ARE THESE PEOPLE HIGH OR WHAT?
Post date • THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16
Are these people high or what?
The Department of Education—whose new secretary, Betsy DeVos, begins her term acting like she’s never had any education—tweets out a salute to the author and activist W. E. B. Du Bois . . .
By misspelling his name.
Department of Education.
Then, hours later, issues its apologies . . .
And misspells apologies . . .
Are these people high—or what?
On Instagram, Trump commemorates Abraham Lincoln’s birthday—and the GOP does the same on Twitter—by posting his photo and attributing to him the quotation “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
The quote is actually from an advertisement for a book about aging published in 1947—eighty-two years after Lincoln died.
Are these people high—or what?
Trump, in a private meeting with senators of both parties to talk about his Supreme Court nominee, wanders into his mental woods again, calls Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” and tells ex-senator Kelly Ayotte that she would’ve kept her seat in New Hampshire but for thousands of illegal votes cast there by people bused in from Massachusetts . . .
Are these people high—or what?
New Hampshire’s former Republican chairman offers a thousand dollars for any proof of just one such illegal vote.
A federal elections commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush demands that Trump share whatever proof he has “with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly.”
Whereupon Trump’s Propagandist Flavor of the Month, Stephen Miller, goes on television and offers as proof . . . no proof!
“I’ve actually, having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters in to New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real, it’s very serious. This morning on this show is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence.”
Translation: You want proof?
I offer as proof—my opinion.
Because there is no proof.
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Are these people high—or what?
Public Policy Polling asks 712 voters, “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘The Bowling Green massacre shows why we need Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration?’”
Roughly 51 percent of Trump voters answer yes . . . the Muslim ban is justified by the Bowling Green Massacre.
There is no Bowling Green Massacre—this is the nonsense that Kellyanne Conway made up.
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Are these people high—or what?
Last August, the same pollster asked, “Would you support or oppose building a wall along the Atlantic Ocean to keep Muslims from entering the country from the Middle East?”
Thirty-one percent of those identifying themselves as Trump supporters said yes—to walling off the entire Eastern Seaboard . . .
To keep out . . . Muslims . . . coming in by . . . surfboard . . . or submarine . . . or swimming here from Baghdad.
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Are these people high—or what?
Again, same pollster, asking, “Do you think Donald Trump should be able to overturn decisions by judges that he disagrees with, or not?”
Again, 51 percent said yes . . .
Another 16 percent aren’t sure . . .
Only a third said no!
A democracy in which the president can overturn the rulings of judges is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship.
A majority of Trump voters are okay with replacing key parts of the United States of America with one-man rule.
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Are these people high—or what?
And when all of these threads of madness join up, and the immigration history of this country is betrayed by a would-be tyrant looking for scapegoats . . . the picture changes.
From Americans acting as if intoxicated . . .
It becomes Americans acting . . . just like ordinary Germans did under the Nazis, or just as ordinary Russians did under the Communists . . .
JFK Airport. An Iraqi woman detained. Thirty-three hours. Handcuffed. Denied a wheelchair. She had come here to see her son. A sergeant in the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.
Philadelphia International. A woman flies in from Iran to see her daughters—both American doctoral students. Her passport is seized. Somehow she doesn’t have her cell phone anymore. Customs puts her on another flight to Iran, can’t tell her daughters which flight.
Frankfurt, Germany. American customs there keeps Dr. Samira Asgari from flying to Boston, where the next day she is supposed to start her fellowship at Harvard Medical School.
Dulles Airport. Woman traveling with two citizen children. Reportedly detained for twenty hours without food, told the kids can stay but she will be deported to Africa. Handcuffed. Even when going to the bathroom.
Bush Intercontinental, Houston. Man coming in from Chile, forced to give his phone to customs. To give them the PIN number. To authorize them to copy its contents. He is a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The phone belongs to his employer, NASA. He works for an arm of the U.S. government. He was born in Los Angeles.
And back at Dulles. Five-year-old boy. U.S. citizen. Kept from his mother. Detained for four hours. Reportedly handcuffed by customs officials.
Sean Spicer’s reaction? “To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.”
Are.
These.
People.
High—or what?
*
Last month, as I sat next to him on his set, my friend Bill Maher managed to do something he hadn’t done since 1978: he shocked me. He cited statistics that the fourteen states in this country with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person all voted last November for Trump.
Where Trump did the best? West Virginia. An average of 433 pain pills per person over the past six years.
Eighty percent of the states with the greatest heroin use—went for Trump.
Six of the nine Ohio counties that Trump flipped from Obama have opioid overdose rates high above the national average. All of the ones he flipped in Pennsylvania have nearly double the national overdose rate.
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Madness surrounds us.
In the government . . .
In the behavior of its spokespeople . . .
In the amorality and brutality of those who enforce its decrees . . .
And in the rising disinterest in democracy of those who support it.
So, once more—much more solemnly.
Are these people high—or what?
THE SUICIDE OF A PRESIDENCY
Post date • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21
The suicide of a presidency occurred on Friday, February 17, 2017, at 4:32 p.m. Eastern Time.
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!”
Donald Trump struck a fatal blow against his own presidency at that moment, with the use of those terms never heard before from an American president, not even from Richard Nixon, not ever.
The presidency, of course, did not end with those words.
But the inevitability that it will end, later or sooner—the truth that his position as president is no longer tenable—became fixed the moment he pressed “send” and promulgated those evil words.
And then he deleted them.
But he deleted them not because they were the spasmodic outburst of a man with no self-control sudde
nly understanding that he had just finally thrown everything he had achieved out the window and he was seeking to destroy the record, as Nixon destroyed the tapes.
No, he deleted them because he had left out some of the specific targets he wanted to smear with words that even the evil founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, waited until he was a month in power before using.
Sixteen minutes later.
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
There is no walking those words back.
A man holding the office of the president of the United States using the language of the totalitarian states of Russia, the language used to mark groups of people for removal and death.
A man holding the office of the president of the United States specifically attacking a group, specifically protected by the Bill of Rights, the first amendments ever passed to the Constitution to which he swore allegiance—apparently falsely swore allegiance—but a month earlier.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Freedom of the press—sandwiched in among the freedom from a state religion, and against government abridgment of free speech, and of the right of assembly, and of petition against grievances.
An attack on freedom of the press is an attack on all those other freedoms and all those Americans who exercise all those other freedoms.
It is an attack on the Constitution itself.
And that may not mean much to Trump or his wilder supporters, nor even to some of the men and women on the fringes of Congress to whom democracy has always been nothing more than a brand name.
But the most tepid of Democrats must realize—or be made to realize—that everybody else in the president’s party now has to decide how to answer . . . new questions.
“Speaker Ryan—do you agree? Are The New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN, and many more the enemy of the American people?”
“Vice President Pence—a decade ago, you cosponsored a bill to let reporters protect confidential sources. Do you agree with the president—or do you believe in freedom of the press?”
“Majority Leader McConnell—can you defend the president of the United States’ calling Americans, holding American jobs in American-owned businesses, ‘the enemies of the American people’?”
“Senator McCain—do you believe the president should be calling any American citizens a phrase coined by the Communist Lenin?”
“Secretary of Defense Mattis—when people say that freedom of speech and freedom of the press exist because of the United States military, and that the military fights for free speech and freedom of the press, what, exactly, does that mean?”
“Judge Neil Gorsuch—do you believe in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?”
“Republican candidate for the Senate, for the House, for the state legislature, for village mayor, for the school board—not condemning Donald Trump means not condemning his belief that the news media is the enemy of the American people. Do you support Donald Trump, or do you think the news media is the enemy of the people?”
These questions.
And similarly blunt follow-ups.
Again and again and again.
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This is a door that Trump has closed behind himself—forever.
He cannot reopen it and go back through—even if he were smart enough to try to do so.
It is the suicide of a presidency.
Because whether all of those Republicans answer those questions now, or next fall, they will answer them, and they will not be able to nuance their answers, and if the country still believes in democracy and not fascism, it will punish any politician who does not repudiate Trump’s authoritarian madness.
It does not mean his presidency ends today or tomorrow.
Richard Nixon committed the suicide of a presidency in the late morning of Friday, June 23, 1972, when he ordered the FBI to discontinue its investigation of the Watergate break-in of just six days earlier. The tape recording of his order did not become public, however, until August 5, 1974.
Nixon’s presidency died of its two-year-old self-inflicted wounds at noon on August 9, 1974—just as Trump’s presidency will die of the wound he inflicted on it, and for exactly the same reason.
Not because it was a crime against the United States of America and the Constitution.
But because . . . Republicans were going to have to answer questions about it in the midterm elections.
As the Republicans of 1974 would have had no choice but to run against Richard Nixon . . .
The Republicans of our day will have no choice but to run against Donald Trump.
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We have always been very celestial about our motives in this country. The Constitution, the flag, American exceptionalism.
But ultimately, most of our internal decisions have come down to far less lofty issues—often they’ve come right down into the gutters and the sewers . . . of who is going to be reelected, and who is not.
And on Twitter, on February 17, Donald Trump guaranteed that Republicans would have to try to get themselves reelected as Republicans while a Republican president insisted that the free press was an enemy of the American people.
Those Republicans can’t do that.
So they will not try.
So Trump will have to go.
And so, his presidency is, right now, dying—by his own hand.
The only question is: How fast will it die?
INTEL
Post date • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22
Do you think Donald Trump realizes that the American intelligence community has already started to kill and eat his presidency?
The leaks.
The drip, drip, drip.
The tiny revelation that cost Michael Flynn the national security adviser’s job.
The slightly larger revelation that was the play-by-play of how and why his first three choices to succeed Flynn . . . didn’t.
The larger revelations that put the backbone in New York Times and CNN stories about the Trump campaign talking with Russia while still hiding the potentially disastrous details of what they said.
The far more meaningful—but far more subtle—revelation that the so-called British Dossier is gaining credibility within the intelligence agencies because they have been able to confirm so many little details, like how the claims of meetings and phone calls on specific dates are turning out to be exactly right.
Do you think Trump understands what all these things are?
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They are . . . warnings.
They are . . . the cop letting the belligerent drunk see just the tip of the gun.
They are . . . the poker player putting down the twenty-dollar chips, then smiling at the mark, then pulling back the twenty-dollar chips and replacing them with hundred-dollar chips.
They. Are. Warnings.
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Stories based on sources usually bear no resemblance to what you see in the movies or on television dramas. It’s not All the President’s Men with indefatigable and annoying pests overwhelming reluctant individuals until the latter do the right thing.
You might have enough sources who are around the center, but not at the center, of a given story, and with all the circumstantial evidence they have provided you, you might be able to persuade the key source to confirm what you have already proved to them that you know.
But this is almost always true:
A source doesn’t give you a story because you want them to give it to you.
A source gives you a s
tory because they want to give it to you.
And there are sources—a lot of sources, very well placed, very well informed sources—who want to tell the world about Donald Trump.
The details they are doling out have a dual purpose. They get these stories out that confirm the correct perception that this administration is like a giant fire hose that the firefighters have lost control of.
But, more important, they are there to get the message to Trump and those around him that there is an iceberg, and it will be revealed one square foot at a time, so stop screwing around.
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Maybe he’s not smart enough to get it.
Maybe he’s not sane enough to get it.
Maybe he’s not experienced enough to get it—that individuals sitting on details potent enough to pick off his national security adviser, hours after Kellyanne Con Job said he had Trump’s full confidence, are also clearly sitting on a hoard of far more embarrassing, far more destructive, far more lurid details.
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So why aren’t those lurid details known?
Well, this is entirely speculative, of course, but the way leaking in the intelligence community—or, as they sometimes phrase it, “story placement”—was explained to me, it’s supposed to be done with the minimum expenditure of assets.
In other words, to go back to that analogy of the poker player pulling back the twenty-dollar chips and replacing them with hundred-dollar chips, you want to use as little of your stash as possible.
Each chip—each story you confirm or promulgate—involves something you then can no longer use for its original purpose. The essence of intelligence is secrecy: reveal a secret to a reporter and you may reveal within the worldwide intelligence community a thousand details of how you learned that secret.
Why spend the hundred-dollar chips when you might get the job done with the twenties?
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And it is clear that the Oliver Stone version of the intelligence community is, at best, an exaggeration. Trump derided the IC, as it calls itself, during the campaign, insulted it after the election, impugned it during the transition—and yet, for the most part, the spies kept quiet.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 27