Daily Beast – Opinion

‘Enemy Action’

Roy Moore Is Deplorable, and Donald Trump Condoning His Sins Is Unforgivable

The judge’s behavior is unforgivable, no matter what your ideological leanings and party identification may be.

Rick Wilson      November 26, 2017

A society where nothing is forgivable is as untenable as one where every transgression is hand-waved away. The things we forgive in the name of compassion should be many. The things we forgive in the name of comity should be large. That said, the things we forgive in service to partisan tribalism should be tightly constrained.

The things we should forgive for a child-molesting, law-breaking, edge-case whackjob who will stain the Senate and the Republican party with his creepy sexual predilections, his contempt for the rule of law, his thinly veiled racial animus, and his role in the firmament of Bannonite political arsonists? Pretty much nothing.

The judge’s behavior is unforgivable, no matter what your ideological leanings and party identification may be. That hasn’t stopped President Trump and Steve Bannon from continuing to back Roy Moore. The only people in Washington with even vaguely clean hands are in the hated Establishment, which dropped Moore like a radioactive potato after his grotesque behavior with teenage girls made the news.

This week, just to prove that their response to hitting rock bottom is to bellow, “Keep digging!” the Trump Administration sent a clear signal it’s perfectly happy with Moore’s history of serial child sexual assault as long as he’s a solid vote on their tax bill. It started on the weekend politics shows with Mick Mulvaney of the White House Budget office and Mark Short, the White House legislative liaison, rolling out the Team Trump line of, “We’ll leave it to the people of Alabama to decide.”

This is an administration and a president with a declarative opinion on everything from NFL policies to NCAA basketball players to Kim Jong Un’s waistline. You might have noticed that President Best Mind has many opinions he shares briskly and loudly on Twitter, generally in the mornings when he’s perched his ample backside on the golden toilet in the executive residence of the White House. Suddenly, nay, miraculously, Trump and his minions have no opinion on what should be done about Roy Moore. It’s an election miracle!

It took Kellyanne Conway—a woman whose soulless, serial lying has become the entirety of her personality—to grab the controls of the Trump plane and send it crashing to the ground faster than Roy Moore’s pants as he lurks under the bleachers at a high school cheerleading practice. On an appearance on Fox and Friends, which in the White House has an audience of one, Conway argued for Dirty Roy saying, “I’m telling you, we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.”

Even the Fox News hosts had a moment of stunned silence, perhaps shocked that a senior counselor to the president of the United States was defending Alabama’s Uncle Creepy, perhaps hypnotized by the last tiny shred of Conway’s integrity begin vaporized live on television in service to Steve Bannon’s hand-picked candidate.

For far too many on the conservative side of the fence, the defenses of Moore have taken on one of two strained, agonizingly contradictory themes. The first path is “Moore is bad, but Doug Jones will vote with the Democrats.” This is tribal whataboutism at its peak. Doug Jones isn’t going to be the deciding vote on squat in the U.S. Senate; he’s there for two years at most if the good people of Alabama can nominate a Republican candidate who isn’t a kid-fondling reptile.

The second, blisteringly stupid argument is that this is some kind of grand conspiracy theory and the real villain in the story of Moore’s victims is… wait for it… the news media. The argument, as tiresome as it is predictable, in what remains of the ruins of the conservative movement comes down to this: “Well, Roy Moore may be a guy who likes to have teen girls touch his junk in his backwoods love shack, but hey The Washington Post is worse, amirite?”

Then there’s the Bannon-fueled conspiracy theory faction, which has been out in force for a couple weeks, like grotesque locusts. The usual cast of characters has been in evidence, digging for dirt, not on Moore, but on his victims. The Virgin Matt Boyle, a stout little gargoyle usually perched on Steve Bannon’s scrofulous shoulder, was deployed to Alabama briefly, but ended up confirming The Washington Post’s reporting. Infowars and the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft—rightly called the Stupidest Man On The Internet—have been full throttle in trying to turn Moore’s mess into a Deep State conspiracy.

Sadly, the Never Trump movement’s time machine is in the shop, so as disappointing as this may be, Bill Kristol, Jeb Bush, and I didn’t travel back in time to the 1970s and use our RINO powers to make Roy Moore a pedo-curious sleazebag.

The vast majority of Americans believe Moore’s victims came forward to expose the true nature of his behavior. The Bannon right may not, but it’s worth reviewing the old Ian Fleming rule: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Let’s play political shenanigans, and grant that one case could be a set up. Maybe. Two? Almost impossible. Now that we’ve heard from ten women who have made credible on-the-record claims backed up by contemporaneous eyewitnesses, the chances of this being a conspiracy are absolutely zero.

For the emergent kook-right who see an army of Soros-NWO-ZOG Lizard People Illuminati Deep State disinfo agents working to bring down Donald Trump while imposing Sharia law in every burg in this great nation of ours, let me give you some real talk: Skip your Alex Jones vitamins and remove the tinfoil hat, please.

Hermetic, secure conspiracies to knock out political opponents are the stuff of novels. Conspiracy is hard. It doesn’t work like House of Cards. Fabricating evidence that holds up to the light is even harder. Coaching and training witnesses to deliver cogent, consistent lies is harder still. Everything leaks eventually. People are flawed. Mistakes get made. I’m not going to try to convince the pro-Moore residents of Alabama, the readers of Chumpbart, or the eager Bannonite hordes that this is the case, but it is.

As for the Moore supporters in Alabama, by God, you may get your wish. You may elect a man who puts his personal religious views before the Constitution, who has lied and blustered his way to into the arms of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, but you won’t be proud of him in the end. What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light, and you’ll carry the guilt of supporting a man whom history will record as a child molester as a U.S. senator.

For Moore’s defenders, enablers, and the crew of whataboutists, just remember: Some stains don’t wash out. Some actions can’t be forgiven.

Salon

GOP insider Bruce Bartlett: “The Republican Party needs to die”

Onetime Reagan White House aide Bruce Bartlett on the media’s massive failure and his own party’s living death

Bruce Bartlett (Credit: Getty/Drew Angerer)

Chauncey Devega          November 23, 2017

American democracy is in crisis, a fact that should be obvious to everyone but that too many people keep ignoring. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, does not believe in or respect basic norms of democratic governance. His words and behavior reveal a deep affinity for fascism.

Over the last few decades there has been an increase in authoritarian values among American voters, and this is especially true for Republicans and other conservatives.

The Citizens United decision defined corporate money as free speech. This undermines American democracy by allowing the most powerful business interests and the richest individuals to overrule and veto the desires of the American people.

The United States is an oligarchy.

Recent research shows that the country’s elected officials are most responsive to the rich, business interest groups and others with the resources to buy access.

The Republican Party uses gerrymandering and voter suppression to remain in power. It has ceased to believe in any form of compromise or negotiation with Democrats or liberals. This has made consensus politics and a healthy, responsive, functioning government all but impossible.

Public faith in basic social institutions is declining and the American public, broadly speaking, lacks civic literacy. This is a recipe for the American authoritarianism and demagoguery embodied by Trump and the Republican Party.

Journalists, the so-called Fourth Estate, were supposed to sound the alarm about these developments. Instead, the corporate news media has all too often defaulted to a naïve belief that America’s democratic institutions are healthy and strong, thus able to resist any challenge or corruption. Instead of being truth-tellers who balance power by informing the public so the latter can make good decisions, the corporate media empowered Donald Trump and the Republican Party through a slavish devotion to “fairness” and “balance” and a “both sides do it” narrative.

How has the truth been assaulted by Donald Trump and the Republican Party? What role did Trump’s incessant lies and his talking points about “fake news” play in his election? How does the myth of the “liberal media” empower the American right? Is there any space for a liberal or centrist alternative to Fox News and the broader right-wing disinformation-propaganda machine? Can the Republican Party in its present form be saved? Does the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election reflect a larger cultural and political problem?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Bruce Bartlett. He was a former White House adviser under President Ronald Reagan and also served under President George H.W. Bush. Bartlett is a regular contributor to the New York Times and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and other major news networks. He is the author of the new book “The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts From Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks.”

A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

How do you think Donald Trump was able to get elected?

I admit that I was dismayed by the election results. As I thought about how it happened, it just seemed to me that a big part of the story is the media. The media is broken and has adopted certain conventions that I think have normalized Trump’s craziness as well as the craziness of the Republican Party.

Why do you think the mainstream news media was so reluctant to directly confront and expose Trump’s lies? 

When the mainstream media began to downsize to cope with the loss of revenue from advertising and subscribers, the first thing they did was lay off their most senior reporters. They were able to save a lot of money that way. The problem is that a lot of journalistic training takes place informally in the newsroom, where young reporters learn from the old veterans who have been around for a long time. One of the things that you learn in that way that can’t be taught in the university is how to tell when somebody is lying.

There is also “he said, she said” journalism, where in order to gain access to a source that can now go around the traditional news media through Twitter and other methods you have to give them whatever they want.

Your source has to be convinced that you’re going to be good to them and get their message out the way they want it to be gotten out, so reporters are now almost forced to be stenographers. Now, obviously the reporters can’t just do that, but neither can they inject themselves into the story and say, “OK, here’s what my source inside the campaign is saying but my reporting and examination of the facts says this is all bullshit, that it’s a lie.” They can’t do that because then they burn their source, the source will never talk to them again if they tell the truth.

Instead, they go to the Clinton campaign and say, “What do you think about this statement that was just given to me by somebody in the Trump campaign?” They will say whatever it is they say and the reporter will take that down. “Trump said this, Clinton said that,” and that’s all you get. You don’t get the follow-up, you don’t get the reporting, the analysis, the fact-checking that would tell you which one is right and which one is wrong.

Conservatives have also created a cudgel with the myth of the “liberal news media.” It intimidates the press into being subservient to their agenda in the interest of “fairness” and “balance.”

Yes, but I also think that organizations like the New York Times bend over much too far backwards. I don’t know why they bother. Conservatives don’t read the New York Times; they’re not going to lose any subscribers by telling the truth.

If you were to pick a moment when the media landscape changed in a way that helped to birth Donald Trump’s presidency, what would it be?

I think there are several inflection points. I would go back to 1969 as the beginning, because that was the year that Spiro Agnew gave his famous speech attacking the media. It set the tone for everything conservatives have thought about the media ever since, which is that it is “elitist,” opposed to their values, and hopelessly liberal. It was nonsense then and it’s certainly nonsense now.

As a consequence, conservatives I think have long drifted away from the mainstream media and sought out alternative media. Even before talk radio, it was very common that conservatives would get much of their news from newsletters and small magazines like Human Events. The fact that conservatives had an alternative media network actually put them in a good position once the mainstream media began to decline.

I think liberals, by contrast, have always been very happy with the mainstream media. I think Democrats really depended on the New York Times to come up with good ideas for policies and hearings and so on. Then came the ending of the Fairness Doctrine, which immediately gave rise to Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk. I think the next inflection point was of course the Republican takeover of Congress [in 1994] and then the creation of Fox News very shortly thereafter.

Why do you think there has not been a successful counter to right-wing talk radio, and right-wing media more generally, from liberals and centrists?

Well I think the simple answer is that liberals and centrists are perfectly content with the mainstream media. They’re very happy with the New York Times and the Washington Post exactly as they are; they’re happy with ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR. People forget that NPR is essentially liberal talk radio, and that’s one reason why a more explicitly liberal type of talk radio couldn’t compete. NPR, like Limbaugh, is very, very good at what it does. I think that’s a big part of the problem.

And of course liberals never had a chip on their shoulder — they never felt that the media was biased against them and they never felt that their ideas were ridiculed the way Republicans and conservatives have always believed. The soil is simply not conducive to something that would be more explicitly liberal.            

Back in the 1960s, the political scientist and historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote about the power that anti-intellectualism and the “paranoid style,” i.e., conspiracy theories, held over American conservatives. Decades later, fringe narratives are now the mainstream in American conservative thought and media. This is extremely dangerous for democracy. How can we find solutions to problems when we can’t agree on the nature of empirical reality?

I think you’ve touched on one of the most disturbing aspects of the Fox News phenomenon, which is that it normalizes and mainstreams a lot of nutty crackpot conspiracy crap that would otherwise stay in the fever swamps of the far right.

I have an idea, and tell me if you think it is viable. The so-called experts and other talking heads who appear on the TV news should have their qualifications, professional relationships (i.e., who is paying them) and political affiliations listed under their names. This would help the public to understand the agenda at work. Do you think that would actually help our public discourse?

Well, I don’t know if it would help, but I do think it is genuinely desirable. There is no reason why that information could not at a minimum be posted online. You reminded me of another moment that changed my thinking about how this all operates. Many years ago when cable news became ubiquitous, I was working for a conservative think tank and I was often invited to be a talking head on various networks.

In the very early years I would usually be on with somebody like myself — for example, a senior fellow at a liberal think tank. The problem from the point of view of producers was there were no fireworks because we respected each other. We understood what the data was, we understood what the literature was, our differences were not that great and we often agreed with each other. Producers hated this.

I noticed after a few years that I was no longer being put on against a peer but instead people that I had no idea who they were. For example they were a “Democratic consultant” or a “liberal activist” — very vague terms. I’d never heard of these people and in fact when I would go online to look them up I couldn’t find anything. It was as if they literally didn’t exist. Another problem was that these people I was up against clearly had gotten media training. All the networks have the same attitude about talking heads, which is that they want somebody who’ll give the rote repetition of the Republican line of the day and someone else who’ll give the rote repetition of the Democratic line of the day. There will be absolutely zero agreement and preferably they’ll yell at each other and scream and we’ll have fireworks, which are good for ratings.

With your many years of experience in Washington, with the news media, and now your new book on “fake news,” how much does the Russia scandal remind you of Watergate? Or do you think what Robert Mueller uncovers about Donald Trump and his associates will be even worse? 

I hope not. But I am prepared for it. Trump is clearly the most incompetent president we’ve ever had in our lives. Richard Nixon may well have been the smartest. Nixon was cursed by paranoia, and I think Trump is as well. The question then becomes: Is this incompetence a good thing or a bad thing? Is it more dangerous to have a paranoid incompetent than it was to have a highly intelligent paranoid person as president? I don’t think we can tell. When I hear Trump talk, I sometimes have this feeling that he literally had no idea what was going on in his own campaign. He can deny these allegations and be perfectly truthful in his own mind because nobody told him.

He’s a useful idiot.

That’s one way of describing him. It may be that he is the person who will be the most shocked when the truth finally comes out. He may say, “Oh my God, I had no idea my son-in-law was doing such stupid things.”

To watch the national and global calamity that is Trump’s presidency in real time is unbelievable. If someone had told me 10 years ago that the country would be in such a crisis I would have said they were crazy. Do you feel the same way, or did you see it coming given how extreme the Republican Party has become over the last few decades?

Well, it’s vastly worse than I could possibly have imagined. I had this naïve idea that Trump had been a successful businessman because he had competent staff. I just assumed that Trump’s company had an army of lawyers and vice presidents with MBAs from Harvard Business School who went around like the guy behind the elephant in the parade with a broom and a shovel cleaning up his messes and fixing the contracts and getting the deals done properly that their boss was too incompetent to do himself. I just assumed that once he got into the White House we’d find these people would just come in and run things. I was shocked that that wasn’t the case. There was nobody.

If someone were to ask you why Trump’s voters backed him, how would you answer?

That’s the $64,000 question. Certainly a big part of it was voter fatigue. As far as the Democrats are concerned it has been true since at least the post-World War II era that each party gets eight years — and only eight years. There is only one exception to that rule and it was George H.W. Bush. It was probably in the cards that whoever got the Republican nomination was in a much better position to win than was generally assumed. Of course, Hillary Clinton turned out to be a historically poor candidate not just in a general way but also technically. From what I’ve read about her campaign, Hillary didn’t do statewide polling in the last couple of weeks before the election and really had no idea what was going on in critical battleground states.

The Comey letter [to Congress in late October] was horribly timed of course. I think there’s been this idea in American politics for a very long time that outsiders have some kind of special gift as compared to professional politicians. Moreover, Republicans just love the idea of bringing in a businessman to run the government. What they don’t realize is what you end up with is somebody who has absolutely no training for the job. The most successful presidents in recent memory were men with massive amounts of skill, namely [Lyndon B.] Johnson and Nixon. They had been in government their whole lives.

How did today’s Republican Party, in your estimation, become the way it is? Can it be saved?

The Republican Party needs to die. It’s already a zombie. It’s brain dead. 

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show.