And Another One Bites the Dust

Allegations of sexual abuse are reaching pandemic proportions. Now it's a senior White House official who's resigning under pressure:

A senior White House official said Wednesday that he would resign after his two ex-wives accused him of physical and emotional abuse, with one presenting pictures of her blackened eye.

The official, Rob Porter, served as the staff secretary, a title that belies the role’s importance in any White House — but especially in President Trump’s. Porter functioned as Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s top enforcer in their shared mission to instill discipline and order in what had become an extraordinarily chaotic West Wing. He was the gatekeeper to the Oval Office, determining which articles and policy proposals reached the president’s hands and screening the briefing materials that his visitors shared with him.

I have to take exception to the rush to judgment so prevalent in all of these cases. Not that I'm about to start calling the accusers liars, but it's become a pattern: Woman (or in some cases, man) accuses High-Profile Person of abuse, High-Profile Person is immediately ostracized and/or forced to resign and/or resigns because of the negative publicity.

Sorry, but I'm very much an evidence-based thinker. I'd like to see some proof -- documentary evidence (photos, etc.), corroboration by witnesses/friends who knew at the time what was going on -- before I decide that High-Profile Person really is the scum of the earth and join the calls of "Off with his head!"

In this case there does seem to be corroboration, but that hasn't always happened. I guess it's a matter of not only something that has been swept under the rug for too long finally coming to light, but that we've also been conditioned to jump to conclusions (Fox News, anyone? Or the rest of the media, for that matter).

Via Balloon Juice.

Another Must-Read: But Who Gets To Be King?

Tom Sullivan, at Hullabaloo, with a summation of the urge toward -- not totalitarianism, exactly: he's casting it in terms of aristocracy:

There has always been a muted desire among some of our neighbors, as there was during the American Revolution, for rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Holding onto our republic against that impulse has always been problematic, as Benjamin Franklin hinted it would be. A yearning for a return to the old ways never seems far from the surface. It has seemed a little bit closer lately.

I've written repeatedly of my theory that members of the fringe right, alt-right or whatever are simply acting out a traditional murder ballad with their country. Facing demographic and economic changes that threaten to upend the traditional political and cultural dominance of white Christians in America, extremists among them are pursuing the slow murder of their lover because if they can't have her, nobody can. Donald Trump is their hands around her throat. Those hands (insert your own joke here) got tighter last week at the G20 meeting.

But that frame applies more to the middle and working classes. For moneyed interests, what's happening could be the denouement of a decades-old effort to roll back the New Deal and Civil Rights era projects that strengthened and broadened the middle class, flattened American society, and brought the country closer to (although still far from) the ideal of a society in which all its citizens are not just created equal, but treated that way. For the Caledon Hockleys who see themselves as society's better or at least more productive half — 53 percent is surely not exclusive enough — that was never their ideal.

No matter what form it takes -- oligarchy, dictatorship, de facto monarchy -- this is the end goal of the ruling elite.

Again, a pretty thorough piece, and pretty sobering.

The "Press Conference", Part II

Digby highlights some deadly accurate comments from Deadspin:

Ethical guidelines exist for a reason. Norms exist for a reason.

The reason is not “Jerks who think they’re smarter than us trying to control our lives from on high.” The reason is that human history is long, and all of the mistakes that could possibly be made have been made, and at a certain point people figured out that following some common sense rules could prevent us from making the same dire mistakes over and over again. Mistakes that come from human nature. Mistakes like: allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to make money for themselves, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to squelch legitimate dissent, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to flout the very ethical guidelines and norms that prior people in powerful positions established to keep people in powerful positions in check.

Read the whole thing. And then go on to this open letter from a Russian reporter, Alexey Kovalev, to his American colleagues:

“Congratulations, US media!” Kovalev wrote at Medium.com. “You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear.”

“We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now  — with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader  — so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang my bells. Not just mine, in fact  — read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times,” he went on.

Putin’s press conferences, Kovalev said, are annual media spectacles at which “Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s circus-like press conference on Wednesday, he said, showed that the former reality TV star is “apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook.”

I'd be more sanguine about this if it weren't for the for the fact that the American media have spent a few decades rolling over for those in power -- if they're on the right.

Maybe our "journalists" will finally wake up?

A Thought (Updated, and Again)

(A Note: I may be adding links to this as the day goes on, when I find stories that illustrate some of my points.)

This spins off of a comment I left at this post at AmericaBlog, which concerns itself with how James Comey -- working against DoJ and FBI policy and quite possibly in violation of the Hatch Act -- announced "new evidence" in FBI's investigation of Clinton's State Department e-mails and how the FBI is building on it that leak. Aravosis has done a Facebook Live session on it in which he's done a good job of pulling together all threads of the various FBI leaks over the past week and going back to Comey's press conference in July when he announced the results of the e-mail investigation (which itself caused some raised eyebrows, especially considering how he went out of his way to indict Clinton without being able to call for an indictment). You'll have to watch that at the post, since I can't embed Facebook videos. You can skip the first couple of minutes, when he's fiddling with the camera, but it is worth watching.

Here's the comment that sparked my larger thought, and my response:

crazymonkeylady • 5 hours ago

Even if Donald Trump Doesn't win, he has scarred elections for years. And Comey has undermined the trust we have in the FBI for the future. Who do we have left to trust? Nobody.

rmthunter -- crazymonkeylady • 37 minutes ago

This is just another step in what I see as the Republicans' long-term effort to undermine the American system -- shutting down the government when they don't get a budget that guts the safety net, questioning the integrity of the courts when there's a decision they don't like, refusing to fill a Supreme Court vacancy until they can make it a blatant political appointment, using their power of "government oversight" to instigate political witch-hunts against their opponents, and now undermining our trust in not only our electoral system, over and above voter suppression, but also in our federal law enforcement agencies.

After all, a healthy democracy and an oligarchy are pretty much mutually exclusive.

Think back to the Clinton years and the investigations that led to his impeachment. Can you say "fishing expedition"? And shutting down the government when the Republican budget -- no deficit, no revenues -- failed to pass. (That bit them in the ass, happily.) Stonewalling Obama on everything -- it's a good thing the ACA passed when it did, and a good thing the Democrats in Congress took the reins on DADT repeal. Fast forward to the "investigations" of Benghazi!!1! (ten so far?) and E-Mails!!! (which some Republican senator, I've forgotten which one, was dumb enough to admit was purely political against Hillary Clinton).

And how about the reaction to Obergefell? And now, refusing to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Not stalling, not holding interminable hearings, just flat-out refusing until a Republican president can make the appointment. We don't even have the pretense of compromise any more.

I don't think this is random. The pattern is too clear, and while I don't think it's the result of any grand strategy (sorry, I don't do tinfoil hats, and the Republicans aren't that together), it's the inevitable playing out of a trend, with each new player ready and more than willing to build on what's gone before. The Republicans' goal is quite clear, and they've been quite open about it: a permanent majority, by whatever means necessary. (They can't do it by honest elections, because what policies they do have most Americans find distressing, at best. In spite of what the press has been telling us, the only way we've moved to the right in this country is by measure of which wingnuts get elected, and that, more often than not, is not the result of honest elections -- not after all the gerrymandering and voter ID laws and dangling chads.)

I'm a great believer in the processes of history, which itself is a series of reactions. I think right now we're seeing the tail end of the reaction to the liberalism of the 1960s and early '70s -- conservatism has gotten too radical for most Americans to tolerate, and the advent of Trump - and something like Trump was inevitable -- painting the picture in somewhat garish colors is starting to turn people off. My basic optimism says the pendulum will start to swing back.

But, a thought experiment: Way back, when Bill Clinton right after assuming office took the first steps toward open military service for gays and lesbians, the reaction was swift and violent. What you don't hear about these days is that it was a group of generals who went flying to Congressional Republicans to put a stop to it. Now, given that it's at least as likely that there is a group of mid-level officers at the Pentagon who are as unhappy with the left as that group of disgruntled agents at the FBI, transpose that little rebellion to the armed forces.

If that doesn't set you tossing and turning in your sleep, nothing will.

Footnote: When I said "By any means necessary" I meant it. Check out this from Joe.My.God. and think who has the Russian connections.


Update: Just ran across this from the Guardian, which throws some light on the chaos at the FBI:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

Add this Update, from Rachel Maddow:

This week, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that there has been, I guess you’d call it, like, a breakout? There’s been a breakout from this otherwise insular little Breitbart.com corner of conservative media and political activism.

Those two papers reported that apparently there are Breitbart.com fans, there are Breitbart.com true believers, there are people who buy this stuff who are working inside the New York field office of the FBI.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were first to report that the New York field office of the FBI used that anti-Hillary Clinton book, and the DVD of the same name, from the Breitbart.com guys, from the Breitbart.com editor and his boss who’s now the head of the Donald Trump campaign, the one funded by Donald Trump’s biggest donor, right? They actually used that Breitbart.com, anti-Hillary Clinton book as their source for launching a local FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton. That was their evidence. That was their research.

And let's not forget this (via Joe.My.God.):

There is no denying that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has become one of the most significant surrogates of this campaign cycle.

Mr. Mayor has been going to bat for his longtime pal Donald Trump in just about every conceivable media arena, and recently seemed to slip in a bit of surprising information to Martha MacCallum of Fox News. At the conclusion of an interview on October 26 about the presidential election, Giuliani (while speaking about FBI Director Jim Comey) said, “I think he’s got a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next two days. I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” When MacCallum prompted the Mayor for follow-up, he coyly continued, “You’ll see.”

Don Lemon reported it on his show. Video at the link.

Maybe I'd better rethink this whole "no grand conspiracy" thing.

Brothers in Arms

There are dots to connect here. First, this post from Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog, on the rich and the way they see the world, based on this piece by Chris Hedges. Hedges writes:

“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.

See also this piece by digby.

My own experience is somewhat different, but not very. At one point I worked at an art museum as the executive secretary to the director, which meant working closely with the board. I raised eyebrows and caused comment all over the institution early on in my tenure because I dared to argue with the president of the board, who in retrospect, fits fairly neatly within the paradigm described by Hedges -- and this was one of Chicago's "lakefront liberals." For most of my tenure there, however, I worked with his successor, a woman of great charm and intelligence to took me into the fold, so to speak -- she learned to value my judgment and intelligence (and my political acumen), and when I followed her to another job, I had great input into policy and had the day-do-day operations left entirely in my hands. But there was always an underlying attitude that came out when she started talking about people's social standing -- including mine: I just wasn't in her class.

It didn't help matters that I simply refused to recognize the "superiority" of the people I was dealing with. It wasn't rebellion -- it just never occurred to me that they were superior, except that they had more money. They didn't share that opinion.

Now, some connecting, with this piece by Rob Tisinai at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Thomas Peters, NOM’s communications director, shows us the limits of empathy.

Peters suffered a diving accident that left him with a fractured fifth vertebrae, a severe spinal cord injury, and doubtful prospects for recovery. Fortunately, it seems, he’s doing better than most with this kind of injury, though he still may never walk and has limited use of his upper body. Recently, on NOM’s website, he posted “Reflections on my Time Away.”

. . .

The accident has taught me more about the incredible gift of marriage. My father, during his speech at my wedding reception, said the sacrament of marriage gives us the grace to do the impossible. I have met people during these months who think it is incredible, even impossible, that my wife and I survived a trauma like this having been married only three months. I tell them it helps to marry the right woman and get married the right way, the way the Church taught the two of us what marriage is and why it should be honored. People have told us that they are inspired and receive hope from the witness of our marriage – it inspires us too, I respond! We feel it is possible to face anything, even a future of me paralyzed, so long as we cling to each other, to God, and to our marriage vows.

I think the connection is somewhere in the comment I left at Tisinai's post, to the effect that ideology trumps humanity: Peters is not capable of independent thought and has to rely on what the Church has told him to think, especially, in this case, about marriage and gay people. (In my comment I noted that, in my opinion, it's a morally and intellectually stunted outlook.)

It comes down to the Other -- for the rich, everyone else is the Other, to be kept in their place; for Peters and his cohorts, those who don't follow their ideology, and especially LGBTs, are the Other, to be fought at every turn -- and to be kept in their place, preferably out of sight and, consequently, out of mind.

There's an element of pathology in both, and I suspect it's the same, or a very similar, pathology: lack of ability to connect with others, lack of empathy, and consequently, a lack of social consciousness. In some cases, I hesitate to go so far as to call it sociopathy, but it's at least the seeds of it: it's an outlook that is totally self-referential and self-absorbed. (By way of illustration, I'm reminded of the story about one of NOM's interns who went to a rally of some sort or other and was "saddened" by the preponderance of marriage equality demonstrators and the relative paucity of the "pro-marriage" contingent. Her reaction was that allowing same-sex marriage "diminished" her relationship with God, and "demeaned" her own -- future, and therefore hypothetical -- marriage vows. So it was all about her, and not about the people -- not really people, mind you, but abstractions -- whose rights, and whose essential humanity, she was working to deny.)

And also common to both the anti-marriage activists, as exemplified by Peters, and the rich is the element of control: they must be the ones controlling others.

The sobering part is that the rich are succeeding. The NOMbots, happily, not so much.

Threats

Have you noticed that the concept of "the majority rules," which the right is so fond of when it comes to stripping marriage rights from gays, doesn't apply when it's a matter of getting something they want -- or stopping something they don't want -- in the legislative process? I'm thinking of the Stupak amendment, in particular, but also the Catholic hierarchy's threats in D.C. over the marriage bill there. Granted, the shenanigans in Congress are open to other interpretations, but it's the area where horse-trading turns into open threats: if you don't allow our measure, which upsets established public policy, establishes our personal religious beliefs as the law of the land, and essentially abrogates women's right to personal autonomy, then we'll defeat a bill that stands to benefit millions of people. It's more blatant in the Senate, where the goal is simply obstruction, pure and simple. (Yes, I know Stupak is supposedly a Democrat. Prove it.)

The Church is the most blatant of all: if you grant equal rights to gay and lesbian citizens, we'll pull the plug on our social service work -- which, by the way, according to its own PR, is an essential concern of the Church. They wonder why they are losing adherents. Perhaps their flock has discerned the sharp disconnect between what they say and what they do. Most of us call it "hypocrisy."

Funny how that works.

Update: If you think I'm overstating my case, note this comment from one of Sullivan's readers:

I'm truly at a loss for words at this story. I was raised Catholic my whole life, but was between parishes when it came time to make confirmation in middle school. I took charge of my religious life in high school and college and decided to finally be confirmed earlier this year because I cannot live my life any other way except by the tenants (sic) of the Gospel. This "threat" is so contrary to everything I've learned about service through the Church that I'm just completely numb.

Double-Think

Once again, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers makes a good point:

As your earlier reader noted in passing, the Catholic Bishops refused to accept the "segregation" of federal funds from abortion dollars. Under that scheme, health insurance companies would separate federal money from private money and require abortion payments to come from the private pot.

The New York Times reported today that the Catholic Bishops rejected the segregation plan as an accounting gimmick. They have a point. The private pot of money can be easily subsidized by the federal pot of money. The federal pot of money will buy items that the private pot would have bought, thereby subsidizing the private pot of money.

This is the same method that is used when tax dollars go to parochial schools, many of which are Catholic. Tax money can buy pencils and desks, but not Bibles. Catholic schools do not have to spend money on books because the taxpayer chips in for those. This leaves more money to spend on religious activities.

I wonder if the Catholic Bishops even considered this point when slamming the abortion-segregation device as an accounting gimmick.

Setting aside for a moment my outrage at public policy in a secular nation being dictated by a bunch of morally bankrupt religious extremists, there's a simple answer to this one: they don't care. If they are doing it, it's OK, but if the segregation method is used in public health care, it doesn't suit their agenda and they're against it.

This is an ongoing feature of the right wing as it has come to exist in this country: they are special, and the rules that they dictate don't apply to them. Nor do anyone else's, as we saw when suddenly organizations such as the Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army became "religious" organizations, when they had existed quite peacefully for years as organizations that were associated with churches but not bound by the same doctrinal rules. In fact, Catholic Charities was founded for exactly that purpose: it was created as a separate organization specifically to enable it to receive public funding for social programs, and operating under the rules created to govern that funding, without running afoul of the separation and establishment clauses.

In the case of the Catholic bishops, I will accept that they have sincere moral qualms (although I have to note that their moral qualms seem somehow always directed toward the activities of others), but those qualms are also inextricably tied to the desire to increase the Church's secular power. Let's be perfectly honest: bishops are politicians. That's how they got to be bishops. And one of the defining characteristics of a politician is the desire to gain and maintain power. I suspect that's a fundamental motivation, maybe the fundamental motivation.

And that makes it relatively easy for them to preach "do as I say, not as I do" without any visible sign of cognitive dissonance.

Update: Here's the prior post from a reader referred to above. It shows the depths of the Church's hypocrisy on this.

Zeitgeist

Or something very like it. I'm not the only one who is ready to come out swinging -- it's just that I've been there for a while. Andrew Sullivan reports:

Steve Hildebrand tells Rex Wockner:

We are fools to have spent all this money and time and not have defined the opponents. It's not enough to answer their charges. We need to hit them back and not let up on it until voters don't buy their lies anymore. Malpractice in my opinion.

We can, of course, do both. A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church's long, long history of racism would also be salient. We're new to this, and we're learning.

We spend entirely too much time and effort trying to get people to approve of us, and they're never going to. So fuck 'em. I don't need their approval, especially dregs like the Catholic hierarchy.

"Looking Forward"

From Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog, this item:

From the Democratic Policy Committee's press release:

[Sen. Byron] Dorgan chaired a hearing on August 3, by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC), which looked into the Army’s response to the 2003 exposure at Qarmat Ali in Iraq of hundreds of U.S. soldiers to sodium dichromate, which poses the highest inhalation risk for cancer of any of the 500 substances classified as a carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senators wrote that they “believe that the conduct and/or inaction of KBR and the Army may have caused hundreds of U.S. troops to be exposed to dangerous levels of sodium dichromate,” and asked the Inspector General to investigate seven separate areas of concern.

Sudbay's comment:

We heard a lot of rhetoric from the Bush administration and GOP members of Congress about supporting the troops. Call me crazy, but I don't think exposing troops to carcinogens is very supportive. But, with Dick Cheney's friends at KBR in the mix, there was no way Bush or the GOP would ever hold KBR accountable.

The problem is, there's no way Obama's going to hold them accountable, either -- at least, based on all available evidence. This is part and parcel of the administration's refusal to investigate the implementation of torture as official U.S. policy, which it begins to look as though we will never recover from. (I don't take the dog-and-pony show coming out of Justice on this one as any indication that there is serious interest in holding those responsible accountable. Quite the opposite. I mean, come on -- they're taking morally repulsive practices which we have abhorred throughout our history as the norm.)

There's one simple and very basic response to the president's wish to "look forward" and to leave all this behind us: How do we know where to go if we don't know how we got on this road? How can we fix it if we don't know how it got damaged? (If the response to the collapse of the financial industry is any indication, there's very little interest in really fixing anything. Why am I surprised that there's no interest in fixing the torture regime?)

And I truly believe that the most serious damage to the country has been that those in power could implement a whole range of what are essentially the practices and methods of dictators and not be held accountable. I read a very interesting article some while back that compared the Pax Americana to the Pax Britannica under the Empire -- basically, the functional form of Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum "Speak softly and carry a big stick." We avoided major conflagrations for decades because we had the biggest stick. Combine that with our traditions of democracy, of open and honest government that was responsive to the will of the people, our institutions that guaranteed freedom to our citizens, and a tradition of fairness, justice, and mercy. That gave us the moral authority to negotiate, to act as peacemakers, and to avoid using that stick. We have no credibility any more. And Obama isn't helping, by claiming the power to hold detainees who have been cleared by the courts, by fighting every attempt at openness and transparency, by throwing up distractions to avoid dealing with the real issues. This is change I can believe in only in my most cynical moments.

Just Who Is Running This Country?

Hilzoy makes a point that no one else seems to have caught in the latest Halliburton/KBR scandal:

In fact, KBR did at one point threaten to stop providing basic supplies -- little things like food -- to our troops in Iraq. (I've put the account of this episode below the fold.) What that means is, to my mind, even more scandalous than simple corruption by a company with good connections. It means that we have outsourced absolutely critical functions to private companies, companies which, unlike military personnel, can threaten to stop doing their jobs without facing courts-martial. In wartime, when a company is doing something as important as providing food to our troops, the military has no choice but to cave to their demands. (That's one reason I said it was more scandalous than simple corruption: it virtually ensures that that corruption will occur, while simultanously leaving our troops at risk.)

I'd put it in stronger terms: the Bush administration has abdicated the government's responsibilities to ensure the uninterrupted provision of basic necessities to the ground troops and handed to a private and completely unaccountable corporation the power to dictate under what conditions the war will be fought. (And if you don't think feeding the troops is a "condition," guess again.) I, like Hilzoy, find this completely unacceptable. She's written a good post on it: go read it, because I don't really have much to add, and I don't have time this week anyway.