Friday Talking Points -- Disrespecting The Troops

[ChrisWeigant]

It has been three weeks since we've done this, since for the past two Fridays we were still writing up our notes on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Now that all that hoopla is over, we can return once again to our usual Friday Talking Points format.

We're not even going to try to cover all three of those weeks today, since that would be a monumental task. So much happens so fast these days that it is almost impossible to keep up. And no, this is not just hyperbole -- while reading a little history of political haircuts (after Nancy Pelosi's now-infamous visit to a salon), we came across the following extraordinary reminder of the way things used to be in the political world:

In 1993, The Washington Post's Reliable Source revealed that President Bill Clinton got a haircut aboard Air Force One as it sat on a Los Angeles International Airport runway. Other outlets reported the trim had delayed commercial flights. The rumors of an air-traffic jam turned out to be untrue, but the cost of the haircut -- $200 -- was still a scandal. (That's about $360 in 2020 dollars.)

Hard to believe now with our warp-speed news cycle, but the controversy dominated headlines for at least six weeks, and "blemished [Clinton's] public image." The stylist, Cristophe of Beverly Hills, became pre-Twitter famous.

Got that? The "Hair Force One" scandal lasted at least six weeks in the headlines. Six freakin' weeks! Can anyone imagine anything scandalous lasting six weeks in the current political atmosphere? We can't. Six days is now an eternity. And yet, back in the dim and distant days of 1993, one presidential haircut was enough to fill the headlines for a month and a half. So, no, stating that the fact that it's now impossible to contemplate reviewing three whole weeks is not overstating the case, especially considering how things used to be.

It's not that there is a dearth of scandal these days -- quite the opposite, in fact. We get so many scandals on a daily basis that it's tough to keep track of them all. If these were normal times (for instance), reports that the president of the United States called American soldiers killed in action "losers" would be an enormous scandal -- well worth six full weeks of headlines, in fact. If a Democratic president had said anything remotely like what Donald Trump is reported to have said, impeachment articles would have already been drafted by now. And yet Republicans just shrug it off, as they've shrugged off all the incendiary and disgusting things Donald Trump has said and done over the past four years (such as, this week, comparing a police officer killing an unarmed suspect to a pro golfer "choking" by missing a 3-foot putt). "No biggie, as long as we get our conservative judges and tax cuts for the rich," seems to be their go-to response these days.

Trump, according to the report in The Atlantic, not only called dead soldiers losers, he also: didn't want to honor John McCain after his death, called George H. W. Bush a "loser" for being shot down in battle, and also called the 1,800 Marines who were killed at Belleau Wood "suckers." Trump refused to visit the cemetery, because he thought the rain would muss his hair, and he was mystified at why anyone would honor soldiers' graves in the first place. During the same trip, he also asked aides: "Who were the good guys in this war?"

That's worth a week of headlines on its own -- the president of the United States had to be told which side were the 'good guys' in a World War. He has previously confused World War I with World War II, when he stated that the Spanish Flu caused the end of the second world war.

Trump also reportedly asked that wounded soldiers not be included in his plans for a military parade, because: "Nobody wants to see that." Trump has visited wounded warriors a total of four times since he became president. Obama made 29 such visits in his eight years in office.

It's really hard to imagine anything more scandalous from a sitting president, than such naked contempt for those who serve this country. And yet, by next week we'll almost certainly have moved on to a newer and fresher scandal, leaving the most disgraceful and disrespectful comments towards the military ever uttered by any U.S. president in the dust behind us. It is what it is, in Trump's America.

Joe Biden and veterans everywhere are reacting strongly to Trump's disrespectful attitude towards those who serve. As well they should. Interestingly, in a Military Times poll conducted before any of this happened (taken before the conventions, even), Joe Biden is doing better among those currently serving in uniform than Trump. Biden has 41 percent support among the troops, while Trump only has 37 percent. So much for the myth that the military loves Trump (even before his disdain for them was fully exposed).

Also before this scandalous story broke, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to reassure Congress that the Pentagon would not interfere in the election in any way:

I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military. In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S armed forces in this process.

If these were normal times, such a question would never even have to be asked, of course.

Meanwhile, other scandals are also swirling out of the Trumpnado. Donald Trump is now urging his supporters to commit voter fraud -- ironically, in an insane attempt to prove that there isn't any voter fraud. Voting twice (once by mail-in ballot and once in person) is illegal -- a felony, in some states -- and yet that's precisely what Trump is instructing his followers to do. This will have the (intended) side-effect of making Election Day lines longer and slower at the polls, and it will almost certainly delay the accurate counting of votes. Trump doesn't care, because any such perceived chaos will just add fuel to the fire of claiming the election was stolen from him. Earlier this year, in May, Trump confidently stated: "If you told a Republican to vote twice, they'd get sick at even the thought of it." I guess that statement is "no longer operative," now that he's explicitly telling them to do so.

Attorney General William Barr has now converted the Justice Department into a wing of Trump's re-election team. He'll do or say anything to help Trump get elected, including lying his face off about the possibilities of mail-in voter fraud. Twice this week he's been caught just makin' stuff up to scare everyone. The first time, he said foreign governments are printing up lots of ballots and will be sending them in by the truckload (false, and even if it were true they'd be thrown out due to security procedures already in place). The second time, he came up with this whopper:

Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion. For example, we indicted someone in Texas -- 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to.

Except that none of it was true. The case Barr was referring to came up with one single ballot being fraudulently cast in a local election. So Barr was only off by a factor of 1,700. And as the fact-checkers noted:

A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

Another analysis over a longer period also found a very low rate of fraud. "There were 491 prosecutions related to absentee ballots in all elections nationwide between 2000 and 2012, out of literally billions of ballots cast," Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California at Irvine, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

None of this has stopped Donald Trump or Bill Barr from just flat-out lying their faces off about the non-existent risk.

In other "Trump trying to rig the election" news, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to personally tour two mail-sorting facilities today, but was turned away by armed guards both times:

U.S. Postal Service police officers barred a Florida congresswoman from scheduled tours at two mail processing complexes Friday, blocking entry to the facilities and threatening to escort her from the property if she refused to leave.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) had arrived at the Royal Palm Processing and Distribution Center in Opa-Locka, Fla., for a 4 a.m. tour to find the parking lot entry roped off with caution tape and a U.S. Postal Inspection Service cruiser blocking the gate. Local Postal Service officials informed her and union leaders waiting to accompany her into the building that national USPS leadership had directed them to bar the group from the building.

At 6:30 a.m., Wasserman Schultz was denied entry at the Miami Processing and Distribution Center 10 miles away by a local Postal Service official as two armed Postal Inspection Service officers stood in front of turnstiles in the lobby.

Wasserman Schultz was not happy about this situation, as she tweeted: "After seeing alarming pictures of delayed mail, some pieces undelivered since July, I arranged a tour of So Fla to see how idle sorting machines have impacted workflow. But when I arrived this AM I was greeted with police tape and armed guards blocking my entry." This was backed up by the Union leader who helped plan the congresswoman's visit:

"The disrespect of a Congress member who sits on the Oversight and Reform Committee that is protecting the post office and they're denying her coming in," said Nick Mosezar, the president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 318 who helped plan Wasserman Schultz's visit. "Unbelievable."

. . .

"Carriers were ordered off the streets at 5 o'clock whether you finished your route or you didn't finish your route," said Al Friedman, president of the Florida State Association of Letter Carriers. "That was everywhere. That was all over Florida."

Problems at the Royal Palm facility had been mounting in recent weeks, Mosezar said. On Thursday afternoon shortly before Wasserman Schultz informed the Postal Service of her planned visit, mail sat in pallets on the shop floor that was supposed to be delivered on July 22 -- 43 days late -- according to photos of the mail taken by postal workers and provided to Mosezar.

The article contained one more ominous detail:

The week after [Postmaster General Louis] DeJoy took office, the Postal Service removed a Flat Sequencing System, a gargantuan machine that sorts "flats," or larger paper mail items such as magazines and ballots, by Zip codes and into delivery sequence for letter carriers.

Note that "such as magazines and ballots" phrase. So it's pretty obvious what Postmaster General DeJoy has to hide, here -- including piles of mail from over a month ago and missing machines that process ballot envelopes.

In campaign news, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden visited Kenosha, Wisconsin this week. Biden spent over an hour with the family of Jacob Blake, while Trump refused to even talk to them on the phone. Trump staged a photo op in front of a burned-out store, but the owner of the store refused to be used as a political prop, so Team Trump had to substitute a former owner for their Potemkin photo op. This continued a false-video trend from the GOP convention, where three New York City tenants were featured in a video but later said they had no idea their interview would be used for this purpose, and that none of them supported Donald Trump: "I am not a supporter of his racist policies on immigration. I am a first-generation Honduran. It was my people he was sending back." And the immigrants filmed in a naturalization ceremony for use at the GOP convention were likewise not informed how their images would be used politically.

So far, it seems that both political parties' conventions has not really moved the needle at all -- post-convention polling shows a race little changed from where it was three weeks ago. Joe Biden has a lead of 7 to 10 points nationally, and Biden leads in almost all of the battleground states (some with closer margins than the national one). So Trump's "let's scare the heck out of the suburbanites" strategy doesn't seem to be paying off one bit.

Trump still sees this as a winner, in fact, so he announced this week that he'd be cutting off funding to "anarchist cities" that he doesn't like (because they are run by Democrats, of course). In other words, while falsely accusing Joe Biden of wanting to "defund the police" Trump thinks the answer to the problem is to cut off all federal funding for police to certain cities. Yea, that's the ticket!

Six days from now, however, we'll all likely have moved on to whatever outrages Donald Trump has perpetuated in the meantime. The election can't get here soon enough, folks.





It hasn't happened yet, but for the first time the House of Representatives will get a chance (sometime this month, it has been promised) to vote on legalizing marijuana at the federal level, by completely descheduling it. This would still leave it up to the states to chart their own course, but it would completely remove the federal ban on weed. So we've got that to look forward to.

Joe Biden gave an excellent speech this Monday, which is his kickoff to the general election campaign. Thankfully, the original plan of waiting until after Labor Day was scrapped so that Biden could both forcefully respond to all the lies told about him during the Republican National Convention, as well as travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin later in the week.

The speech Biden gave is well worth reading in full, or watching on video. Biden essentially reminds everyone: "This is who I am -- not that strawman Republicans created last week." So Biden deserves at least an Honorable Mention for starting his campaign off with a barn-burner of a speech.

But this week the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award has to go to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, for winning his primary race.

Now, normally, a sitting senator winning a primary challenge isn't all that big of a deal, but Markey's challenger this time was Representative Joe Kennedy, of the dynastic Hyannis Port Kennedys. His loss was historic, because this is the first time in Massachusetts history that a Kennedy has lost any election for any office.

In somewhat of a twist, the youthful Kennedy was backed by the establishment of the Democratic Party while Markey (who is a bit longer in the tooth, shall we say) was championed by the progressive youth movement (Markey collaborated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to write the Green New Deal).

Markey will likely only serve one more Senate term, due to his age. So Joe Kennedy may get a second shot at this seat in six years. But his loss shows the diminishing value of the Kennedy name. Younger voters certainly don't remember J.F.K. or R.F.K., and many of them don't even remember Teddy. The times (in Massachusetts) are a-changin', it seems.

For winning his primary race -- against a Kennedy -- by a healthy double-digit margin, Senator Ed Markey is our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

[Congratulate Senator Ed Markey on his Senate contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]





We didn't even consider giving the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week to Nancy Pelosi this week. She thought she was following the rules, she only removed her mask when getting her hair washed, and the whole thing was nothing short of a tempest in a teapot. This story is not going to be around six days from now, never mind six weeks.

But we are awarding one Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week to California Democrats. All of them, in fact, in the state legislature.

The legislative session wrapped up this week, in complete and utter chaos. Here is merely the worst of what happened:

And in the waning moments, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks appeared on the floor with her crying, 1-month-old daughter Elly after being denied the right to vote by proxy.

"Please, please, please pass this bill," she said as she held her swaddled child. "And I'm going to go finish feeding my daughter."

After a long debate and multiple votes, lawmakers did as Wicks exhorted them to and passed a fiercely contested housing bill -- but it was too late. The Assembly acted with only minutes to spare, leaving no time to send the measure to the Senate for final approval.

. . .

The Senate long ago concluded remote voting was constitutionally sound and authorized it, allowing Republicans to participate. The Assembly thought otherwise, worrying about legal challenges invalidating votes -- and then Speaker Anthony Rendon faced a backlash for not extending a limited proxy voting system to Wicks, concluding the new mother was not sufficiently at-risk.

They had a deadline of midnight, and they blew it. And this wasn't the only important bill that died through nothing short of sheer incompetence.

Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) was not pleased her bill had withered for lack of time.

"To send over S.B. 1120 at 11:57 -- that was impossible, and those votes were there days ago," a weary Atkins said some time after 2 a.m., decrying the "the absolutely needless delay of housing bills."

The housing measure wasn't the only one to fall for lack of time. Major criminal justice reform bills introduced in the wake of George Floyd's death never got floor votes. Law enforcement opponents successfully ran out the clock on a bill to decertify police officers who break the rules -- ignoring a late lobbying push by celebrities like Kim Kardashian West -- and a measure to restrict the use of rubber bullets and tear gas.

Why were dozens of important bills voted on at the very last possible moment? Incompetence. Why were dozens of other important bills not even voted on? They didn't have the time, because of their own incompetence. These votes could have been scheduled days or even weeks ago, but they were not. Democrats absolutely dominate the legislature, so they really have no one to blame for this fiasco but themselves. So we're collectively awarding them all a group Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, in response.

We have a second MDDOTW to hand out as well, since this election is not the time or the place to be cracking jokes. Here's the story, in a nutshell:

Twitter on Tuesday forced a Democratic House candidate to delete a tweet that urged supporters of President Donald Trump to vote the day after this November's election, a company spokesperson confirmed to Politico.

The company said an Aug. 18 tweet by the campaign for Elizabeth Hernandez, who is challenging GOP Rep. Kevin Brady for his seat in Texas' 8th Congressional District, violated its rules against voter suppression.

Hernandez's campaign told Politico that a staffer had posted the tweet in jest.

. . .

In response to a Twitter user who wished Hernandez luck in her race and said they have "relatives in Texas who are tRump supporters" [sic], the official @LizForTX8 account wrote: "Thank you! And remind all of your Trump supporting relatives to vote on Wednesday, November 4! (Since they're Trump supporters, they might fall for it. Just saying....)"

The tweet included a laughing emoji. The account has more than 26,000 followers.

As we mentioned, this particular election is not a laughing matter. Jokes like this are common, but not from actual politicians (or wannabe politicians). And the campaign's reaction was less-than-impressive as well:

"In a jovial exchange with supporters on Twitter, one of our campaign staff was a little too loose with their words. The emoji at the end of the tweet indicates that the tweet was made in jest, not intended to actually mislead anyone," spokesperson Christopher Phipps said in an email. "But when Twitter brought the tweet to our attention, we took action to take it down, out of an abundance of caution."

Now, Hernandez is a longshot because the Texas district she's running in is solidly red. So it's unlikely that she'll actually make it to the House. But even so, we feel that the best way to call out Republican election interference is for Democrats -- all Democrats -- not to engage in such practices themselves. Which is why this rises to the level of a Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, in our opinion.

[Contact the California Legislature via their web pages, to let them know what you think of their actions. Elizabeth Hernandez is a candidate for office, and our policy is not to link to campaign websites, so you'll have to search her contact information out yourself.]




Volume 587 (9/4/20)

Democrats looking for good talking points to use this week really need look no further than the speech Joe Biden gave this Monday. It was a remarkable speech, covering many aspects of the campaign but for the most part it was a rebuttal of the charges that Trump flung at Biden during the Republican National Convention. Biden clearly disavows all political violence and explains how he would be doing things far differently than how Trump is reacting to the various crises we're now experiencing.

Instead of trying to compete with Biden's fine words this week, we're going to offer up instead some extended excerpts from an interview that ran recently in Salon. Stuart Stevens worked as a Republican strategist for three decades, including working on the campaigns of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. He's written a new book with the catchy title: It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump.

Stevens is blunt in his appraisal of where the Republican Party finds itself today, and he does not mince words at all. Here's just a sample:

I say this in all sincerity: Can anybody make a credible case that if these Republicans had been around in 1776, that we would not be celebrating the Queen's birthday today? These Republicans are not going to stand up to Donald Trump. Would today's Republicans have fought against the king of England and the most powerful army in the world? Are you insane? Maybe we should not be surprised by their cowardice. Maybe we should instead remember just how unusual courage is.

Stevens is now advising the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans working hard to defeat Trump and elect Joe Biden. But his insights are so damning for the Republican Party as a whole that they're worth reading (the entire interview is well worth a full read, in fact). What follows are the seven passages that leapt out at us. The last one, in particular, is downright frightening.



Tell us how you really feel...

Stevens keeps topping his own rhetoric, when asked about the current state of the Republican Party, with increasingly dire metaphors:

Watching the Republican Party is like watching your friend drink himself to death. The Republican Party has legitimized hate. History tells us that once such forces are unleashed, that is very difficult to undo. That hatred is not going to be even partially defeated until Donald Trump is defeated. The whole situation is very sad.

It is difficult when you are in the middle of any moment, of course, to realize the consequences of that specific moment. But I think the Republican Party and Donald Trump are unlike anything in the country's recent history. The only thing I can liken it to is the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union. A major political force has become so disconnected that it just collapsed under its own weight. Chernobyl is basically a more benign version of the Republican Party.

Nothing like the party of family values

For many decades, Republicans took the high road of "supporting family values." Sometimes this was code for "discriminating against families we don't approve of," and sometimes it was just used as a political club to beat Democrats with. But this just isn't possible anymore, as Stevens points out:

I didn't want to believe that the political party that I'd worked in and helped build would go along with a guy who was a failed casino owner who talked in public about having sex with his daughter. It just seemed kind of impossible.

Then, once Trump won, the Republican Party just completely collapsed and supported him. I went through a period of denial, telling myself that this was not really the Republican Party. But I could not sustain that denial. The Republican Party is now the party that endorsed Roy Moore and attacks John Bolton. Those are just facts.

How will it end?

Towards the end of the article, Stevens is asked to write the epitaph of the Republican Party. He responded with a shorter version of the excerpt below: "The Republican Party was killed by a changing America. It became a white party and there were not enough white people."

I liken the Republican Party to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007. How it's going to end is more obvious than how long it will take. The future of the Republican Party is pretty clear. It's California. California was the beating heart of the Republican Party. It was the electoral citadel, and now we're in third place. Not second -- third. That's what's going to happen to the Republican Party. It's inevitable.

Half the Americans 15 years old and under are non-white. It is the end of the Republican Party. It is just a question of how long that outcome will it take. Ronald Reagan won something like 44 states in 1980 with 55% of the white vote. In 2008, John McCain loses the election with 55% of the white vote.

No higher moral good

Stevens foresees some time in the wilderness for true conservatives:

I believe that we are in for a period of center-left government for a good while. Eventually it will go too far, and then some coherent, moral center-right argument backed by policy will develop. At present, I do not know anyone on the right who can articulate a credible theory of conservative government.

I worked for more than 30 years at the highest levels in the Republican Party and even I cannot tell you what being a conservative means right now. Right now, all the Republican Party cares about is power. The Republican Party exists to elect Republicans. That's it. In that way, it is like a cartel. There is no higher moral good. All they exist to do is beat Democrats.

An international child-rape ring

There are many examples of the completely amoral nature of both Trump and the Republican Party today, but this is perhaps the worst of the lot:

For example, the president of United States, at the White House, actually wished a woman well who was just arrested at the center of an international child-rape ring. In response, the Republicans, for the most part, did nothing. Republicans complain to us at the Lincoln Project, "Why do you guys want to burn the Republican Party down?" We didn't burn it down. We didn't walk away. It was today's Republican leaders who did. If you can't object to the head of your party and the president of the United States supporting a woman who was arrested in an international child-rape ring, then what is your existence as a public figure about? That is why we at the Lincoln Project are trying to beat Trump and elect Joe Biden.

A national emergency

Yet another shocking reversal for the Republican Party is their foreign policy attitudes, which would have made Ronald Reagan's head explode were he alive today to witness what Trump has done to his party.

Normal people believe that when we see someone acting abnormally, they will eventually revert to normality. They'll come to their senses. That is a great weapon and tool that Donald Trump has used because he is not a normal person. He senses weakness. Trump saw that the Republican Party was full of weak people and he could just come on in and take over.

Donald Trump also understood that racial animus was a root, unifying principle of the Republican Party. That meant that he could just walk on in and say things that other people would not. Want a Muslim ban? He's 100 percent for it. Trump gave Republican voters a raw, unfiltered version of what they really want. Donald Trump is a national emergency. I do not understand how you can call yourself a patriotic American and support someone who was elected with the help of the Russians. I've seen a lot of things during my time working on campaigns, but -- man, I never woke up and worked on the same side as the Russians. Today's Republicans do.

A very plausible nightmare scenario

Imagine "The Brooks Brothers Riot," except this time with guns.

I wake up every day to fight against that outcome. In terms of the law and Trump delaying the election or doing other things? He is not going to ask permission. He will just do it. I have challenged Republicans with the following scenario. I have not found one who can sensibly respond.

In November there are reports of voting irregularities in Dade County, Florida. There usually are. They usually do not mean anything. Donald Trump orders Chad Wolf to send those camo-wearing paramilitaries who were deployed in D.C. and Portland into the Dade County Courthouse and they seize the boxes of votes. The courts go crazy. They order the boxes returned. But let's say some of those boxes are opened. Now there is a problem with the chain of custody.

What happens then? Are the votes in Dade County thrown out? How do you have a national election without Dade County? Who would stop this? Security guards at the Dade County courthouse aren't going to stop guys in camouflage with automatic weapons. Trump would give those orders to seize the boxes and interfere with the 2020 election. Trump is testing whether the Republicans will stand up to him. Bill Barr won't stop him. That is for sure.

Moreover, why do all these people around Donald Trump keep getting arrested? It is because they are crooks. It's not as if they didn't want to work in presidential politics before. It was just that no one would hire them. The campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, the foreign policy adviser, the national security adviser, the chief political adviser -- all those guys are felons. Now Steve Bannon's been arrested, and he'll probably be a felon too. Donald Trump is a wannabe gangster. Gangsters hire other gangsters.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
Follow Chris on Twitter: ChrisWeigant
Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com
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[SharonClark]

1. Excellent recap.

Thanks for putting it all together in one place, although I'm sure you missed a couple of dozen trump scandals that flew under the radar.