Tag Archives: Rank Stupidity

Shooting Down One Argument

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A Democratic congressman from Massachusetts offered this argument against impeachment hearings:

It would be disastrous — and Speaker Pelosi has hit on this — if we proceed with impeachment and we fail in the Senate just as people are going to the polls. That will be a vindication of Trump and it will help him in the final election,” Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said.

Rep. Lynch apparently thinks the televised presentation of loads of evidence for impeachment, and the news coverage that will generate, won’t do much. He must think we won’t come to a decision about the president’s unfitness all on our own. Instead, we’ll wait to see the results of a trial in the Senate, as if we believe the senators will all act like disinterested jurors making a reasonable, impartial decision. Perhaps Rep. Lynch doesn’t remember the O. J. Simpson trial. It received massive publicity and convinced most of America that Simpson was guilty, despite the jury, which wasn’t even made up of politicians, acquitting him. And who knows, a majority of senators might actually do the right thing and vote for his removal (even though the required two-thirds of them probably won’t).

Adam Jentleson, who used to work for Senator Harry Reid, gave an expert’s response to Rep. Lynch:

This answer from [Rep. Lynch] contains multitudes of learned helplessness and miscalculation.

First, on what planet is it bad for [Republican senator] Susan Collins to vote to protect an impeached [DT] right before the election? Remember, [the nomination of] Kavanaugh [to the Supreme Court] was a much bigger driver for Democrats than Republicans in 2018.

The idea that Trump will be “exonerated” in the public eye by a Senate vote to keep him in office reflects a massive degree of learned helplessness. Democrats have a huge stack of evidence and bipartisan voices attesting to his crimes. If we can’t win that argument, we should hang it up.

There’s a lot of angst about how Senate Republicans still evade accountability for being Trump lackeys. But you counldn’t invent a better way to tie every single Senate Republican to Trump than having them vote to let him off the hook for high crimes. This isn’t brain surgery!

Imagine [senators] Collins or Gardner on camera, being pressed on which of Trump’s many crimes they think should be permissible for a president.

It’s not a good thing to have to explain why you are letting a criminal off the hook. Again, if we can’t win that debate, we should hang it up.

And yes, Collins and Gardner will almost certainly vote to protect Trump. If they don’t, their base will abandon them overnight. In 2018, Dean Heller never recovered from mildly criticizing Trump over health care. Ditto Joe Heck in 2016 over the Access Hollywood tapes.

Meanwhile, we’ll have a presidential nominee. Ask yourself: if you ran for president, would you like your opponent to be on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors? If you answered yes, the good news is, you’re right! The bad news is you’re now disqualified from being a Democratic consultant.

What this boils down to is that people like [Rep. Lynch] are engaged in an exercise of unparalleled groupthink. It’s stunning to witness intelligent people convince themselves that *actually* it is good for a president to get impeached. It’s really quite something.

The group thinkers have also convinced themselves that the pro-impeachment side hasn’t thought through the endgame, when in reality it’s the reverse.

There is no endgame for non-impeachment. It will be a year of Democrats looking like deer in the headlights trying to explain why [DT] did impeachable crimes, but doesn’t deserve to be impeached. Everyone knows Democrats think he should be impeached. They look ridiculous trying to punt.

The endgame for impeachment is impeachment, then a Senate trial where Democrats can win the debate if and when the Senate votes to protect Trump. Then we run in 2020 on the validated idea that the ballot is the only way to remove him, against Senate Republicans who fell in line to protect him.

As the man said, this isn’t brain surgery.

Selected Comments on Evil and Rank Stupidity

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As the worst people in America continue to run most of the federal government, here are a few choice comments from the Twitterverse.

First, from Michael Cohen, columnist for The Boston Globe:

A lot of crazy things have happened over the past 2.5 years … but that so many people are simply accepting the conclusions of the Mueller report based on the word of an attorney general who wrote an unsolicited 19 page memo bashing Mueller’s probe might be the craziest.

The idea that any of us would take the word of Barr about the conclusions of Mueller’s report at face value, without seeing the underlying evidence, is practically surreal.

And don’t get me started on media criticisms: have we all just collectively forgotten that more than a dozen Trump campaign aides met with Russian officials and virtually all of them lied about it? Or that Trump repeatedly & flagrantly tried to interfere w/the investigation?

Were journalists simply supposed to ignore that? Were they supposed to ignore the fact that Trump’s son, campaign manager and son-in-law met with Russian officials promising dirt on Hillary Clinton (and lied about it) as if this wasn’t evidence of attempted collusion?

Do we all have collective amnesia over the president taking the word of Putin, repeatedly, over US Intel agencies on the question of Russian interference in the election?

Let’s be clear: none of know what Mueller found. None of us have seen the evidence. Until we do none of us know anything.

Next, from Will Wilkinson, Vice President of Research at the Niskanen Center:

The crescendo of furious gaslighting following Barr’s propaganda summary suggests a plan was place to exploit the gap between the submission of the report and public revelation of what’s in it to delegitimize Mueller’s actual findings and the ongoing investigations.

Trump’s “one weird trick” is the shameless public delegitimization of anyone aligned against his interests.

Our idiot media still isn’t capable of understanding how to not be co-opted by Trump’s reality-bending propaganda machine, and continues to get played like a burgled Stradivarius.

Barr’s cover-up gambit means Mueller will certainly be called to testify under oath in the House.

That’s why we’re getting the full-on blitz to mischaracterize his findings: to lock the media and public into a favorable narrative nowhere in evidence, before he actually speaks.

The media’s atrocious gullibility, which is letting this happen without serious resistance, is even more scandalous than the credulity that herded public opinion behind the invasion of Iraq. Because we already *know* this administration does nothing but lie.

The Trump machine is making a lot of political hay with necessary legal distinctions. Barr says Mueller didn’t establish conspiracy or coordination between the campaign & “the Russian government,” which doesn’t imply there wasn’t plenty with Russians hard to pin as agents of Putin.

Barr says Mueller supplies evidence of obstruction, then uses the fact that he doesn’t establish conspiracy to a certain legal standard (which doesn’t at all rule it out, in fact) to argue in a shady way that there was nothing to obstruct, so he let’s Trump off scot-free.

Trump has gone to pains to confuse people into accepting that the legitimacy of congressional oversight depends on a prior, narrow legal finding of criminality, which it has done everything it can to prevent. 

Trump’s hand-picked AG (confirmed by a lapdog Senate, with a record of shielding presidents from scandal) telling us what the report says & sitting on it doesn’t settle anything. But spinning it like it does to prevent congressional oversight tell us a lot. This is far from over.

From Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University:

This week is starting to remind me of the 2000 presidential election. This is what I was thinking.

Republicans declare victory before the results are actually in.

Republicans count on the national media to quickly repeat their conclusion. Pack journalism gets to work.

When serious concerns emerge about the results, Republicans stand by the initial declaration of victory.

Meanwhile, charge that Democrats are being “sore losers” by asking legitimate questions about what is going on.

The GOP then tries to force an ending to the controversy by running out the clock.

After the Supreme Court stops the Florida recount in December 2000, Republicans act like there is a clear mandate and national consensus about the results. Never look back.

From Ryan Cooper, National Correspondent for The Week:

The discourse around this report has revolved far too much around who gets to gloat about making correct predictions, and whether the media exaggerated this or that, which risks letting the content of the report get lost in the noise. Better by far to focus on the actual facts at hand, which are not at all favorable for Trump.

Contrary to many blaring news headlines, the quoted sentence of the report does not say there was no evidence of coordination, but that it “did not establish” it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the lawyer saying goes.

The Trump administration’s approach here — carried out in concert with Attorney General Barr — is pretty clearly to try to muddy the waters around the Mueller findings to make it appear as though Trump is completely free of sin.

In reality, just what is publicly known about the Mueller investigation is incredibly damning. A foreign government interfered with a U.S. election, the Republican candidate embraced it, and the rest of the party leadership connived to prevent bipartisan action to stop it.

Seven Trump or Republican associates, including Trump’s campaign manager, national security adviser, and personal lawyer, have been convicted of various felonies in the biggest white-collar crime investigation in years, and another is on trial.

Finally, from Michelle Goldberg, columnist for The New York Times:

The media’s biggest failure in Russiagate is letting Trump get away with pretending to be exonerated by a four-page letter from Trump’s own AG that quotes Mueller saying his report “does not exonerate him.”

Add the Evil to the Rank Stupidity and It’s Even Worse

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Where to begin?

From NPR: In a significant shift, the Trump administration says the entirety of the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in the courts. Previously, the administration had pushed to remove the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions but had not argued in court that the whole law should be struck down.

The change was announced in a two-sentence letter from the Department of Justice to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that the ruling made in December by a district court judge in Texas “should be affirmed.” In that case, District Judge Reed O’Connor declared the ACA unconstitutional. He ruled that a 2017 change in federal tax law eliminating the penalty on uninsured people invalidated the entire health care law.

From The Washington Post: At the Casa Ismael clinic for HIV-positive men with severe health complications, the staff used to immediately change patients’ diapers after they were soiled. But last week, [the] clinic administrator … told the nurses that had to stop. To save money, the nonprofit clinic, which relies on its patients’ food-stamp money for funding, will ask patients to sit in diapers in which they have repeatedly urinated, sometimes for hours.

The Casa Ismael clinic is short on funds in part because of cuts in food stamps that hit about 1.3 million residents of Puerto Rico this month — a new crisis for an island still struggling from the effects of Hurricane Maria in September 2017….

A senior administration official with direct knowledge … described Trump’s stance: “He doesn’t want another single dollar going to the island.”

Meanwhile, the nonsense continues:

From columnist Greg Sargent: Have we really learned nothing from the first two years of the Trump presidency?

Welcome to the new narrative: President Trump and Republicans are “turning the tables” and going “on offense” against Democrats and the media, who, we are told, should be groveling for forgiveness in the wake of Attorney General William P. Barr’s brief summary of the special counsel’s Russiagate conclusions.

Unfortunately, there are scattered signs that some in those quarters are taking this far too seriously. We’re seeing news accounts suggesting media coverage of the Russia scandal may have overreached; columnists demanding introspection from journalistic colleagues; and analyses that overestimate the degree to which Trump can now claim victory over Democrats. Some accounts hintat angst among Democrats about how aggressive an investigative posture to strike going forward.

It’s amazing this needs to be stated, but here goes. This “new offensive” from Trump and Republicans is saturated with nonsense from top to bottom, and it is designed to get the media to back off of its entirely legitimate scrutiny of Trump, and to get Democrats to retreat from their entirely legitimate efforts to impose oversight and accountability.

Trump has spent the past two years screaming “WITCH HUNT!” and “FAKE NEWS!,” even as he and his congressional allies have absurdly cast the investigations as corrupt based on one fake “scandal” after another. Throughout all this, what’s actually happened is that one revelation after another has emerged detailing startling criminality among those in Trump’s inner circle and extraordinary corruption and abuses of power by Trump himself.

Much of the current discussion and journalistic handwringing has the effect of badly downplaying the significance of what has emerged in the past two years, and the potential for more damaging information to emerge. And it doesn’t adequately reckon with the rot of bad faith at the core of what’s driving this new “turn the tables” offensive — an effort to chill continued efforts to unearth that information, through legitimate scrutiny and oversight. We know this, because we’ve seen it for two years.

Remember: All we know about the Special Counsel’s report is what the president’s hand-picked Attorney General has said about it. Presumably, it’s true that the Special Counsel didn’t exonerate the president regarding obstruction of justice. Otherwise, the Attorney General’s letter would have said it did. Presumably, it’s true that the Special Counsel didn’t find enough evidence to say the president was part of a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government. We need to see the Mueller report now.

But we already know there was collusion between the campaign, various Russians and Wikileaks. That’s because, despite what the president and his defenders would like us to believe, “collusion” means “secret agreement or cooperation, especially for a DECEITFUL OR ILLEGAL purpose”. As the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says, the evidence for collusion (and obstruction of justice) is “in plain sight”:

“There [is] a big difference between whether there was evidence of collusion — and I think that evidence is in plain sight — and whether you can establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a criminal conspiracy,” he told CNN.

Schiff also questioned whether Attorney General William Barr would be able to come to an unbiased conclusion about special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings.

“You have [an] attorney general who applied for the job by talking down any potential obstruction conviction or indictment who then went to a Senate confirmation and refused to recuse himself,” Schiff said. “He has now done the job he applied for, which is attempt to exonerate Mr. Trump. That ought to deeply concern people.”

Asked Schiff tonight if he would drop his probe after Mueller didn’t find a Trump-Russia conspiracy, and he said: “Our investigation has always focused on counterintelligence issues, that is, is the president or anyone around him compromised in some way. That work has to go on.”

Of course it does, and it will, despite the president’s absurd claim that he’s won a race that isn’t over.

Sometimes the Rank Stupidity Gets You Down

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This is one of those times. Special Counsel Robert Mueller gives the results of his two-year investigation to the new Attorney General William Barr. Two days later, Barr issues a four-page letter that is supposed to summarize Mueller’s findings.

The letter mentions that Mueller found a significant amount of criminal activity and referred several items to other officials for further investigation, but gives the impression that the president himself didn’t do anything wrong. The president and his supporters declare total victory. No collusion after all! Millions absorb the headlines. Media figures blame their colleagues for giving Mueller’s investigation too much attention, for misleading the public, for being too tough on the president.

But it’s bullshit.

First, consider who wrote the letter and who concluded that Mueller didn’t find enough evidence of obstruction of justice. William Barr is a Republican lawyer who delivered an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department and the president’s lawyers in June, in which he argued that Mueller’s inquiry into obstruction of justice was “fatally misconceived”. Barr claimed that, given the nature of their authority, it’s extremely difficult for presidents to obstruct justice. He saw no reason to conclude that our current president committed a crime, even though the president tried in various ways to limit investigations into his own activities by, for example, firing the head of the F.B.I. Lo and behold, six months after Barr issues his memo, the president selects Barr to be his new Attorney General (after firing the previous Attorney General because he wasn’t sufficiently loyal).

Barr’s letter says another Republican official, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, agreed that Mueller’s evidence was insufficient. But last May, Rosenstein wrote a memo that purported to explain why the president fired the head of the F.B.I. He claimed James Comey’s dismissal had nothing to do with the Mueller investigation, even though the president admitted on national television that Comey was fired because of “this Russia thing”. Rosenstein now concludes that no obstruction of justice occurred, even though he played a questionable role in the president’s behavior that’s at issue.

Now consider the Barr letter itself. It helps a lot to pay close attention to the actual wording of a document like this, even though nuance doesn’t easily translate into headlines. My first impression was that Barr was making this argument. (1) Mueller didn’t find evidence that the President was part of a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government. (2) The president cannot be accused of interfering with an investigation if the investigation fails to find sufficient evidence of an actual crime. (3) Since we are not accusing the president of criminal conspiracy, we can’t accuse him of obstructing the investigation to see if said conspiracy occurred.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds fishy to me. But who knows? They say the law is an ass.

So it was good to see similar reactions to Barr’s letter. William Saletan offers a close reading of the letter at Slate. His article is called “Bill Barr’s Weasel Words”. Everyone who is interested in this fiasco should read his article. He highlights ten instances in which Barr’s language is suspicious or simply misleading. This may be the most important, since it underlies everything else:

“The Russian government.” … Mueller says his investigation didn’t prove that members of the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The sentence specifies Russia’s government. It says nothing about coordination with other Russians. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate who has been linked to Russian intelligence. Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met secretly in Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected lawyer. But neither Kilimnik nor Veselnitskaya is part of the Russian government….

(There were more than 100 meetings between campaign officials and various Russians. Everyone in the campaign, including the president, pretended that none of these meetings occurred.)

Saletan’s main conclusion is that the letter doesn’t show the president to be innocent. Instead, it shows that Attorney General Barr defined criminal behavior in such a way that it didn’t apply to what the president did.

Another article worth reading was written by Neal Katyal, a law professor who drafted the special counsel regulations under which Robert Mueller was appointed. His article is called “The Many Problems with the Barr Letter”. Here’s how it begins:

On Sunday afternoon, soon after Attorney General Bill Barr released a letter outlining the Mueller investigation report, President Trump tweeted “Total EXONERATION!” But there are any number of reasons the president should not be taking a victory lap.

First, obviously, he still faces the New York investigations into campaign finance violations by the Trump team and the various investigations into the Trump organization. And Mr. Barr, in his letter, acknowledges that the Mueller report “does not exonerate” Mr. Trump on the issue of obstruction, even if it does not recommend an indictment.

But the critical part of the letter is that it now creates a whole new mess. After laying out the scope of the investigation and noting that Mr. Mueller’s report does not offer any legal recommendations, Mr. Barr declares that it therefore “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” He then concludes the president did not obstruct justice when he fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey.

Such a conclusion would be momentous in any event. But to do so within 48 hours of receiving the report (which pointedly did not reach that conclusion) should be deeply concerning to every American.

The special counsel regulations were written to provide the public with confidence that justice was done. It is impossible for the public to reach that determination without knowing two things. First, what did the Mueller report conclude, and what was the evidence on obstruction of justice? And second, how could Mr. Barr have reached his conclusion so quickly?

Mr. Barr’s letter raises far more questions than it answers, both on the facts and the law.

As headline writers suggest that everything is rosy in Trump World, and the president pretends he’s been the victim all along, we need to keep in mind that we haven’t seen the actual Mueller report, we haven’t heard Barr and Mueller testify before Congress, and we don’t know how the many other investigations into the president’s activities and associates will turn out. It is way too soon for anyone to hold a parade in the president’s honor. This isn’t the end, it’s just the end of the beginning.