I’m not sure what congressional Democrats are thinking. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her caucus will pivot from investigating the president to “health care, health care, health care.” I suppose, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg said in Sunday’s New York Times, the Democrats are indeed “recovering from their failed push to remove President Trump from office.” But this president continues to prove the arguments against him. Why stop now?

Donald Trump pushed for preferential treatment in the federal criminal sentencing of Roger Stone, his garrulous goombah. US Attorney General Bill Barr, the president’s favorite fixer, is trying to suppress a rebellion at the Department of Justice while weathering outside criticism from more than 2,000 former federal prosecutors who served presidents from both parties. They are calling for his immediate resignation.

Furthermore, the president maligned the integrity of the foreman of the jury that convicted Stone. Stone has since asked for a retrial. Then Trump did, too. Now a national association of 1,000 federal jurists has scheduled “an emergency meeting” to “address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases,” according to USA Today.

Sure, the House Democrats must protect their majority, and that means protecting freshmen now representing conservative districts. But if soliciting foreign interference was enough for those Democrats to join the impeachment effort, surely a president behaving as if he were the embodiment of the nation-state is enough to continue investigating his administration. I mean, the least they could do is impeach Barr!

Perhaps, as she has before, Pelosi is being coy. Stolberg said oversight will continue even as the Democrats move on to health care and economic issues. “They plan in particular to press Attorney General William P. Barr over what they say are Mr. Trump’s efforts to compromise the independence of the Justice Department.” And last week, Pelosi herself said — in no uncertain terms — Trump’s intervention in the Stone case was “abuse of power,” the first charge against the president in his Senate trial.

Perhaps Pelosi is playing both sides, as she did leading up to impeachment. But I don’t think so. This is an election year, and she really does believe the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is that people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 due to “economic anxiety” and feeling “left behind” in the global economy. Given this understanding of 2016, pocketbook issues — “health care, health care, health care” — makes sense. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The people who voted for Trump were not working class. Not if you measure class by money. Two-thirds of his supporters earned above-average incomes — which is to say, annual household earnings of more than $50,000. Yes, they were white. Yes, many of them didn’t go to college. But many of them did, and they still voted for the president. Meanwhile the real working-class voters, many of them white, voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t a working class revolt at all. It was a revolt of the petite bourgeois.

The phenomenon is international, wrote Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. The “middle-classness of populism,” he said, is evident across the west. The middle-class populist “isn’t keen on positive discrimination for women or people of colour, or on high taxes. In fact, he doesn’t want anyone to get ‘handouts.’ In a NatCen Social Research study of the Brexit referendum, ‘affluent Eurosceptics’ were the segment of the electorate least likely to have financial troubles, and most likely to be anti-welfare.”

[The middle-class populist’s] advance has been slow. He has never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations. He feels, with some justification, that his exclusion has been unfair — based on his accent, schooling, clothes and unfamiliarity with trendy conversational topics.

They believe they are better than the real working class, and they yearn to be among their “betters.” But in the end they are victims of their own ideology, because their “betters,” who benefit from the same ideology, don’t want anything to do with them.

If this sounds like the president’s attitude toward New York’s cultural and business elite (think: Michael Bloomberg), it is. In this light, you can see why Donald Trump is the perfect vessel into which the petite bourgeoiscan pour their anti-democratic bile.

The president wants us to believe his base is populated with “Reagan Democrats.” That wouldn’t be so bad if everyone else, including the House speaker, didn’t accept that as true. The leader in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination is a self-identified “socialist” while an oligarch has bought his way to the next debate. The real left-behind aren’t the working class. The real left-behind are liberal Democrats.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 February 2020
Word Count: 790
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A long time ago, before September 11, 2001, the right-most flank of the Republican Party tolerated the establishment’s compromise with racial liberalism, by which I mean “the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry — in other words, white people’s definition of racism.” (I’m using here Nils Gilman’s helpful definition.)

After 9/11, that basic consensus began to break down. The GOP’s right-most flank refused to recognize its political legitimacy, even though it was white-centered. They refused, because they believed the basic consensus on race, and on other areas of political difference, permitted “radical Islamic terrorists” to attack God’s country. The Republican elites were no longer partners to be tolerated. They were now the enemy.

While the rest of America focused on terrorism, the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the endless “war on terror,” the right-most flank of the Republican Party focused on “illegal immigration.” This is not as random as it appears. Brown people threatened America’s covenant with God. Brown people were “breaching” the southern border. That these brown people were worlds apart was a distinction with zero difference.

The Republican establishment, by which I mean people wielding real power, did not realize how diametrical the GOP’s right-most flank had become until after 2004. George W. Bush won reelection in part using this strategy — scare the bejesus out of everyone. The liberals were coming for your guns. The gays and feminists were coming for your sons and daughters. The heathens and atheists were for coming for your God. After the election, Bush thought he had political capital to burn. Then things changed.

The cause of change was partly Bush’s failure in Iraq. But failing was not what most polarized the right-most flank of the Republican Party. What most polarized them was President Bush stoking their white rage and then turning around to try privatizing Social Security and reforming federal immigration law. To put it one way, they wanted freedom and “entitlements,” but only for them. Put quite another way, the government was trying to “take away their money” and “give it to the illegals.” After 2007, when both reform attempts failed, Bush was a lame duck. The GOP became something else.

We didn’t know what it would become until after the 2008 election. And even then, racial liberalism still prevailed. No one, not even the GOP’s right-most flank, dared use explicit language with respect to Barack Obama commonplace in public discourse prior to 1970. (John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 were committed to racial liberalism.) But the upward pressure was building. Obama’s victory, according to Arthur Goldwag (a subscriber to this newsletter!), brought “hidden feelings to light”:

Viral, Photoshopped images of President Obama in an African witch doctor’s getup, of Mrs. Obama with her face morphed into an ape’s, of watermelons growing on the White House lawn, and of the president and first lady dressed like a pimp and a prostitute have been popping up in in-boxes everywhere — some of them sent by political activists who would describe themselves as conservative and mainstream.

The party’s margins were taking over the party’s center. By 2010, the GOP’s right-most flank had a name, the Tea Party. By 2015, the seal broke entirely when a candidate referred to Mexicans as rapists, and called for a total ban on Muslims entering the country. Now, after more than three years of sadistic policies aimed at purging the body politic of brownness, all that remains of the “racial liberalism” is ceremonial lip-service, as when Donald Trump is forced to say something nice. Otherwise, there’s no more consensus. There’s no more conservatism. Only leftism, liberalism and fascism.

Sept. 11 had two other outcomes — the militarization of civil society and the over-criminalization of minor crimes. “Illegal entry” is a misdemeanor (the first time), something as socially injurious as reckless driving. But a rapid evolution from the margins to the Tea Party to a fascist White House over 20 years has turned it into a crime threatening to destroy our values, economy and “way of life.” That’s what happens when there’s no difference between brown immigrants and brown terrorists.

Under Donald Trump, the militarization of civil society is enmeshed with the over-criminalization of illegal entry. The administration decided to confiscate babies as a deterrent to unlawful border crossing. It created apparent “concentration camps” for immigrants and their families. Now, according to the New York Times, US Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol, is deploying 100 officers to so-called “sanctuary cities.”

The official goal is increasing deportations by 35 percent. But intimidation appears to be the real goal. Among agents, the Times said, are “members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team … With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”

Before the Times broke the news, Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned civil rights activist, reported a conversation she had with a former senior agency official:

Border Patrol does not believe they are a civilian law enforcement agency. They believe they are kin to the Marine Corps. They do not believe they are accountable to Congress, which is why they have no issues lying to them even while under oath.

They believe they are only accountable to … presidents like Trump. Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency. They claim to be the “premiere” law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a “national police force” to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens. (Italics are emphatically mine.)

None of this is getting the attention it deserves. Democracy dies in darkness.

And in secret.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 1,008
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The battle to replace Donald Trump in the White House got properly under way with the Democratic Party primary election in New Hampshire, so it’s worth examining the state of Trump’s signature campaign promise from 2016: the wall.

How’s that been going?

Well, the wall is up — virtually — and is taking over many more aspects of American public discourse than originally proposed. Illegal immigration through the US-Mexico border, Trump’s alleged justification for building a wall, continues to fall.

However, the US president continues to throw up bureaucratic barriers even to legal entry and immigration. The number of refugee admissions to the United States fell to the lowest level on record last year, fewer foreign students and tourists were going to the United States and fewer green cards were being issued, the US State Department said.

By some estimates, Trump’s vow to bar all Muslims from entering the United States has taken effect in the past two years in the form of varying levels of travel and immigration restrictions on an estimated 7% of the world’s population. More than 135 million people in seven, mainly Muslim countries have been affected.

The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, said the number of permanent visas given every month in 2017-18 to nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen fell 72%.

In the first week of February, Trump extended travel and immigration restrictions to another six countries. As of February 22, people from Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania will no longer be able to permanently migrate to the United States but are allowed short-term travel.

This, too, is a “Muslim ban” of sorts. Except for Myanmar, where Muslims account for 4% of the population, Muslims are more than one-quarter of the population of the countries newly targeted by Trump. Tanzania, for instance, is 30% Muslim and Kyrgyzstan is 86%.

A pattern is emerging from Trump’s travel and immigration restrictions. The target countries either have dark-skinned people or large numbers of Muslims or both. As US Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, recently posted on Twitter: “Trump’s travel bans have never been rooted in national security — they’re about discriminating against people of colour. They are, without a doubt, rooted in anti-immigrant, white supremacist ideologies.”

Admittedly, the Trump administration’s overall policy betrays a broader hostility to any category of foreigner — legal, illegal or asylum-seeker — seeking to enter the United States. But the original targets — Muslims — have been distinct and symbolic and they have always been the foundation of the virtual border wall.

On that foundation have been laid the bricks that constitute the virtual wall. The bricks are a steady stream of administrative decisions. There are orders to bar entry to the United States for certain groups of people from certain countries. There are orders to reduce the annual quota of refugees that America is willing to take.

The administration has made it practically impossible for asylum claims at the US border to have any chance of successful resolution. Brick by brick, the impediments Trump has placed to entry into the United States have had the cumulative effect of an impenetrable if invisible wall.

It is more consequential than the nearly 200km of physical border wall completed by the Trump administration. The virtual barrier will serve as a greater deterrent than the 130km of wall that Trump’s new budget proposal for this fiscal year says he wants to build. And, were Trump to be re-elected in November, it’s almost irrelevant that he finish the full 725km of barriers planned by 2021. The virtual wall would be the more important and the greater deterrent to travel to the United States by Muslims and dark-skinned people.

That’s partly because Trump’s virtual wall suggests to those who live and work in its boundaries a deep and abiding sense of security. It is a false sense, premised on the assumption that the American people are either too stupid or too lazy to notice that their problems do not arise from Muslim and dark-skinned migrants. It is meant to disguise the painful reality that the gains of US economic growth are unevenly distributed, that Trump as president has only aggravated income inequality with his 2017 tax law and that a strong safety net and affordable healthcare remain a distant dream in the world’s richest country.

In their 2016 book, Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion and Policy, Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla and Karthick Ramakrishnan explored the discourse about immigration in the United States.

They said attitudes towards immigration change when the economy is faring badly or when politicians bring up the issue. Ramakrishnan suggested the politicians are the more influential. By Trump’s own, somewhat disingenuous, account, the US economy is doing very well. So the focus on immigration is clearly based on a darker vision of foreigners as criminals, competitors and a burden on the American state.

The virtual wall takes the United States back to a century ago, when being white was key to acquiring US citizenship and there were barriers to immigration for all but Caucasians and Western Europeans. In the 21st century, though, it merely highlights the growing dissonance between Trump’s America and the country’s founding ideals.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 863
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I want to address this note to Trump supporters and others who may be considering voting for him. You are the ones stereotyped by critics as being all alike in your hatreds, resentments, closed minds, prejudices, and fears. While you may hoot and holler at his mass rallies, people like you defy these stereotypes back home where you live, work, and raise your families. When asked, you may call yourselves Republicans, conservatives, or patriots. Yet you want many of the same things in life as neighbors who call themselves liberals or progressives.

Both want clean and fairly counted elections. Both want law enforcement against businesses that cheat, bully, and harm their families, often by directly selling things on television that are bad for their children, bypassing parental authority. They are angry over big business and the superrich not paying their fair share in taxes, even as they can afford to buy politicians. (Who doesn’t object to all the maddening fine print in the credit card agreements, health insurance policies, and pension contracts that deny customers the benefits and services they’ve already paid for?)

Both want their cars recalled when there is a manufacturing defect. Both want safe medicines, clean food, air, water, and a safe, respectful workplace. They expect their taxes to be used to repair and upgrade their community’s roads, schools, drinking water, and public transit systems. Probably many Walmart workers voted for Trump, but that doesn’t mean they think it’s fair for them to be paid a wage they can’t possibly live on while their top boss makes $12,000 an hour plus huge benefits. During his campaign, by the way, Trump, the vastly overpaid failed gambling czar, asserted that American workers were “overpaid.” How do his supporters let him get away with that?

The commercial drive to overcome more important civic and human values doesn’t distinguish between conservatives and liberals, between Republicans and Democrats. They are all fodder for profit. Did you know that every major religion warned its faithful not to give up too much power to the merchant class? More than two thousand years ago, merchants, even then, were running roughshod over civilized values in their quest for profits or riches.

Today they know how to get you in so many ways and to get away with it. Only a democratic society can make these big corporations our servants, not our masters, by subordinating their commercial greed to the supremacy of the law and to civic values that allow people to enjoy freedom, justice, and decent livelihoods.

I’ve always been amazed at the success that so many politicians have with voters just using a few repeated phrases. Is it because they are boldly saying out loud what certain voters have been thinking about unpopular segments of the population, and keeping it to themselves? So someone like a Trump, even as he lavishes tax breaks on corporations, can make the quick sale exploiting real resentments about job losses by blaming them on imports and immigrants.

Many Trump voters blame their labor union leaders as well. Trump may be losing the trade war, with arbitrary tariffs costing us jobs, raising consumer prices, and losing farmer markets, but, hey, at least he’s trying to make sure foreign countries don’t take us to the cleaners. For “five minute voters,” who don’t give themselves a chance to dig deeper, as they do with the details of their sports teams, the key role of U.S. corporations who exited America for those foreign countries with their cheap labor may be missed.

And recall when Trump told them during the campaign that “the drug companies are getting away with murder” and yet has done nothing as president, well hey, at least he is talking about the rip-offs. (Drug companies are laughing as they collect more subsidies and tax breaks from Uncle Sam. Their “pay-or-die” business just got 13 percent more expensive on the average this year.)

Trump scoffs at the climate crisis. All those intensifying heat waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and wildfires are no evidence of massive man-caused climate disruption, which he calls a “hoax.” Whom do you trust — your eyes and the climate scientists, whose warnings have been accurate for years, or the “beautiful, clean coal” booster — Donald Trump?

Presidential behavior, in a modern social media age, can be very contagious. And not just for preteens sassing their parents in ways imitative of Trump’s outlandish behavior or talk. For example, when talking politics with people, if I mention his chronic, pathological lying in tweets and speeches day after day, saying things that just clearly aren’t so, somebody always says, “Well, all politicians lie” — which may well be true. But just as there is a difference between coffee that is hot, boiling, or scalding, a difference in degree can become a deadly difference in kind. Especially when the lies and their false scenarios are stacked and baked by the power and delusions of the president of the United States.

But the price of a Fake President is a continuing betrayal — betrayal of the people who believed and put him in office. When he says the economy is so rosy, and it clearly isn’t for a majority of people having trouble paying their bills even after going into deep debt, they’ve been betrayed. Trump then acts as if there were nothing he can do to provide health care for 80 million people without insurance or underinsured … when in reality he is pushing Congress to repeal or reduce critical health insurance benefits for millions of people. You can look it up and see for yourself. Or when he says industrial jobs are coming back and factories are returning, and they have not, his lies hide his broken campaign assurances and evade accountability. And the cycle of betrayal continues … for which his voters pay a big price when the cheering stops. His repeated lies about too many government regulations help his corrupt and conflict-saturated deregulators to sabotage public health and safety. Sure, there is sometimes too much paperwork, just as there are poorly conceived regulations that are sometimes too weak. But overall, for example, aren’t you glad to learn there is less lead in your children’s blood, no more lethal asbestos filling your lungs, and far fewer fatalities, broken bones, or amputations in motor vehicle crashes? Chalk all that up to federal regulatory law enforcement finally saying NO to corporate profits over people’s lives.

Sometimes it’s useful to know a little history about other people, no better than us, who stood up together for justice and got a better living standard across the board. I’m speaking of the people of Western Europe who pulled themselves together after their countries were destroyed during World War II. With their multiparty systems (more choices and voices), their larger and stronger labor unions than we have in the United States, and their many consumer cooperatives, as voters they demanded and received full health care; four weeks or more annual paid vacation; decent pensions, wages, and public transit; tuition-free higher education; paid child care; paid individual and family sick leave; and paid maternity leave.

Today in the United States, nearly 75 years after World War II, which we helped to win, we have scant few of these necessities for all our people. To these Europeans, the logic was simple. They earned their pay, sent their tax payments to the government, and wanted them returned in the form of these necessities that make a more decent life. You don’t find many conservatives in those nations wanting to turn the clock back. The famed conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher kept that country’s national health insurance.

Then there is our northern neighbor, Canada. In the 1960s, while our country was wasting lives and money in Vietnam, the peaceful Canadians were laying the groundwork for full Medicare for All. Soon all the Canadian provinces had a health insurance structure called “single payer” (meaning the government provided universal, high-quality care). Everybody in, nobody out, with free choice of physician or hospital. No nightmarish networks. Lower drug prices. The Canadians cover everyone for half the price per capita that we pay in our gouging, profiteering system that still manages to leave 29 million people uninsured and double that number in underinsured fright.

If you’ve been to Canada, you’ll note they act and look a lot like Americans. But at a certain time in their history, without being absorbed in the quicksand of costly foreign wars, Canadians said, “enough is enough,” and created a very popular health care insurance system that reduced a lot of anxiety, dread, and fear from their quality of life and work. (Again, you can look it up — visit singlepayeraction.org for 25 ways full Medicare improves Canadian livelihoods compared to their counterparts in the United States.)

To get votes in 2016, Trump on the stump repeatedly promised that he would abolish the “disastrous” Obamacare and replace it with “great” health insurance. For two years, with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he did neither. In fact, he had no replacement plan for Obamacare. Had he persuaded Congress to repeal Obamacare, he would have left 20 million additional people without health insurance. In a sense, he was lucky. There are lots of Trump voters in that group.

Let’s face it, Western Europeans — from Scandinavia to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and others — had higher expectations for themselves and their political systems than we do. Sure, their politics are fractious; they fight with one another and endure all kinds of shifting coalitions in their parliaments. But eventually they returned to their people a lot for their taxes — decent livelihoods; income security through retirement; paid leisure and sick time; and far less anxiety, fear, and dread than our trapdoor economy allows.

Many Trump voters read about the great labor leader, Eugene Debs, in their high school and college American history books. One day, near the end of his career in the 1920s, a reporter asked an exhausted Debs what was his greatest regret? He looked at the reporter and said, “My greatest regret? … My greatest regret is that the American people under their Constitution can have almost anything they want, but it just seems that they don’t want much of anything at all.”

I thought of Debs when I observed the muted reaction from the American people to the $4.7 trillion budget Trump sent to Congress in March 2019. It contained another staggering increase in the already bloated, wasteful, unaudited military budget. But he also wanted, dangerously, to cut Medicaid; food stamps; consumer, environmental health, and safety protections against cancer and other diseases; and Medicare (breaking his campaign promise). And he gave the superrich over a trillion dollars in tax cuts and handed your children the debt. “How Dare He!” did not ring out from all corners of our land.

And whatever happened to Trump’s big plans for repairing and upgrading America’s failing infrastructure or public works? His proposed budget barely even pays lip service to the problem. As a builder of hotels and casinos, he knows his proposal falls short, but he isn’t telling you. Fortunately for the people, the House Democrats declared his budget dead on arrival. The question remains: Whose side is he really on? Clearly not the side that truly loves America and Americans.

He is not on the side of struggling blue-collar workers who are abandoned or mistreated by their bosses. Even when confronted with Trump’s massive fakery, most of his victimized supporters say a version of, “Yes, but” — “but” meaning any excuse to justify their intuitive embrace of him. Trump loyalists may feel bolstered by low unemployment numbers (which actually began their steady descent back in 2010, several years before he came into office), but they overlook stagnant real income, the absence of benefits, and the lack of investment in public works and their communities.

They may be bemused by his antics with Kim Jong Un, the erratic dictator of nuclear-armed North Korea. And they may choose to ignore his transparent commercial ties with Russian crooks and oligarchs. (Don’t believe it? Again, you can look it up!) Why? Perhaps because his reckless behavior doesn’t appear to directly affect their families? They may revel in his intimidating attacks on our free press … or applaud when he attacks hardworking immigrants … but these are core features of our democracy; they need to be defended and not undermined, especially by the president.

They may see his abhorrent personal behavior with women as distasteful, but then … he’s only human, like many men they know. As far as his failed business career, cheating workers, including undocumented ones, customers, creditors, and the IRS — that, to many of his supporters, is Fake News. Besides, to them he is so rich that he can’t be bought (though, still, he refuses to disclose his tax returns, so while we know he has something to hide, we just don’t know what). As for his evangelical voters, they know about his infidelities, his many sins and non-churchgoing life, and his past support for abortion. They shrug. To them, it’s enough that Trump is vocally championing their values and policies from the biggest bully pulpit in the land.

Finally, they may be what Matt Taibbi, in his new book, Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, calls “grudge voters.” One Wisconsin voter told him, “I usually don’t vote, but I’m going Trump because f*** everything.”
Pessimism never won a battle or an election. I am asking you to learn about what Trump has really been up to. I’ve co-authored a book, Fake President,which I hope will (a) better equip those who refuse to reward such a miserable person with cruel policies, (b) perhaps activate some of the 120 million nonvoters—nearly as many as all those who do vote, and (c) encourage betrayed supporters to vote with their heads rather than their fears.

Keep all this in mind, dear Trump supporters. Spend some hours studying the actual words of the presidential candidates and your congressional candidates. Politics is not entertainment. If you like politicians because they say what you think, also question whether they will do what you need.

A president who excites angry voters with racist rants while rewarding his wealthy friends with policies that further enrich them is not a populist, but a phony — the opposite of someone who “tells it like it is.” Did you know that the Trump presidency has brought us the first-ever reduction of life expectancy in the United States, the stagnation of wages, and an avalanche of cancerous particulates in the water and air of our country? Including his coal-country base!

It’s time to persuade a segment of reasoning Trump voters that he is fundamentally a Fake President who can’t be trusted and is destroying the best in America while bringing out the worst. That’s a theory of the case that will sway the jury of voters, if they are registered and informed. For the Fox Corporation isn’t America. We — the progressive majority — are.

With high hopes for our future,
Ralph Nader

A pioneer in consumer advocacy, Ralph Nader was named by Atlantic magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in American history. Together with Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate, he is co-author of Fake President (Skyhorse Publishing), which aims to raise the bar of what all voters deserve.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 2,521
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ISTANBUL — Hardliners are expected to win big in Iran’s parliamentary elections February 21, ending a string of election victories by “pragmatists” in recent years and setting the stage for the 2021 presidential poll, analysts said.

Tensions between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme form the backdrop of the election for the 290-member chamber. More than 50 million voters are asked to go to the polls amid economic pressure from US sanctions and a credibility crisis for the regime following the violent suppression of street protests in November and the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in January.

The election is a political test for competing political camps in Iran as they stake out positions for the looming succession of 80-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“These elections are significant because they are paving the ground for a conservative takeover of Iran’s elected institutions for the first time since 2012,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, said by e-mail.

The hard-line IRGC, which has gained considerable economic and political influence, could see its power strengthened as a result of the election.

“The tendency is towards a more hard-line polity in the Islamic Republic with a more prominent role of the IRGC,” Ali Fathollah-Nejad, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre, said in a message in response to questions.

“I think this kind of horizon is also understood by the Iranians who, in protests in the wake of the shooting down of the passenger jet, were shouting slogans against the IRGC and their willingness to sustain a conflict with the US to divert attention from popular discontent as well as an eventual de facto rule by them that might emerge down the road.”

The current parliament, elected in 2016, has more than 100 “reformists” and “moderates,” while the rest of the chamber is split between independents and hardliners. Pragmatists won the last two presidential elections, in 2013 and 2017, but President Hassan Rohani is barred from running in 2021 after two terms.

In the run-up to the parliamentary elections, the powerful Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog that vets prospective candidates, barred approximately half of the more than 14,000 people who applied to enter the race. The majority of those rejected were reformist and moderate candidates but there were also hardliners among those barred, as well as 90 current lawmakers.

Rohani, whose pragmatist camp could be weakened in the election, criticised the council’s approach, saying it had hurt “competition and participation.”

“The greatest danger for democracy and national sovereignty is the day when elections become a formality,” the government’s website quoted Rohani as saying in a meeting with provincial governors in January.

Vaez said that by weeding out reformist candidates, the regime demonstrated its determination to minimise internal debates.

“The system’s tight grip in vetting the candidates shows that it doesn’t want to take any risks in these elections and seeks a pliant parliament that would allow for internal consolidation in the face of external threats,” Vaez said.

Moderates and reformists have championed improved ties with the West and expanded social freedoms but they suffered major setbacks since US President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Trump pulled the United States out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, setting the agreement — championed by Rohani — hurtling towards collapse and re-imposed sanctions that sent Iran’s economy into free fall.

“The hardliners in Iran have lost every election since 2012 but Trump has been a political boon for them by completely discrediting their pragmatic rivals who invested their entire political capital in the 2015 nuclear deal, which is hanging by a thread now,” Vaez said.

He added that the February 21 vote could provide clues for next year’s presidential race and beyond.

“The takeover of the parliament by the hardliners is likely to harbinger a similar development in 2021 presidential elections. With the supreme leader’s succession looming on the horizon, the stakes for the control of these power centres are quite high.”

Angry protests followed attempts by the IRGC and hardliners to deny the IRGC’s responsibility for the downing of the Ukrainian jet in January but Fathollah-Nejad said the pragmatists also had a problem.

“There is still a lot of public scepticism vis-a-vis all wings of the regime,” he said.

Pragmatists could “try to portray themselves as some kind of an opposition to this kind of effort by the hardliners to monopolise power,” he added, “but, yet again, the context is that also the reformists have lost much credibility in view of large sections of the population over the past few years” because they failed to deliver on their promise of economic and political improvement after the signing of the 2015 nuclear agreement.

As both hardliners and pragmatists struggle to create enthusiasm, voter turnout will be a key factor. A high participation rate is likely to be seen by the regime as a vote of confidence in the Islamic Republic despite mounting economic and political problems. Turnout in the 2016 parliamentary election was nearly 60%.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 846
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The United States Attorney General went on ABC News Thursday to “rebuke” the president, “attack” the president, “push back” against the president, or whatevs. The Washington press corps can be more problematic than it’s worth. It loves conflict, and it loves giving senior government officials an endless supply of benefit-of-the-doubt.

Bill Barr is under fire. He meddled with the sentencing recommendations for Roger Stone, Trump’s friend convicted last year for lying to the US Congress, among other things. Prosecutors said he deserved as many as seven years in federal prison, per Justice Department guidelines. Barr reined them back, instead recommending three to five years. Turns out this was the second time Barr got into the way. Michael Flynn received the same preferential treatment. The judge in Stone’s case has the final say.

Barr undermined prosecutors the day after the president said on Twitter his friend was getting a raw deal. Trump suggested, moreover, that the real criminals were the people prosecuting Stone, particularly Robert Mueller. On Tuesday, all four prosecutors associated with the special counsel’s office quit en masse. The New York City Bar demanded Thursday an investigation by the inspector-general. Nancy Pelosi said the president “abused his power” again. In extremely-Nancy-Pelosi-voice, she said: “The attorney general has stooped to such levels. What a sad disappointment to our country.”

So Barr went on ABC News. In short, the attorney general said, I am my own man. I do not take direction from the president. But then he said something perplexing. “I’m going to do what I think is right. And you know … I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” he said.

He meant the president’s tweeting.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this. Each interpretation of “I cannot do my job here” depends on how much of the benefit of the doubt you are willing to give Barr.

If you give the attorney general 100 percent of the benefit of the doubt, as the press corps is wont to do, that could mean Barr “really is angry,” as Charlie Sykes said. “Perhaps his institutionalist instincts really did finally kick in, the vestiges of his conscience stirred — and dammit, he just had to take a stand for the rule of the law.”

But, if you give the attorney general zero percent of the benefit of the doubt, as most of the president’s critics are wont to do, you come to a different conclusion. As Charlie Sykes said: “Or maybe he was just annoyed that Trump was giving away the game.”

Let’s put this another way.

“I cannot do my job here” could mean Barr can’t administer neutral justice and equal protection under the law while Trump creates the appearance of unethical conduct. Cue headlines saying Barr “rebuked,” “attacked” or “pushed back” against Trump.

Or! “I cannot do my job here” could mean Barr can’t continue to get away with covering up the president’s crimes while the president is crowing about it.

I say pick Door No. 2.

There’s more at stake than the president’s criminality, though. In response to Barr’s TV appearance, Trump said, again on Twitter, that while it’s true he never asked Barr to get involved in a criminal case, he nevertheless has the “legal right” to do just that. To translate this from the original Trumpese: “This is how I ask without asking.”

More serious, however, are the implications of this claim. When a president claims the “legal right” or, as he did Wednesday, “the absolute right” to interfere with the neutral administration of justice, that means something all Americans should worry about.

One, it means equal treatment before the law isn’t equal. It can’t be. Not when friends of the president get off easy for crimes everyone else would be punished for. Two, it means the president isn’t bound by the law or even above it. He is the law. He is the embodiment of justice itself. That means the administration of justice and the rule of law are anchored in the whims of the president. Three, and most worrisome, is that he can solicit, without appearing to, federal crimes beneficial to him and his friends.

Claiming the “absolute right” to undermine justice is the start of turning the federal government into a criminal syndicate. That is, after all, what government is in nations like Russia. The line there between government official and mobster is no line at all.

We are a long way from that, of course, and we may never get there.

Not if we stop giving people like Bill Barr the benefit of the doubt.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 February 2020
Word Count: 774
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My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even paying attention?

I mean, if another great power had been so fruitlessly fighting a largely undeclared set of conflicts under the label of “the war on terror” for so long, if it had wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars with no end in sight and next to no one in that land was spending much time debating or discussing the matter, what would you think? If nothing else, you’d have a few questions about that, right?

Well, so many years later, I do have a few that continue to haunt me, even if I see them asked practically nowhere and, to my frustration, can’t really answer them myself, not to my satisfaction anyway. In fact, since 2001 — with the exception of the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq when America’s streets suddenly filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators asking a range of questions (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” was a typical protest sign of that moment) — our never-ending wars have seldom been questioned in this country. So think of what follows not as my thoughts on the war in question but on the war in questions.

The age of carnage In October 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush launched a bombing campaign not just against al-Qaeda, a relatively small group partially holed up in Afghanistan, but the Taliban, an Islamist outfit that controlled much of the country. It was a radical decision not just to target the modest-sized organization whose 19 hijackers, most of them Saudis, had taken out almost 3,000 Americans with a borrowed “air force” of commercial jets, but in the phrase of the moment to “liberate” Afghanistan. These days, who even remembers that, by then, Washington had already fought a CIA-directed, Saudi-backed (and partially financed) war against the Soviet Union in that country for a full decade (1979-1989). To take on the Red Army then, Washington funded, armed, and supported extremist Islamist groups, some of which would still be fighting in Afghanistan (against us) in the twenty-first century.

In the context of that all-American war, a rich young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, would, of course, form al-Qaeda, or “the base.” In 1989, Washington watched as the mighty Red Army limped out of Afghanistan, the “bleeding wound” as its leader then called it. (Afghanistan wasn’t known as “the graveyard of empires” for nothing.) In less than two years, that second great power of the Cold War era would implode, an event that would be considered history’s ultimate victory by many in Washington. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who first committed the U.S. to its Afghan Wars, would, as last century ended, sum things up this way: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Afghanistan itself would be left in ruins as Washington turned its attention elsewhere, while various local warlords fought it out and, in response, the extremist Taliban rose to power.

Now, let me jump ahead a few years. In 2019, U.S. air power expended more munitions (bombs and missiles) on that country than at any time since figures began to be kept in 2006. Despite that, during the last months of 2019, the Taliban (and other militant groups) launched more attacks on U.S.-and-NATO-trained-and-financed Afghan security forces than at any time since 2010 when (again) records began to be kept. And it tells you something about our American world that, though you could have found both those stories in the news if you were looking carefully, neither was considered worthy of major coverage, front-page headlines, or real attention. All these years later, it won’t surprise you to know that such ho-hum reporting is just par for the course. And when it comes to either of those two on-the-record realities, you certainly would be hard-pressed to find a serious editorial expression of outrage or much of anything else about them in the media.

At 18-plus years or, if you prefer to combine Washington’s two Afghan wars, 28-plus years, we’re talking about the longest American war in history. The Civil War lasted four years. The American part of World War II, another four. The Korean War less than four (though it never officially ended). The Vietnam War, from the moment the first significant contingent of U.S. advisors arrived, 14, and from the moment the first major U.S. troop contingents arrived, perhaps a decade. In the Trump era, as those air strikes rise, there has been a great deal of talk about possible “peace” and an American withdrawal from that country.  Peace, however, has now seemingly come to be defined in Washington as a reduction of American forces from approximately 12,000 to about 8,500 (and that’s without counting either private military contractors or CIA personnel there).

Meanwhile, of course, the war on terror that began in Afghanistan now stretches from the Philippines across the Greater Middle East and deep into the heart of Africa. Worse yet, it still threatens to expand into a war of some sort with Iran — and that, mind you, is under the ministrations of an officially “antiwar” president who has nonetheless upped American military personnel in the Middle East to record levels in recent years.

Of course, this is a story that you undoubtedly know fairly well. Who, in a sense, doesn’t? But it’s also a story that, so many years and so much — to use a word once-favored by our president — “carnage” later, should raise an endless series of disturbing and unnerving questions here. And that it doesn’t, should raise questions in itself, shouldn’t it?

Still, in a country where opposition to endless war seems constantly to falter or fade out amid a media universe in which Donald Trump’s latest tweet can top any war news, it seems potentially useful to raise some of those questions — at least the ones that occur to me — and perhaps for you to do the same. Isn’t it time, after all, for Americans to ask a few questions about war, American-style, in what might be thought of as the post-9/11 age of carnage?

In any case, here are six of mine to which, as I said, I don’t really have the answers. Maybe you do. Here goes:

1 When the Bush administration launched that invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and followed it up with an invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, did we, in some curious fashion, really invade and occupy ourselves? Of course, in these years, across the Greater Middle East and Africa, the U.S. played a remarkable role in creating chaos in country after country, leading to failed states, displaced people in staggering numbers, economic disarray, and the spread of terror groups. But the question is: Did the self-proclaimed most exceptional and indispensable nation on the planet do a version of the same thing to itself in the process? After all, by 2016, the disarray in this country was striking enough and had spread far enough, amid historic economic inequality, social division, partisan divides, and growing anger, that Americans elected as president (if not quite by a majority) a man who had run not on American greatness but on American decline. He promised to make this country great again. (His declinist credentials were not much noted at the time, except among the heartland Americans who voted for him.) So, ask yourself: Would President Donald Trump have been possible if the Bush administration had simply gone after al-Qaeda on September 12, 2001, and left it at that? Since January 2017, under the tutelage of that “very stable genius,” the U.S. political (and possibly global economic) system has, of course, begun to crack open. Is there any connection to those forever wars?

2 Has there ever been a truly great power in history, still at or near the height of its militarily prowess, that couldn’t win a war? Sure, great imperial powers from the Romans to the Chinese to the British sometimes didn’t win specific wars despite their seeming military dominance, but not a single one? Could that be historically unprecedented and, if so, what does it tell us about our moment? How has the country proclaimed by its leaders to have the finest fighting force the world has ever known won nothing in more than 18 years of unceasing global battle?

3 How and why did the “hearts and minds” factor move from the nationalist left in the twentieth century to the Islamist right in the twenty-first? The anti-colonial struggles against imperial powers that culminated in America’s first great losing war in Vietnam (think of Korea as kind of a tie) were invariably fought by leftist and communist groups. And whatever the military force arrayed against them, they regularly captured — in that classic Vietnam-era phrase — “the hearts and minds” of what were then called “Third World” peoples and repeatedly outlasted far better armed powers, including, in the case of Vietnam, the United States. In a word, they had the moxie in such conflicts and it didn’t matter that, by the most obvious measures of military power, they were at a vast disadvantage. In the twenty-first century, similar wars are still being fought in a remarkably comparable fashion, Afghanistan being the most obvious.  Again, the weaponry, the money, everything that might seem to pass for the works has been the property of Washington and yet that ability to win local “hearts and minds” has remained in the hands of the rebels. But what I wonder about is how exactly that moxie passed from the nationalist left to the extremist religious right in this century and what exactly was our role, intended or not, in all this?

4 When it comes to preparations for war, why can’t we ever stop? After all, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States essentially had no enemies left on the planet. Yet Washington continued essentially an arms race of one with a finish line so distant — the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 — as to imply eternity. The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it, including mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for future military domination, went right on without an enemy in sight. In fact, in late 2002, preparing for his coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush had to cook up an “axis of evil” — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, two of which were mortal enemies and the third unrelated in any significant way to either of them — as a justification for what was to come, militarily speaking. Almost 20 years later, investing as much in its military as the next seven countries combined, updating and upgrading its nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion in the coming decades (and having just deployed a new “low-yield” nuclear weapon), and still investing staggering sums in its planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, and the like, the U.S. military now seems intent (without leaving its forever wars) on returning to the era of the Cold War as well. Face-offs against Russia and China are now the military order of the day in what seems like a déjà-vu-all-over-again situation. I’m just curious, but isn’t it ever all over?

5 How can Washington’s war system and the military-industrial complex across the country continue to turn failure in war into success and endless dollars at home? Honestly, the one thing in America that clearly works right now is the U.S. military (putting aside those wars abroad). We may no longer invest in domestic infrastructure, but in that military and the giant corporate weapons makers that go with it? You bet! They are the true success stories of the twenty-first century if you’re talking about dollars invested, weaponry bought, and revolving doors greased. On the face of it, failure is the new success and few in this country seem to blink when it comes to any of that. How come?

6 Why doesn’t the reality of those wars of ours ever really seem to sink in here?  This, to my mind, is at least partially a question about media coverage. Yes, every now and then (as with the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers last December), America’s forever wars briefly break through and get some attention. And yes, if you’re a war-coverage news jockey, you can find plenty of daily reports on aspects of our wars in the media. But isn’t it surprising how much of that coverage is essentially a kind of background hum, like Muzak in an elevator? Unless the president personally decides to drone assassinate an Iranian major general and prospective future leader of that country, our wars simply drone on, barely attended to (unless, of course, you happen to be in the U.S. military or a military spouse or child). Eighteen years of failed wars and so many trillions of dollars later, wouldn’t you have expected something else?

So those are my six questions, the most obvious things that puzzle me about what may be the strangest aspect of this American world of ours, those never-ending wars and the system that goes with them. To begin to answer them, however, would mean beginning to think about ourselves and this country in a different way.

Perhaps much of this would only make sense if we were to start imagining ourselves or at least much of the leadership crew, that infamous “Blob,” in Washington, as so many war addicts. War — the failing variety — is evidently their drug of choice and not even our “antiwar” president can get off it. Think of forever war, then, as the opioid not of the masses but of the ruling classes.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 February 2020
Word Count: 2,362
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ISTANBUL — Women’s rights activists in Turkey said they are concerned that an amnesty planned by the government could result in impunity for child abusers.

“This bill will not become law and it must not become law,” said Selin Nakipoglu, a lawyer and activist.

The draft proposal is part of a wide-ranging amnesty plan that could free tens of thousands of prisoners by reducing mandatory prison times for a range of crimes and widening the use of alternative criminal justice methods such as house arrest and probation.

The amnesty has been postponed several times and Turkish Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul said the final version of the bill would become clear only after consultations between political parties in parliament. Women’s rights activists said they expect the package to be tabled in parliament this month. There is no official timetable by the government.

Convicted sex offenders, drug dealers and members or organised crime gangs, as well as people sentenced under Turkey’s controversial anti-terror laws, would be excluded from the amnesty, the government said. However, a planned exception for certain sexual offences would amount to an “amnesty for rapists,” Hulya Gulbahar, a women’s rights activist said by telephone.

The proposal says a sexual offender could be released from prison if the age difference between him and the victim is less than 15 years, if there is no criminal complaint and if the offender and the victim are married. Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has roots in political Islam, withdrew a similar bill in 2016 because of protests. A group of 197 women’s rights organisations called on the government to cancel the new draft as well.

The AKP said the bill could protect thousands of families in socially conservative sectors of society from harm.

Many conservative families marry off their daughters before they reach the legal age of 18 in religious ceremonies called “imam weddings” but thousands of husbands end up in prison when underage wives are registered in hospitals when they give birth, triggering criminal charges by prosecutors. Reports said 4,000 families could be affected. The law would be a one-off amnesty so sexual intercourse following an “imam wedding” would count as a crime after a yet to be determined cut-off date.

Women’s rights groups rejected the government’s argument that an exception from prosecution in such cases is beneficial for young mothers because many are left penniless when their husbands are in prison. Activists said the bill would legalise child abuse if it became law.

Murat Emir, an opposition lawmaker in Ankara, said last year that teenage pregnancies in Turkey were much more widespread than thought. Citing figures from Turkey’s statistics office, he said 84,500 girls under 18 had given birth since 2014. He said in parts of eastern and south-eastern Turkey, among the poorest and most conservative regions of the country, girls as young as 11 years were married off.

Gulbahar said the draft proposal was not an isolated initiative but an element of a broader effort by the AKP to implement ultra-conservative social policies.

“This amnesty project is part of the same policies that also include child marriage and an advice to couples to have many children,” she said.

Nakipoglu agreed. “This policy means underpinning the system of male dominance with religious rules and taking a stance against gender equality,” she said by telephone.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regularly calls on Turkish families to have at least three children to save the country from going the same way as aging Western societies. In a recent speech, he complained that the average age of people getting married in Turkey is rising and that many Turks never get married at all. Official figures indicated that the median age in Turkey had risen from 28 years in 2007 to more than 32 years in 2019.

Nakipoglu said her sources told her that the amnesty draft had been tabled after pressure by Islamic groups close to the AKP.

Two years ago, Turkey’s state directorate for religious affairs, which oversees the practice of Islam in the country and administers its more than 80,000 mosques, caused an uproar with a statement on its website saying that Islam allowed 9-year-old girls to be married. The post was taken down after protests and the directorate published a sermon condemning child marriages.

Women rights groups said they are determined to fight the new proposal.

“It will not be easy to stop it,” Gulbahar said. The AKP and its right-wing partner, the Nationalist Movement Party, a driving force behind the amnesty package, have a comfortable majority of seats in parliament.

Repeated delays in getting the package to parliament could be a sign that the government side is not convinced that society would accept the amnesty proposals, however.

Gulbahar pointed to a recent stir caused by a religiously conservative professor at Istanbul’s Yildiz University, Bedri Gencer. In a tweet, Gencer argued that a massive earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed 41 people in December was caused by Turkey’s decision to ban underage marriages even though the unions were allowed by God. Following protests against the statement, Yildiz University distanced itself from Gencer, saying the tweet had been “unacceptable.”

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 February 2020
Word Count: 859
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When Senate Republicans acquitted Donald Trump of abusing power and obstructing the US Congress, they established the precedent that the president is the nation-state and the nation-state is the president. His interests are the national interest. His friends are our friends. His enemies our enemies. We’re a nation of men, not laws.

In the hours and days after acquittal, the Republicans in the Senate pretended they were doing no such thing, just as the Republican majority of the US Supreme Court pretended in 2000 the invasion of one branch of the federal government into another branch did not establish any sort of legal precedent. But just as Bush v Gore set the Republican Party on a new course toward minority rule through the force of law, Trump’s acquittal set the GOP on a new course toward elevating themselves above it.

The result has been a president unleashed from normal constraints and pursuing objectives that — again — show contempt for the US Constitution and the rule of law. Trump is now free to abuse his power and profane virtually whatever he wants, tempting the House to impeach him again and the electorate to send him packing.

He fired administration officials who testified against him. Goombahs at the Treasury Department expedited to Senate Republicans financial documents related to Hunter Biden while sandbagging House Democratic requests for the president’s tax returns.

Trump, moreover, seems to be preparing for what would ordinarily be unthinkable in a democratic republic: prosecuting federal prosecutors for their love of this country.

Yes, I’m talking about Robert Mueller.

Recall the two main takeaways of his report to the Congress. One, Trump did indeed obstruct justice — nearly a dozen times, Mueller hinted. The special counsel wouldn’t say so, though. Only the Congress could say so, he said. Two, the Russians sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, because the Kremlin wanted Trump to be the president.

The second takeaway got less attention, but it evidently scarred Trump for the public to know his presidency is the product of covert cyberwarfare directed by the Kremlin, not a legitimate election. We have known since the beginning Trump’s greatest fear is being seen as illegitimate. Newly acquitted and newly married to the American national interest, Trump seems ready to “prove” he’s a legitimate president even if it means investigating, prosecuting and jailing the man who discovered the truth.

It wasn’t clear until this morning that Trump had Mueller in his crosshairs. We already knew the president told Bill Barr, the US attorney general, to go easy on Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime goon. Stone was convicted late last year for lying to the Congress, among other things. Four prosecutors associated with Mueller’s team said Stone deserved as much as seven years in prison. Barr intervened, saying his sentence should be three to four. A federal judge has the final say. Expect to hear more about that soon.

All four prosecutors quit last night. Some are calling it the “Tuesday Night Massacre” in homage to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in which Richard Nixon’s went through two Justice Department heads before the special counsel investigating him was fired.

But the massacre has been in slow-motion. Turns out the president told Barr to go easy on Michael Flynn, too. Another facet of the president’s revenge, post-acquittal, is apparently making sure the crooks, liars and traitors caught up in Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign receive a special kind of equal justice.

Some say Trump’s next move is pardoning Stone and Flynn, but that thinking suffers from lack of imagination. We now know Barr has taken control of all “legal matters of personal interest” to Trump, according to NBC News. We also know, as of this morning, the president isn’t going to settle for pardons. He wants blood. He said:

Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!

Trump yesterday denied interfering with the free and fair prosecution of justice. But, he said, if he had, he has “the absolute right” to. No, he doesn’t. To interfere is to explicitly obstruct justice, which is a crime and yet another impeachable offense.

That he believes he does makes sense, though. His interests are now the national interest. His friends are our friends. His enemies our enemies. A president can’t break the law when the president is the law. He can’t obstruct justice when he is justice.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 February 2020
Word Count: 762
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ISTANBUL — Raising the stakes in an already volatile situation in the embattled Syrian province of Idlib, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued warnings against Syria and Russia that amounted to a “declaration of war,” an analyst said.

The threats triggered a sharp response from Moscow, accusing Turkey of failing to rein in rebels in Idlib. The exchange sent the Turkish-Russian alliance in Syria to a low point.

Erdogan’s speech February 12 addressing lawmakers of his ruling Justice and Development Party in Ankara came after 13 Turkish troops were killed in clashes with Syrian government forces in Idlib since the start of the month.

Erdogan’s nationalist ally, Devlet Bahceli, on February 11, said Turkey should prepare to march on Damascus to stop the Syrian offensive in Idlib that is threatening to send hundreds of thousands of refugees into Turkey, a country that already houses 3.6 million Syrians.

Even though it came just hours after Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to iron out their differences in a telephone call, the speech by Erdogan included sharp accusations against Moscow. He suggested that Turkey would see agreements with the Kremlin, such the deal on Idlib reached in Sochi in 2018, as null and void if attacks on Turkish troops in the province continued.

“I hereby declare that we will strike regime forces everywhere from now on regardless of the Sochi deal if any tiny bit of harm is dealt to our soldiers at observation posts or elsewhere,” Erdogan said in reference to 12 Turkish observation points in Idlib set up under agreements with Russia.

Erdogan said Turkey was determined to push Syrian government forces beyond the observation posts by the end of February. “We will do this by any means necessary, by air or ground,” he said. Aircraft striking settlements in Idlib would “no longer move freely.”

The United Nations said about 700,000 people are on the move, with many seeking shelter along the closed Turkish border in the north-western Idlib.

“I want particularly to underline that the [Syrian] regime and Russia, together with regime-aligned forces, take aim at the civilian population coming from the east,” Erdogan said. “The goal is to clear the region [of civilians] and push the people of the region towards our borders.”

The Kremlin said in a brief readout of the call that Putin and Erdogan had agreed on the importance of implementing Russian-Turkish agreements on Syria and that contacts between Syria and Russia about the situation should continue.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Turkey of flouting agreements it had made with Russia to neutralise militants in Idlib and said militant attacks on Syrian and Russian forces in the region has not stopped.

“We continue to note with regret that these groups are carrying out strikes from Idlib on Syrian forces and also taking aggressive action against our military facilities,” Peskov said.

However, Erdogan said Turkey was determined to act. “We will do what is necessary without waiting for never-ending conferences,” he said.

The Turkish leader highlighted a controversial principle of his Syria policy: the aim to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power. Turkey played down that goal in recent years to smooth relations with Russia, Assad’s main backer.

“The fight for freedom of the Syrian people is a fight for survival for Turkey’s 82 million people,” Erdogan said.

His speech did not burn all bridges with Moscow. A Turkish delegation is to soon go to Moscow to discuss Idlib, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

But Erdogan’s words were a clear signal that Turkey views its cooperation with Moscow as having limits and that Ankara was not willing to sacrifice what it sees as Turkey’s core interests in order to work with Russia.

Kerim Has, a Moscow-based expert on Turkish-Russian relations, called Erdogan’s speech a “declaration of war” against Syria. “It’s his ‘personal war,’” Has said about Erdogan.

“Turkey doesn’t need a war with Syria but it seems that he needs [one] to consolidate his power inside country even in the short term,” Has added, “but I think it’s a miscalculation for him.”

Has said Moscow was likely to back Damascus in a military confrontation with Turkey while avoiding a direct one with Turkish troops but he stressed that the Kremlin had other means of pressuring Ankara.

“Moscow can put into force again some economic, tourism sanctions, personal blackmailing tools against Erdogan to force him [to accept] Russian rules,” he said.

The United States is eager to exploit the Turkish-Russian tensions over Idlib to rebuild a relationship with Ankara that has gone from crisis to crisis in recent years. James Jeffrey, the US envoy for Syria, was to meet with Turkish officials. The US Embassy said they would discuss working together towards a political solution to the conflict.

“Today, our NATO ally Turkey is facing a threat from Assad’s government and Russia. We are here to assess the situation with the Turkish government and offer support if possible,” Jeffrey said after his arrival in Ankara February 11.

Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar called for NATO assistance for Turkey in Syria. “NATO countries, NATO, Europe and the world must look at this issue more closely and must provide serious, concrete support,” he told the Associated Press.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 February 2020
Word Count: 870
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