10,000 on ignore, Book 174: The Days of Reckoning, Part 33.....

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Trump Resumes His ‘Big Lie’ Rallies While Biden Focuses on Getting Things Done - The Bulwark

A week of historic and hysterical political news.

thebulwark.com

......As it turned out it didn’t bring much that was new. Trump’s rants are now well known: They always cover Hillary Clinton, the news media, Hunter Biden, the border, etc. His ninety-minute Ohio harangue was a tired retread—a version of his failed re-election rallies that mostly made Trump sound like he belongs to the past and should stay there. Of course there were some of Trump’s favorite rally songs, like the Village People’s disco tune “Macho Man,” which was oddly followed by Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.”

In reality Trump is no “Macho Man” and he only wishes he were always on our mind.

The usual court jester sycophants showed up, like Reps. Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Also present in a cameo appearance was the MyPillow conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell. And there were the red-hatted worshipers calling for “four more years” for their adored hero.

Early this month, it was reported that Trump believed he would be “reinstated” to the presidency in August—as if he will merely walk up to the White House, knock on the door, say “I’m back!” and then be accepted as our nation’s chief executive. He did not go that far at Saturday’s rally. But he did spout a stream of grudges and grievances and gripes, including an extended diatribe on his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.....

 

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Opinion | The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump

Why there was Trumpism long before Trump — and there will be long afterward.

www.nytimes.com

.....After more than a decade in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided fruitful targets for an audience fearful of cultural change, conservative media has struggled to turn the older white president who goes to Mass every Sunday into a compelling villain. Yet the apocalypse remains nigh, threatened by the presence of those Americans they consider unworthy of the name.

On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Under such an ideology, depriving certain Americans of their fundamental rights is not wrong but praiseworthy, because such people are usurpers.....

 

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Professor1215
Jun 27, 2021 at 10:14:47 AM

I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but the cases of genuine voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election that have come to light all appear to involve illegal votes for Trimp. For example, there’s a recent indictment of a man who used his father’s absentee ballot after his father died to vote twice for T, and the man who murdered his wife and used her mail-in ballot to do the same.

Does anyone know of cases that were pro-Biden?

 

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William Barr says William Barr did all the right things before Trump launched an insurrection
Hunter

In The Atlantic, journalist Jonathan Karl gives us a short look at Trump attorney general William Barr's last weeks in power according to William Barr himself, who was kind enough to grace Karl with a series of interviews out of the innate goodness of his heart. Oh, and because Barr is now seen by many as the most thoroughly partisan and corrupt attorney general in a generation, which is going to seriously cut down on future speaking fees if he can't figure out how to massage the record back into something vaguely defensible.

The actual news out of it is Not Damn Much, but this is a good opportunity to revisit the First Rule Of News Consumption: Be aware of the source. From the nation's top powerbrokers to man-on-the-street interviewees, anyone talking to a reporter about their own doings is going to tell that reporter the most flattering version of events they think they can get away with. Many of the most important details about what Trump and his core team did in their attempts to overturn a United States election remain murky because those most in the know, like ex-House Republican turned chief of staff Mark Meadows, are clamming up.
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What we can learn from the Atlantic story is that according to William Barr, William Barr is great. He's always the bravest and most integrity-filled person in the room, doing the right things despite pressure on all sides and so on and so forth. This isn't exactly news. What might be news is that the put-upon Barr believes the time is right to mete out a bit of punishment on everyone else.

Here's what we learn from Karl's interviews with Barr, then:

First, Barr wants you to know that Sen. Mitch McConnell is a gutless coward. Barr is willing to recount several conversations with McConnell in which McConnell, who in public spent most of the post-election period dodging questions about Trump's increasingly outrageous and dangerous claims, pleaded with Barr to be the one who contradicted Trump by telling the world that Trump's election "fraud" claims were utter bullshit.

McConnell told Barr in mid-November that Trump's hoaxes were "damaging" to both the country and to the Republican Party—no guesses on which of those was the more pressing concern, for Mitch—but Republicans "cannot be frontally attacking [Trump] right now," because Mitch and the others were trying to keep on Trump's good side for fear an open declaration of Biden's victory would result in an angry Trump sabotaging Republican election chances in the two Georgia Senate runoff races. Barr was "in a better position to inject some reality" into Trump's claims of election fraud.

Barr replied, according to Barr, that he was "going to do it at the appropriate time." So here we have one slightly interesting tidbit, then: Even in Barr's own accounting, he was urged to combat Trump's "damaging" election hoaxes and could only muster up an assurance that he would be getting right on that ... eventually. After it played out a bit more. In Barr's account, he was bravely using the Department of Justice to gather evidence of which claims might be true or might be false; in the actual news stories of each day, the claims being peddled by Trump's minions were brazenly fraudulent to begin with.

The second tidbit is that William Barr is, along with multiple other people inside Trump's inner circle, perfectly willing to tell Karl that after Barr eventually did publicly nix Trump's claims Trump became quite batshit unhinged, when finally meeting Barr again. Trump had "the eyes and mannerism of a madman," sez a source, which we can probably take to mean "even more than usual," and Barr compared him to the madman brigadier general of Dr. Strangelove.

"You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump," Trump is said to have told Barr, which is a pretty dead-on example of a malignant narcissist in the throes of a decompensating episode. You there, who have asserted that reality is something other than what I have claimed it to be? You must have been plotting against me all along.

Great, super. So again we have a situation in which everyone around Trump was pretty damn certain he had gone off the rails, jumped the trolley, sprung a brain-leak, and had become devoid of marbles but nobody in government, from Secret Service on down, was willing to toss him in a burlap sack, tie it shut, and declare that Mike Pence was taking charge because the sitting president had developed a serious case of bananapants.

The rest is not of note. Barr says Barr acted with integrity, despite everyone else in Trump's orbit pressuring him to help topple the national government. Barr says Mitch was a spineless weasel who wanted someone else to save the country from potential violence so Mitch wouldn't have to. Barr says Trump was an unhinged, raging monster but Barr, having Integrity and stuff, was loyally willing to stay and then two weeks later was forced to resign because of the same Integrity after Trump continued to push the same hoaxes and the likely consequences of those acts began to become more and more concrete.

How do we sum all this up, then, properly taking into account Barr's actual record of assisting Trump in hiding evidence from Congress, in fishing expeditions against Trump's prime political foe, in using the resources of his office to help discredit American intelligence officials and in assisting Trump's government-wide purge of inspector generals, watchdogs, and other whistleblowers—all the petty corruptions William Barr didn't see fit to highlight, in his own interpretation of those last days? It appears that William Barr decided after Donald Trump's loss that no matter what else William Barr was willing to do for conservatism, he wasn't going to go to jail for Trump or get caught up in actual crossfire if Trump succeeded in goading violent revolution.

Not so much "integrity," then, as a decision that he wasn't going to go down with a sinking ship. Self-interest is the usual reason powerful people recount their lives to waiting reporters, and Barr has more damage control to do than most.

 

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Who's really trying to defund police? Chris Wallace takes to task Republican Rep. Jim Banks
Lauren Floyd

It seldom takes much to put a Republican in his or her place. Simple facts do it on most occasions, and Fox News anchor Chris Wallace had plenty of them for GOP Rep. Jim Banks on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace responded to Banks' accusation that Democrats opposing police brutality are to blame for increasing crime rates with a clip of the top Democrat, President Joe Biden promoting his $350 billion anti-crime plan. “That means more police officers, more nurses, more counselors, more social workers, more community violence interrupters to help resolve issues before they escalate into crimes,” Biden said.

Wallace pointed out that Banks opposed the spending, which was part of the American Rescue Plan, as well as every other Republican in Congress. “Congressman Banks, you voted against that package, against the $350 billion, just like every other Republican in the House and Senate, so can't you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace asked.
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Republicans who’ve grossly mischaracterized the defund the police effort have repeatedly accused Biden of supporting their misinterpretation, which is to strip law enforcement agencies of all funding leaving rapists and murderers free to roam suburban streets. The actual call of the defund the police movement is to reallocate a portion of public safety funding to preventative social services, mental health resources, and education programming.



Banks wrote in a Fox News op-ed that the murder rate jumped by an average of 30% in America’s biggest cities in 2020, and that there is “overwhelming evidence connecting the rise in murders to the violent riots last summer and the Defund the Police movement.” He of course cited no such “overwhelming evidence” that the protests, which were actually aimed at stopping police violence against people of color, caused the uptick in violent crimes.

“The saddest part about Democrats’ own responsibility for rising violent crime is that it’s now impossible the White House to work to reduce violence in America – they would have to denounce everything they stood for less than a year ago,” Banks wrote. He attempted to name Rep. Rashida Tlaib in continuing the same argument on Wallace’s show. Banks was referring to Tlaib’s statement following the death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright, in which she said policing in the United States was "inherently and intentionally racist." Wright, a Black man, was shot and killed in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, about 10 miles north of the Hennepin County Courthouse, where ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was on trial for murdering George Floyd, another Black man. Ex-cop Kim Potter claimed she was reaching for her Taser and grabbed her gun instead when she shot Wright on April 11, and Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison on Friday.

Wallace cut Banks off at the mention of Tlaib. “I heard you make that point but I’m asking you there’s $350 billion in this package the president says can be used for policing and let me put up some of the specific things that he said,” Wallace said. “Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer.”

“The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people,” Wallace continued. “Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other Republican voted against this $350 billion.” With no answer for Wallace and no actual solutions to propose to help reduce crime, Banks continued trying to pin rising crime on progressive Democrats who as he put it “stigmatized one of the most honorable professions in America.” It’s a shame he didn’t actually listen to the protesters he’s now trying to demonize. Banks might’ve actually learned the truth of what racist policing looks like in Black and brown communities.

 

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Tweets of the Week Jun 20-26 2021
oldhippiedude

 

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Hypocrisy much? Republican speechwriter promotes alternate history to criticize critical race theory
Christopher Reeves

Remember this guy? In the stream of the QAnon loving Republicans today, you’d think they have just forgotten him. He denounced Trump (far too late), and got onboard with vaccines (too soon for the Qanon conspirators). If you want to know a lot about where the Republican party is right now, take a look at the people who go to work in the Republican infrastructure. They know what the base wants, and they will say whatever it takes to continue to be relevant. Enter Ned Ryun, former Bush speechwriter, son of Kansas congressman Jim Ryun, who was defeated by Democratic candidate Nancy Boyda in a bit of an upset, and now, a ridiculous puppet for outright bonkers ideas.



Too bad he isn’t here to answer that, right Ned? Care to answer how that came about? The response to Ned’s comments highlights exactly the problem





Even I couldn’t resist a response.



Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King delivers the knockout blow:



It is a terrible thing, Ned when you forget that this is recent history and there are still people alive who remember what happened. It may be before me, but it wasn’t before my parents — and that should tell you there are a whole lot of Americans alive who were here, and would wildly disagree with your weird 100% take.

 

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