wildly radical and therefore inherently un-electable leftist because he advances basic liberal-left programs that most Americans unmentionably support – Single Payer health insurance, green jobs programs, re-legalized union organizing, seriously progressive taxation, a doubling of the federal minimum wage, and free public college.

If one follows the lead of nearly every liberal pundit and talking head in U.S. corporate media, Democrats who are serious about defeating the demented and unmentionably fascistic oligarch Donald Trump are supposed to ... rally behind neoliberal center-right Wall Street tools like Pete Butiggieg and the ridiculous right-wing buffoon, racist, and dementia-victim Joe Biden. Even mildly liberal Elizabeth "capitalist in my bones" Warren is considered "too left-wing" by much of the neo-McCarthyite/-"liberal" media-politics elite – this because she partially aligns herself with Medicare-for-All and says she wants to break up some of the obscenely gargantuan tech monopolies.

[Everything] the ludicrous conservative "front-runner" Biden does or says past or present ... gets a free pass ... It's down Orwell's memory hole with: two horrific and laughably poor performances in previous presidential bids (1987-88 and 2007-08) even before his brains started coming out of his ears; plagiarism scandals in law school and during his first presidential run; a long Senate record of supine service to finance capital and corporate America; beating up on the sexual harassment victim Anita Hill during the confirmation of the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; voting to authorize George W. Bush to arch-criminally and mass-murderously invade Iraq; calling Barack Obama "clean" and "articulate" in 2007. ...

2020 presidential candidate Biden has had to be restrained from inappropriately touching and sniffing women and children. He has justified past collaboration "across the [U.S. Senate] aisle" with racist white segregationist senators from the South (who happened to be Democrats) by saying that one of those senators "never called me boy." He has bragged that he would have beaten up Trump "in high school." He has in all seriousness told a comically bizarre story to Black children about how he once faced down a Black youth named "Corn Pop" with a "rusty chain" in a parking lot outside a Black swimming pool where he once worked as a lifeguard (adding that "I like it when kids sit on my lap"). He advocated phonographs as a solution to Black poverty in a candidate debate. ...

Biden is a deeply conservative pawn of the corporate and financial establishment ... [he] recently told an Iowa town hall that he would consider a Republican as his running mate. ...

Despite the blackout and smearing of Sanders by the "liberal" media, the New York Times ["Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat"] and Politico ["Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination"] have recently felt compelled to publish major stories conceding that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination. ... [T]he aim of these articles is not to give Sanders more momentum. As Norman Solomon observes, the real goal it to alert conservative Democrats, funders, and media about the urgent need to escalate their attacks on Sanders:

…the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign's chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority…For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn't work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks. ...

[T]he overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage — synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party — will range from condescending to savage. ...

For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it'll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign. ...

[The Democrats] are not primarily about winning elections, much less about social justice, democracy, and environmental sanity. They are primarily about serving wealthy sponsors and entering the corporate and financial oligarchy. They and their elite backers would rather lose to the right, even to an apocalyptic and neofascist right, than lose to the left, even a mildly progressive left, in their own party. ...

Not that Trump would leave peacefully if Sanders or perhaps even if Biden bested him in the nation's anti-democratic Electoral College. As the conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein recently observed, Trump will "do anything" to stay in office. "Suspension of the election, negation of the results, declaration of martial law are not simply fanciful, alarmist, or crazy things to contemplate. Members of Congress, governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law enforcement figures and the military need to be thinking about how they might respond."

In Today's Edition Of "Nothing New Under The Sun"

In today's edition of Nothing New Under The Sun, we look at Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 essay, "Anti-Semite and Jew":

The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has pleased himself on other ground from the beginning. ...

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. ...

If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti-Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.

He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others. What he flees even more than Reason is his intimate awareness of himself. But some will object: What if he is like that only with regard to the Jews? What if he otherwise conducts himself with good sense?

I reply that that is impossible... A man who finds it entirely natural to denounce other men cannot have our conception of humanity; he does not see even those whom he aids in the same light as we do. His generosity, his kindness are not like our kindness, our generosity. You cannot confine passion to one sphere.

Under Trump's Law, Every Act Is A Test Of One's Fealty, Violence Against Outsiders Equals National Loyalty, And Empathy Is Treason

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, November 2019:

Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast.

This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. ...

[T]he president's ardor for violations of the laws of war has manifested itself in his decisions to intervene in war-crimes cases on behalf of the defendants. In four separate cases since the beginning of his presidency, and for the first time in the history of modern warfare, an American president has aided service members accused or convicted of war crimes, against the advice of his own military leadership.

The clearances [were] ... a rational extension of Trumpist nationalism, which recognizes no moral, legal, or institutional restraints on the president worth upholding, and which sees violence against outsiders as a redemptive expression of national loyalty. Even the cynical invocation of legal restraints on warfare can provide a modicum of protection for civilians, but Trump would do away with this meager safeguard in pursuit of political advantage, in part because he does not see the people whom those restraints protect as fully human to begin with. In the long run, Trump hopes to do with the U.S. military what he has done with the police and immigration enforcement: forge the institution into a partisan weapon for himself to wield against his enemies, using the promise of impunity for crimes against the weak or despised. ...

[Trump] argues that the crimes of which the men are accused are not truly crimes at all. As the president put it on Twitter, "We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!" This is a philosophy that makes no moral distinction between killing combatants and killing the innocent.

Trump pardoned Mathew Golsteyn, once a decorated Army Special Forces officer, who told the CIA in a job interview that he killed an Afghan detainee he suspected of being a bomb maker; Trump prevented the demotion of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing in photographs with a detainee's corpse, but who was acquitted on more serious war-crimes charges; and he pardoned Clint Lorance, an Army lieutenant who ordered his unit to fire on unarmed Afghans. In May, Trump pardoned Michael Behenna, a former Army lieutenant who was convicted of killing an unarmed Iraqi detainee. ...

"I will always stick up for our great fighters," Trump told the crowd at a rally in Florida yesterday. "People can sit there in air-conditioned offices and complain, but you know what? It doesn't matter to me whatsoever."

The seven Navy SEALs who told investigators that Gallagher shot unarmed civilians from his sniper nest, including "a girl in a flower-print hijab who was walking with other girls on the riverbank," after being warned that doing so could "cost them and others their careers" were not sitting in an office. The soldiers who testified that Lorance ordered his unit to fire on unarmed Afghans who were "definitely not any type of threat" were not luxuriating in an air-conditioned building. ...

It would be a mistake, however, to view Trump's pardons as stemming from a deep reverence for the military or an understanding of the difficulties faced by service members. Rather, he views these crimes as acts of nationalist solidarity against Muslims, against whom crimes are not simply acceptable but praiseworthy. Trumpists are capable of recognizing the evils of excessive state power—but only when it is directed at those they see as like themselves. When it is directed at those they hate and fear, such excesses are not crimes but virtues.

The crimes of which these service members are accused were committed against people the president does not consider fully human. It would not do to punish Americans for killing people whose lives, in the eyes of the president and many of his supporters, do not matter. ...

Trump is already reportedly planning to have one or more of these service members appear at his campaign rallies. Trump's ideology is also his politics: As with calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers who must be kept out, Muslims terrorists who must be banned, and black Americans criminals who must face unrestrained brutality, Trump divides the nation by making everything a test of loyalty. ... To respect the rights of those who are different, to even acknowledge that they exist, is to show disloyalty and weakness, is to side with the "animals" against civilization. To disregard them as nonexistent is to display patriotism and strength.

The very act of concern for those harmed by Trump's policies—migrant children separated from their families at the border, Muslims banned from entry, or black people murdered by police—is itself a kind of treason. As a con man, Trump cannot fathom why anyone would adhere to principle when there is an advantage to be gained, and he regards such people with contempt ... Doing the right thing without expectation of material reward is not something Trump can personally comprehend—even his war-crimes pardons are themselves transactional. At future campaign rallies, if Trump has his way, the president's enthusiastic retelling of war crimes will come with props, as legions of Trump supporters cheer. ...

Patriotism here ultimately means something far less than love of country—it means love of a very specific group of Americans, who regard the majority of their countrymen as usurpers. And that love must manifest itself in loyalty to Trump, who represents their will. The ominous message, which echoes from the Justice Department to the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon, is that the only law that matters is Trump's law, and the only loyalty that even counts as loyalty is fealty to Trump.

18 Years Of War In Afghanistan: "The American People Have Constantly Been Lied To"

The Washington Post's lengthy series — "At War With The Truth" — offers an inside, no-longer-secret history of the United States' 18-years-and-counting war in Afghanistan, the longest "armed conflict" in the country's history.

Part 1
At war with the truth
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2
Stranded without a strategy
Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Part 3
Built to fail
Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that.

Part 4
Consumed by corruption
The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled.

Part 5
Unguarded nation
Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption.

Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium
The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.

Interviews and Memos
Explore the documents
Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history.

Post Reports
'We didn't know what the task was'
Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

The Fight for the Documents
About the investigation
It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records.

MORE STORIES
A visual timeline of the war
Interviewees respond

The fact that the Pentagon and the US government - through three presidents, Republican and Democrat - intentionally and deliberately lied, constantly, for nearly two decades, cannot come as much of a surprise to anyone who possesses an open mind and a knowledge of history, but it's still worthwhile to see "a mountain of previously secret documentary evidence [from] within the military" laid out in the harsh light of day.

The US military refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests for three years until ordered to turn over the documents by a U.S. district judge. This could certainly be a limited hangout, but it's still pretty damning.

Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015:

We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing. ... We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.

In the same interview, Lute says:

We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn't bust the bank. But should we? Can't we get a bit more rational here? ... One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some Godforsaken province. [The US Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.] The police chief couldn't even open the door. He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.

Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego and a specialist in the Afghan public sector: "We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it."

Much of the money ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials. There is copious evidence of "ghost projects" into which millions of dollars were dumped. For example, the US had signed $8 million in contracts to build an industrial park near Kandahar for 48 businesses. Tim Graczewski, a Navy Reserve officer who oversaw economic development projects in southern Afghanistan from 2009-10, could not find the 37-acre project. It appeared to exist only on paper. While Graczewski eventually found the property, there were no buildings, only empty streets and some sewer pipes.

It blew my mind how much we didn't know about the park in the first place when we embarked on this project. It was impossible to get info on it, even where it was located. It was that much of a blank spot. Nobody knew anything about anything.

However, the people who got extremely rich from those contracts would not call what was going on (and what is still going on) in Afghanistan a failure in any way, shape, or form. To them, and many others, those millions and billions were not "wasted".

Numerous people said the chaotic outcome in Afghanistan was foreseeable, citing US military interventions in other countries in the last 25 years, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia. Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush: "We just don't have a post-conflict stabilization model that works."

Three comments.

1. The US is a "rich country" only if you are rich. And "the bank" has most assuredly been broken, for a long time.

2. What looks like a failure to a normal human being may not be a failure to a defense contractor with a suddenly-overflowing bank account or to government officials who have wanted to control an oil-rich area for decades. Indeed, despite the inevitable hiccups along the way, the various invasions since 2001 have been a resounding and towering success for the people who planned them.

3. The majority of US military officials do not give a shit what happens to a country once it has been destabilized and/or destroyed.

Jacob Hornberger, Counterpunch:

More than 2,300 American soldiers killed for nothing. Thousands more injured, mentally, spiritually, or physically. Tens of thousands of Afghans killed, maimed, incarcerated, or tortured. The entire country destroyed. ...

Americans have ended up with the loss of both freedom and security, with a massive toll in terms of death and suffering, with a mountain of federal debt, and with one great big pack of lies. ...

[I]t's also worth mentioning that the Pentagon waged its war on Afghanistan without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war. That makes the Afghan war, and all of the death and destruction that have come with it, illegal under our form of government. ...

[T]he Pentagon has succeeded in turning [Afghanistan] into one gigantic hellhole of violence, official corruption, and opium production.

Craig Whitlock, Washington Post:

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans. ...

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case. ...

[I]n the field, U.S. troops often couldn't tell friend from foe.

"They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live," an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. ...

"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are," [Donald] Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003 [memo]. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence." ...

"Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government," an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. "The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn't have." ... [I would not be surprised if the United States is still in Afghanistan in 2103.]

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: "We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason." ...

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption. ... One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. ...

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity. ...

"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,'" said Douglas Lute, the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of the market that's working. It's really much worse than you think." ...

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary. ...

John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

"They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop," he told government interviewers. "There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures ..." But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful. ...

Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

"I do think the key benchmark is the one I've suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed," James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. "If the number's going up, you're losing. ... It's as simple as that."

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.

Trump: "I think he's a maniac. I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he's a very sick man. And he lies."

Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law:

If what we're talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable. This is precisely the misconduct that the framers created the Constitution, including impeachment, to protect against.

Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor:

The biggest difference between the English tradition of impeachment and the American constitutional plan was that the king of England could not be impeached. In that sense, the king was above the law, which only applied to him if he consented to follow it. In stark contrast, the president of the United States would be subject to the law like any other citizen. The idea of impeachment was therefore absolutely central to the republican form of government ordained by the Constitution. Without impeachment, the president would have been an elected monarch. With impeachment, the president was bound to the rule of law. Congress could oversee the president's conduct, hold him accountable and remove him from office if he abused his power.

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor:

The founding generation, like every generation of Americans since, was especially concerned to protect our government and our democratic process from outside interference. For example, John Adams during the ratification expressed concern with the very idea of having an elected president, writing to Thomas Jefferson that "you are apprehensive of foreign interference, intrigue, influence. — So am I — But, as often as elections happen, the danger of foreign influence recurs." And in his farewell address, President Washington warned that "history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government." ... The very idea that a president might seek the aid of a foreign government in his re-election campaign would have horrified them. ...

The upshot of this conversation in the Constitutional Convention was that the framers believed that elections were not a sufficient check on the possibility of a president who abused his power by acting in a corrupt way. They were especially worried that a president might use the power of his office to influence the electoral process in his own favor. They concluded that the Constitution must provide for the impeachment of the president to assure that no one would be above the law.

Professor Karlan:

One of the key reasons for including an impeachment power was the risk that unscrupulous officials might try to rig the election process. ... President Trump invited — indeed, demanded — foreign involvement in our upcoming election ...  [D]rawing a foreign government into our election process is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself. ... The evidence reveals a president ... who did this to strong-arm a foreign leader into smearing one of the president's opponents in our ongoing election season. That is not politics as usual — at least not in the United States or any other mature democracy.

Professor Gerhardt:

The president's serious misconduct, including bribery, soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader in exchange for his exercise of power, and obstructing justice and Congress are worse than the misconduct of any prior president, including what previous presidents who faced impeachment have done or been accused of doing. Other presidents have done just the opposite in recognizing the legitimacy of congressional investigative and impeachment authorities. Even President Nixon agreed to share information with Congress, ordered his subordinates to comply with subpoenas to testify and produce documents (with some limited exceptions), and to send his lawyers to ask questions in the House's impeachment hearings. The fact that we can easily transpose the articles of impeachment against Nixon onto the actions of this president speaks volumes — and that does not even include the most serious national security concerns and election interference concerns at the heart of this president's misconduct.

Discussing the distinction between kings and presidents, Professor Karlan said: "The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility. While the president can name his son Barron, he can't make him a baron."

Melania Trump took extreme offense, tweeting:

A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it.

However ...

Melania Trump did not post a tweet when thousands of children were forcibly taken from their parents by government officials and put into cages (for weeks and months) in concentration camps on the border. Babies (some as young as two months old) are left to sleep on the cold, concrete floor at night.

A 16-year-old girl: "We are in a metal cage with 20 other teenagers with babies and young children. We have one mat we need to share with each other. It is very cold. ... The lights are [on] all of the time."

Another 16-year-old girl: "Our clothes were still wet and we were very cold, so we got sick… I've been in the US for six days and I have never been offered a shower or been able to brush my teeth. There is no soap and our clothes are dirty. They have never been washed."

A 15-year-old girl: "I started taking care of [a 5-year-old girl] ... after they separated her from her father. ... She was very upset. The workers did nothing to try to comfort her. I tried to comfort her and she has been with me ever since. [She] sleeps on a mat with me on the concrete floor."

A pregnant 17-year-old girl: "I was given a blanket and a mattress, but then, at 3 a.m., the guards took the blanket and mattress. My baby was left sleeping on the floor. In fact, almost every night, the guards wake us at 3 a.m. and take away our sleeping mattresses and blankets. They leave babies, even little babies of two or three months, sleeping on the cold floor. ... I think the guards act this way to punish us."

Melania Trump did not post a tweet when her husband recently mocked a 16-year-old girl for her comments on global warming. (Barron is 15, by the way.)

Melania Trump did not post a tweet when her husband boasted about the techniques he has used to sexually assault women.

Melania Trump did not post a tweet when her husband signed legislation that would literally take the food out of the mouths of hundreds of thousands of poor and starving children (see below).

Melania Trump saw nothing wrong with posing with a baby whose parents (Jordan Anchondo and Andre Anchondo) had been murdered in an El Paso mass shooting in August. The baby actually had been discharged from the hospital the day before, but was brought back to the hospital solely to be used as a prop for a photo op, in which Trump offered a big shit-eating grin and a thumbs-up.

And in June 2018, Melania Trump boarded Air Force One, on her way to visit children at the Texas-Mexico border, wearing a jacket with the words "I Really Don't Care. Do You?" on the back. There have been at least three official explanations. First, her spokesperson said there was "no hidden message". Then Melania said there was a message and it was aimed at her "left-wing critics". A new book states Melania wore it as a passive-aggressive jab at Ivanka Trump's "near-constant attempts to attach herself to positive administration talking points".

So Melania is full of shit, though not nearly as full of shit as her moronic husband. They can both die in a fire.

Trump Stomps Home From NATO Meeting After 'Two-Faced' Trudeau Was Mean to Him
Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast

Donald Trump hit out at Justin Trudeau on Wednesday after a candid video emerged of the Canadian prime minister ridiculing the U.S. president to the obvious delight and amusement of other world leaders. A fed-up Trump then canceled his scheduled press conference and said he'd fly straight home.

The video shows Trudeau with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a gathering at Buckingham Palace. Trudeau mocked Trump's unexpected Monday press conferences, and said he "watched his team's jaws drop to the floor" when the president made an announcement, which wasn't specified in the video.

Trudeau later confirmed the leaders were laughing about Trump's "impromptu press conference" at the meeting ... Johnson can be seen laughing at Trudeau's shtick, and even the Queen's daughter Princess Anne appears to join in. ...

Trump made no such effort to swerve from the controversy, hitting back on Wednesday, saying: "Well, he's two-faced."

'What Cruelty Looks Like': Trump Finalizes Plan to Strip Food Aid From 750,000 Low-Income People by 2020
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it has finalized a plan to tighten punitive work requirements for food stamp recipients, a move that would strip nutrition assistance from an estimated 750,000 low-income people by mid-2020. ...

The rule change, which was first unveiled earlier this year, would restrict states' ability to exempt people without dependents from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's work requirements. The rule is set to take effect April 1, 2020. ...

During the rule's 60-day public comment period, tens of thousands of people decried the measure as an immoral attack on the most vulnerable by an administration that has worked tirelessly to fatten the pockets of the rich.

"The comments make it clear that most Americans not only oppose but are utterly repulsed by this plan to punish the poorest among us by denying them help to feed themselves," Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said in a statement in April.

According to an Urban Institute study (pdf) published last week, the Trump administration's three proposed SNAP changes combined would strip federal food aid from 3.7 million people.

Trump, Who Slashed Taxes by $1.5 Trillion, Is Pushing Cuts to Food Stamps
Patrick Reis, Rolling Stone

President Trump, a very rich guy who promised to help not-rich people get ahead but so far hasn't, is pushing rules that would place new limits on a program that helps poor people buy food.

The push isn't new, but it's getting new attention due to an Urban Institute study that concluded the rules, if they'd been in place last year, would have reduced the main federal food aid program's rolls by 3.7 million people — as well as cut food stamp spending by about $4.2 billion. Remember that number for later. ...

There are two main arguments conservatives have marshalled in support of food stamp cuts, and they're both dishonest. Work requirements are often touted as an effort to nudge (starve) people into self-sufficiency. ...

Supporters of the requirements often claim to be helping poor people access "the dignity of work," meaning that it's inherently more satisfying to get paid for work than to depend on public support. That may well be true ... But you won't hear those people talking about the "dignity of work" when it comes to organizing workers into unions that protect them from abusive management or unsafe conditions. Nor do they pipe up in favor of the "the dignity of a living wage." In fact, the people who favor work requirements near universally oppose unions and minimum wage hikes. Go figure. ...

The other argument for making it harder for poor people to buy food is somehow even flimsier ... the need for fiscal responsibility when it comes to the federal budget. ... [M]any conservatives say, we need to cut spending on "entitlements" — a term for helping people buy food or make ends meet or access health care through Medicaid. ...

This isn't a particularly credible argument ... But it's revealed to be a comically disingenuous argument once you remember the Trump administration's signature domestic "achievement": tax breaks that will add at least $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years ... [A]t a baseline, that works out to about $150 billion annually, which, if math isn't your thing, is approximately a fuckton more than the $4.2 billion they want to "save" on food stamps.

Who got those tax breaks? ... [T]he lion's share of those will go to the very wealthy, as well as to the heirs of the very wealthy, who thanks to the law can now inherit millions up millions of dollars without paying a cent in taxes. Cool. And yes, most everyone did get a tax cut, but for lots of people — particularly the people Trump promised to help — that will work out to about $50 a month. Spend it all in one place. ...

When it came to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Trump and Republicans felt the nation's finances were firm enough to give up more than $1,500,000,000,000. When it's time to spend a fraction of that to help poor people eat, that's when the well has supposedly run dry.

Fun Fact: The US spends one billion dollars on war every four days. (That's as of November 2017. the amount has likely gone up since then.)

Lawmakers Admit Lobbyists Helped Them Write Attacks on Medicare for All
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

Documents obtained by the Washington Post Monday showed that lobbyists helped three state lawmakers draft op-eds this year attacking Medicare for All ...

The Post's Jeff Stein reported Monday that Montana state Rep. Kathy Kelker (D), Montana state Sen. Jen Gross (D), and an aide to Ohio state Sen. Steve Huffman (R) admitted in interviews that lobbyists helped craft their recent op-eds criticizing Medicare for All. The three columns appeared in local newspapers; none of them disclosed that they were written with the assistance of lobbyists.

Kelker and Gross "acknowledged in interviews that editorials they published separately about the single-payer health proposal included language provided by John MacDonald, a lobbyist and consultant in [Montana] who disclosed in private emails that he worked for an unnamed client," Stein reported. ...

"The emails appear to show extensive outside involvement in the Montana lawmakers' op-eds," Stein reported. "In a Microsoft Word document, MacDonald removed three paragraphs from a draft of Kelker's op-ed that pointed out that the United States 'clearly spends significantly more on healthcare per capita than other developed nations.' He also deleted a table from the lawmaker's original draft showing that the United States has higher healthcare spending per capita than France, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland."

'He's Just...Erased': PBS 2020 Segment Finds Time for Klobuchar, Sestak, and Bullock—But Completely Ignores Bernie Sanders
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

A Monday night PBS NewsHour segment on the state of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary highlighted Sen. Amy Klobuchar's new ad campaign in Iowa, the departure of marginal candidates Steve Bullock and Joe Sestak, a tender campaign moment with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden's "No Malarkey" bus tour—but did not once even mention Sen. Bernie Sanders despite recent key endorsements and a surge in the polls.

Sanders' presidential campaign has repeatedly accused the corporate media of ignoring the senator from Vermont, a phenomenon Sanders supporters have dubbed the "Bernie blackout."

The PBS segment, led by NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, offered "a real taste of what Bernie is talking about," Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson wrote Tuesday.

"Remember that Sanders has been #1 in two out of three recent New Hampshire polls, and is currently second in Iowa, ahead of 'frontrunner' Joe Biden," Robinson noted. "Alcindor found time to talk about Joe Sestak and Steve Bullock, plus plenty of candidates struggling to get out of single-digit poll numbers. And yet: not even a photo of Bernie Sanders. Incredible. He's just... erased. He's gone. Bernie who?"

Robinson described the NewsHour segment as an example of "manufacturing consent in action":

Political commentator David Pakman recently asked, looking at Pete Buttigieg's rising poll numbers, 'What do you think is behind Pete's rise?' My own answer to that is simple: the manufacture of consent by a media apparatus invested in selling a candidate that will not disrupt the economic status quo.

So much of our understanding of the world and what matters is filtered through the media, because that's how we get access to things that are not in our direct experience. If nobody talks about Bernie Sanders' campaign, how are you supposed to learn about it unless Bernie people come and knock on your door?

The NewsHour segment came just weeks after a detailed analysis of MSNBC's coverage of Sanders by In These Times found that the Vermont senator received both the least frequent and most negative coverage of the top 2020 Democratic presidential contenders.

"The corporate media's war against Bernie Sanders is very real," Jacobin's Luke Savage wrote last month.

"MSNBC, of course, is hardly the only culprit," Savage noted. "As Katie Halper documented a few months ago, the New York Times reporter assigned to cover his campaign 'consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders' temperament, history, policies, and political prospects.' The Washington Post once famously ran sixteen negative stories about Sanders in the same number of hours."

More "Nazi-Normalizing Barf Journalism" From The New York Times
Dorothee Benz, FAIR:

On November 19, in a news analysis piece titled "A White House Now 'Cannibalizing Itself,'"the [New York] Times (11/19/19) went on at length (1,600 words) about the novelty of a sitting president publicly attacking members of his own staff. ...

Halfway through this article, there is this spartan description of threats to one such person, Col. Vindman:

The Army has been assessing potential security threats to Colonel Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, who also works at the National Security Council. There have also been discussions about moving the Vindmans and their families onto a military base for their protection.

But in contrast to the adjective-rich astonishment the Times expressed at Trump's attacks on his own staff, this tidbit is unworthy of further comment for the paper of record.

Sadly, threats of violence to anti-Trump witnesses are not new (think Christine Blasey Ford), but they are much more important to the story of the impeachment proceedings—and the survival of what is left of US democracy—than the new but unsurprising fact that Trump's Twitter vomit has now landed on people inside the White House as well as outside. ...

At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, I'm going to say that a society in which witnesses have to fear for their safety when they expose government corruption or other wrongdoing is a society distinctly titling more towards authoritarianism than democracy. That the New York Times hasn't raised the alarm about that is… alarming. It is more Nazi-normalizing barf journalism. ...

The New York Times' voluminous coverage of the hearings details many of the pieces that make up the overall strategy, but the vast majority of it boils down to the predictable formula of covering the whole process like a partisan horse race. ... It sounds alternately like an NFL halftime report and a review of a Broadway show. ...

Masha Gessen (New Yorker, 11/14/19) provided a framing analysis in a single column that the New York Times could not manage to do in its 131 articles. ... Republicans are not actually defending the president against accusations of abuse of power; instead, they are mounting an offense against the Democrats, whose very enterprise they consider illegitimate. Gessen's point is that the Republicans are playing a whole different game than the Democrats, and the Democrats don't realize it and will lose as a result: ...

Why exactly the New York Times is studiously keeping its impeachment coverage so superficial I don't know. My hunch is that it has to do with the Times' longstanding affinity for legitimizing power and, as I've said elsewhere, the belief that the stability of US institutions is more important than their integrity. Naming and scrutinizing the extent of the assault on democratic norms revealed in the impeachment proceedings would lay bare the fragility of those institutions. ...

In the New York Times (11/15/19), Trump attacking a witness testifying against him isn't witness intimidation; it just "raises charges of witness intimidation." ...

It's a bitter irony that the Times' bias against Trump has contributed to the downplaying of the danger he poses to the US.

Glenn Greenwald:

My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes.

Trump Ridiculed for Claiming Unnamed 'Legal Scholars' Praised Calls With Ukraine Leader as 'Absolutely Perfect'
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

President Donald Trump told reporters in London Tuesday that "legal scholars"—who Trump did not name—examined transcripts of his two phone conversations with Ukraine's leader and concluded they were "absolutely perfect calls," a story that was immediately ridiculed by academics and critics.

"You'll see there was absolutely nothing done wrong," Trump said during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. "They had legal scholars looking at the transcripts the other day and they said, 'These are absolutely perfect. Trump is right when he uses the word.'" ...

Joyce White Vance, a University of Alabama law professor and MSNBC contributor, urged reporters to "make Trump identify the legal scholars who reviewed the transcripts (plural!) and said they were 'absolutely perfect.'"

"Then those scholars should be interviewed," said Vance. "But I feel certain they don't exist."

Political scientist Miranda Yaver suggested Trump either completely fabricated the story or used the "legal scholar" label very loosely.

"Yeah, that's not how legal scholars talk. I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say he thinks that Jeannine Pirro is a legal scholar," tweeted Yaver, referring to the host of the Fox News show "Judge Jeanine."

'He Has a Lot of Explaining to Do': Call Records Show Devin Nunes Spoke With Giuliani Multiple Times Amid Ukraine Scheme
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

The House Intelligence Committee's 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday made public previously undisclosed and "hugely incriminating" phone records that showed Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the committee, spoke with President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani multiple times amid the Trump administration's scheme to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

According to the records, Nunes was also in contact with Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate who was indicted in October on campaign finance charges.

Communications between Nunes—a fervent defender of the president—and individuals at the center of the Trump administration's months-long effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden were viewed as "far and away the most damning" revelation in the Intelligence Committee's sprawling impeachment report ...

"I think he has a lot of explaining to do," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said of Nunes. ...

As The Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay noted, the phone records show that Nunes—who has repeatedly attempted to discredit the impeachment probe into Trump by alleging improper conduct by House Democrats—"had engaged in his own behind-the-scenes communications with the very people at issue in the whistleblower complaint."

"Nunes never revealed those communications during the weeks of committee testimony," Markay pointed out.

In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity Tuesday night, Nunes said he doesn't recall talking to Parnas, who said last month he is prepared to testify that Nunes met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor in Vienna last year to dig up damaging information on Biden. ...

Asked on Tuesday about Nunes' appearance in the call records, House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said "it is deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity."

Obama Privately Considered Leading 'Stop-Bernie Campaign' to Combat Sanders 2020 Surge: Report
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

Former President Barack Obama reportedly told advisers behind closed doors earlier this year that he would actively oppose Sen. Bernie Sanders if the progressive senator from Vermont opened up a big lead in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race. ...

"Obama's post-presidency is grating and full of contradictions," tweeted David Klion, news editor at Jewish Currents. "He considers himself the leader of the party but refuses to lead. He considers himself a success but the mere fact of Trump's presidency belies this. He won on hope and counsels hopelessness."

One anonymous Obama adviser would not confirm to Politico that Obama "would really lay himself on the line to prevent a Sanders nomination."

"He hasn't said that directly to me," the adviser said. "The only reason I'm hesitating at all is because, yeah, if Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something." ...

Earlier this month, Obama told a roomful of rich donors that he is worried about "certain left-leaning Twitter feeds" and "the activist wing of our party," sparking outrage from progressives. ...

David Dayen, executive editor for The American Prospect, wrote last week that Obama's attacks on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party "are music to the ears of the wealthy and powerful."

"This defense of the reigning economic order, originating with the donor class and media allies, with its effective abandonment of the vulnerable and disenfranchised, with nothing for those struggling to make it in a rigged economy, is a recipe for social and political unrest," Dayen wrote. "From lofty heights, Obama has now become a dampener of hope, a barrier to change, and a threat to progress."

The Anonymous White House Book-Writer Can Anonymously Bite Me
Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

I have no intention of shelling out a dime to read about how someone almost ran into the burning house to save the baby, or about how someone almost gave up their seat in the lifeboat when the great ship went down, or about how someone almost dove into a freezing river to save a busload of nuns, or, for that matter, about how someone almost decided not to be a part of the most monstrous executive administration since the (un)death of Vlad The Impaler. I am not interested in someone's heartfelt account of their near-collision with actual integrity. I decline to be fascinated by the tale of how someone nearly ran into courage on the street but had to catch a bus instead. ...

The excerpts from the book are as garish in their horror as you might expect them to be. From the Washington Post:

The author alleges that Trump attempted a Hispanic accent during an Oval Office meeting to complain about migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. "We get these women coming in with like seven children," Trump said, according to the book. "They are saying, 'Oh, please help! My husband left me!' They are useless. They don't do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something."

After the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, the author writes, Trump vented to advisers and said he would be foolish to stand up to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. "Do you know how stupid it would be to pick this fight?" Trump said, according to the book. "Oil would go up to one hundred fifty dollars a barrel. Jesus. How [expletive] stupid would I be?"

As he ranted about federal courts ruling against some of his policies, including the 2017 travel ban, the author writes, Trump once asked White House lawyers to draft a bill to send to Congress reducing the number of federal judges. "Can we just get rid of the judges? Let's get rid of the [expletive] judges," the president said, according to the book. "There shouldn't be any at all, really."

The author portrays Trump as fearful of coups against him and suspicious of note-takers on his staff. According to the book, the president shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting, "What the [expletive] are you doing?" He added, "Are you [expletive] taking notes?" The aide apologized and closed the notebook.

Yeah, and?

This was all stuff that we knew before he got elected. This is all stuff we knew before he was nominated. Yet Anonymous took a job in Bedlam anyway, and, as nearly as we can tell, still works there.

A Very Sick Man
Abby Zimet, Common Dreams

Oh man. The Stable Genius just fell off the world stage at London's NATO meeting, and it was not pretty. His speech slurred and his eyes amphetamine-huge, Trump's wee brain seemed spectacularly frazzled, perhaps by the just-released, 300-page, utterly damning House Intelligence Committee impeachment report finding he "abused the power of his office for personal and political gain at the expense of national security," citing "overwhelming" evidence of his misconduct and obstruction of Congress, and adding, for good measure, "Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of obstruction than that demonstrated by the president," never mind "the steaming nonsense" of the GOP's lame, nothing-to-see-here response. Thus burdened by a hovering cloud of impending reality, Trump ranted, rambled, raved, lied, contradicted himself, delivered indecipherable non sequiturs and insulted enemies and friends alike in multiple ill-considered appearances before the press.

Macron was "very, very nasty" - though Trump also flailingly tried to "joke" about ISIS with him. On Syria - yes, journalists still pretend they're not speaking to a madman - "We have taken the oil. I've taken the oil. We should have done it in other locations, frankly, where we were. I can name four of them right now, but we've taken the oil...Our great soldiers are right around the oil where we've got the oil." On climate policy: "I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear, clean water and clean air. That's a big part of climate change." On nuclear proliferation: "I'm - you know, the - the whole situation with nuclear to me is very, very important...It has to be dealt with very strongly." Most gob-smackingly - though how to choose? - on Adam Schiff, as a pained Trudeau sat next to him (and later joined in a snickering group troll): "I think he's a maniac. I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he's a very sick man. And he lies." To which the Internet wisely, universally responded with, "P-R-O-J-E-C-T-I-O-N."

"The Democrats have gone crazy and you know what? They have to be careful because when the shoe is on the other foot, and some day, hopefully in the very long distant future, you'll have a Democrat president, you'll have a Republican House and they'll do the same thing because somebody picked an orange out of a refrigerator and you don't like it so let's go and impeach them. That's not the way our country is supposed to be run." - The President of the United States.