Category: Republican Reality

For a president-elect who touts ‘America first,’ Russian hacking poses a problem

The following article by Dan Balz was posted on the Washington Post website December 17, 2016:

President-elect Donald Trump speaks in Hershey, Pa., during his “thank you” tour. (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Presidents often are tested early, by unexpected crises or provocations by foreign adversaries. President-elect Donald Trump’s first test has come even before he is sworn in, and so far, he has responded with denial, equivocation and deflection.

The test has come over Russia’s brazen intrusion into the U.S. election process through its hacking of the servers at the Democratic National Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. Continue reading “For a president-elect who touts ‘America first,’ Russian hacking poses a problem”

Trump’s Twitter falsehoods fire up his base, provoke opponents and distract from larger issues

The following article by Cathleen Decker was posted on the L.A. Times website December 15, 2016:

Dawn had barely broken Thursday when Donald Trump once again broadcast via Twitter a provably false claim: that the Obama administration had not raised an alarm about Russian interference in the presidential election until after Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

In fact, on Oct. 7, the administration issued an official statement accusing the Russians of being behind the cyberattacks that appear to have harmed Clinton’s campaign. Continue reading “Trump’s Twitter falsehoods fire up his base, provoke opponents and distract from larger issues”

A Handy 14-Point Guide To Identify Fascist Leaders

The following article by Kali Holloway was posted on the Alternet website December 8, 2016:

In 1995, Umberto Eco, the late Italian intellectual giant and novelist most famous for The Name of the Rose, wrote a guide describing the primary features of fascism. As a child, Eco was a loyalist of Mussolini, an experience that made him quick to detect the markers of fascism later in life, when he became a revered public intellectual and political voice. Eco noted that fascism looks different in each incarnation, morphing with time and leadership, as “it would be difficult for [it] to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances.” It is a movement without “quintessence.” Instead, it’s a sort of “fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions,” he wrote.

Eco’s famous 14-point list outlines what the author dubbed “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism”—and it fits hand in glove the political persona created by Donald Trump. Hours after 60 million Americans voted to give the presidency to a dangerously incompetent narcissist whose campaign was based on nativist fear-mongering and racist appeals, British historian Simon Schama lamented that Trump’s newly sealed win would “hearten fascists all over the world.” Sure enough, congratulations poured in from far-right admirers around the world, who recognized Trump as one of their ilk. Continue reading “A Handy 14-Point Guide To Identify Fascist Leaders”

From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency

The following article by Rick Perlstein was posted on the National Memo website December 2, 2016:

shutterstock_364331684-668x501This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen who dared abet the evil socialist agenda; drunken louts in a Queens, New York, bar describing Richard Nixon’s impeachment as a liberal coup, opining, “If I was Nixon, that’s what I’d do—I’d shoot every one of them.” I stroked my chin, and explained how such maniacal, anti-democratic, and violently anarchic rage had always been part of the story, though really only at the margins of the American conservative movement.

At the same time, as a citizen and as a journalist, I documented that margin encroaching on the center, until, with Donald Trump’s apotheosis, it seems now to have consumed the entire damned thing.

Let’s look at the score. Continue reading “From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency”

The 5 Cruelest Actual GOP Policies

The following article by @LOLGOP appeared on the National Memo website on April 11, 2016:

You didn’t see Saturday Night Live‘s “Establishment Shuffle” sketch on national television because it didn’t make the actual show. But it’s probably the best summary of the the 2016 GOP primary that you’ll find.

In it, the dignified Paul Ryan — who almost had America intentionally default on its debt because President Obama wouldn’t agree to enough cuts to Social Security and Medicare — explains that Trump’s proud racism and erratic demagoguery don’t represent the establishment Republican Party, which prides itself on subtle, coded racism in service of a constant and unwavering effort to undo everything that built the middle class. Continue reading “The 5 Cruelest Actual GOP Policies”

‘Browning Of America’ Is Tearing The GOP Apart

The following article by Cynthia Tucker Haynes appears on the National Memo website February 20, 2016:

Pope_Francis_1_at_the_Wednesday_General_Audience_in_St_Peters_Square_on_June_24_2015_Credit_Daniel_Ibanez_CNA_6_24_15Before Pope Francis spoke a single word at the Mexican border, Donald Trump had — quite predictably — denounced the pontiff’s message. The real estate mogul and former reality-TV star has built his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination on an ugly nativism, so the moment was tailor-made for him.

The counter-messaging only escalated after the pontiff told reporters that anyone who wants to build a border wall, as Trump has infamously proposed, “is not Christian.” That prompted a retort from Trump, of course: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” he said.
(If the pontiff’s remarks were recorded correctly, he didn’t say Trump isn’t “a” Christian. In other words, he didn’t question the faith to which Trump ascribes; rather, the pope described Trump’s behavior as failing to follow Christian principles.) Continue reading “‘Browning Of America’ Is Tearing The GOP Apart”