The lightning rod that is Ukraine

 The world waits with bated breath to see how the incoming Trump administration is going to handle Russia's continuing savaging of Ukraine.

At the recent Halifax security conference, representatives of various nations searched for signs of continuity between Biden's policy and Trump's, but one participant says it had more the feel of a therapy session. 

I don't know a whole lot about Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), but I'm impressed by the priorities and fealty to the Constitution that seems to be guiding him on this matter:

South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds has dismissed calls for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to honor such an agreement.

"As much as I would like to believe we can negotiate with a tyrant, I suspect we may be deceiving ourselves," Rounds said in reference to Putin at the Halifax Security Forum on Friday.

"Do you believe that this tyrant, if you offer him a part of a free country, do you think he's gonna stop?" Rounds said.

"I wish I could say there's an easy way out, there's not."

The Republican's sentiments stand in contrast with those of President-Elect Trump, who has previously claimed he could end the conflict in one day.

Rounds also bemoaned the restriction placed on Kyiv in its response to Russia's full-scale invasion.

"I just feel so frustrated that we have not been able to provide them all of the equipment that they need, and all of the weapons systems that they need, in order to respond to the absolute tyranny coming from Russia," said Rounds, who did reportedly stress that his views were not those of the incoming administration.

(As a side note, I also dig his recent introduction of legislation  to dismantle the Department of Education. Progressives are going to use this to conflate actual conservative policy with Trumpist yay-hoo-ism. And the Trumpists will say, "This is conservatism now." This is why I write my occasional "wheat from chaff scoreboard" posts over at Precipice. )

I have to imagine that he's going to get upbraided by the drool-besotted throne sniffers for showing an  independent streak. In fact, that's already started. The disgusting Laura Ingraham tweeted that Rounds was "already undermining" the Very Stable Genius. Sorry, toots, but the legislative branch is independent of the executive.

We. of course, have no idea what the VSG would actually do to achieve this peace in 24 hours he speaks of. Presumably, he's confident that his personal charm would be the deciding factor in a sit-down with Mad Vlad and President Zelensky. You know, like the way the summits and beautiful letters changed North Korea into a legitimate member of the international community.

The Trumpist excuses for not seeing that the Ukraine and Israel situations are morally identical range from "America First" isolationism to the argument that we need to focus all our world-threat attention on the way China is breathing down Taiwan's neck. Another argument is that support for Ukraine drains resources from the effort to seal the southern US border. (The actual truth is that, given our $36 million debt, we don't have the money for anything. But for the world's only superpower ostensibly committed to a stable, Western-oriented world order, expenditures must be made anyway.)

There's also the "start World War III" argument, articulated recently by Joe Rogan  and Donald Trump, Jr. who, for good measure, trotted out the hackneyed term "military industrial complex." As if it's okay not to do the right thing because there's some attendant risk.

There's a more sinister line of argument that tries to let Putin off the hook for the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the more general war against Ukraine he commenced in February 2022. 

That matters a great deal at present, given the VSG's nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to the DNI director position.

Let's have a look at her track record on this subject:

n the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.

You will note that peacenik lefties, libertarians and Trumpists all have in common this emphasis on the ickiness of war, untethered to moral considerations. 

Within Europe, there's less than a unified stance on the matter. So far in the war, Romania has proven a stalwart supporter of Ukraine, but that looks to change with the probable election of isolationist Calin Georgescu as Romania's president.

Something else to consider: the war in Ukraine is ratcheting up, and eye-opening developments could well occur between now and January 20. That could change some players' calculus.

In any event, let's be clear-eyed about the fact that not everyone wants to see the acceptable outcome - Ukraine's total defeat of Russia - take place. 

Lotta variables in a very volatile situation.  

 

The Trumpist poisoning of the GOP runs as deep as ever

 Not only do the Trumpists refuse to give up in Maricopa County, they use the word "dominoes" to describe their ultimate intent:

Arizona’s election results were certified on January 6, of course, and there were numerous legal challenges in Maricopa County, none of which concluded that county election officials committed any wrongdoing. Six months after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes of the 3.3 million ballots that were cast statewide in the November election, rogue GOP officials continue to propagate baseless accusations of fraud despite the fact that local election officials took pains to ensure that the county tabulated votes correctly. 

Immediately following the November election, Maricopa County election officials oversaw a hand-count of a statistically significant sampling of ballots—47,000 votes—that were cast by county residents and tabulated by Dominion Voting Systems, the election company the county has used since 1998. The results from the first hand-count—which was staffed by volunteers from the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties—were 100 percent identical to the initial total tabulated on Dominion’s voting machines. 

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors then hired two additional elections companies to conduct a forensic audit of the Dominion voting software. The companies concluded that the installed software was certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Arizona secretary of state and that there was no malware connected to the machines. Neither company found any evidence to suggest the software was connected to the internet or that any votes were switched from one candidate to another.

Arizona State Senate Republicans still weren’t convinced. Under the leadership of Senate President Karen Fann, they ordered a so-called forensic audit contesting the victories of Joe Biden and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. The Republican-led audit began on April 23 after a judge granted Fann’s subpoenas for ballots and other election materials. 

[Former Arizona Republican Party chair Randy] Pullen claims that the recount will be completed by the end of June. As of Wednesday, more than 1.7 million of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have reportedly been counted. 

The partisan operation has been criticized by Democrats and Republican election officials in Arizona for its lack of transparency and its failure to adhere to state election rules. Audit organizers also aren’t being shy about their long-term goals. “What will come out of this is the entire process for how you do this large of an audit will be written up,” Pullen said. “It will be a plan that someone else can take and use as the basis for doing something similar to this.”

The idea is already gaining traction among rogue Republicans in swing states. Three members of the Pennsylvania Senate toured Maricopa County’s election site Wednesday and told reporters they plan to launch a similar audit in their own state.  

In many ways, the audit can best be summarized by one word: “dominoes.” Arizona GOP leaders are hoping this Maricopa County audit will launch similar undertakings nationwide. “Arizona is the first domino that will fall, and then other states will look into irregularities, abnormalities, mistakes and potentially outright fraud that happened in their states as well,” state Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward said on Newsmax on May 1. 

Ward, who previously served in the Arizona Senate, has spent months cheering on the audit and stoking baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Dominion improperly influencing the November election.* On December 28, a lawyer for Dominion sent a cease-and desist letter regarding defamatory claims Ward has made about the company, and ordered her to preserve all documents that relate to the matter. (Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell are both facing $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits by Dominion.)

But Trump and his Arizona allies are undaunted. “Arizona Republican State Senators are engendering such tremendous respect, even adoration, for the great job they are doing on the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” the former president said in a statement on May 25. “Our Country is watching as early public reports are indicating a disaster, far greater than anyone had thought possible, for Arizona voters.”

Arizona state senators have made it clear that the former president and his closest allies are influencing the audit behind the scenes. “I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,” Fann wrote in an email to a constituent on December 28. (The message was obtained through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight.) “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”

They're still making life hell for Brad Raffensperger and his family:

Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”

A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”

That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”

Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.

Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.

In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.

The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.

“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”

In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.

“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.

And not just the Raffenspergers:

The intimidation in Georgia has gone well beyond Raffensperger and his family. Election workers - from local volunteers to senior administrators - continue enduring regular harassing phone calls and emails, according to interviews with election workers and the Reuters review of texts, emails and audio files provided by Georgia officials.

One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” The specific text of the threat has not been previously reported. The email, a state election official said, was forwarded to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declined to comment for this story.

It's a longstanding norm that presidents immediately preceding the current one don't weigh in on what is happening in the current administration, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. The Very Stable Genius has not one subatomic particle of regard for this convention:

Consider that Elise Stefanik recently replaced Liz Cheney as House Republican conference chair. We traded integrity, principles and a solid conservative voting record for this:

I'd thought that perhaps the Republican Party in my state (Indiana) was immune to this, but I see in an email I got today that the guest speaker at its spring dinner is going to be Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

There are still people I respect and to whose observations I give due consideration who insist that the GOP will remain the only other game in town along with the Democrats and that our nation's political system has weathered worse. I'm not seeing it. This is a 167-year-old party that has permitted its own ruination.

Conservatism is going to have to build something from the ground up. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post-America stares into the abyss

 

So the pipe bombs have been found and presumably dismantled. The gallows that had been hastily erected on Capitol grounds is likewise presumably gone by now. A fistfight between two Democrat House members and one Republican was averted on the floor of that chamber once Congress returned after the National Guard had secured the Capitol. Some of the idiot Republicans who'd intended to object to the Arizona and/or Pennsylvania Electoral College results had changes of heart after the, shall we say, interruption. 

But this wasn't a hiccup-type incident, after which basic order will once again prevail and the nation's citizens will turn their eyes to productive and unity-conducive activities. Lasting damage has been a feature of the post-American landscape for some time, but yesterday afternoon gave us a look at an entirely new level.

The head of the executive branch egged on his cult followers with a fiery speech harping yet again on the theme of a stolen election. He exhorted them to march up to Capitol Hill. His subsequent tweets - what a lame way for the chief executive of the world's most powerful nation to address what was going on  - finally culminated in a call for his slavish devotees to go home, but not before he, yet again, spoke of a stolen election. 

Did he anticipate that they would take their actions as far as they did? Do you really doubt it?

He was surely radiating glee at the thought of the Constitutional obligation of the legislative branch to count electoral votes being interrupted by force. 

It's being reported that Mike Pence is red-hot angry with Trump for his midday speech and his recent antics in general. That's good, Mike, you just stew in your anger for a while. Let it steer your thoughts back to May 2016, when you, while sitting in the governor's mansion in Indianapolis, made your Faustian bargain. Let it steer your thoughts back to that state dinner in Washington at which Marilyn Coats kept sending you looks intended to say, "How do you sleep at night being part of this?" You got it. It burned deep into your soul. But you stayed the course and now here you are.

It's a pickle, isn't it? We have two weeks to go. Not enough time for a Senate trial if impeachment is initiated. The 25th Amendment would surely ratchet up the ugliness. We now have proof that Trumpism can be as savage as Antifa-style leftism. 

But he does need to go, yet this morning. 

The damage done to the Capitol building's offices and hallways, doors and windows serves as a kind of metaphor for the damage done to our institutions and our national character by giving this charlatan the time of day.

I don't know if the Republican Party can be salvaged or not. It is encouraging to see some principled voices speaking out. But I do know that conservatism needs to squarely look at how so many of its adherents ever came to think that this unfit buffoon could somehow embody their hopes for the kind of nation they'd always envisioned.

I wish it did not have to go as far as it has for the colossal mistake of giving the time of day to Donald Trump to become apparent to most of us. 

But now we know. What shall we do?

The essence of Trumpism comes into yet sharper focus as the home stretch nears

The current election cycle is nearing its final phase. Both major parties have their presidential candidates. That's so locked in that it's not of much consequence that neither party will be able to hold anything approximating a normal convention this summer. 

Republicans are in quite a bind. Officially, the party has wholly given itself over to the Trump phenomenon, although internecine squabbles such as the House dustups surrounding Liz Cheney make clear that not everyone is on board. 

Still, the face that the party is obligated to present to the voting public at this late date is one of unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. Campaign material from pretty much any candidate for the national legislature or even state-level chambers is going to mention him prominently. 

This may keep the base, which is not going anywhere, fired up, but it makes for quite a self-inflicted problem more broadly, most recently evidenced by the fact that there are now no US Senate tossup races, and the Real Clear Politics average shows the Democrats getting 52 seats to the Republicans' 48. 

What's happening? For one thing, most of the country understands that while it doesn't much like the measures that have to be taken to address the coronavirus - masks, social distancing, pauses in state reopenings, quandaries over how or even if to reopen schools - they are necessary, given that neglect of them is shown to exacerbate its spread.

Most citizens admire the likes of Doctors Fauci and Birx and trust their expertise. They feel comfortable heeding such figures' admonitions. 

A recent pattern of Trumpists unabashedly expressing diametrically opposite takes on the matter of public-health expertise demonstrates a new level of tone-deafness for that movement. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group has made an eleventh-hour decision to "rework a segment" set to air on a cable show hosted by Eric Bolling (one of the long line of former Fox News personalities who had to leave that network over sexual-harassment scandals). The segment was going to suggest that Fauci has actually created the coronavirus. It was going to include an interview with Judy Mikovitz, who was prominently featured in the video "Plandemic" which went viral for a few hours last spring and then was abruptly and thoroughly discredited. 

Seems Bolling and Sinclair are now looking at how to come up with a more "balanced" approach to their subject.

Speaking of Fox, two of its biggest current stars are also peddling rank coronavirus-related conspiracy.

Tucker Carlson sees the recent tone of the nation's pandemic conversation as a nefarious Democrat plot:

Tucker Carlson said Thursday that coronavirus safety guidelines were really a plot to promote Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Donald Trump. (Watch the video above.)

In a rambling segment that attempted to build his kooky case for a conspiracy to make America so unhappy that it would back the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Fox News host called Democrats “radicals” who “will do anything for control.”

“Democrats understand that the unhappier Americans become, the more likely they are to win,” Carlson said on his show. “Unhappy people want change, it is not complicated. So every ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job. The more that people suffer, the greater Joe Biden’s advantage. Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore, to inflict as much pain as they can, and that’s what they are doing.”

He even called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert known for his level-headed guidance as a White House task force member, “capricious and transparently political.”

In a conversation with Eric Trump, Jesse Watters notes that Twitter has cracked down on several thousand accounts related to QAnon, and goes on to say, "Q can do some crazy stuff, with the Pizza[gate] stuff and the Wayfair stuff, but they've also uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and when it comes to the deep state." He and Eric then proceed to indulge in some whataboutism, mentioning that Antifa, Adam Schiff and JerryNadler have all posted some wild content on Twitter. Eric said that "some 22-year-old dweeb in Silicon Valley" holds the key to this year's presidential election.

The people mentioned above have been in the Very Stable Genius's thrall for some time, in some cases from the get-go.

We're still seeing saddening cases of figures who had resisted his power to recruit into the cult until more recently, such as Nikki Haley, who, even as recently as her stint as UN ambassador, was publicly parting ways with him.

She has now deemed wholesale sycophancy to be the advisable political course:

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

We know how much 

@realDonaldTrump

 wanted to have a blowout convention.Proud of the selfless leadership he has shown in cancelling the convention. He has a great story to tell on how he turned our economy & foreign policy around. We look forward to sharing it in the next 100 days!

Someone really needs to stage an intervention. 

There are some really old-school Republicans who are no longer politically active, but do not care to sully the party's legacy with what it has mutated into:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute formally asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop using the 40th president's name and image to raise money.

The request came in response to a fundraising appeal sent from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the RNC, offering two commemorative coins, one engraved with Reagan's image and the other with that of President Donald Trump to anyone who donates $45 or more for Trump's reelection. The email was "signed" by Trump.

Of course, it was a colossal mistake for the GOP to ever take Donald Trump seriously, much less let him bully the party into treating him differently from other candidates in 2016. The list of disappointments who went from resolute opposition to his phenomenon to opportunistic and craven hitching of their wagons to it is long indeed.

But such people are not stupid. That they are Kool-Aid-besotted is the only explanation I can see why they are conducting themselves as they are rather than running for the exits and plotting how they are going to maneuver through the disaster that awaits as this year concludes.