Saturday, May 12, 2018

Editorial: Check the Lying King

Americans must guard against the normalization of lying under the administration of Donald Trump.

Trump passed the milestone of 3,000 false or misleading claims as president, uttering his 3,001st on May 1, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported. That works out to nearly 6.5 false claims per day since Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. And his pace of lying has picked up. In his first 100 days in the White House, he averaged 4.9 false claims a day. After 406 days in office, as of March 1, he had raised his mendacity average to six false claims a day. In the following two months, he told an average of nine false claims a day, raising his overall mendacity average to 6.5 lies per day.

Lying Donnie tells lies at such a pace that it is difficult for fact checkers to keep up with him. In effect, he runs over the truth and dares the media to try to make him tell the truth.

His record of mendacity is bloated by his tendency to repeat, over and over, many of his false statements, even after being corrected. He apparently is following the fascist playbook, which advises that a Big Lie repeated enough times will be believed by the masses. The Post has counted at least 113 different false claims Trump has repeated three or more times — and some with breathtaking frequency, such as the 72 times he has claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history, when in fact it ranks in eighth place. At least 53 times the president has made some variant of the claim that the Russia probe is a “phony, made-up witchhunt,” with the repeated refrain that there is “no collusion,” despite the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort’s business partner, Rick Gates, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities.

Trump has continued to downplay the investigation of his campaign’s ties with Russia, despite the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe so far has produced guilty pleas from Papadopolous, for making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with Russian agents while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. Gates reportedly is cooperating with investigators. Gates has pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and making a false statement to federal gents. Flynn also pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI, and later announced he is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and “working to set things right.” Mueller also has gained guilty pleas from Richard Pinedo, a Southern California computer science major who set up bank accounts for shadowy entities that turned out to include a Russian operation that used social media platforms to sow political discord around the 2016 presidential election, and Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan, a son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, who admitted he lied to federal investigators about his contacts with a Trump campaign officials.

Then there is the notorious Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, with Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and at least five other people, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was represented as a “Russian government attorney” with official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya later stated that she was not a government official, though she was known to have ties to the Russian government and she later described herself as an “informant” to the office of the Russian prosecutor general.

As Jonathan Chait noted at New York Magazine, “You have a Russian agent dangling Russian assistance in the election (‘part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump’), and the offer of help being accepted (‘if it’s what you say I love it’). It doesn’t even matter to what degree or even whether the offer was actually followed through. If you take a meeting to plan a crime, and the crime later happens and you benefit, you are an accessory to the crime whether or not you participated after the meeting.” Kushner later failed to report the meeting with Veselnitskaya, or other meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US and the head of a Russian bank that was subject to US sanctions, in his initial request for a security clearance as a special adviser to the president.

(Remember that Republicans in Congress spent four years trying to blame Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four people at the US consulate in Benghazi and they spent two years investigating Clinton’s use of private emails, which succeeded in bringing down her approval ratings, as Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy noted. No charges resulted from either case, but Trump still wants to jail Clinton.)

Trump has offered variations of the false claim that Democrats don’t really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump is terminating to clear the way to deport the children of undocumented immigrants, Fact Checkers Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly wrote in the Post May 1. The president has wrongly asserted 34 times that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not stop the illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal border entries or through tunnels that go under existing walls.

While Trump’s defenders say other presidents have lied, too, the New York Times compared Trump’s lies with those of other presidents and reported Dec. 14, 2017, that Trump in the first 10 months of his presidency told 103 separate lies, while Obama told 18 lies during his eight years in office. That works out to about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump. But it’s worse when you consider that Obama didn’t continue to repeat things that turned out to be untrue, such as his most notorious claim, that all Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare).

“Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson noted in the Times. “And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.”

However, when Trump is caught lying, the Times reporters noted, “he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”

As Robert Mueller appears to be winding up his investigation, his attempts to interview Trump apparently have been rebuffed as Trump’s attorneys and other advisers fear Mueller is setting up a “perjury trap.” What they mean is Trump has shown he cannot be expected to keep his facts straight and he will end up lying to Mueller.

Republicans have been unwilling to stand up to the Lying King so far, as they have called off congressional investigations into Trump’s role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election and even threatened to remove FBI and Justice Department officials (who happen to be Republicans) who are supervising the probe. Voters must decide if they will tolerate a Grand Oligarch Party that enables the president’s reckless disregard for the truth and the neutering of the rule of law. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

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Selections from the June 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Robert Borosage
How to build a progressive populist movement from the ground up


EDITORIAL
Check the Lying King


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Paul Ryan and the unintentional prophet


RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Dairies are squeezed to the limits


DISPATCHES
NRA tries to distance itself from Russia by hiring man known for working with foreign adversaries;
Trump exploring new ways to hurt people;
Report: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran deal;
Consumers will pay for Trump sabotage of ACA;
Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, study finds
Americans spend time in ICE prison trying to prove citizenship;
Newest attack on Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are done being subtle;
Trump administration stops short of most restrictive Medicaid proposal;
Texas officials ignore dioxin spread in Houston waterways ...


ART CULLEN
They’ve built a sham. 


JILL RICHARDSON
‘The Art of the Deal’ was a lie


JOHN YOUNG
Your swamp water is served


BOB BURNETT
‘Christians’ go astray


SETH SANDRONSKY
Worker safety is not assured in US


GREG BAILEY
Trumpian chaos plays out with Missouri’s embattled governor


GENE NICHOL
Pence and taxes


HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The greatest health scourge: Religious persecution


SAM URETSKY
Antibiotic resistance: The bugs are gaining on us


JOEL D. JOSEPH
Needed: An elected attorney general and an independent justice department


WAYNE O’LEARY
The mythology of trade


JOHN BUELL
Good jobs in a neoliberal era?


BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Life in the wild fracking upper Midwest


ROB PATTERSON
Looming Tower


SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Last man standing: Kevin J. from Boise, Idaho


THEATRE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Enter stage left: ARULA’s onstage revolution continues

and more ...

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Walking away from Iran treaty is enormous foreign policy mistake. It only helps Saudis & Benjamin Netanyahu


By Marc Jampole

What I wrote last September about decertifying the Iran Nuclear Deal still holds, so rather than recreate the wheel, here it is again:
The sheer stupidity of “decertifying” the nuclear—or should I say “antinuclear”—treaty between the United States, five other nations and Iran beggars the imagination. That an ignorant bully with no experience and a history of failure should propose such an idea is not noteworthy, not if the ignorant bully is Donald Trump. That supposedly patriotic, educated and experienced cabinet officers and advisors are unable to squelch this move in any way possible makes me shudder for the future of this country—and the entire human population.
The decision is bad in every way. It destabilizes the entire world every time another nation gets nuclear weapons, because the entire world would suffer from any nuclear war. The more nations have weapons, the more likely one is going to slip into the hands of a nutcase who might push the big red button. Of course, that seems to have already happened.
The decision also sets back the peace process between Iran and the West, specifically the United States. Why would we want to be enemies with a country with such an educated population and unrivalled natural resources among mid-sized countries and whose thousands of years of history has been one of the major influencers of the European culture upon which America is built? Let’s also remember that Iran wields a lot of influence with insurgent movements around the world. Coming to a lasting, all-inclusive peace with Iran would ease tensions throughout the Muslim world.
Think, too, of the lost opportunity to reduce the need for armed forces. A rapprochement with Iran would enable us to dedicate money a large portion of the billions of dollars now spent on armed forces and counter-terrorism to fixing our infrastructure of mass transit, sewers, roads and bridges and investing in alternative energy.
The key moment in the history of American-Persian relations is a stupid mistake that the United States made in 1953. We were allies and big supporters of Iran in 1953 when the CIA engineered an overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a secularist who wanted Iran to follow the model of American and European societies. Of course, he did nationalize oil industries, which was the secret reason the United States installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. Yes, that’s right. Shah! King. Royalty. A dictator who rules by divine right. The system we fought a revolution to change. The United States of America overthrew a democracy to install a dictator not to protect our oil supply, but to protect the interests of certain oil companies. We continued to support the Shah of Iran as opposition to his rule grew and grew through the years until his overthrow in 1979 by ultra-right religious fanatics in what was a relatively bloodless revolution. It was in the immediate aftermath of the revolution that Iranian students took 52 Americans hostages and held them for 444 days.
The hostage crisis wounded America’s pride, leading to the current situation—decades of enmity between the two countries, during which we have embraced Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that oppresses its people and is the home to most of the 9/11 hijackers and the mastermind behind 9/11 and Al Qaeda. We’ve essentially taken sides in a regional religious dispute and selected a side less in tune with our values, all because the other side slapped us around a little after we had helped bludgeon it for 26 years.
The absurdity of not taking a road to pace with Iran will come into stark view if we consider that we have now had an adversarial relationship with it for 38 years, which is 10 years longer than Germany was our enemy in the middle of the 20th century. We essentially forgave Germany for all the death and misery it caused and immediate embraced it after WW II. Of course we beat their asses and they were Christians. When we deal with Iran across the peace negotiating table, we have to treat them as equals.
Usually when an Administration does something that hurts most people, the answer as to why can be found by following the money: who benefits. In this case, it’s primarily the Saudi Arabians and whichever governments, insurgent movements, terrorist groups and oil companies it is supporting. Also benefitting is the government of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Note I write the Israeli government, not the Israel people, who stand to benefit more than anyone else from peace with Iran. But Bibby needs another external enemy. We know Trump is buddy-buddy with both the Saudis and Bibby. It wouldn’t be the first time that crony capitalism has led America to make a bad foreign policy decision.
But in the case of Trump, I have to wonder. Media reports suggest that virtually all White House advisors are telling Trump not to do it and that he is digging in his heels. Why? Is he that much in the pockets of the Saudis?
Or could it be that Trump’s main motivation is to destroy everything done by that black man out of a sense of revenge for being the butt of a few jokes? For a while, I’ve heard and scoffed at the utterly Shakespearean theory that Trump’s hatred of Obama overwhelms all other thoughts and emotions when it comes to government. Trump as Iago or Lady Macbeth. An interesting and theatrical idea, but how could it be? Destabilize global politics? Throw 800,000 people with jobs or going to college out of the country? Walk away from our first real shot at addressing human-caused global warming? All because you dislike some uppity guy because he doesn’t know his place (although I imagine that instead of “black man” and “uppity guy,” Trump uses a different word when thinking about President Obama). Impossible, I thought. But maybe not.
Not that it will help, but we should all be jamming the phone lines and Internet bandwidth with pleas to Trump not to walk away from the Iranian deal and demands to our Senators and Congressional representatives that they announce they will support impeachments proceedings if Trump goes ahead with his plan to “decertify.”