No Matter How Slavishly You Lick Trump's Boot, You Still Get a Republican Primary

 

Maggie Haberman and Ken Bensinger, in the NYTimes:

[Paul Dans,] the Republican architect of Project 2025 — the right-wing blueprint that Democrats made a rallying cry in the presidential election last year — is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, saying he isn’t sufficiently devoted to President Trump’s political movement.

As he begins his challenge, Dans, who is not originally from South Carolina, starts out as a distinct underdog. Mr. Graham, who has the support of Mr. Trump, has won past primaries handily despite appearing vulnerable, and he is likely to have a significant financial edge.

But Mr. Dans plans to run highlighting the work of Project 2025, from which Mr. Trump distanced himself during his campaign before enacting significant portions of it into his government. And while Mr. Dans had nothing but praise for Mr. Trump, his candidacy comes at a moment when some of Mr. Trump’s hard-line allies have been critical of some decisions, including his authorization of military strikes in Iran and his handling of files in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

He intends to cast Mr. Graham as an old-guard Republican who is not aligned with Mr. Trump’s movement.

Introducing Dr. Annie Andrews, the South Carolina Pediatrician Who Says Lindsey Graham Is Full of S**t

 

9 Blackbirds Sitting in a Pie

 

"It's darkest before the dawn." 

Get outta my face with that shit! I totally appreciate the proverb and get it that the November 3rd election is "the dawn," and dawn is supposed to reestablish hope when so much seems lost, but in all honesty I don't feel better. This moment is more like a minute to midnight to me, than anywhere near 6 a.m. There are still some 44 days til we vote the bastard out, say. Or, say, McConnell fails to get Trump's nominee through before November 3rd because of defections in his caucus. Will that even matter? Because McConnell will still have another bite at the apple, starting on November 4th, as he strong-arms a lame duck session with still plenty of time to display the full measure of his corruption. 

Who are the potential Senate defectors from another McConnell power grab? The esteemed men and women who actually know right from wrong but who en masse gave up long ago objecting to wrong? The equivocators, the shrinkers, the shell-shocked. Which of these are the Senators most likely to resist? 

(Presented here in rank order of most likely to stand firm against McConnell hypocrisy to least likely to let out a peep):

Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) -- Told an interviewer on Friday, shortly before the announcement of Justice Ginsburg’s death, that she opposed confirming a new justice before Nov. 3. “I would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee,” she said. “We are 50 some days away from an election.” Murkoski has shown steel in her spine before, especially as relates to displeasing Trump. I think the guys don't strong arm this chick.

Mitt Romney (Utah) -- Increasing defiance of Trump all year, so maybe he's actually grooving to the perception that he finally took his balls out of the lockbox. This might be another watershed moment for a revivified Mitt Romney.

Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) -- Previously the judiciary panel’s chairman, said in 2018 that if there were a vacancy in 2020, he would not bring a nomination before his committee until after the election if he were still in charge. But he surrendered his gavel to Lindsey Graham (see below). Grassley is perfectly capable of standing up for principle, in his Grandpa Simpson way, just as he's also perfectly capable, in his Grandpa Simpson way, of getting confused and wandering out of frame. He did not say last night how he would vote as an individual senator. At least he's thinking about it.

Ben Sasse (Nebraska) -- As recently as August 10 called Trump's attempts at power-wielding "unconstitutional slop." Trump immediately lashed his naked back: “RINO Ben Sasse, who needed my support and endorsement in order to get the Republican nomination for Senate from the GREAT State of Nebraska, has, now that he’s got it (Thank you President T), gone rogue, again, This foolishness plays right into the hands of the Radical Left Dems!” Trump has Ben Sasse's number. He's disciplined Sasse before, and Sasse obediently sat in the corner. But he also likes to think of himself as a virtuous warrior, and he might get a wild hair and impersonate a do-or-die Marine for Halloween. 

Cory Gardner (Colorado) -- Could the showdown over SCOTUS awaken Gardner's disgust with McConnell's hypocrisy, and might he attempt a "hail Mary" to turn around his fortunes in the Colorado Senate race? Hickenlooper looks likely to beat him. But Gardner's defection is a longshot. Gardner looks too cowed by the Trumpists, though maybe the independent vote in Colorado makes Gardner less predictably cowed than Susan Collins.

Susan Collins (Maine) -- The most endangered Republican incumbent (according to Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman). Collins told The New York Times this month that she would not favor voting on a new justice in October. “I think that’s too close,” she said. “I really do.” But it's a classic Susan Collins head-fake. She always caves. She really, really does.

Thom Tillis (North Carolina) -- Though he's shown rogue moments of independence, he's been whipped thoroughly into line, and he's gonna go for any SCOTUS nom Trump puts forward. Jumping ship would destroy him with much of the Republican base.

Martha McSally (Arizona) -- She knows she's losing to Democrat Mark Kelly in her reelection campaign. Losing means she's totally free to be as Trumpist as possible before she exits the scene.

Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) -- The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would consider any nominee, said in 2018 that if an opening occurred in the last year of Mr. Trump’s term, “we’ll wait to the next election,” but then hedged in July, telling CNN that “we’d have to see.” In a statement issued Friday night mourning Justice Ginsburg, Graham, who is in a competitive reelection race of his own (against Jaime Harrison), made no mention of when to fill the vacancy. So ... as you were. Graham would never buck Trump/McConnell.

 

The Collaboration of Mark Meadows and Virginia Foxx

The photo-op at St. John's Church. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is at far right.
SecDef Mark Esper is at far left, who has said he didn't know where he was going that evening.
Presumably Meadows knew and collaborated in the operation

Former Congressman Mark Meadows is from North Carolina. By way of East Berlin? I ask because East Berlin was the home of the Stasi, the East German secret police who taught collaboration with tyranny as self-advancement.

Meadows' sycophancy toward Trump was already legendary. He willingly gave up a seat in the US House in order to be in that man's armpit every day, praising his ideas, facilitating his desires, fanning his fantasies, taking a hike through a park which still reeked of chemicals, trailing behind his Great White Shark like a remora.

Consider that other accomplished Republican collaborator from the Carolinas, Lindsey Graham, who in the presence of Trump acts like a sorority chick who just got pinned. Anne Applebaum reports, "A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, 'he brags about having just met with Trump' while exhibiting 'high school' levels of excitement, as if 'a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me!' "

Yes, I've been reading Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on the psychology of collusion in an authoritarian state, an exhaustive and exhausting trip through the 20th Century and its many outbreaks of tyranny and the collusion of some of the people. Applebaum writes persuasively about the several types of collusion, from the unwilling and reluctant to the ideologically propelled, with lots of examples from the history of the last 100 years. I recommend you read her on your own time.

A remora attaches itself to a Great White

Look at Congresswoman Virginia Foxx. She becomes a giddy cheerleader (senior citizen league) in Trump's presence, a fawning autograph-hound giggling in the presence of an iron-fisted male she admires. Those of us who've known her personally for decades know her authoritarian instincts and her imperious nature. She drives a car likes she thinks: I'm the only person on this road.

Her toadying to Trump is just as inexcusable as Meadows' and Graham's, if less public and considerably less consequential. Her motivation? Gotta be personal gain. She's gotten progressively richer in public office, and it doesn't hurt building that wealth to be in the front row of group photos featuring ultimate power. Meanwhile, she's quite pious, published "God Is in the House" in 2016 (her version of waving the Bible in front of St. John's), and she issues self-congratulatory little homilies about religious and civic virtue at the drop of a body, most recently following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, offering thoughts and prayers for the family and then saying this in classic collaborator style: "I applaud both President Trump and Attorney General Barr’s decision to conduct a full inquiry into this horrific incident." 

"Full inquiry"? What? Not a word about Trump's militarizing the streets of the nation's capitol, his lack of respect for protestors, his unconstitutional grabbing of power and the deployment of the top officials in his government -- Mike Pompeo at State and William Barr at Justice -- as accessories in his subversion of the Constitution and its whole framework of checks-and-balances.

Why, even the Pope in Rome condemns such collusion with immoral authoritarianism. Southern Baptists ... not so much. Which perhaps explains Foxx's current self-descriptor as "a Catholic-Baptist," since the absolution you can't get from the one, you can probably get from the other.

Democrat Jaime Harrison Running for Senate in South Carolina

The Jaime Harrison senatorial campaign to take out incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in South Carolina could be a bellwether for politics in a new New South. Can a moderate, business-aligned black Democrat, who learned his politics at the elbow of Rep. Jim Clyburn, defeat the entrenched Lindsey Graham, the sycophantic chameleon who now smooches the ass of a man he once called “a kook”? Graham said of Trump in February 2016, “I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” He now bows to him as Lord and Master.

MotherJones.com

According to reporter Kara Voght, Harrison has been a dynamo at fundraising, raising $3.5 million in the last quarter of 2019 which makes Harrison a champion in the money race though he's still some $5 million behind Lindsey Graham.

He came up from extreme poverty in South Carolina but got a degree at Yale and then at Georgetown Law and sought out a staff position with Rep. Jim Clyburn, where he learned the personalities and the ways of the Hill. From there he went on to work for the Podesta Group with clients like the pro-coal American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Walmart. In other words, he's well educated and well connected to corporate America.

But for our hyper-partisan age, he's also decided on a softer approach to campaigning, mainly refusing to draw distinctions to Graham or even mentioning his name. Gibbs Knotts, who teaches political science at the College of Charleston, said of Harrison's campaign, “To characterize this as a long shot would be accurate.” A long shot not just because of the money disadvantage and not just because he's a black man running in the former Confederacy but because he's trying to rise above partisanship when the tide of history is flowing the other direction.

Someone Is Out To Get Us

Growing up in West Texas in the 1950s, I witnessed paranoia about Russia first-hand, about how Russian moles never stopped plotting world-wide domination. Beware of the United Nations! It's so Red it's pink! Beware the prophets preaching peace and "one world government." Oh, the wheat and cotton fields, they stayed awake all night worrying about the 2nd grade teacher planning to Trick 'r Treat For UNICEF, and what it might portend for the survival of freedom.

Now Russia is in the White House. They've perched so long they've roosted. Virtually. Also literally: Trump has enjoyed 11 phone calls with Vladimir Putin (that we know about) over the past three years. "The content of those conversations has mostly been kept confidential." Yeah, we know. Locked up in a secret safe computer-Fort Knox because Trump knows that if we know what Putin's telling him, and what he's promising Putin, we'd revolt.

At least I hope we'd revolt. Because, there are clear and disturbing signs that the whole Republican Party is just okay with Trump's divided loyalty. Certainly, his grassroots support could care less. It's all fake news to them. But it's the Republican members of Congress that should worry us, educated men and women who can presumably read, yet they are plain blah about Russia's evil Rasputin dominating our president. Is it because they're so cowed by Trump or more especially afraid of his mob of low-information supporters? Trump believes what Putin tells him, thinks what Putin thinks, and does what Putin says. Meanwhile, the Republican members of Congress -- bless their hearts! -- mouth the Ukrainian mythology too. "A fictional narrative," Fiona Hill labeled it yesterday, which came straight from Russian "security services."

Republicans in the Senate, however, know better. They know the origins of the Ukraine Lie, and how it's been propagated, because they've been briefed by American intelligence officials (CIA, et al.). That news just broke last night -- that senators were informed in recent weeks about "a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election." But even after that intelligence briefing ("wise up, gentlemen!") and even after Fiona Hill riveted the TV audience by asking legislators directly and bluntly not to be stupid dicks and spread the Russian lie, there goes Senator Lindsey Graham off to dig up the black yucky truth about Ukraine's conspiring for Hillary in 2016 while simultaneously paying a bribe to Joe Biden's son. The headline in Slate: "Lindsey Graham Is Now Investigating the Bidens Anyway, Cementing Ukraine’s Role as Hapless Fall Guy."

The paranoia in 1950s West Texas about the Russkies was maybe too hysterical. And certainly ahead of its time.

Profiles in Chickenshit*

Burgess Everett et al., on politico.com:

Republicans unleashed perhaps their most aggressive outcry of the Trump era after he abandoned the U.S.’ Kurdish allies and ceded northeastern Syria to Turkey. But now GOP lawmakers are dialing back their direct criticism of the president....

... while they’re still dissatisfied with the situation, they’ve shifted gears away from confrontation with the president.

“I do appreciate what the administration has done against Turkey through executive action, but more to follow,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon, after joining Trump for a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday. “I appreciate the phone calls yesterday with Erdogan, I think [Trump] reached out in a good way to let Turkey know they needed a cease-fire right now.”

It's a good way, according now to Lindsey Graham.

*Indebted to Rick Wilson for the headline.

The Kavanaugh Saga: Did Too Much Virginity Make Him Mean?

Most telling moment of the entire day yesterday was the very last question: Senator Kamala Harris asked Brett Kavanaugh if he watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony that morning. "No," he answered.

If you were innocent, as he insists, wouldn't you want to watch what she was saying about you in a Senate hearing room?

Clearly, he needed to come in hot. That was the gameplan. That was what Trump wanted. So watching Blasey Ford's testimony might have done something else to Kavanaugh -- especially if it's true. Unimpaired by the sight of his accuser, Kavanaugh marched in there like a thundercloud, complete with lightning bolts and raindrops.

What to make of the tears? And the gulping of water? Gosh, I was beginning to feel sorry for the dude, but then the QandA kicked in, first with the woman sex crimes prosecutor and then with a visibly alarmed Dianne Feinstein, and we watched Kavanaugh literally begin to disintegrate.

He was clearly coached to be aggressive with a self-righteous and self-pitying script. "This is all an ambush. I should have been informed of these charges weeks ago. It's a Democrat plot to get me. Because of the Clinton thing. I was a sterling scholar in school. I was a good boy. I went to the best law school in the nation, and women love me. They really do."

Poking at that façade, the Democratic senators got back belligerence. It was combativeness like on a schoolyard -- "So's-yer-old-man!" "Takes one to know one!" He actually implied that Senator Amy Klobuchar might be a blackout drunk when she asked him if he was a blackout drunk, and he practically hissed at Sheldon Whitehouse, "Whaddya you like to drink, Senator? Whaddya you like to drink?" 

Dick Durban finally knocked him off his script, and Kavanaugh completely collapsed, physically collapsed. It's painful to watch. And it's part of the record now for eternity.

Watching this implosion of their boy, the Republican senators ditched the woman sex crimes prosecutor, and Lindsey Graham volunteered to throw the public hissy fit with the counter-allegations and the finger-pointing theatrics -- the ole Trump counter-punch -- of -- gasp! -- collusion amongst the Democrats and extreme malpractice against an upstanding young man. 

With that hired woman from Arizona out of the way, the Republican men all took turns doubling the charges of ambush against the Democrats or praising the choir boy before them, and thus they rallied their troops, made the Christine Blasey Ford testimony simply disappear, and probably saved Kavanaugh's ass. At least for a day.

(Lindsey Graham was so clearly talking to Senator Jeff Flake when he warned his fellow senators not to be fooled by this whole "farce." Don't even think of voting against "this fine man.")

The Only Child

When Kavanaugh said he was an only child, I sat up straight. In my experience -- and my experience is limited, granted -- only-children can sometimes be spoiled brats, entitled from birth to the best and indignant when things don't work out to their expectations. Aggressively indignant.

I suddenly saw him for what he was.

And I don't think this man belongs in a judge's robes. I seriously don't. The tantrum thrown to get his way -- topped by the tantrum Lindsey Graham threw, but never mind that! -- and the rank partisanship of dragging up Trump's election and the prosecution of the Clintons over White Water -- it all speaks to his tribal mentality. This is a not a good judge of anything.

It's Not the Word, People

I keep seeing people on Facebook and in newspaper opinion pieces drawing back in horror that Trump said "shithole." Saying shithole was not the offense. Writing off huge segments of dark-skinned humanity as being unworthy of respect let alone empathy -- that was the gaping abyss in Trump's soul which suddenly opened up for all of us to contemplate. Is there any bottom to that hole?

It was not the word he uttered. It is the fact that this particular person -- putatively, the "leader of the free world" -- would express such racist contempt for millions of other people, out loud and in front of witnesses.

“This is how the forgotten men and women of America talk at the bar,” said a Fox News host, as if Trump's "honesty" were his saving grace. A lot of things get said in bars, which does not necessarily elevate those sentiments to a place of privilege in our public discourse. Bars are where small men go to swagger in front of their friends and rivals. The utterance “shithole countries" is mere swagger, meant to short-circuit discussion and bully any opposition.

The United States of America is full of people who came from troubled places, mere shitholes you could say, but it was not their places of origin which defines them. It is the content of their aspirations that defines them as "American," their willingness to become contributing and productive citizens of our commonweal (despite any asshole bully currently ruling the joint).

This president has clearly grown more comfortable blurting his overtly racist attitudes, condemning whole countries and their people for not being more like Norway, one of the whitest countries on Earth. Did those Republican congressmen in the room who now profess a failure of memory about what Trump said, did they laugh nervously when he said it? Did they through their grunts and gestures, like a gaggle of masculinity at a bar, let the bully's opinion stand unchallenged? Did they study the floor of the Oval Office, wishing they were elsewhere but also secretly acknowledging that Trump was speaking their truth too?

Senator Lindsey Graham claims that “following comments by the president, I said my piece directly to him yesterday," and we wonder what that "piece" might have included. We'd love to believe that Senator Graham told the president to knock it off, to stop being the braggart racist in the bar, but we also know the senator for a suck-up, so we're hedging our bets on that one.

We Double-Dog Dare You

“Lindsey Graham knows better. Deep in his heart, he must know that Donald Trump is fundamentally unfit to be president, and he has to pretend that Trump is. And when you engage in a game like that, there’s often a cost to it.”

--Peter Wehner, advisor to former President George W. Bush

You may not have noticed that the tart-tongued Senator Graham of South Carolina, who actually ran against Trump in the primary of 2016, has decided to transform himself into "the Trump whisperer" (according to the NYTimes). Graham says he hears from Trump regularly on his cell phone.

And Graham is pretty up-front about his motives: “He’s very popular in my state. When I help him, it helps me back home. And I think it probably helps him to be able to do business with an old rival who’s seen as a deal maker .... I’m going to try to stay in a position where I can have input to the president. I can help him where I can, and he will call me up and pick my brain. Now, if you’re a United States senator, that’s a good place to find yourself.”

Until it isn't a good place, until it turns into a scorching vast tundra of recriminations, insults, and Twitter tantrums.

Yes, We're Tired of So Much Winning!

Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie in the US Senate last night to deny bank and credit card customers the ability to band together in class action lawsuits against Wall Street banks and credit card companies that rip them off.

They say that Trump will sign the bill immediately, probably with a brass band and marching elephants to celebrate getting to sign something, anything, despite how badly it hurts the consuming public. He won't know what's actually in the bill and how it hurts regular, non-billionaire type people, but then, he also won't care.

So who were the two Republicans who forced the tie-breaker? Surprise! Not Bob Corker and not Jeff Flake and not Susan Collins and not John McCain and not Lisa Murkowski. They all voted for it. The two defecting Republicans were Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana.