https://twitter.com/jakeadelstein/status/1150434126442291201
Category: Media
Dems have one job. Will they screw it up?
We were on the porch at my shack in the Tinicum swamp. “Swine was all I could swipe at the SuperFridge,” Swamp Rabbit said as he placed a few hot dogs on my hibachi. “Couldn’t even steal no sardines.”
I’m no swine fan, but I wasn’t complaining. It was 9 p.m., almost dark, and my cupboard was bare except for some stale wheat bread. We wrapped the wieners in the wheat bread and ate them while we jawed about the presidential race.
The first round of debates ended more than a week ago. Eric Swalwell (who?) has dropped out but billionaire hedge fund manager (ugh) Tom Steyer has jumped in. The herd hasn’t yet thinned, though most of the two dozen-or-so candidates are and will remain almost unknown except in their home states.
“They know they got zero chances but they want to brag to their grandkids that they ran for president,” Swamp Rabbit said after complaining there was no ketchup in my shack.
You’re right, I told him. If Beto O’Rourke, John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock weren’t delusional egotists they would recognize that a Democratic president won’t be able to undo many of Trump’s dirty deeds unless she or he has a Democratic Senate and House to work with. They would run for Senate seats in their respective states, not for president.
And Kirsten Gillibrand would admit she’s a shallow opportunist who is likely to be remembered only for her leading role in chasing the progressive Al Franken out of the Senate for minor sexual misconduct. And Bill De Blasio would quit making a fool of himself. And anti-vaxxer Marianne Williamson would just go away. And…
“I don’t need to hear you run through the whole list,” Swamp Rabbit said. “The only ones got a real chance are Biden, Sanders, Warren, maybe Harris and maybe that little guy with the goofy name — Bootyjuggs, I think.”
I reminded the rabbit that only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have crafted boldly progressive plans for changing the rigged system that gave us the enormous gulf between rich and poor, the student-loan racket, the health insurance racket and all those other symptoms of a failing democracy.
And that Biden and Harris, although they differ on some social issues, are both corporate candidates, meaning they’re being funded mostly by the powerful entities that have been dismantling New Deal-style democracy for more than 40 years.
“Blah blah,” the rabbit said. “Save all that jive for later. The Dems got one job this year — to get behind the candidate who will win enough states to get rid of that spray-tanned Mussolini in the White House. Ain’t nothing else matters if that don’t happen.”
Go Stacey
She’s so good. I’d like to see her as someone’s VP…
We got Barr’s report. Where’s Mueller’s?
I remember telling Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer last month that the Senate confirmation of William Barr for attorney general did not bode well for those of us who were hoping the Mueller report would be Trump’s undoing.
“Barr is Trump’s boy, Victor,” I said. “Last year Barr wrote that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s possible collusion with the Russians was ‘fatally misconceived.’ That’s why Trump nominated him for AG.”
It’s amazing. Everybody following the story understood that Barr believed in “broad presidential authority,” a belief he acted on while serving as AG for George H.W. Bush.
And we all knew that Barr said Trump was doing the right thing when he fired James Comey as FBI director, even though Trump had admitted in a TV interview that he fired Comey because of “the Russia thing.” (If that’s not an admission of obstruction of justice, what is?)
And yet a lot of mainstream media types profess to be shocked that much of Barr’s four-page summary of Mueller’s report reads like a spin doctor’s press release for Trump. Barr wrote:
After reviewing the Special Counsel’s final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, including the Office of Legal Counsel; and applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.
So Trump remains in the clear for now, partly because he and his Republican toadies in the Senate were and are in a position to appoint and control lawyers who interpret the law from an extreme right-wing perspective.
Footnote: Barr likes to pretend he is above the fray, on a plane that is purer than partisan politics, despite the fact that he is a militantly conservative Catholic and has been “associated with” the extreme right-wing Federalist Society and the equally extremist Heritage Foundation.
Another: The Mueller report hasn’t even been released for public scrutiny yet, but Republicans, citing Barr’s press release, are saying Trump has been exonerated. We’ll see about that.
The right to become a one-man army
From The New York Times:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand on Thursday announced a national ban on all military-style semiautomatic weapons, all high-capacity ammunition magazines and all parts that allow weapons to be modified into the kinds of guns used to kill 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch last week.
“How come they don’t ban them semiautomatics here?” Swamp Rabbit said as he read over my shoulder at the shack.
“You know why, rabbit,” I replied. “The NRA wouldn’t allow it. They’d take the money they set aside to buy the current crop of Congress critters and spend it to elect new critters who promise not to mess with existing gun laws.”
‘
Swamp Rabbit looked dubious. “It’s more than that,” he said. “The U.S. ain’t New Zealand. They only got five million peeps and a few islands. It’s easier for the gov’mint over there to make them give up their guns.”
I corrected him. There are plenty of gun owners in New Zealand, and plenty of gun lobbyists who, like their U.S. counterparts, are always trying to prevent gun control laws. The difference is that New Zealanders accept the fact that assault-style guns — AR-15s and so on — are in a more dangerous category than other guns because of their high-capacity magazines and rapid-fire capability and so on.
I got up on my soap box – there’s one next to my front door — and told him assault-style guns are weapons of war and shouldn’t belong to civilians. He just stared at me, so I stated the case in more down-to-earth terms.
“They’re for wackos,” I said. “An assault gun turns a wacko into a one-man army. He — and it’s always a he — can wipe out a full squad of civilians in two minutes.”
“That’s the whole point,” Swamp Rabbit replied, playing devil’s advocate. “In this country a man’s got a right to become a one-man army. It’s in the Second Amendment.”
I corrected him again. The Second Amendment calls for a “well-regulated Militia” to keep and bear arms. It does not say wackos can own assault guns to use for massacres. It doesn’t even guarantee an individual right to bear arms.
“Millions of peeps would say you’re wrong, Odd Man. The gov’mint bans assault weapons and the next thing they might ban unregistered hand guns, and then where would we be?”
I told him we’d be in a country with a lot fewer homicides. If semiautomatic guns were harder to get, there wouldn’t have been massacres in Las Vegas and Orlando and Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook and Parkland… If Congress had pursued gun control instead of taking orders from the NRA… If the NRA hadn’t worked for decades to convince rednecks everywhere that the government wanted to seize all their guns… If millions of rednecks in rural areas hadn’t put pressure on their Congress critters…
“Like I said,” the rabbit interrupted. “This ain’t New Zealand.”
Footnote: One of the dirty secrets about these mass killings is that cops, for obvious reasons, are sometimes slow to respond to reports of wackos rampaging with assault weapons. Only once in a while will you encounter this alarming fact in the media.
I’m jealous
Bribery can get you into top schools. (This is news?)
The mainstream media is obsessed this week with parents who got their under-qualified kids into prestigious colleges by using a fixer who funneled their bribes to “certain college officials,” as Alia Wong of The Atlantic put it before stating the obvious:
The country’s elite have long used their wealth to get their kids into top colleges via legal and widely recognized means — legacy and athletic admissions tend to favor the wealthy, and those who can pay for test prep and expensive sports get an additional leg up. In extreme cases, wealthy parents make hefty donations to schools, or, for example, pay for new campus buildings. The 33 parents now being charged allegedly opted instead for organized conspiracy.
“The media focused on this story because it’s crude and involves a few celebrities,” I said to my friend Swamp Rabbit. “They usually ignore college admission scams. There are no front-page stories about mediocre students like George W. Bush and Jared Kushner getting accepted at Ivy League schools.”
“Of course there ain’t,” the rabbit said. “Unethical and legal is okay, but unethical and illegal gets you arrested. What else is new?”
Nothing is new, I told him. The cost of education (and everything else) keeps growing, along with the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of the country. As the student loan bubble expands, it’s clear that the middle class — what’s left of it — no longer has the earning power to handle college costs. The poor never did.
So a lot of people walk around feeling angry and frustrated. Some of them, the dopes who voted for Trump, blame the cost of higher education and the rest of their woes on Mexican desperadoes and so on. Others just step back and say the hell with all politicians, and thus help monsters like Trump come to power and make the situation even worse.
“You must be one of them experts,” the sarcastic rabbit said. “So tell me, when are the peeps gonna get wise?”
I thought of the busload of Democrats running for president — Beto O’Rourke is the latest — of all the confusion and in-fighting up ahead.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But when they do, it probably won’t be because of the news media.”
GOP still clings to Trump’s sinking ship. Good.
The heater in my shack broke down yesterday, so Swamp Rabbit and I put on heavy coats and huddled around a space heater to watch newly disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen testify at the House Oversight Committee hearing. Cohen started with a summary assessment of his former guru, Donald Trump: “He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”
“Yo Mike, tell us what you really think,” Swamp Rabbit said to the flat screen. “Stop beating around the bush.”
It was refreshing to hear Cohen state the obvious, but the Republicans at the hearing weren’t having any of it. One after another, they scolded Cohen for being a liar and a fixer but somehow never addressed the fact that he’d been a liar and a fixer for Trump.
The hearing — what I saw of it — was a monotonous charade, with only a few instances of comic relief. At one point Rep. Paul Gosar, a vile wingnut from Arizona, ended a tirade against Cohen by shouting, “You’re a pathological liar. You don’t know truth from falsehood.”
Not missing a beat, Cohen replied, “Sir, I’m sorry. Are you referring to me or the president?”
Cohen’s testimony will probably be a big help when the feds indict Trump for insurance fraud, tax fraud, and/or bank fraud. Cohen even showed copies of two checks he says he received from Trump’s gang as partial reimbursement for paying Stormy Daniels to keep quiet regarding her alleged one-night (two-minute?) stand with Trump.
I told the rabbit this: Republicans will ignore the checks and all other evidence that their dear leader is a racist, a con man and a cheat, as well as a bully, a coward and, yes, a would-be dictator. They’ll ignore it all because they’re as rotten as Trump and would gladly accept him as dictator if that was the price for their re-election.
“Yo Odd Man, tell us what you really think,” the rabbit replied.
Newspaper drought makes it worse
the decline of local newspapers and the “nationalization” of political news are polarizing vote choice: Voters were 1.9% more likely to vote for the same party for president and senator after a newspaper closes in their community. https://t.co/f5LQNv6bBg via @ConversationUS
— The Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) February 25, 2019
The ‘national emergency’ is Trump
From The Hill:
President Trump said on Friday that he “didn’t need to” declare a national emergency but did it to speed up construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. “I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden in the White House.
It seems Trump doesn’t know what “emergency” means. Or he was inadvertently admitting that his executive order was made on false premises — that he knows there’s no emergency. I asked Swamp Rabbit what he thought of the grabber-in-chief’s latest unforced error.
“He don’t care about errors.” Swamp Rabbit said. “He knows there ain’t gonna be no thousand-mile brick-and-mortar wall, no steel slats. He knows illegal border crossings are way down since 2000, there ain’t no crisis. The crisis is in the White House, not on the border.”
I asked him to explain. He said Trump’s only talent is for stirring up fear and hate in the ignorant and easily led — his base, as he calls them. If he concedes defeat regarding the wall, he’ll lose his base, and then lose the support of congressional Republicans who stick with him only because they fear being driven out of office by his base.
I poured the rabbit a half-glass of whiskey for being so astute. “What about the Republicans who say they’re for the wall but unhappy with Trump because he’s setting a bad precedent by declaring an emergency in order to usurp powers that the Constitution assigned to Congress?”
The rabbit drank up and laughed, hee-hee-hee. “Trump don’t need to usurp nothing, them chumps been handing power to him since he took office. They think they’re using him to get what they want — tax cuts for the rich, right-wing members of the Supremes and so on — and can cut him loose when Mueller nails him, or when the base finally realizes he ain’t on their side.”
“But that’s a dangerous game,” I said. “What if Mueller doesn’t nail him? What if Trump’s morons never get wise to him? Congress would be stuck with a president who acts like a dictator. Then what?”
The rabbit sat down on my porch, dangling his feet over the swamp. After a while he said, “Gimme another drink, I’ll have to think about that one.”
Footnote: The mainstream media continue to struggle with a similar dilemma. Reporters and editors created the Trump monster over decades, by presenting him as a savvy businessman and “deal maker,” even while knowing all along he was a fraud and a dangerous fool. Now what?