The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
Francine Prose at The Guardian writes—Mary Louise Kelly's interaction with Mike Pompeo was like satire. If only it was. The character flaws of the secretary of state would be grotesquely hilarious – if all our futures were not at stake:
Before celebrities and their publicists figured out that a goofy, faux-homeboy named Ali G was actually the smart, edgy comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a succession of political and cultural figures – Newt Gingrich, C Everett Koop, James Baker, Gore Vidal, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, among others – agreed to sit for televised interviews with the “rapper.” Almost always, Ali G’s calculatedly crass, good-humored stupidity brought out his subjects’ petty vanity and condescension, their humorless self-importance. The unmaskings – the glimpses of bad character – were at once horrifying and hilarious.
I thought of those episodes while listening to NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly’s January 24 interview with secretary of state Mike Pompeo. One imagines Pompeo or his staffers assuming that a pretty blonde woman with such a good-girl name, Mary Louise Kelly, would lob softballs and take notes as he explained the government’s Iran policy. Someone must have failed to do due diligence, alerting the secretary to Kelly’s paradoxically calm and hard-hitting approach, to the unperturbed persistence with which – in interviews and in reporting from Russia, China and Iran – she has pursued the facts.
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. At USAToday, she writes—Trump’s defense team has offered several arguments to divert public attention from a quest for the truth. Senators and voters should focus on facts:
When a college basketball player shoots free throws, he can expect opposing fans sitting behind the basket to wave their arms, shout and hold up clever signs to distract his focus from the rim. During opening arguments at the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, his lawyers attempted the same tactics.
A former colleague once used the analogy to free throws during a trial in the prosecution of a massive fraud case. She asked members of the jury to maintain focus on their mission of finding the facts after the defense offered a number of irrelevant arguments to distract them from their job. Similarly, Trump’s team offered several arguments to divert public attention from a quest for the truth.
One bit of arm waving that Trump’s lawyers have engaged in is the argument that House managers are attempting to undo an election. White House counsel Pat Cipollone argued that Democrats are asking the Senate to “tear up every ballot” from the 2016 election, characterizing impeachment as an affront to democracy. But our Constitution includes impeachment to protect our citizens from a leader who abuses his power. Concerned about a monarch with too much power, the framers specifically included a method for removing a president from office. If impeachment were improper because it reversed an election, then no impeachment of a president could ever occur. Our Constitution provides otherwise.
Elizabeth Drew writes—Why Having Hunter Biden Testify Would Be Bad for Trump. If it means John Bolton would also testify in the impeachment trial, it could help the Democrats:
For some time, I was against the Democrats’ offering any Biden as a witness in Mr. Trump’s trial, on principle. Just because the Republicans want to batter Hunter Biden is no reason to submit either him or his father as fodder to hostile Republicans. But principle can be turned on its head; calling Hunter Biden could backfire on the Republicans big time. [...]
Having Joe Biden’s son testify would illuminate the Bidens’ irrelevance to the issue of whether the president held up congressionally appropriated military assistance for Ukraine until the Ukrainian president announced — not necessarily conducted, just announced — a government investigation into the Bidens’ role. An appearance by Hunter before Senate questioners now could also go some distance toward removing him as an issue in the general election, should his father be the Democratic nominee. In fact, Hunter could be the star witness as to why a president’s (or vice president’s) offspring should stay out of any business that might have something to do with their parents’ job.
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open-heart surgery:
“I’ve read 25 books on it.”
— Jared Kushner, on the conflict in the Middle East
Hello! I’m a relative of your doctor, and I am here to perform your open-heart surgery. [...]
Please lie back and stop attempting to struggle. In case you might worry that I am not qualified to perform this surgery: I read 25 books. So you are in good hands. No, I have not done this before, but in a way, that makes me actually more competent. When I look at you, I don’t see all the problems people saw before: an aorta, and ventricles, and the little tube thing that pokes out. I just see solutions. I am going to put your heart together in a way that has never been tried, but I can guarantee (I read 25 books) that it will make everything 100 percent better, using synergies.
Sasha Abramsky at The Nation writes—Trump Acts Like a Mafia Don—and GOP Senators Yawn. Day by day, tweet by presidential tweet, the country retreats from its democratic premise, yet the grandees of the GOP decline to intervene:
Day by day, tweet by tweet, the country retreats from its democratic premise, this great experiment in pluralism wilts a little more, and the prospect of violence in the political process grows, yet the grandees of the GOP, running scared of its base, declines to intervene.
Former national security adviser John Bolton lets it be known that Trump personally told him that releasing aid to Ukraine was tied to the latter’s announcement of an investigation into the Bidens—and the revelation is met with yawns from GOP senators.
Bolton wants to be a Senate witness, yet majority leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus is terrified that he will blow apart the GOP’s hear-no-evil/see-no-evil strategy. So they pretend his testimony is a nonstarter. The rapidity with which a great democracy has sunk into cultist politics is terrifying.
Lev Parnas produces an audio recording of Trump demanding that his acolytes “take her out,” referring to then–Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Trump sounds just like a Mafia don ordering a hit, yet the GOP meets this revelation of thuggery with silence. It’s now apparently acceptable for the president to “take out” ambassadors who stand in the way of his corrupt machinations.
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones writes—“This Is Kavanaugh All Over Again,” Say Republicans. They’re Right. But not for the reasons they claim:
“This is Kavanaugh all over again,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters on Monday. Soon it was the company line. [...]
Republicans are framing the revelation—from a book manuscript by former national security adviser John Bolton obtained by the New York Times—as a last-minute gimmick, a desperate attempt to change the rules of a game that’s already in progress. Bolton can’t be trusted, and besides, it’s way too late! The House had its chance to get Bolton on the record, the argument goes, and the Senate should not let the development sidetrack it from a case that’s already been laid out. Otherwise you risk losing control of the whole process and creating a partisan spectacle that needlessly tarnishes the reputation of a good man. (The good man, to be clear, is Donald Trump.)
This is, as Barrasso intimates, the basic story Republicans have told themselves about Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for more than a year. Kavanaugh was on his way to confirmation when Christine Blasey Ford came forward to allege that he had sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers in Washington, DC. Under pressure, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to hold a new hearing to question Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh.
But the lesson of the Kavanaugh hearings wasn’t the effectiveness of Democratic gamesmanship; it was the power of stonewalling. Blasey Ford was unambiguous about what had happened (“indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” as she put it), and offered a roadmap for further investigation. But none of it mattered, because Senate Republicans did not want to know what had really happened. They were not interested in figuring out, definitively, whether their nominee for the Supreme Court had sexually assaulted someone, and whether he was lying about that or anything else (for instance: his drinking). They did not want to uncover information that would change their minds, so they constructed an elaborate public ritual to help them not find out.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—Trump’s Geofencing Could Be a Potent Political Issue:
Donald Trump’s digital advantage may be freaking out Democratic strategists, but what should worry everyone is the technology itself. What makes Trump’s operation so formidable is not so much his investment in digital or any particular architecture that he’s built. It’s more that he’s able to take advantage of monitoring people through their cell phones.
To be clear, the Democrats can and will do the exact same thing. The problem isn’t the candidate, but the capability.
Thomas Edsall discusses this in a piece for the New York Times. It begins with geofencing, a practice that involves tracking every cell phone that enters a predefined area, like a church or MAGA rally. Armed with these phone numbers, identities can be sussed out from other commercial databases, and then people can be sorted by how frequently they vote, their party registration (if any), and all manner of personal information.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board says Darrell Issa’s shameful gay-baiting attack ads are the worst kind of time warp:
It’s possible, we suppose, that former Rep. Darrell Issa didn’t realize his TV ad attacking a GOP rival, Carl DeMaio, in the 50th Congressional District primary race could be seen as gay-baiting. The ad, ostensibly about DeMaio’s stance on immigration and President Trump, includes two gratuitous references to the fact that DeMaio is gay.
But others did make the connection, including the chair of the San Diego County Republican Party, who called the ad “highly inappropriate.” For any honorable candidate, this would have been the moment to apologize for any unintentional (assuming it was unintentional) messaging and agree to stop running the ad. Instead, Issa continues to stand by it. [...]
This district just emerged a few weeks ago from the disgraceful era of Duncan Hunter, who stepped down from Congress this month after pleading guilty to misusing campaign funds. Hunter also exploited inflammatory tropes in attack ads against his Democratic challenger in 2018. It was bad enough that voters in this district rewarded him with another term. They should demand better from whoever replaces him.
Nick Martin at The New Republic writes—There’s Nothing More American Than Native Mascots. Redface and tomahawk chops are a cultural product rivaling the Super Bowl itself:
On Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in to Super Bowl LIV to watch Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs try to crack the nut that is the San Francisco 49ers defense. After the fourth quarter comes to a close and the clock reads triple zeros, the fans, casual and devoted alike, will turn off their televisions or change the channel. They probably won’t think twice about the Kansas City team name or the “tomahawk chop” and redface that Kansas City fans will almost certainly bring to the stadium in Miami.
The contours of the issue are familiar, playing out on repeat in the decades since the tomahawk chop first emerged out of Florida State and made its way to Kansas City, Atlanta, and countless high schools across the country: Native people have protested the cartoonish racism and appropriation, while the franchises, team owners, and local legislators—with varying degrees of malice—have ignored these protests or deflected criticism. Papers put out polls on whether readers believe something that is very obviously racist is actually a problem. Public relations firms are paid to craft campaigns to preserve team names as tradition or some kind of perverse tribute. And then the teams play. Fans watch. Some people make money. Everyone goes home.
The mascot issue is not about whether Native people have been properly polled. It is not a question of American ignorance. It’s that the people with the most power in this situation—the owners, the franchises—know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. And in the face of much more pressing material concerns, it’s true that a fair number of Native people might not care much, either, which is a sentiment I’ve heard from members of my own family and tribe.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—Selling the Green New Deal to Texas Unions. The AFL-CIO's endorsement of Mike Siegel suggests a new way forward for environmentalists and labor:
Texas’s 10th Congressional District stretches, improbably, from the outer fringes of the Houston metro area to suburbs west of Austin. After sending Democrats to Congress for over 100 years, it has voted for Republican Representative Michael McCaul in every election since its 2005 redistricting. Two years ago, Mike Siegel—a civil rights lawyer and labor activist running on an ambitious progressive platform—came within five points of flipping the district back to blue. This year, campaigning as a Green New Deal supporter, he’s hoping to finish the job. Influential Democratic Party groups like Emily’s List have lined up behind his primary opponent, corporate lawyer Shannon Hutcheson, who fits a more typical profile of Democrats running for red seats. Having been dual-endorsed by the Houston-based Texas Gulf Coast Labor Federation, Siegel and Hutcheson battled it out for the Texas AFL-CIO endorsement, which Siegel had won in 2018. The endorsement was announced at the regional federation’s Committee on Political Education, or COPE, Convention in Austin this past weekend, and while Siegel won it again, his harder-fought victory this cycle offers a preview of what it will take to win labor’s support for a new generation of climate policies.
Siegel and his supporters spent last weekend in nearly round-the-clock meetings with unions, some of whose international leaderships have previously spoken against the Green New Deal. “Everybody throws in something about a just transition when they talk about taking on climate change,” Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, told me. “But I think there’s concern about how central workers’ issues are going to be to that process.… It’s just really hard when you’re in that industry, particularly in a place like Texas,” Levy said of unionized fossil fuel workers in the Right to Work state. “You see all these slings and arrows headed your way to your livelihood, climate change being one of them.” The Green New Deal, he told me, “is either the panacea or the devil, depending on where you’re coming from.”
David Dayen at The American Prospect writes—They Forgot About Bern:
With six days until the Iowa caucuses, the political establishment has arrived at a troubling realization: It might be time to take this Bernie Sanders guy seriously. In the past few days, polls have shown Sanders breaking dramatically from the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls have shown him leading in Super Tuesday states California and Utah, while he’s climbed meaningfully in early states Nevada and South Carolina.
In the aftermath of Sanders’s ascendancy, various corporate gatekeepers and big-money representatives are scrambling—with little coherence or success—to put together a last-minute campaign to slow him down. The justification for such action, of course, is that the political establishment and their corporate henchmen, self-styled paragons of pragmatism and stewards of lucid, sober thinking, need to protect the electorate from a wild-eyed radical who is dangerously out of touch with America.
But the last-second freakout tells us less about the Sanders campaign than about those political elites themselves, whose political instincts are so alarmingly wrongheaded that they’ve managed to ignore an obvious risk to their continued status until a week before voting begins. If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch.
Sanders has been in the race since last February, which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Bernie Sanders Is Rising on the Strength of His Anti-War Stance:
Cedar Falls, Iowa—A roar of approval filled the packed ballroom on the University of Northern Iowa campus when Black Hawk County Supervisor Chris Schwartz reminded hundreds of Iowans that, almost two decades ago, “It was Bernie Sanders who stood up to George Bush and said no to war!”
The applause was just as loud a few minutes later, when Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan, from neighboring Wisconsin, told the Iowans he was barnstorming for Sanders because “Yes! We must stop endless wars!”
The national media has moved on from discussing the prospect that President Trump’s decision to kill a key Iranian general had brought the Middle East to “the brink of war.” But concerns about issues of war and peace—which briefly upended the national debate in early January—continue to influence the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s benefiting Sanders, especially in Iowa.
Nelson Lichtenstein at Jacobin writes—What’s Old for US Labor Is New Again:
Everything old is new again. If American workers are ever to emerge from the economic insecurity and political powerlessness that are so characteristic of our second, contemporary Gilded Age, they are likely to rediscover some of the innovations in labor policy and corporate governance that emerged more than a century ago in that first era of social inequality and capitalist excess.
That’s because the structure of capitalism today, and the legal framework that sustains it, evokes many of the same social and economic pathologies that made Americans of that bygone era question the future of US democracy itself.
It has never been just a question of inequality: robber barons then, and the rise of a politically potent billionaire class today. Rather, the two Gilded Ages are similar because at both times a new and disruptive reconfiguration of American capitalism has made necessary a radical set of policies designed to democratize the world of work and empower a multiracial working class.
A bold and comprehensive report from Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program, “A Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy,” offers twenty-first-century reformers an innovative set of policy ideas challenging corporate power in our time.
Sonny Bunch at The Washington Post writes—Everyone at Sundance knew what Harvey Weinstein was. They should stop pretending:
It was with something like slack-jawed amazement that I read Dominic Patten’s on-the-ground report from Sundance chronicling attendees’ disgust and amazement at the testimony in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial. The Deadline reporter’s missive reads almost like parody, a communique from an Armando Iannucci-esque parallel universe where Hollywood swells hope and pray that the country is a nation of easily misled rubes. [...]
Patten, wandering around Sundance, found a number of industry bigshots who were shocked, shocked to learn that Weinstein was a world-class monster. The quotes are stunning both in their content and in the fact that they were still, despite Weinstein’s defenestration, delivered anonymously. [...]
All of which is to say it’s a little bit rich to hear the good visitors to Park City profess their disgust with Weinstein. It’s hard to take any of this seriously — especially when it’s offered up anonymously — as a real bit of soul-searching or examination of the predations of the movie profession. Indeed, it reads much more as a bit of rear-end-covering, a way to profess innocence without actually having to put a name to a statement of ignorance.