Advocates of Impeachment Need to Combine High-Minded Appeals with Honest Partisanship

I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite political columnists this week, and among other things have been reminded why Brian Beutler is on my essential reading list for comprehending our extreme times.  In "Don't Absolve Trump of His Impeachable Offenses," he picks apart the contradictions and assumptions in both parties’ views of impeaching President Trump.  Citing how the GOP is talking up an impeachment threat should Democrats win back Congress, he points out how this approach is abetted by the Democrats’ “muddled” positions on this question.  Beutler argues that Democrats who say impeachment talk is premature absent a firm case emerging out of the Mueller investigation ignore the way Trump’s continued ties to his business make him unfit to be president, for a variety of reasons ranging from his susceptibility to blackmail to his use of government for personal financial benefit; that is, grounds for impeachment don’t rest on Russian collusion alone.  He continues:

But even in absence of a Russia scandal, Trump’s business empire (to say nothing of his autocratic tendencies and incompetent management) would be a burning crisis. Democrats wouldn’t be “normalizing” the abuse of the impeachment power by deploying it against Trump. Their refusal to acknowledge Trump’s basic incompatibility with high office is instead normalizing the idea that corrupt businessmen can use the presidency to enrich themselves at the expense of the public [. . .]

The fact that impeachment may not be practicable [. . .] has no bearing on the normative question of whether Trump deserves to be impeached, or on whether Democrats and liberals should try to persuade people that he does. The answer to those questions is obvious.

The way Beutler turns the question of normalizing impeachment around to the question of normalizing Trump’s corruption is an extremely helpful way to both think about impeachment and why it’s a reasonable measure for discussion.  Being explicit about the high costs of the Trump presidency to our system of governance rightly puts the spotlight on those real harms occurring on a daily basis, and contextualizes talk of what would otherwise seem an extreme remedy.  Beutler’s separation of the practicability of impeachment from the question of whether there are actually grounds likewise helps us see our situation more clearly.

Beutler goes on to write: 

It is completely reasonable for Democrats to weigh the political costs of acknowledging or dwelling on Trump’s obvious unfitness for office. But it’s also a mistake in both the near and long term to pretend the obvious doesn’t exist.   It’s a dangerous thing—for people and for the institutions that make the country governable—that Trump is president. The fact that he won’t divest himself from his businesses, won’t stop mingling his public duties and his financial interests, and also won’t say whom he owes money to, or who could otherwise ruin him financially, is an affront to all citizens, and a national security emergency.  [. . .]

Those who are scared that any impeachment buzz in the air will hurt Democrats politically ought to say so, but without absolving Trump of all the impeachable depravities he’s engaged in before our eyes.

For me, this final paragraph catalyzed an insight that hovers over the whole article: impeachment is a conundrum for Democrats in part because it requires them to argue they are acting in the national interest — to confront a “national emergency,” in Beutler’s phrasing — while inevitably also acting in a partisan manner, in that impeachment means acting against a president from the opposite party.  This is a contradiction that the GOP exploits when it points to the impeachment threat as a reason to vote for Republicans — that the Democrats want to remove Trump because he’s their political nemesis, not because he’s committed impeachable acts.  (Though, as Beutler points out, this puts Republicans in the unenviable position of defending his actual impeachable behavior — a difficult situation somewhat analogous to the danger to the Democrats of not opposing Trump sufficiently.)

Putting aside the impeachment question for a moment, this same tension underlies the broader debate over the political cost to Democrats of putting opposition to Trump and a focus on his malfeasance at the center of the party’s agenda: they may claim to be acting in the national interest, and may objectively speaking actually be acting in the national interest through opposition to the president, but this does not mean that the broader public supports such a focus — as opposed to, for instance, the Democrats downplaying opposition to the president and fighting for a concrete, positive vision of their own.

Under normal circumstances, opposing the other party and advocating your own positions are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re the regular substance of politics.  The reason there is a question, and anxiety, about the Democrats defining themselves primarily by their opposition to Trump isn’t necessarily due to flaws in the party, but because for so many Democrats, Trump merits implacable and virulent opposition.  The question of impeachment is the logical extension of a conclusion that he’s done and said things that merit removal from office.  

So I see a second tension here: the existence of a president who deserves impeachment also means that the opposition party must to some greater or lesser extent necessarily subordinate its identity and partisan goals to this one overriding objective.  You could say that the seriousness of the situation requires that the balance between advocacy and opposition requires a shift in favor of opposition.  But going back to the first tension I identified, though, this puts the Democrats in a bind, since our two-party system means that impeachment will inevitably assume a partisan cast, even as the Democrats could persuasively argue that they’re serving a broader national interest.  The largely single-minded mode a party seeking impeachment must embrace will perversely make them seem even more partisan in their motivations.

The basic danger and fear — which I think is pretty broadly clear to anyone involved in Democratic politics, wherever they come down on how to proceed — is that Democrats will be identified with an oppositional stance simply for partisanship’s sake rather than a party fighting for a concrete agenda that will help Americans, and in doing so will sink their chances of either stopping Trump or accomplishing any of their positive party goals.  But I would argue that if Donald Trump truly merits full and unremitting opposition, up to and including impeachment — and I believe he does — then Democrats need to fully acknowledge and navigate the inevitable tensions I’ve identified.

If there is an ineluctable partisan dimension to such opposition in a two-party system, then Democrats are either going to need to figure out how to minimize this perception of partisanship, or how to explain it in a way that upends easy dismissal of their actions as simply “partisan.”  Likewise, if there is an inevitable danger in Democrats subordinating their positive party goals to the emergency of removing a president from office, Democrats need to figure out how to minimize the risks on this front as well.

In our highly-polarized political environment, these are incredibly difficult tensions to navigate.  In fact, a signature danger of our time is that a president clearly unfit to serve is protected both by a seemingly unshakeable base of support, and by an overall atmosphere in which arguing for a larger national interest is seen by many as suspect.  Yet, just as Beutler points out that failure to pursue impeachment equates to essentially normalizing impeachable presidential behavior, one could argue that Democrats’ failure to fully oppose Donald Trump’s impeachable behavior, rather than insulating them from unpredictable political downsides, actually carries its own toxic downside for Democrats: of normalizing not just a president, but a form of politics, deeply inimical to their core beliefs and goals.  

Beutler argues that Trump’s failure to separate himself from his business is grounds for impeachment; but I would argue that beyond this, Donald Trump has engaged in an array of behaviors and actions that, while no single one might merit impeachment, together constitute a self-inflicted indictment of the man’s unfitness for office.  From calling a free press “the enemy of the people,” to a restriction on immigration that quite clearly singled out Muslims, to his coddling of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, to his failure to protect the United States from future Russian election interference, to his accusations that the Justice Department and FBI are broken and not to be trusted, to his lies that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton and that we can’t trust our own elections, Trump has proved himself to be an illiberal autocrat fundamentally opposed to American democracy. 

The question of whether Democrats should seek Donald Trump’s removal from office only has one answer.  The question, then, is how to navigate the treacherous terrain of seeking this goal.  Somewhat paradoxically, the depth and depravity of Donald Trump’s offenses against American democracy, and his attempts to stoke, not allay, partisan divisions, arguably have opened a path forward for a stance of full opposition by the Democrats.  In a two-party system, impeachment will inevitably assume some degree of partisan cast.  However, because Donald Trump’s offenses go to heart of our democratic system, the Democrats have a clear opportunity to make the case that their partisan identity is inextricably linked to their commitment to basic American democratic values.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s become both a necessity for Democrats to double-down on this commitment, and to insist on it as a key part of what the party stands for.  These are basic values that most Americas agree with: The rule of law.  One person, one vote.  No special treatment for the wealthy.  No person is above the law.  There is no basic tenet of American democracy that Donald Trump has not run afoul of; in this, there is a path forward for Democrats to neutralize inevitable accusations of partisanship in their fight to end this presidency.

As to the question of the price Democrats will pay for emphasizing opposition over engagement: it seems to me that here, too, the path forward is to embrace partisanship in a creative and canny fashion.  They should keep making make the case that they are serving the national interest; but also assert that Democrats don’t simply oppose Donald Trump, but advocate for an entirely different way of doing things, in terms of both democratic process and legislative substance.  They should embrace a traditional American way of politics that actually believes in democracy and equality, while also reminding voters of what legislation they would work to pass.  This will energize Democrats who want more than just opposition to Trump, and inspire other voters who want the country to move forward.  Democrats must paint Trump and the GOP as anti-democratic forces standing in the way of progress that the majority wants to see, and must emphasize and describe as much as possible what they will aim to get done once Trump is removed from office and the GOP is defeated.  The agenda necessarily will include both measures to strengthen our democracy — both in terms of voter registration, anti-gerrymandering measures and the like, as well as strengthened defenses against hacking — but also promises to pass items like real infrastructure legislation, immigration reform, and a tax bill that moves some of the obscene cuts to the top 1% into the pockets of middle- and working-class Americans.  In other words, Democrats need to both defend democracy on principle, and demonstrate, through a concrete agenda, how democratic action delivers concrete benefits to the American people that in turn strengthen the public good.

This strategy is key in light of another factor we need to consider when talking about opposing Trump: the GOP’s decision to protect the president from his malfeasance, in the name of short-term party gains like the recently-passed tax bill.  The broader picture is that it’s not just Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole, that has increasingly turned to an anti-democratic agenda, from voting restrictions, to tax cuts that primarily benefit the richest among us, to gerrymandering that strikes at the heart of representative democracy.  Any strategy for opposing Donald Trump needs to implicitly or explicitly involve an indictment of the GOP as a whole; to treat Trump as an isolated issue would be to treat the symptom but not the disease.  Democrats needs to push for common-sense laws in defense of basic democratic processes that the GOP will not support, in order both to protect our form of government and to help expose the authoritarian direction of the Republican Party.

One obvious rejoinder is that while this approach might win Democrats enough votes to take the House and impeach Donald Trump, it’s impossible to win enough Senate seats in 2018 to convict and remove the president from office; in fact, this “partisanship-forward” approach, to coin a phrase, would likely mean Republican senators would be more opposed than ever to removing a president from their own party.  True enough; but I would reply that there seems to be no possible scenario in which most Republican senators would vote to remove the president.  But impeaching the president, and forcing GOP members of the House to defend him, would set Democrats up for significant victories in 2020, both in the presidential election and in Senate races in which many Republicans would be forced to defend their votes to retain a corrupt president, who at that point would be up for re-election and exerting a serious drag on GOP prospects.

A couple final thoughts on impeachment and its discontents.  First, I think Democrats would do well to recognize that in times that feel so fraught and destabilized, talk of impeachment can feel like part of the problem, rather than part of its solution.  If they’re going to pursue impeachment, they need to be sure to frame it as the constitutional remedy for a situation like we now face.  Second, we need to remember that the discussion around impeachment is a process, and that the primary ingredient is making the case regarding Donald Trump’s unfitness for office.  At a minimum, such an argument will strengthen Democrats’ prospects in the mid-term elections and in 2020 —  particularly if it is combined with a broader indictment of the GOP for its authoritarian inclinations and the Democrats' assertion of themselves as the party that defends both the constitutional order and the American Dream.

Wolf Wreaks Mayhem in the Lion’s Den

Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last weekend was comedically vicious and unsparing.   Eviscerating White House officials, up to and including the president, in the face of an audience that grew increasingly restive, she riffed off of the hypocrisy and madness of America’s political leadership and Trump-enabling media.  With jokes that took as a given Donald Trump’s serial assaults on women and the daily dispensing of lies from the White House, Wolf shocked the audience because she didn’t care to soften the full horror of our political moment, while those who had invited her obviously expected her to play by a more jovial and forgiving set of rules.  That powerful people don’t want their misdeeds to be exposed is one the eternal cliches of our world; to see Wolf make this audience squirm was to see such exposure in action.

The absurdity of asking a comedian to do a political roast, and then to be offended when that comedian hits too close to home, should be plain to all.  The criticism that Wolf wasn’t funny is silly; her jokes may not have been laugh-out-loud funny, but they were humorous in a sharper, cerebral manner.  The truth is, she’s being criticized for attacking the powerful — both the Trump administration and any media figures who think it’s acceptable to cavort with those they cover — in an utterly disrespectful and insulting way.  In implicitly asserting the indefensibility of this president and any who cover for him, Wolf reminded us that the powerful depend on their lessers’ willingness to respect their power; in showing no respect, but rather flashes of anger and righteousness, Wolf committed the ultimate sin of reminding them that they may not be as powerful as they believe.  To accomplish this with words and wit, Wolf conducted a lightning incursion of accountability and egalitarian spirit into a lion’s den of elitist self-congratulation.

Wolf is being criticized for being inappropriate; but the whole of her routine does not even begin to match the moral obscenity, cruelty, and ignorance of Donald Trump last week, when he said of the Paralympics that, “it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could.”  This is what truly vicious and inappropriate language sounds like: words uttered by the most powerful man in the world about a group of people who live with challenges most of us will never have to deal with, in a way that makes them sounds like freaks who can only be tolerated for short periods of time.  Critics of Wolf are catastrophically wrong: Donald Trump and his defenders deserve every bit of truth-telling that our fellow citizens can throw at them.

Following Withdrawal of V.A. Nominee, Trump Exacerbates Self-Inflicted Political Wound

My first impulse was to write “Not surprisingly, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson has withdrawn from consideration as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs” — but that’s not really accurate, as I’m not sure what’s surprising or not these days.  After all, would I have been surprised if he were still the nominee?  The president did seem to be doubling down on his pick just a couple days ago.  Also, you need look no further than Scott Pruitt to see a man surviving toxic levels of corruption allegations.

Still, there are some obvious reasons why Jackson wouldn't object to being out of the spotlight.  The allegations of careless dispensing of medications and drunkenness on duty undermined not only his case for acting as VA head, but his ability to perform his current job as physician to the president.

This is why you just have to smile when you see reports of Donald Trump trying to turn Jackson’s failed nomination into a cudgel against Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who as ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee played a prominent role in publicizing the allegations against Jackson.  The president has actually called for Tester's resignation, and talks as if the senator had promoted baseless slurs against the good doctor, when in fact the larger storyline is that Tester helped protect the VA from a potentially comically unqualified leader at a time when the department cries out for competent leadership.  It's also noteworthy that Trump suggested he has secret information that would end Tester's career — a creepy insinuation that reminds us both of Donald Trump's willingness to abuse the power of his office, and of his long-practiced tactic of throwing accusations back at accusers.  

It’s hardly shocking that Trump would lash out at Tester rather than admit to his own catastrophic choice, but it also means that the national conversation is likelier to turn to whether Jackson should remain in his current position.  More damningly for the president, it also provides a opportunity for Democrats, including Tester, to make the case that Donald Trump has failed America’s veterans by nominating such an unfit nominee; in fact, you could make the case that it shows that Donald Trump cares more about his underlings’ loyalty to himself than whether they can ensure adequate health services are provided to literally millions of American veterans.  I'm not so sure the president has thought through the full consequences of pursuing this vendetta against Tester; I’m somewhat more sure that Jon Tester isn’t losing any sleep over it.

V.A. Nominee Is Sunk If Allegations of Wanton Pill-Dispensing, Occasional Drunkeness Are True

“Mr. Tester said that there was no evidence before the committee that Dr. Jackson had shown up drunk to the White House.” - The New York Times, April 24, 2018

One can’t help idly wondering if the president’s defense of Dr. Ronny Jackson in the face of credible allegations around his sobriety and prescription ethics isn’t tied to Jackson’s previous endorsement of the president’s miraculous state of health.  If it turns out he’s a wild card, then that’s sure to raise questions about the president’s exam earlier in the year.

This nomination is also a perfect study of the collision between standard GOP contempt for government and competence, and a department with a life-and-death, moral obligation to provide health services to American veterans.  Trump’s preference for personal loyalty and connections over experience has supercharged this collision in the manner of one of those miles-long supercolliders tucked beneath the Swiss Alps.  Trump fumbles; Americans suffer.

Atlantic Writer Makes Case That GOP Pressure on FBI Set Context for Bad Decisions by James Comey

Adam Serwer’s analysis of James Comey’s role in the 2016 election zeroes in on some of the former FBI director’s major flaws and contradictions, arguing that Comey clearly broke FBI protocol by his actions, appears not to fully recognize his mistakes, and ultimately chose his own peculiar sense of personal honor over the duties of his office.  But Serwer makes another point that needs broader airing: Comey’s decision-making process in relation to the Clinton and Trump investigations, at least in terms of his public disclosures around these, was arguably structured by the atmosphere of intimidation and criticism in which the GOP had forced the FBI to operate during the previous years.  As Serwer says:

The FBI is petrified of criticism from its conservative detractors, and is relatively indifferent to its liberal critics.  Comey may have known that the Republican outrage over not disclosing the reopened Clinton investigation would dwarf whatever frustration Democrats might express at the opposite course of action, had he kept it under wraps as Justice Department guidelines obligated him to do.  Indeed, despite the role Comey’s decision played in helping Trump win the White House, Republicans have spent the Trump administration demanding political purges of the FBI and prosecutions of the president’s critics and rivals.  While Republicans bear the responsibility for attempting to politicize federal law enforcement, the Democrats’ feeble acquiescence to this dynamic has only enabled them.

A Republican effort to game the FBI during the Obama years paid off big time when it counted, and the anti-democratic tendencies inherent in this attitude have now blossomed into full, sickening bloom, as the GOP presses the boundaries around using the FBI as a tool for political revenge.  But Serwer’s line about Democratic acquiescence to this process is crucial to understanding the situation we’re in.  For years, Republicans have been playing by a different set of rules than the Democrats: rules that prioritize power over democracy.   In failing to adequately challenge this pressure, the Democrats have crippled their own ability to win elections and exert power in government, but have also failed to defend our political system.  This seems less the result of incompetence or strategy, although the Democrats have done poorly on both fronts, and more of a basic failure to understand the fundamentally anti-democratic direction of the modern GOP.

But as I’ve repeatedly argued, there’s no mistaking the Republican tilt toward authoritarianism now.  Among other things, returning balance to the system will require a full reversal of the Trump-era politicization of the Justice Department.  Our current situation is perilous, but Democrats should fight for a system of impartial justice that most Americans agree with; it’s their responsibility to highlight this issue and argue for its central importance to our democracy.

The GOP is assaulting our national institutions and democratic norms on many fronts, but subverting the Justice Department to political ends may be their single most dangerous maneuver.  When issues of crime and punishment depend on who holds political power, then we're well on our way to an authoritarian nightmare replete with intimidation and violence.

Obviously, our situation will be much more dangerous should the Democrats fail to recognize the stakes and the primacy of restoring traditional boundaries between politics and law enforcement.  One danger is that some Democrats might be tempted to use such tactics should they return to power: to embark on a cycle of revenge using the toolbox the GOP has engineered.  Needless to say, this would be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.  Such dark possibilities are yet another reason why Democrats need to be absolutely clear right now about resisting this move towards politicized law enforcement, and about their plans to return the FBI and Justice Department to a position of impartiality and trust.

Has Oregon’s Republican Secretary of State Caught the Pruitt Flu?

So apparently our Oregon Secretary of State, Republican Dennis Richardson, asked that he be provided with a security detail, unlike all other Oregon secretaries of state before him.  Richardson’s staff claimed that the secretary of state faced security threats due to “heightened partisan tensions across the country,” in the wording of The Oregonian, though they could not point to any specific threats.  If this sort of outside-the-box request by a Republican politician rings a bell, it’s because EPA head Scott Pruitt has at the federal level earned headlines due to the millions of dollars he’s blown through on his own unprecedentedly elaborate security protection.  

So is this a thing now, Republican politicians claiming they need security to be protected from non-existent threats?  Apart from the authoritarian connotations of even lesser-known bureaucrats requiring their own personal firepower, it’s worth noting the way such actions bizarrely slur Democrats as threatening physical harm against them.  After all, only one of America’s two major parties is headed by a president who has regularly prescribed violence as a suitable prescription for immigrants, reporters, families of terrorists, and other apparent enemies of the state.  Only one party has a president who found himself unable to call out Nazi thugs who killed a woman in Charlottesville.  Only one party seems untroubled by the mainstreaming of physical threats into our political discourse.

Here in Oregon, Richardson has withdrawn his request for security (and a driver), citing his concern that future holders of his office might abuse these services — a consideration that was obviously true at the time he initially made these requests.  I am left to conclude that he’s changed his mind due to the shitty reception his proposal received, though one suspects he considers himself ahead of the game among right-wing voters by having managed to suggest that the left in America has turned violent toward politicians it opposes.  Heck of a way to build that base, Dennis.

Frightening Times, But Not a Time to Be Frightened

Frank Bruni provides an effective rundown of President Trump's extreme and worrisome response to news that the FBI had raided the premises of Michael Cohen, his long-time consigliere, and I'd recommend it for some more color around events I referenced in my previous post.  But while Bruni's conclusion that we should be "frightened" of what the president might do next is superficially reasonable, it's actually a point of view that suggests that both elected officials and the public at large are powerless to counteract our increasingly deranged president — and this, my friends, is actually part of the pickle we're in.  It speaks to an underlying dynamic, charted by cannier observers than myself, in which the nation seems to exist in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump; he acts, and we react.  But while there's admittedly plenty of evidence that we're stuck in a psychological showdown, it's also true that there are no literal constraints on either our legislators or the public at large to express their will, and exert their own powers, against the depredations of this president.

I agree that Trump is frightening, and that this is a frightening moment; but I, for one, really don't feel like being frightened, definitely not by a reality TV star who became famous for firing people, and who plenty of evidence shows colluded with a hostile foreign power to gain the presidency of the United States.  Frankly, I'd rather dwell on other feelings I'm experiencing on a daily basis, like anger, and righteousness, and solidarity with the millions of other people in this country who appear to feel more or less exactly like I do.

The founding fathers were hyper-aware of all the things that might go wrong with a political system, both in general and with the one they were creating.  Prevention of a despotic executive was a primary concern in the design of the U.S. Constitution; hence the separation of powers, and the mechanism of impeachment in a worst-case scenario.  What we're encountering with Donald Trump would hardly strike them as something unusual; in fact, they'd probably be surprised we hadn't had to deal with such a figure until now.

This is no time for naivete.  People like Donald Trump are part of the reason we have a government in the form that we do; and we can't just run around like headless chickens bemoaning the falling sky, when the very design of our country signals to us that the sky would inevitably fall at some point, you silly chickens!  It stinks that one of our two parties (cough-cough!  the GOP!) has embraced increasingly anti-democratic tactics and provided cover for Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies.  But let's face it — sooner or later, some asshole was going to come along and try to be king, or, OK, the BIGGEST STAR IN THE HISTORY OF PRESIDENTIAL TELEVISION EVER.

Mueller Investigation and FBI Raids On Cohen Are America Defending Itself Against Trump

Yesterday, FBI agents served search warrants at the office and home of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s long-time fixer-attorney and confidant.  Although the crimes under investigation are apparently unrelated to the Russia-collusion investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump’s initial response was to essentially reiterate the existence of a vast and implacable conspiracy out to get him and to revisit his recent attacks on the Mueller team.  In the past 24 hours, fed by reports out of the White House as to the president’s rageholic-brooding state of mind, there’s been plenty of speculation that a presidential move against Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be imminent.  Such an action would constitute a full descent into the brewing constitutional crisis that is, at its base, about the president’s likely criminality and his use of the tools of his office to obstruct an investigation into himself.

Since the early weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has been the position of The Hot Screen that Donald Trump must either be impeached or forced to resign.  This never felt like going out on a limb, as this stance was based on more than a year’s worth of observing Donald Trump’s anti-democratic, racist, and misogynist rhetoric as he campaigned across the U.S.  There were no surprises once he won the election; he immediately set to work undermining the credibility of our electoral system, claiming without a shred of evidence that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.  This is a claim that he has maintained to the present day; in fact, he renewed this line of slander against American democracy just this past week.  I highlight this particular line of attack because of its intersection with yet another ground for the need to remove the president from office: his campaign’s collusion with a Russian effort to undermine and throw the election to Trump, which had at its core an identical purpose as the president’s claims that our electoral system cannot be trusted: to undermine popular faith in U.S. democracy.

I could go on, but I offer this brief retrospective for now to demonstrate the consistency of this site’s position regarding the president’s unfitness for office, to point out that the events of the last year have only provided mounting evidence of his unfitness, and to argue that the pass we have reached — at the precipice of a constitutional crisis, where he would rather decimate the rule of law than face the consequences of his own unfitness — has always been a foregone conclusion with Donald Trump.  It was just a matter of time.

I remain dazed by the fact that, with Trump, the truth is so often right on the surface, even when he tries to bury it in lies or dissimulation.  The one central question has always been whether citizens choose to accept or deny the hideous reality of this man.  In this, he’s been a Rorschach test for the American character: do you see a con man, or do you see a leader?

The plain fact is that the president talks like a cornered criminal.  Virtually every sentence out of his mouth suggests he has something to hide, and testifies to how personal interest comes above all else.  To listen to his initial remarks yesterday following the Cohen raids is to hear a man who would rather burn down the rule of law than to answer for his crimes.  He is either delusionally paranoid, or willing to cold-bloodedly and knowingly peddle conspiratorial theories that suggest only Donald Trump stands between a Deep State takeover and American liberty.  I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the latter, but who knows if there isn’t some small amount of the former mixed in?  His self-interest is transparent; if the stakes weren’t so high, it would even be laughable.

But unfortunately, the stakes are as high as you can imagine.  My sense has been that, after so much build-up, and events hobbling along, the true crisis will be swift and disorienting: disorienting because it’s been so long coming and is suddenly here, and because in one blow we will have gone from a world in which we still have some assurance that our laws will protect us to another framework entirely, in which that assurance seems radically in doubt.

By instinct or advice (or, less likely, by thorough consideration), the president is attacking institutions vital to our democracy to aggrandize his own power, in line with a playbook followed by autocrats in other countries.  He maligns the free press; he attacks law enforcement; he claims our elections are flawed.  Truth, justice, and democracy — all are in his crosshairs.  But his plan, such as it is, is rough and not well thought through.  Certainly in the case of the Mueller investigation, his strategy has been reactive, which is not really a strategy at all; he makes decisions that increase his problems unless he then does something else that seems to make things all right for him but actually increases his jeopardy even more.

So we’ve been pushed to the edge of crisis; but of course it’s much more complicated than just Trump making bad decisions.  One other huge piece of the puzzle is that the Republican Party has by and large made itself complicit in his offenses against American democracy.  In the days ahead, we will find out which GOP politicians are fully committed to Trump’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to democracy, and which ones will understand that this is a bell that can’t be unrung; that once the GOP goes full authoritarian, there’s no going back.  They will either need to succeed in making sure we never have free and fair elections in this country again, or face such electoral oblivion that it will not be an exaggeration that a Republican will not be able to be elected dogcatcher in most of the U.S.

We’re also going to find out who the true leaders in the Democratic Party are: who can handle the biggest domestic crisis our country has faced at least since Watergate, and more probably since the Civil War.  We will see who thinks that we can return to politics as usual after this, and who understands that this is a time to renew American democracy, such as by passing legislation that eliminates attempts to disenfranchise Americans and puts an end to partisan gerrymandering by either party.

The biggest question, though, is what most of us are about to find out about ourselves, and about our fellow citizens.  Without a sudden and unlikely change of heart by Republican legislators, the final check against Donald Trump will have to be public resistance.  There are widespread calls for mass demonstrations in the event of Mueller’s firing, and those are sure to be part of the necessary response.  But we need to be prepared to keep the demonstrations going for a sustained period of time, and to consider actions like nation-wide strikes to keep the pressure on the political system to remove Donald Trump via impeachment or through forced resignation.  We need to be prepared to collectively and creatively figure out mass, peaceful solutions to save our country.  We've seen signs of how much collective power we have, from the amazing Women's Marches putting Trump's inauguration turnout to shame to a small band of Florida high schoolers reframing the gun control debate almost overnight.  It heartens me to think that literally every person who attended the Women's Marches, and every one of those high schoolers, has better ideas about how to make America great than our current president.

Right now, there's a lot of talk about Trump's rage, about how everyone's worried about what he does next.  This is hardly the first time that the national narrative has been framed around Trump as the sole terrifying actor who drives the national narrative and forces everyone to respond to his actions.  I suggest an alternative read: that for many months, the American people, embodied by the Mueller investigation, have in fact been bearing down on Donald Trump, causing him to react in an increasingly desperate manner.  I suspect we are at a pivot point when not only Trump, but the national consensus as well, turns to an awareness that it is the American people who make the decisions about where this nation goes, not a failed reality TV star who colluded and sleazed his way into the White House. 

Torture Advocates at CIA and State Department Suggest an Even Darker Direction for Trump Administration

Andrew Sullivan’s writing is marked by a tendency to draw extreme conclusions from sharp and insightful observations about real-world phenomena.  One of his dispatches this week is a case in point of how this can go wrong, as he matches a fine analysis of the right’s tendency towards authoritarianism — a proven fact in the age of Trump — with an alleged tendency of the left to an equivalent zealotry.  By my reckoning, there’s a world of difference between the mainstreaming of proto-fascism into the Republican Party — which controls all three branches of the federal government — and, say, people on the left defending the rights of transgender people to full equality, or even at a more adventurous extreme asserting that there’s no fundamental difference between the sexes.  Sullivan seems to have convinced himself that progressives have been driven to extreme positions by the rise of Trump; but my own observation is that progressives are by and large fighting for basic American values like equality and freedom from fear.  Liberals as a whole aren’t fighting to defeat Trump so they can turn around and force their fellow citizens in red states to all bake cakes for gay weddings and dress their toddlers in gender-neutral colors; they’re collectively fighting to defend basic rights across a broad spectrum of areas, from voting rights to protecting the environment.  Sullivan tends to ascribe an intellectual uniformity and extremism to a group far more diverse and conflicted in its specific goals, out of a desire to find some nonexistent parity with conservatism.

This said, there are also times when Sullivan’s identification of the deeper consequences of certain topics is spot on and deeply heartening.  His essay this week on the many, many acts of torture committed by the CIA, and enabled by Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the agency, is Sullivan at his best.  After describing the abuse of prisoners in graphic and affecting detail, fully establishing that there can be no doubt that these were acts of torture, he ends with arguments that not enough people make, but which are essential to understanding the heinous crimes committed in our name and the evil of a president nominating Haspel as CIA head: 

It would amount to a full-on endorsement of torture by the United States, and a signal to the entire world that it can be justified. This is a profound threat to human rights globally and to the long tradition of American warfare, initiated by George Washington no less, in which the use of torture has always been regarded as exactly the kind of barbarism America was founded to overcome. It would be the final nail in the coffin that used to be the West.

Maybe in the era of Trump, that coffin is already covered in dirt. But if senators want to retain any semblance of the notion of American decency, if they are to honor the countless men and women in the CIA and military who for decades have resisted the impulse to torture, if they are to respect those who fought the torture-states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and if they also want to remember those Americans, like John McCain, who were once subject to exactly the kind of torture Haspel authorized, they will vote down the nomination. If this line of defense falls, we are truly lost in a vortex of self- perpetuating evil. We will have abolished something deep and essential in the soul of America.

Overturning a basic tenet of human rights that the United States honored for literally its entire history, at least until the evils of the Bush administration, should chill every thinking American.  To institutionalize this evil exception by appointing one of its prime enablers as head of our premier intelligence agency would be to bring it out from the shadows into avowed U.S. policy.  As Sullivan suggests, this betrayal would mark a turning point in the history of the entire Western world, trading democratic progress for a turn to barbarism.  Worth adding to Sullivan’s indictment is the fact that this is happening not in the midst of a crisis or its aftermath, as was the case with 9/11; contemplating a defense of torture now is as cold-blooded and calculated a choice as can be imagined — torture for its own sake, torture as a principle of governance in a time of relative peace.

One of the most powerful weapons in democracy’s arsenal is the delegitimization of torture.  Torture is the cornerstone of anti-democratic control — the capacity to inflict violence on a helpless human being.  It is the most extreme form of violent repression; it isn’t the state defending itself against armed resistance, however morally wrong that might be, but against someone who is already a prisoner of the state.  If you can torture, all other forms of lesser force are also allowed; and the ability of a government to use force against its own citizens is always an enemy of democracy.  If people can organize and meet without fear of physical harm, then fighting for and defending democracy is so much more possible than otherwise, because then numbers and moral suasion are that much more powerful.  This is why I still have so much hope for our country: so long as we can organize and act democratically, we can defeat Trump and move ourselves forward.

So if the United States truly believes that democracy is a universal value, then in the most self-interested sense, we gain nothing from engaging in a practice that allows authoritarian regimes the cover they need to commit torture against their own people.  American advocates of torture, in fact, stand revealed as enemies of democracy; not only democracy abroad, but at home, as well, because how long will it be before the mentality of abuse of helpless prisoners begins to seep back into domestic politics?

If you have not done so already, please take a few minutes to call your U.S. senators’ offices, and urge them to vote against both Haspel and fellow torture advocate Mike Pompeo as secretary of state.  An outpouring of public outrage can make a difference.

President's Tolerance of Corruption in Cabinet Members Tests Bond with Base

Highlighting Republican corruption has emerged as a leading strategy for Democrats looking to take back Congress in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.  EPA head Scott Pruitt’s unethical behavior is a particularly juicy example: the man is a preening peacock who has demanded unprecedented security, flown first class repeatedly on the taxpayer dime, and got a sweetheart deal on a condo co-owned by an energy lobbyist’s wife (and then resisted moving out, despite his landlords’ entreaties).  This is to say nothing of the fact that he’s not doing his job of working to protect the environment, but instead is cozying up to the businesses that would prefer to treat our common air and water like their own personal ashtray.  

Americans tend not to like feeling ripped off by their government, and President Trump is playing with fire in tolerating this level of corruption.  But of course, his primary motivation to be president is likely to make a buck, so the idea of him tolerating or not tolerating corruption is probably not the most accurate way to frame the situation.  I’d argue that a lot of Trump voters welcomed his self-serving approach to the presidency, assuming that as supporters they’d benefit, at least indirectly, from his particular brand of cronyism when applied to federal policy and largesse.  Something of this mindset seemed to be reflected in comments by White House spokesperson Sara Sanders, who suggested in an interview that Pruitt’s corruption might be balanced out by his work in enacting Donald Trump’s agenda.  Corruption, in other words, is all right so long as a larger good is also being served.

In this respect, Pruitt’s behavior can be seen as something of a stress test for the corruption Trump’s supporters are willing to accept.  Do they really believe that it’s all right for an official to rip off taxpayers, so long as he’s also doing the president’s bidding and, by extension, fighting for those very voters?  In other words, will this direct affront to themselves as taxpayers be excused by the sense that the corruption is for the greater good of actually benefitting them by helping the president deliver on, say, more jobs in the coal industry?

The president’s willingness, at least so far, to defend the EPA chief supports the theory that Trump understands the bargain he’s made with his supporters — in this perverse reasoning, his willingness to tolerate corruption by his cabinet members is also a sign of his willingness to tolerate corruption in support of his base.  Clearly, though, events are pushing their credulity to the limit.  

Sadly for the president, the sense that such behavior is outrageous is far easier to understand for the majority of Americans who don’t support him, and who will be even less inclined to vote for either him or the GOP going forward based on such abuse of taxpayer dollars and trust.  It would be so easy for Trump to make examples of at least the most outlandish corruption, as a way of faking concern to appeal to more persuadable voters, but luckily for the survival of the republic, this is one area where he seems unable to act deviously.

I've only talked about self-aggrandizing behavior here; but of course the other side of the coin is the failure of Scott Pruitt and other cabinet members to serve the public interest.  With Pruitt, you see this in his efforts to undo a broad swathe of environmental regulations, from automobile emissions standards to the presence of lead in paint.  But as both The New York Times and Politico detail this weekend, Pruitt's eagerness to serve corporate interests at the expense of public health has been matched by his incompetence in actually doing this work.  Malign intent matched by ineptness: the Trump administration in a nutshell.  But these bozos have another three years to push through their foul agenda, though, more than enough time to correct their initial mistakes and do lasting damage.

With “Caravan” Tweets, the President Asks Americans to Trade In Their Patriotism for Cowardice

Donald Trump’s repeated tweets that the United States is about to be invaded by a “caravan” of Latin American immigrants is so transparently an incitement to fear and hatred, so obvious an example of the way he creates crises out of nothing, that it raises anew the issue of how this sad and sordid fool is able to drive the national dialogue with such relative ease.  This episode is the reductio ad absurdum of his methodology: we are to believe that people dislodged by poverty and political repression are actually determined enemies of America, so threatening and powerful that no less than deployment of the U.S. military will suffice to stop them from visiting terror on the Homeland (a word that, in the age of Trump, feels increasingly impossible to separate from its authoritarian associations).

Despite the president’s attempts to redefine the character of our nation, the United States traditionally takes in refugees forced to flee their countries due to violence, natural disaster, and other dire circumstances not because we’re weak and can’t protect ourselves from crossing the border, but because we’re a powerful country that subscribes to international conventions on how to treat the powerless.  Donald Trump would have us act like cowards, when we have the power and resources, not to mention moral obligation, to act humanely.  

The presence of Honduran refugees among the caravan that Donald Trump claims is about to invade the U.S. highlights the moral bankruptcy of his vision for America.  The United States has long backed abusive and anti-democratic forces in Honduras; most recently, the U.S. helped legitimize the dubious re-election late last year of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who cemented his hold on power by violence against peaceful protestors.  For the president to double-down on this initial betrayal of democracy by treating its victims — those very people the United States should have stuck up for in the first place — as enemies of America shows such contempt for our ideals that every American should feel ill at heart.

Donald Trump claims to be putting America first, but when his government pursues policies that actually generate refugees and ask us to ignore our own obligation to defend democracy, he’s in fact asking us all to put America last.

If the president and the Republican Party wanted to stop illegal immigration, wanted to stop illegal immigrants from taking American jobs as they claim, they could simply pass a law that required all employers to verify the citizenship or legal immigration status of job applicants.  But they will not do this because too many employers want to continue hiring illegal immigrants because they’re cheap labor; and many of these are GOP voters and financial contributors.  So instead, we have this continuing vile and racist onslaught against Latin American immigrants, which the president has escalated to be equivalent to an actual assault against our country.  

Trump no doubt feels this a great fight to pick because it energizes his base and puts Democrats in the position of balancing a defense of human rights against the perception advocated by the president that to treat immigrants humanely means to hurt the security of Americans.  But in branding a small group of refugees as an existential threat to America, Donald Trump has staked out a position so absurd that it presents an opportunity to define his policies as the unhelpful, un-American bullshit that they are.  Democrats and other opponents of Trump should highlight the moral cowardice of his position, the way it compromises us all while gaining us nothing in return.  As the ultimate example of his tendency to create crises out of thin air for political advantage, it’s also yet another example of his fundamental unfitness for office.  We need to make it clear, however we can, that Donald Trump hasn’t just picked a fight with refugees; he’s picked a fight with America.

Renewed Attacks on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Demonstrate Vulnerability of the President's Fake Populism

Predictably, Mick Mulvaney, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is recommending that Congress overhaul the agency so that it can no longer perform its function of protecting consumers from the predation of banks and other financial actors.  I’ve argued before that opposition to CFPB is a symbol of the Republicans’ fundamental alignment with major financial interests against the needs of average Americans, and that Democrats would be wise to highlight GOP attacks on the bureau as incontrovertible evidence of where the Republican Party stands.  It’s telling that Mulvaney’s criticisms go at the very strengths that make the bureau a strong advocate for citizens: its independence from political interference, and its effectiveness at exposing and punishing bad behavior by financial actors.  In other words, the CFPB is a problem for the GOP because it’s been doing its intended job.

Republicans' nonsense attacks on the agency transparently favor the powerful over ordinary consumers, and in this create an enormous vulnerability for the GOP and a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party.  More specifically, Mulvaney’s role in attempting to gut the bureau helps expose the contradictions and deceit at the heart of Donald Trump’s brand of right-wing populism.  What sort of politics that purportedly puts the little guy first would go after an agency specifically dedicated to protecting the ordinary consumer?  The president will clearly say anything to try to sway working- and middle-class voters, which makes it even more important to highlight where his actions contradict his words.

The battle over the fate of the CFPB also shows how there’s no half-assed way to fight Trumpism, because it’s rooted in exploiting the tensions and contradictions of American politics, on both sides of the aisle, even while it's riven by its own contradictions to the point of incoherence.  First, the contradictions of Trumpism: Mulvaney’s attacks on the CFPB, presumably in line with the president’s wishes, demonstrate the hollowness at the heart of Trump’s populism; his criticisms partake of a mainstream, pre-Trumpian Republican attitude that the CFPB is the spawn of Satan (aka Elizabeth Warren), and should be combatted with a holy fervor because its very existence is premised on the idea that big business neither automatically acts with the public good at heart, nor automatically produces outcomes that benefit the public when pursuing the bottom line.  Trump's embrace of this perspective undercuts his populism — for all his bluster of fighting for workers, he’s not even pretending to want to shield workers from predatory lending practices.

Looking beyond the CFPB, the president’s economic populism actually shields American business from any responsibility for the parlous state of the American worker — instead, it’s all the fault of other countries taking our jobs, or immigrants stealing our jobs here at home.  In offering such a vigorous explanation for what ails America, but which in practice fails to address the roots of our inequality and the economic challenges of so many, Donald Trump forces the opposition to articulate a clear alternative vision rooted in reality, lest the president’s blustering (and misleading) vision be taken as the best (and perhaps only) way forward.

So on the CFPB front, effectively attacking the president’s agreement with Republican orthodoxy means advocating a perspective that views big business as self-serving and willing to exploit the public in the absence of strong regulation.  This is clearly not the easiest thing in the world for Democrats, many of whom receive contributions from the financial sector and who fear that such a position might mean they get tarred as anti-growth or anti-business.  In other words — and at the risk of sounding tautological — the Democrats can’t fully exploit Donald Trump’s vulnerability on this issue unless they’re ready to be the party that sees the financial sector and other large economic actors as existing at odds with the needs of ordinary Americans.  Muddying this point only works to the president’s benefit — it ends up helping him justify aggrandizing the power of big business at the expense of ordinary Americans (which will have the real world effect of making most of us less well off).

I would love to see Democrats make a concerted effort to expose the contradictions of Trump’s faux populism by pushing for legislation that would bring tangible benefits to Americans.  A higher minimum wage; expansion of the CFPB; real infrastructure spending and not just bullshit tax credits for corporations; laws that make unionizing easier.  This last item feels extremely promising to me, at least at a gut level: has the president ever been asked about whether he supports unions, or why he’s not doing anything to support them?  The Democrats will win back union voters by exposing these contradictions, and by doubling down on their role as the party of labor.  Trump won the election in part by promising to fight for ordinary Americans in a way that too many believed the Democrats have failed to do; one way to refute and defeat him is to show what fighting for working Americans really looks like.

Hey, Joe, Where You Going With That Really Dumb Idea in Your Hand?

However heartfelt and relatable, Joe Biden’s declaration that he would have whupped Donald Trump’s teenage ass in high school is like listening to someone elevator-pitch the worst Back to the Future spin-off ever.  It’s also very much like listening to someone make a clear case that he should not be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020.  And now that Biden has said that he regrets making the remarks, even as he tried to explain that they were taken out of context — he was talking about a time-traveling Joe and Don, not a present-day senior division wrestling match — he’s just provided more evidence that whatever his many virtues, Biden is not the person Democrats should look to as their 2020 presidential candidate.

The number one rule for taking on Trump is to never, ever lower yourself to his level — Trump is simply the king of the muddy pigpen, and there’s nothing to be gained by engaging at his schoolyard level.  This includes never partaking of the ways that he has gradually insinuated the threat of violence into mainstream political discourse, from encouraging supporters to threaten reporters covering his rallies, to his refusal to call out neo-Nazis in the Charlottesville clashes last year.  For Joe Biden to have gone there — first in 2016, and again more recently — was an idea lacking this basic common sense.  I suspect his Fight Club remarks, rather than being a gaffe, were quite consciously made to establish him as a tough guy who can take on Trump.  To me and I suspect many others though, the talk of fighting it out in the name of defending women’s honor more strongly suggests that it’s long past time we had a woman as president.  Our times demand a different type of toughness than fists and bluster.

For a more comprehensive argument against Biden 2020, check out this piece by Jamelle Bouie.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Story Opens Window on Role of Propaganda in American Politics

For anyone looking to get up to speed on what the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story is all about, you couldn’t do better than this piece by Zenep Tufekci, who’s written other incisive pieces about the power of big tech in our society, including this excellent article about YouTube.  She provides a concise run-down of what happened and why it matters to the public and to our country, describing a business model in which Facebook’s customers are not its social users, but the “advertisers, political actors and others” to which Facebook sells our attention and personal information.  Making a persuasive case that there was no meaningful consent by users to the release of their information, Tufekci describes what happened with Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of user information as something of an inevitable by-product of Facebook’s business model.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that any American who goes online and isn’t aware of basic concepts about how Facebook and other big tech companies make their money off the exploitation of user data is akin to a babe in the woods, unaware of the privacy being given up and the fundamentally predatory attitude of these corporations.  And with the many reports of how online social networks were used by Russians and others to influence the 2016 election, the consequences of our mass blindness and exploitation begin to seem darker by the day.

This is a complicated and troubling situation that invites the classic “no easy solutions” response.  On the tech fix side, Tufekci says that the Facebook business model is inherently flawed and will be abused, and that its lack of accountability needs to be reigned in.  Amen to that — and the start to such accountability is getting the word out about how exploitation of its own users is at the heart of its business.  But beyond this, we’re at an inflection point in how we think about conducting politics in this country.  Ads and other techniques based on micro-targeting of voters put provoking an emotional response over dialogue and understanding; they seem to be most effective at raising fear, not building hope.  Their tendency is to manipulate and push people to extremes, funneling down information flows rather than broadening its reach or facilitating critical thought.

For these reasons, they are the latest, most technologically sophisticated expressions of a propaganda model of politics, which has long haunted our democracy, particularly in the age of mass media.  Voters are viewed as targets to be activated, not citizens to be persuaded, or, crucially, listened to.  This model has existed for so long now that we all see it as part of the normal state of things.  But with cutting-edge technologies putting manipulation at the center of its technique, its coexistence with democratic discourse is revealed to be more inappropriate than we might have thought.  And its dangers are even more pronounced given the political-economic state of our union, which I would argue is badly in need of fresh, egalitarian, democratizing ideas that are less about reinforcing people’s existing views, and more about asking people to think anew and creatively about our common challenges. 

Let Your Senators Know A Torturer Doesn't Deserve to Head the CIA

One big meme of the last couple weeks is that Donald Trump is finally feeling comfortable as president and is ready to start doing things his way, at long last!  Notably, he seems to be doing so in a way that hearkens back to his reality TV past: by firing people.  Rex Tillerson, whose manly name likely got him hired as secretary of state yet was not talisman enough to save him from ignominious dismissal, has been the biggest head to roll.  There are rumors that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster will go soon as well.

But just as life and death exist in an intricate balance, firings are cosmically joined to hirings.  Tillerson may be gone, but his position is not, and so Donald Trump has nominated CIA director Mike Pompeo as the new secretary of state.  In Pompeo’s place at the CIA, the president has named Gina Haspel, currently a deputy at the agency.  But while Trump may be feeling Tillerson-level manly with all this secretary-appointing and position-swapping, this has presented an even greater test of the Democrats’ cajones: because no rational political calculation would allow either of these nominees to get through the Senate without a vicious fight.

Many in the media may talk about the president engaging in a second year re-set, but where Mike Pompeo is concerned, the crucial context for evaluating this nomination is the mounting evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.  As noted in this Politico piece, there are plenty of questions Democrats can ask about Donald Trump's communications with Pompeo around the Russia investigation.  The last thing we need as secretary of state is someone who shares Donald Trump’s willingness to kowtow and otherwise practice bizarre subservience to Vladimir Putin.

The nomination of Gina Haspel requires, if anything, an even greater dose of evaluative woop-assery.  Haspel was deeply involved with the torture of detainees during the Bush administration; she ran a torture site in Thailand, and enabled the elimination of video evidence of waterboarding.  As a former Department of the Navy lawyer argues here, these are disqualifying activities, no matter how great Haspel’s managerial skills might be.

The fact that Haspel still has a job at the CIA, let alone could be nominated to head the agency without being laughed out of town, speaks volumes about our country’s failure to reckon with and punish the Bush-era torture regime.  One of that administration’s most self-defeating acts was to piss away America’s moral high ground versus al-Qaeda and its ilk; substituting sadism for proven interrogation techniques, torturing prisoners was less about extracting information and far more about revenge, at the price of violating the very values we claimed to be defending.  That most Americans chose to ignore or suppress their knowledge of these heinous acts done in our collective name does nothing to change the fact that they happened, and that they blurred the line between the bad acts of al-Qaeda and the bad acts of Americans in a way that only helped the extremist cause.  Torture turned out to be the choice of the incompetent and the morally bereft, as the same leaders who OK’d such practices also undertook an occupation of Afghanistan that lasts to the present day and an invasion of Iraq that is a contender for the single most catastrophic and counterproductive foreign policy action in U.S. history.

It feels inevitable that our newest worst president would be unable to avoid the temptation of appointing a torture supporter to head the CIA.  Donald Trump has voiced support for torture in the past, and you can be sure that his choice of Haspel signals that torture is once again to be accepted as U.S. policy.  Last week, I noted the challenge of keeping up with the rush of news out of this administration, and how to prioritize responses.  Well, this one is a no-brainer.  Appointment of a torturer to head the CIA is a story to pay attention to, and is a story that concerned citizens can do something about.  Call your senators, and let them know that you oppose Haspel as CIA director, and Pompeo as Secretary of State.  Torture is immoral, unconstitutional, counter-productive, and evil; it’s a renunciation of civilized values that, when implemented in our name, degrades us all, and brings our country down to the moral level of the terrorists themselves.