Tag Archives: Republican Party

Who’s On Your Side: A Simple Dichotomy?

Posted on by

The White House website has a new page devoted to last year’s very big infrastructure bill.

Untitled

It got Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post thinking about the Democratic Party’s “message”, a phrase that ideally would fit on a bumper sticker:

While Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and a highly impressive Supreme Court nominee afford Biden his first chance in months to break the bad news cycle and to project strength, he still lacks a big picture that ties it all together.

Biden faces several challenges: 1) He can’t do much about the biggest economic concern (inflation) which fairly or not voters blame on him; 2) Voters seem to have taken job growth and a return to post-covid normal for granted; 3) The GOP noise machine of constant conspiracies and baseless accusations effectively manipulates the mainstream media, which regurgitates GOP talking points; and 4) Voters forget how positively nutty the GOP has become and the degree to which its worst elements will predominate if it returns to the majority in one or both houses.

So what can Biden do? At its most basic, Democrats must convince voters they are on the side of regular Americans — making progress and solving real problems (e.g., jobs, covid). They need to remind voters that Democrats are on the right side of the middle class, democracy and law and order. Democrats must leave no doubt as to which party did a lot to clean up the mess left behind by the previous administration and which party understands the real problems left to work on (e.g., inflation, green energy, defending against international bullies).

Republicans? They are bullies and chaos creators (be it attacking the Capitol, letting the country default on the debt, setting up a litigation machine to sue teachers, undermining elections, threatening to take away kids whose parents give them medical care and inviting a truck blockade). Do voters really want to give power back to the crowd that defends violence (“legitimate political discourse”), lets their cult leader extort Ukraine, and goes to bat for big corporations (e.g., allowing them to escape paying taxes, protecting Big Pharma’s price gouging)?

Democrats need to get back to a fundamental message: When in power, they make government work for ordinary people and defend American values (democracy, opportunity, fairness, playing by the rules). They solve real problems. When Republicans are in power, they create division, conflict and chaos. They are not on your side. That’s it. A simple dichotomy.

Unquote.

The problem is that if there are voters out there who don’t already understand the difference between the two parties, they’re probably unreachable. If they bother to vote, they’ll make their choice one of two ways. If they see themselves as a Democrat or Republican, they’ll stick with the party that makes them feel comfortable. If they don’t have a particular political identity, they’ll vote for or against “change” (i.e. for or against the incumbent) depending on their mood that day. The irony is that if voters want meaningful change, they should elect more Democrats. In particular, more Democrats in the Senate would make roadblocks like Manchin and Sinema irrelevant. But since Democrats “control” both houses of Congress, many voters will mistakenly think electing more Republicans will bring about the kind of change they want.

The Pro-Russia, Anti-Ukraine Party

Posted on by

Some Republican lowlife actually said the unindicted co-conspirator who leads their cult was, unlike Biden, “tough on Russia”. (Shamelessness is their superpower). Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine reminds us of what happened on planet Earth:

On February 25, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Lee Smith published an essay in Tablet arguing that Ukraine had brought on its problems. Smith, a house stenographer for Representative Devin Nunes and the author of two pro-T____ books, unburdened himself of a long list of Ukrainian provocations. In 2014, Ukraine’s people rejected Vladimir Putin’s generous offer to remain a Russian dependency and voted out his handpicked presidential candidate. A few years later, Ukrainian Americans accused Russia of hacking Democratic emails and extorting Volodymyr Zelenskyy — the guilt for which, in Smith and Putin’s view, was shared by the country their parents had fled. These defiant actions “reinforced Putin’s view that, especially in partnership with the Democrats, Ukraine did not understand its true place in the world as a buffer state.” The invasion was a terrible shame, conceded Smith, but this is what happens when a country has the temerity to offend Putin and T____ and assert its independence.

Putin’s war with Ukraine is being fought to settle a single question: Does his neighboring state have the right to make its own democratic decisions or must it subsist as a Russian vassal?

President Biden’s marshaling of a strong and united European response has thrown into sharp relief the contrast with his predecessor’s “America First” bluster. But there is an even more fundamental contrast between Biden’s multilateralism and T____’s nationalism, one that goes beyond diplomatic skill to core ideology: Many corners of the American right, including D____ T____, agree with Putin’s position.

Putin views a democratic Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime for two very good reasons. First, Ukraine’s majority prefers economic integration with Europe rather than Russia. Second, all strongmen are mainly preoccupied with maintaining power, and the existence of prosperous democracy in a neighboring country is a dangerous counterexample.

Twenty years ago, there was no significant reservoir of opposition to Ukrainian independence and democracy. The burgeoning alliance between Russian nationalists and America Firsters was set in motion when Paul Manafort went to work for the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine in 2004. Manafort, once one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington, had begun a globetrotting career selling his services to dictators. His Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, was Putin’s main organ for maintaining control of his neighboring country.

Putin nurtured a cadre of pliant Ukrainian oligarchs and functionaries who served a devious double purpose. They would faithfully weaken Ukrainian democracy on his behalf, and then he could turn around to the outside world and hold up Ukraine’s corruption as a justification for why it should not be treated like a real country.

He paired this with a slowly escalating campaign of violence. Putin and his allies would violently intimidate their political opposition to prevent them from gaining control of Ukraine. In 2004, Putin’s agents poisoned Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western presidential candidate. (This occurred four years before the United States invited Ukraine to join NATO, a sequence that shows Russia’s threats against Ukraine drove its interest in joining the alliance, rather than the reverse, as Putin and his defenders have suggested.) Ten years later, Manafort’s client unleashed snipers and thugs to drive away peaceful protesters before a democratic revolution forced him to flee the country. After Russophiles lost control of Ukraine’s government, Putin started using militias to seize chunks of territory.

At the tail end of the Obama administration, both Democrats and Republicans supported democratization, westernization, and reform in Ukraine. When the Obama administration pressured Ukraine to fire ineffective prosecutor Viktor Shokin — a key step forward for advancing the rule of law in Ukraine — a bipartisan letter commended its efforts and did not draw any significant domestic opposition.

T____’s rise introduced to the Republican Party a figure who shared Putin’s perspective toward Ukraine and often echoed his propaganda. When Putin ginned up demonstrations in eastern Ukraine as a pretext to hive off chunks of land in 2014, T____ gushed, “So smart, when you see the riots in a country because they’re hurting the Russians, Okay, we’ll go and take it over … You have to give him a lot of credit.” After winning the nomination, T____ promised to consider recognizing Putin’s land seizure because “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”

T____ brought on Manafort to run his campaign, which further linked Ukraine’s conflict with Russia to the American domestic struggle. Ukrainians released a “black book” of evidence of secret payments by the previous, pro-Russian regime, which implicated Manafort in an embezzling scandal for which he was eventually convicted. After it hacked Democratic emails and released them to aid T____’s candidacy, Russia claimed it had been framed by Ukraine. T____ subsequently endorsed this theory. (“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” he told the Associated Press a few months after taking office. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”)

T____, of course, was impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to smear Biden, and his motive was primarily to gain an advantage over his opponent. But he also had clearly absorbed Putin’s idea that Ukraine was corrupt and undeserving of sovereignty. T____ regularly flummoxed his staff by insisting Ukraine was “horrible, corrupt people” and “wasn’t a ‘real country,’ that it had always been a part of Russia, and that it was ‘totally corrupt,’” the Washington Post reported. (The element of Russian propaganda here is not the claim that corruption exists in Ukraine, which is true, but the premise that this somehow destroys its claim to sovereignty or justifies subjugation to its far more corrupt neighbor.)

By the end of T____’s presidency, the distinction between his agenda in Ukraine and the Russian agenda in Ukraine was difficult to discern. In the aftermath of T____’s first impeachment, Rudy Giuliani inherited Manafort’s role as a liaison to the pro-Russian elements in Ukraine’s polity. In his travels through the country, Giuliani linked up with Party of Regions apparatchiks as well as known Russian intelligence agents, ginning up business proposals and allegations to fling against Biden. T____’s agents, Russian agents, and pro-Russian Ukrainian apparatchiks were speaking in almost indistinguishable terms.

That view of the world is expressed cogently, if chillingly, in Smith’s essay depicting Ukraine as a tool of the joint enemies of Putin and T____. And it has bled widely into the conservative mind. In the run-up to the 2020 election, numerous right-wing pundits warned darkly that American liberals were fomenting a “color revolution” akin to the pro-democratic uprisings that had broken out against several of Putin’s vassal states. Both their narrative and their diction depicted pro-democracy activists as a sinister cabal and Putin their innocent victim.

By the outset of Russia’s invasion, pro-Putinist rhetoric was common. “Ukraine, to be technical, is not a democracy,” asserted Tucker Carlson. “And by the way, Ukraine is a pure client state of the United States State Department.” To be sure, this view remained a minority on the right — and just as many of T____’s most fervent supporters recoiled at the January 6 insurrection, even many Putin defenders conceded a full-scale invasion went too far. Still, Putin’s claims against Ukraine have received endorsements from both the right’s most popular politician and its most popular media personality. That is not nothing.

It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration’s combination of sanctions, diplomacy, and military aid will be enough to save Ukraine from the predations of its neighboring dictator. The military odds remain favorable to Russia. But as Putin’s militarized irredentism grows larger on the world stage, an increasingly relevant consideration in American politics is the fact that only one American party truly disagrees with it.

Exxon, Chevron, Shell – They’re Not America’s Friends. Neither Are Republican Politicians.

Posted on by

Biden isn’t to blame for rising oil prices. Or gas prices: “Energy analysts say other factors — which predate the Biden administration — are responsible”. Charles Pierce of Esquire uses colorful language to say we should look elsewhere:

Since it seems that the elite political media is going to define everything except the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament through the price of gasoline—CNN should open a bureau at that one gas station that is clearly overcharging people . . .

When did the consensus among us common folk break down that the oil companies are a miserable flock of price-gouging harpies interested only in lining their own pockets, despoiling land and sea and contributing to the planet’s self-immolation? I mean, Deepwater Horizon wasn’t that long ago. . . .

So now, as Ukraine fights to remain an independent nation, and as the economic recovery from a worldwide pandemic rolls on largely unacknowledged by much of the elite political press, the oil company executives, who currently hold a plethora of oil leases, are shoveling the money they’re gouging out of the rest of us to their shareholders rather than plowing it into developing the leases they already own. From the New York Times:

In his broad Oklahoma twang and in language that will be heard repeatedly in the next few months, [former Democratic senator Fred Harris] . . .  said that Congress should “break up” the major oil companies, which he contends illegally control both production and marketing of petroleum products.

Where have you gone, Fred Harris? Your party turns its lonely eyes to you.

Unquote.

Some facts from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post:

A cynic is rarely disappointed by this Republican Party. Yet even by that standard, the current attempt to blame President Biden — and absolve Vladimir Putin — for the spike in gas prices is a special case. . . .

It’s not only that the charge is bogus — the current price of gas has virtually nothing to do with Biden’s energy policies — but that the Republican officials leveling it are sowing division at home and giving a rhetorical boost to the enemy at a perilous moment when national unity and sacrifice will be needed to prevail against Russia.

Announcing the ban on Tuesday, Biden said, accurately: “Since Putin began his military buildup on Ukrainian borders, just since then, the price of the gas at the pump in America went up 75 cents. And with this action, it’s going to go up further.” He dubbed it “Putin’s price hike” and said “Russia is responsible.”

Republicans leaped to Putin’s defense.

“These aren’t Putin prices. They’re President Biden’s prices,” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said on Wednesday. Via tweet, he claimed: “Gas prices started rising the day President Biden took office — when he canceled the Keystone Pipeline and halted new drilling on federal lands.”  

Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), head of the House Republican Conference, added: “Joe Biden blames Russia for skyrocketing gas prices. But make no mistake — Biden’s war on American energy is to blame.”

Scores of Republicans piled on. The GOP side of the House Energy and Commerce Committee tweeted: “Russia isn’t ‘responsible’. Biden’s shutdown of American energy is.”

That’s just a gusher of mendacity.

Gas prices “started rising the day President Biden took office”? Wrong. They’ve been on an upward trend since bottoming out in April 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. This is because of booming demand during the recovery — not because of Biden’s policies . . .

Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline caused gas prices to rise? Wrong. It was only 10 percent done when Biden canceled it, and its owners didn’t expect to open it until 2023 at the earliest.

Biden “halted new drilling on federal lands”? Wrong. After a temporary halt in new leases, Biden has outpaced Trump in new drilling permits for public lands, The Post reported.

As for Biden’s “shutdown of American energy,” U.S. production has increased under Biden from 9.7 million barrels a day to 11.6 million barrels. The number of oil rigs operating was at 172 in July 2020, E&E News reports. Now, 519 are in operation. U.S. production is forecast to set a record next year.

What’s holding back oil production isn’t government policy. U.S. producers still have 4,400 wells already approved and drilled that are not yet producing. They aren’t drilling more because of a shortage of workers and equipment and, particularly, [Big Oil]. As The Post reported, major U.S. oil companies say they would rather use their profits “to boost payouts to shareholders” than “rush to drill new wells.”

Blaming Biden for the spike in prices around Russia’s Ukraine invasion isn’t just false — it’s an assist to Putin . . .

[That’s not surprising]. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, after parroting Kremlin talking points justifying its invasion of Ukraine, has pivoted to blaming the United States for provoking Putin. “Why in the world would the United States intentionally seek war with Russia?” he asked on Monday night.

T____ himself has praised Putin’s acuity, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the United States to appease Russia by abandoning its support for Ukrainian membership in NATO, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) [supports impeaching] Biden for “threatening war” with Russia . . .

Unquote.

Meanwhile, the creepy intruder from Upside Down World speaks:

T____ says the U.S. should not have been buying Russian oil, but imports increased 39% during his four years, after dropping 22% over Obama’s two terms.

Unfortunately, He’s Right About the Right

Posted on by

There was a story yesterday about a Missouri “legislator” introducing a bill to punish anybody who took their child out of state for gender-related treatment. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post says it’s only going to get worse:

If you thought the abortion vigilante law Texas Republicans passed last year was the most appalling abuse of legislative power you’d ever seen, I have some bad news for you.

That law was a wake-up call, not to Democrats — who seem to have done almost nothing in response — but to Republicans across the country. It said to them, We don’t have to hold back anymore. We can do anything we want.

And that’s just what they’re doing.

We’re witnessing a new phase not only in the culture wars but in American politics generally. Republicans are arriving at a reimagined view of power, one without limit or restraint.

Consider Missouri, where a Republican state representative has proposed to take part of the Texas model — making abortion all but illegal by allowing anyone to sue those who help a woman get one — and taking it across state borders. Her bill would allow lawsuits targeting any Missouri resident who obtains an abortion in another state, so that if a woman who lives in St. Louis drove her daughter to Illinois to get a legal abortion there, anyone could sue her.

In effect, it would make it all but illegal for a woman who lives in Missouri to get an abortion anywhere in the country.

If that shocks you, just wait. In Idaho, the state House just passed a bill making it illegal to provide puberty blockers or other hormonal treatment to trans kids under the age of 18. The bill’s language says that not only physicians but “whoever knowingly gives permission for, or permits on a child” these treatments — i.e., parents — will be guilty of a felony and can be sentenced to life in prison.

Every Republican except one in the Idaho House voted for it.

Meanwhile, the state of Texas is already sending Child Protective Services to investigate families who provide loving support to their trans kids, a potential prelude to declaring the parents “child abusers,” and sending the kids off to foster care.

In state after state, bills that a few years ago might have died in committee because they were too extreme are now on their way to passage.

Republican legislatures are reaching into classrooms to ban the utterance of “divisive concepts” and books that conservative Republicans find unsettling. Florida just passed its “Don’t say gay” bill, targeted at teachers who mention sexuality or gender identity and once again using the threat of ruinous lawsuits against individuals to impose its will.

Something has changed, and it isn’t that a new wave of extremist Republicans got elected at the state level and pushed out their “reasonable” predecessors. That may be part of the story, but it didn’t all happen at once, like the Tea Party wave of 2010.

Instead, extreme Republicans have gotten elected to state legislatures over the course of the last few elections, and have worked their way up the ranks. You’re familiar with trolls in Congress like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) or Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), but there are dozens or even hundreds like them in state legislatures around the country.

Even Republicans who have been in office for many years are going along with this new radicalism. The extremists are working with their party’s leadership. Whether out of fear of being primaried or because they finally feel free to indulge their darkest fantasies, the longer-serving members seem nearly as enthusiastic about this new lack of restraint as anyone. And the bills have support from Republican governors who are hardly insurgents within their party.

A number of factors set the stage for the emergence of this new authoritarianism. The most obvious is T____’s takeover of the GOP, which took all the party’s worst attributes — its reliance on anger and resentment as mobilizing tools, its contempt for democratic norms, its loathing for Americans it disagrees with — and supercharged them.

Conservative media has also grown more radical; the most popular conservative media figure in the country is an anti-vaccine crusader whose show is a forum for race-baiting, conspiracy theories, and pro-Putin propaganda. That poison is spread to both Republican voters and officeholders, pushing them to be more extreme in their tactics and demands.

Then you have the way power is divided in America at the moment. Democrats control Washington, which creates a visible target for right-wing anger, while Republicans dominate at the state level, which gives them the ability to express that anger in legislation. It’s all enabled by gerrymandering and other means of eliminating democratic accountability that assure Republicans that nothing they do will threaten their hold on power.

Central to the enterprise is the idea that Democrats are the ones promoting an insane agenda, which serves as the justification for almost anything Republicans want to do. Since Democrats are so horrifying, say Republicans, no tactic is too immoral to utilize, no Republican candidate too dangerous to support, and no proposal too offensive to pass in opposing them.

It’s why former attorney general William Barr describes in detail how T____ tried to stage a coup against American democracy — then says that if T____ is the 2024 Republican nominee he’ll vote for him to combat the “threat” from the left. It’s why the hateful Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers can speak at white supremacist rallies and the state’s governor will respond to questions about her by saying “She’s still better than her opponent.”

And it’s why almost no Republican officeholders anywhere will speak out against their party’s authoritarian radicalism. The farther they push, the more they’re convinced they can get away with. It’s only going to get worse.

Unquote.

Meanwhile, one of Waldman’s colleagues “fact checks” Biden’s speech:

“Our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America.”

“The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than 1 trillion dollars in a single year.”
 

Both of these figures are misleading because of the context — the impact the once-in-a-century pandemic had on jobs and federal finances. Jobs plunged and deficits soared in 2020 when the coronavirus struck and shuttered the worldwide economy.

Thanks for reminding us.

Maybe We’ll Reach a Tipping Point

Posted on by

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court (three of whom were appointed by the worst president of modern times) decided that the Occupational Health and Safety Administration didn’t have the authority to impose a vaccine/testing mandate on employees at large companies because people who don’t work at large companies also get Covid-19. (People also die from carbon monoxide poisoning when they’re not at work, so OSHA probably shouldn’t protect employees from that either).

Later, the Supreme Court majority let stand a law in Texas that gives anybody in the state the right to sue someone who receives or administers an abortion after the woman has been pregnant for six weeks, contrary to previous Supreme Court decisions. Other states with Republican legislatures immediately began enacting similar laws. There’s now a strong possibility that the Republican majority will overturn the Roe v. Wade decision this year, allowing states to make abortion illegal again.

A three-judge appeals court ruled that Georgia’s new congressional map was a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act. Two of the judges who said the map was illegal were Republicans appointed by the same worst president, yet the Supreme Court majority allowed the map to stay in effect through the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a mob of truck drivers decided to block the streets of the nation’s capital, causing the city’s mayor to declare an emergency. Another group, for the most part not driving big trucks, decided to block bridges between Canada and the US, disrupting trade and travel in both countries, in particular, the delivery of goods by both Canadian and American truck drivers. Yet right-wing figures in the US are supporting the Canadian blockades and discussing similar actions in the US.

If the Supreme Court majority overturns Roe v. Wade, if trade and travel are further disrupted by right-wing agitators, maybe there will be a tipping point. A majority of voters will understand that Republican politicians do not have their interests in mind and will vote accordingly.

(I forgot to mention the movement among right-wingers across the country to ban certain books and to eliminate history lessons that make white kids “uncomfortable”. It’s another example of Republicans going too far.)