Mueller Reports

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and delivered his results to Attorney General William Barr. The Justice Department says there are no more sealed indictments from the Office of Special Counsel. Barr will decide what to release publicly. Other investigations related to the president and his business continue.

Update (March 23):  Cenk Uygur hopes Mueller investigated money laundering by the Russians through von Clownstick properties because even if there was no explicit cooperation during the election, the threat to expose that illegal activity can be used against Fuckface to win favors for Russia now. If Mueller didn't investigate that aspect, then getting away with something doesn't mean you're innocent.

Update (March 24):  Heather Digby Parton notes that counterintelligence investigations don't necessarily lead to prosecution. Much of Dear Leader's "corrupt and unethical behavior toward Russia" is already well known.

Sadly, since all this is already on the public record, if it hasn't convinced Republicans that the president is a serious threat to the nation it's hard to imagine what would change their minds.

[I]t will be largely up to the Democrats on Capitol Hill to pursue all the open questions -- and there are many of them.

[T]he people of this country can't hold another presidential election without knowing what happened in the last one. A democracy can't function like this.

And Matt Taibbi warns that the whole "Russiagate" story has been full of sensational reporting.

Further Update (March 24):  William Barr has summarized the Mueller report in a letter to the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Quoting from the report:

[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the [von Clownstick] Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Barr indicates that Special Counsel did not draw a conclusion on the issue of obstruction of justice. Again quoting the report:

[W]hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Also, Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté argue that the relentless promotion of an Orangeman/Russia conspiracy now turns out to be a huge gift to Dear Leader's re-election campaign.

Update (March 25):  Heather Digby Parton cites Ken White to parse Mueller's language:

When prosecutors say that an investigation "did not establish" something, that doesn’t mean that they concluded it didn’t happen, or even that they don’t believe it happened. It means that the investigation didn’t produce enough information to prove that it happened.

Parton also refers to Watergate as a precedent for letting Congress decide the obstruction of justice issue.

Barr appears to have decided that [Fuckface] couldn't have had the intent to cover up a crime he didn't commit. That's nonsense. If someone is successful at obstructing justice, it may well be impossible to prove he committed the underlying crime. That's the whole point.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald claims Mueller found no evidence of collusion. Yet Cenk Uygur still maintains that Dear Leader's actual crimes weren't investigated.

And Jonathan Cook has three brutal lessons from this ordeal on how real power works:

Russiagate has been two years of wasted energy by the left, energy that could have been spent both targeting [von Clownstick] for what he is really doing rather than what it is imagined he has done, and targeting the Democratic leadership for its own, equally corrupt practices.

At the same time, they empowered [Dear Leader], breathing life into his phoney arguments that he is the anti-establishment president, a people’s president the elites are determined to destroy.

Not only was the inquiry doomed to failure – in fact, not only was it designed to fail – but it has set a precedent for future politicised investigations that will be used against the progressive left should it make any significant political gains. And an inquiry against the real left will be far more aggressive and far more "productive" than Mueller was.

Update (March 26):  Amanda Marcotte calls William Barr's letter the fake Mueller report.

[T]he tiny chance that he is offering a good-faith reading of the Mueller report is dangled over people's heads to silence them from expressing doubts.

Update (March 28):  Bob Cesca says there's still a lot we don't know about Mueller's findings. And Jim Sleeper notes that it's up to Americans themselves to preserve democratic traditions, not just one prosecutor. Meanwhile, Cody Fenwick cites Peter Baker in warning that any lack of punishment sets a troublesome precedent.

Mr. Mueller’s decision to not take a position on whether [Mr. von Clownstick's] many norm-shattering interventions in the law enforcement system constituted obstruction of justice means that future occupants of the White House will feel entitled to take similar actions.

Nevertheless, Stuart Newman argues Democrats were powerless to do anything for two years making the Special Counsel worth it.

The investigation quickly began to deliver positive results for the President’s opponents. [Dear Leader's] anger led him to fire his Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions, a staunch racist. [His] obsession with Mueller’s activities kept him tweeting and deflected his full attention from his egregious policies. The ample evidence of corruption that came to light energized Democratic voters and almost certainly contributed to their large gains in the midterm elections, in spite of what appeared to be a strong economy. 

Update (March 29):  Polls show partisan disagreement over the contents of the Mueller report. William Barr says it is now on track to be released (with redactions) by mid-April.

Update (March 31):  Katie Halper interviews Matt Taibbi and Aaron Maté.

Surely, [Fuckface] has done awful things, coverage of which could get out the vote and galvanize opposition. But the Russiagate obsession perpetuated [his] narrative about being picked-on by a media that peddles fake news and a political elite that represents the status quo. [Dear Leader] was able to come off, once again, as the outsider who takes on the establishment, which in turn persecutes him. And now that the Mueller report has said he didn’t collude with Russia, he’s celebrating.

Paul Street agrees.

[I]t’s worse than just diversion. By putting all their eggs into the legally and political non-viable Russia collusion basket, the dismal Dems not only diverted public discussion and attention from the issues that matter most. They also created a deadly exoneration moment for a creeping fascist president they can’t or won’t oppose on authentically democratic and popular grounds.

And Andrew O'Hehir thinks we don't really know anything.

[We're] still in the dark, I’m afraid: Consumed by questions and confronting a report we haven’t read that probably won’t answer them. Did Rachel Maddow and her ilk go way too far in ginning up a seductive conspiracy theory that played into the hopeful, narcissistic yearnings of too many liberals? Yes. Have the skeptics declared premature vindication and issued an overly sweeping indictment of the media, when we still don’t know enough about [von Clownstick's] evident corruption and his numerous connections to sleazy characters around the world, Russian and otherwise? Yes. Are we any closer to a clear idea of how to defeat [him] and what he represents, and how to begin reclaiming democracy? I almost don’t want to answer that. I don’t know.

Update (April 1):  Heather Digby Parton notices that approval ratings for Fuckface haven't moved much despite endless harping about "total exoneration". In fact, there's overwhelming support for releasing the full report.

I would guess that this was not what Barr and the White House expected or intended. Certainly they would have at least expected [Dear Leader's] loyal 42 percent to say they were willing to take Barr's word for it.

But those people didn't, and the only way to dissuade them from wanting it would be to discredit Mueller's findings. [Von Clownstick] and company can't do that since they're now relying on his report to clear the president. It's a bind they didn't anticipate when they launched the "Florida recount" strategy. Now they're stuck waiting once again for the report, and they still don't really know whether they've put this scandal behind them.

Update (April 3):  Doug Noble and Laura Flanders find plenty of collusion--if we just know where to look

Undermining elections? Obstructing justice? There’s no shortage of evidence that the [A]dministration colludes with enemies of democracy of every sort. Sad to say, he’s not the first. But he could be the first to distract so many people, so long, so effectively, with a collusion chase that misses the obvious.

Update (April 4):  The New York Times reports that some investigators who worked within the Office of Special Counsel are complaining that the Attorney General "failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry".

Update (April 18):  A redacted version of the Mueller report has been released by the Justice Department. It seems Fuckface really wanted to obstruct justice, but his staff got in the way.

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I guess Dear Leader's reaction to Mueller's appointment didn't make his intent clear.

Oh my God, This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.

But he's not going anywhere even as the Attorney General's spin is debunked. And yet there may be as many as eleven "mystery" criminal investigations handed off from Mueller's work. It's not clear if any of those might involve something like money laundering or other financial crimes. Cenk Uygur maintains that's the only reason Fuckface would be so afraid of Mueller's investigation.

Update (April 19):  Heather Digby Parton says the next move is up to Congress.

Mueller and his team didn't write all that material out just so that [Dear Leader] could claim full exoneration and carry on as if nothing happened. He wrote it with the understanding that while he could not indict [Fuckface], Congress could and would fulfill its constitutional duties.

This dry recitation of the facts in Mueller's report , as dramatic as they are, was never meant to be the last word. It is an impeachment referral, and Democrats must take it up and do what the Constitution requires. If it fails, so be it. But at least the people will know that some leaders are willing to stand up in public and do the right thing.

Update (April 21):  Cody Fenwick points to statements in the report that suggest obstruction could have actually been successful.

[W]hile Mueller didn’t demonstrate that a conspiracy occurred, he leaves open the possibility that it did. And a cover-up may be the reason he didn’t find it.

Fenwick also argues that impeachment proceedings are necessary.

[D]espite my lack of enthusiasm for impeachment, I’m more worried about what failing to impeach [von Clownstick] means. It would likely be seen as a stamp of approval on [his] conduct and behavior. Any future president, guilty of similar offenses, will be able to point to the record of what [Fuckface] has done as an established precedent. They may even push the bounds a little further, eroding the checks on the presidency.

And, Nancy LeTourneau notes two facts from the report that Dear Leader hasn't acknowledged.

(1) Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, and (2) they did so in support of [Fuckface von Clownstick].

Update (April 22):  Jared Yates Sexton gives a nice summary:

[T]he report is a damning incrimination of a president willing to sell out his country, turn his back on duty and loyalty, and win at all costs, even if that meant cooperating with a foreign power in undermining free and fair elections. What’s more, it tells the tale of a man so unfit for office that those around him are constantly betraying his orders in an attempt to avoid their own prosecution.

Heather Digby Parton says Democrats need to show some resolve.

We have reached a turning point in this ongoing crisis. If someone as obvious and inept as [Fuckface] can get away with all this, imagine what a competent authoritarian demagogue could do. Allowing [Orangeman] to just ride out his term and perhaps even win another one -- which is entirely conceivable, I'm sorry to say -- could be catastrophic. If Democrats refuse to take the risk of changing this dynamic once and for all, someone much smarter and stronger than [Dear Leader] is going to come along, very soon, and take advantage of the destruction of our political culture to fundamentally change our democracy in ways we will not be able to fix. At some point there will be no way to "right the ship" anymore. It will be sunk.

If Democrats don't take a stand this time, it's very likely they won't get another chance.

Absolutely correct. Bring him to trial and make those Republican Senators vote "no" on the record. Brendan Skwire quotes Eli Stokols:

As these things come out and there's more that gets laid out there in the Mueller report and from these investigations that Democrats are going to pursue, Republicans are going to have to stand by and either fight these investigations as the president wants them to do, or they are going to have to sit there and look the other way and put their heads in the sand.

That's not great for any of them on the ballot in 2020.

Update (April 23):  As usual, Tom Tomorrow encapsulates the whole mess.

Update (April 24):  Among many reasons for impeachment, Amanda Marcotte argues that Fuckface continues to take no action on Russian election interference and seeks to obstruct other investigations.

I used to be skeptical of impeachment, fearful that it could backfire if and when the Republican-controlled Senate failed to convict [him]. But with the Mueller report out and [Dear Leader] responding only by escalating the criminally suspicious behavior he engages in, there's good reason to think that starting impeachment trials will not only be the right thing to do, but will benefit the Democrats.

Kenneth McCallion agrees action is urgent.

Democrats may think that it is politically advantageous to spend the next two years merely investigating [Fuckface] and hoping the American electorate ousts him from office in 2020. But the crisis in the presidency is real and immediate and requires immediate action. Those in Congress who preach political caution and expediency will be judged harshly by history if their hesitation and political expediency leads America into a genuine national or international crisis over the next two years with a virtual madman at the helm.

But still, Aaron Maté, in conversation with Chris Hedges, refers to "Russiagate" as a conspiracy theory in which Democrats and the media largely ignore the actual harm this administration is causing to focus almost exclusively on fictitious harm.

Was the interference significant? It's hard to say. Was it worth investigating? I think so, but perhaps it didn't need to be as big a story as it was made out to be. I still think there are reasons to pursue impeachment, but it won't solve our political problems. Lawrence Davidson:

It would seem that we are in a decisive struggle that will determine the shape of our future. Will it be reactionary or progressive in nature? Organized conservatism has evolved into a reactionary force throughout much of the West, and the hard-fought-for, progressive aspects of our world are in serious danger.

I'm not looking forward to next year's campaign. Meanwhile the climate clock is ticking.

Noam Chomsky:

The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave [von Clownstick] a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That’s a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they’re looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success. The real issues are different things. They’re things like climate change, like the Nuclear Posture Review, deregulation. These are real issues. But the Democrats aren’t going after those. They’re looking for something else—the Democratic establishment. I’m not talking about the young cohort that’s coming in, which is quite different. Just all of that has to be shifted significantly, if there’s going to be a legitimate political opposition to the right-wing drift that’s taking place. And it can happen, can definitely happen, but it’s going to take work.

Update (April 25):  Ted Rall says failure to impeach would be a tactical error likely to lead to a loss in 2020.

Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. They pimped the Mueller Report and Russian collusion as the road to [Orangeman] B Gon only to have that narrative evaporate in light of the facts. ... Asking the voters to do next year what they’re not willing to do themselves this year—get rid of [Fuckface]—is an invitation for nothing but the brutal contempt of mass indifference.

Update (April 30):  Heather Digby Parton quotes Representative Ted Lieu on how Fuckface is forcing Democrats to enforce their constitutional mandate.

If we can’t fact-gather, we’re going to have to use the other tools at our disposal and make sure our oversight responsibilities are respected. If it turns out we can’t investigate because the White House is not complying with anything that Congress requests, then I think the caucus would support an article of impeachment on obstructing Congress.

Update (May 1):  Leaked letters from Robert Mueller to William Barr indicate that Mueller was not happy with how Barr released information about the report. The letters are also evidence that Barr mislead or even lied to Congress.

Update (May 6):  At least 560 former prosecutors signed a statement.

Each of us believes that the conduct of [Fuckface von Clownstick] described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

Update (May 15):  Cody Fenwick thinks Democrats have blown the chance to use the findings of the Mueller report to hold Fuckface accountable.

[W]hile the Democrats have suggested that the report requires more investigation, [Dear Leader] and his defenders have argued that Mueller has vindicated the president. And if even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, [Manbaby's] most formidable foe, still thinks the merits of impeachment are debatable, why should Republicans have any reason to doubt the president’s claims of exoneration? After a full special counsel investigation, another investigation does seem tedious and redundant. Insisting on it really does send the message that Democrats are sore losers, rather than conveying the truth that the Mueller report painted a devastating portrait of the president, even worse than many knew, and one that should be entirely unacceptable to any decent American.

Update (May 16):  Martin Longman gives the Speaker some credit.

It could be that Pelosi is being too patient. But she is going to make sure that if she has to give the go-ahead for an impeachment inquiry that as many people as possible perceive the decision as made with extreme reluctance rather than eager partisanship. The biggest mistake she can make here is to fall prey to a form of reverse psychology. If she believes she cannot impeach because that’s exactly what [Fuckface] wants her to do, then she really will have fallen in a trap.

Update (May 17):  Cody Fenwick has six reasons to impeach the motherfucker:

1. Impeachment makes clear that [his] behavior is unacceptable.
2. Impeachment would provide a high-profile venue for airing [his] dirty laundry.
3. It would give Congress more leverage in fights with the administration.
4. Republicans would be forced to align with [his] misdeeds.
5. Democrats could show that they’re willing to fight.
6. It would lay the groundwork to remove [him] should the opportunity arise.

And Heather Digby Parton reiterates that Democrats were elected to stop him from causing further damage.

Even if Democrats never actually vote on articles of impeachment, holding the hearings, using the power of their congressional mandate and showing the president that they will turn over all those rocks whether he likes it or not is the only way to keep him from doing his worst. Bullies only back off when someone stands up to them.

Update (May 19):  Representative Justin Amash is the first Republican member of Congress to call for impeachment. But he has never been a Fuckface supporter. He reached these conclusions after reading the Mueller report.

1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. [Von Clownstick] has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Update (May 29):  Robert Mueller announced his resignation from the Department of Justice. He prefers to let his report speak for itself. But he did briefly discuss the conclusions. "Insufficient evidence" for conspiracy with Russia. But regarding obstruction of justice:

If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.

Update (May 30):  Andrew O'Hehir reflects on the consternation over what Mueller really meant yesterday (" 'the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.' That’s so interesting! I wonder whether that process has a name?"). And O'Hehir picks up on a small detail.

Michael Tomasky’s Times op-ed waxed borderline poetic on the "clash of Robert Mueller’s two Americas," one of them the land of elite prep schools and military service and old-line bipartisan collegiality that Mueller "has served with rectitude and dignity." Tomasky doesn’t even say what the other America is, and I guess he doesn’t have to: It’s being made great again!

A friend who has a long track record in Democratic politics and once worked for Bill Clinton put it more directly: Consensus-building moderates who put their trust in the existing system, he said, "have no strategy for dealing with fascism." As for me, I can see Mueller’s two Americas right there in the text of his remarks, in his literal grammar.

[What] Mueller actually said, "If we had had confidence" — an entirely correct and appropriate usage of the past perfect, an English tense hardly anyone uses in conversation and most people apparently cannot even hear.

But Amanda Marcotte says there's no misinterpretation.

[W]hile many in the mainstream press are reacting to Mueller's not-really-mysterious statement with a collective "shrug" emoji, [Fuckface] and his allies at Fox News do not seem remotely confused about how to interpret Mueller's comments. While they continue to push the Orwellian "no obstruction/no collusion" line, their more authentic — and angry — reactions make it clear that they most certainly grasp that Mueller was suggesting that [von Clownstick] is guilty of obstructing justice and was inviting Congress to do something about it.

Update (May 31):  Marcotte considers whether "loss aversion" explains Democrats' fear of impeachment--the focus on what may go wrong rather than possible gains.

Ultimately, the best argument for impeachment is this: Since no one knows how it's going to shake out, it's a waste of time and energy trying to game that out. Political calculation is useless, so Democrats might as well do the right thing. The right thing, when a president is as corrupt and shameless as [Fuckface], is to start an impeachment inquiry. What's the point of winning power, in the end, if you refuse to use it to take a stand?

Update (June 8):  Paul Rosenberg argues against Speaker Pelosi's reluctance to start impeachment proceedings. Meanwhile, audio recordings have been released of obstruction evidence presented in the Mueller report.

John Dowd’s call to Flynn’s attorney Robert Kelner [demanded a "heads up" about what Michael Flynn was telling Robert Mueller investigators that might "implicate" the president and] also appeared to hint at a pardon for the former national security adviser if he stopped cooperating with the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Update (July 3):  Paul Street considers the significance of "RussiaGate".

Update (July 14):  Matt Fuller and Arthur Delaney present evidence that Democrats really have no interest in impeachment and so really don't care about the election.

[T]here’s a distinction between educating the public, which impeachment hearings would help do anyway, and just emptily calling for more investigations as a way of running out the clock on the [von Clownstick] presidency.

Update (July 24):  Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. Amanda Marcotte boils it down.

There were only two real takeaways from Wednesday morning's hearing. One of them is that [Fuckface's] actions would be enough to charge him with multiple felonies for obstruction of justice if he were not president. Second is that there's only one way to make sure the public understands this: Congress must hold public hearings grilling the very same witnesses that Mueller and his team interviewed during their investigation.

Marcotte says the key concern was over the election interference.

The Mueller report makes it clear that [Dear Leader] knew about the Russia conspiracy, and issued public instructions to guide that conspiracy's efforts; that Manafort shared private information with a Kremlin-linked consultant who he hoped would help get him out of debt; that [von Clownstick] and his associates clearly intended to profit from their Russian connections; and that the ... campaign made multiple efforts to work with the Russian conspiracy to steal emails from Democrats and release them to the public.

Asked about this sort of "collusion" in future campaigns, Mueller replied:

I hope this is not the new normal, but I fear it is.

But in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Seymour Hersh thinks it's time to move on.

Basically, the bottom line is that you can yell at Barr all you want. Mueller did not indict. So there you are. And if I was a Democrat, you can run with that all week but you're not going to get anywhere. The bottom line is they had the investigation. [Manbaby] may have wanted to fire everybody but they had the investigation. If I were the press, I would start writing about what the Democrats need to do. And if I were the Democrats, I'd start talking about what they are going to do to make America a better place for most people.

Sure, but is it really impossible to both impeach and conduct a campaign? Pelosi certainly hasn't changed her opposition to impeachment. Democrats think they have it in the bag, because of polls showing 53 percent of Americans vowing to vote against the asshole. In 2016, 53 percent of 135 million voters did vote against the asshole.

Update (July 25):  So into the abyss we go. Amanda Marcotte:

[B]oth the Washington Post and the New York Times ran articles declaring that Mueller's inability to play to the cameras means that any hope of impeachment is probably dead.

But William Rivers Pitt says Democrats took their best shot.

If you found the hearings boring, it’s probably because you didn’t read the report like most of Congress and the country. Wednesday had to happen because, even in times of deep political and even existential crisis, vile television beats the meticulously compiled written word every day and twice on Sunday.

But maybe, just maybe, Don McGahn's testimony (after a court battle) will really get Democrats to do something.

Marcotte fumes on the media obsession with "optics" over substance.

If they were reporting on the news, the takes and the headlines would read much differently. They would say things such as, "Mueller testimony reveals extent of criminality in [Manbaby's] orbit" and "Mueller affirms that [Fuckface] could be arrested for felony crimes after leaving office." Other exciting headlines, based on what was actually said, could read, "Republicans use misinformation and conspiracy theories to try to discredit Mueller" and "[Von Clownstick's] greed, immorality led him to betray country, hearing reveals."

It turns out that democracy dies in the glow of the TV set, drowned out by the childish whining of supposedly reputable journalists declaring that they need a little more razzle-dazzle before they can be bothered to care about the fate of the nation.

Update (July 26):  House Democrats are filing a lawsuit to obtain underlying grand jury evidence from the special counsel's investigation. It's on the Friday afternoon immediately before a six-week-long recess, but it might be a compromise within the party on how proceed--and they really did need to act soon or the opportunity is lost. Joan McCarter:

Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said that, yes, "in effect" the suit and the ongoing investigation constitute an impeachment inquiry, but not a formal one.

Update (September 13):  David Swanson wants impeachment for the right reasons -- most of which have nothing to do with Russia.

Update (November 3):  BuzzFeed obtained 500 pages of summaries of FBI interviews related to the Mueller investigation through the Freedom of Information Act.

Update (June 20, 2020):  Unredacted portions of the Mueller report suggest that Fuckface lied about his knowledge of Roger Stone's connection to WikiLeaks. Lying to investigators is a criminal offence. I'm shocked. David Atkins:

[W]e only know about [this] now because of a Buzzfeed Freedom of Information Act request that forced the removal of the Attorney General Barr’s redactions of large section of the Mueller Report. It is quite clear that there was no actual national security pretext for these redactions, and that by implementing them Barr was engaged in a political coverup for [the president]. This, in addition to Barr’s previous mischaracterizations of the Mueller Report in his personal summaries as totally exonerating the president when it did nothing of the sort, amounts to obstruction of justice on the part of the Attorney General, hiding from Congress crucial information it would need in order to determine if impeachment proceedings were necessary. Now it appears that both [Dear Leader] and Barr has committed impeachable offenses on this matter.

This revelation alone would have brought any other presidential administration to its knees. But it wasn’t even the biggest story of the night.

Update (August 20, 2020):  That other story had to do with William Barr pushing the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York out his job, yet another impeachable offense. Cody Fenwick suggests Barr had a corrupt reason to do so--to slow the investigation that produced an indictment against Steve Bannon and others.

[I]t’s quite clear why Barr, an unabashed partisan, would want to slow it down. Indicting yet another of the president’s allies — and his second campaign manager — surely reflects badly on [Fuckface]. It’s especially bad because the allegations involve fleecing [Dear Leader's] supporters for venal reasons, which may hit close to home for those feeling let down by his presidency heading into the November election.

Update (September 21, 2020):  Cody Fenwick discusses Andrew Weissmann's book, "Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation".

Though he apparently still reveres Mueller and appears to avoid criticizing him directly, Weissmann derides many of the decisions the investigation made that caused it to pull its punches, including refusing to determine whether the president was guilty of a crime.

Update (August 25, 2022):  The memo William Barr used to justify not charging Fuckface with obstruction of justice has been released. Noah Bookbinder explains why Barr wanted to keep the memo secret and why the reasoning is so dangerous.

The memo points to [Dear Leader's] belief that the investigation was motivated to hurt him politically as somehow excusing his actions. It supports the chilling conclusion that any president can interfere with any investigation if they believe it could damage them politically.

Update (February 5, 2023):  The "investigation of the investigators" turns out to be a massive bust.

[The New York Times report] reveals that there was little justification for [William] Barr to install [John] Durham as a special counsel to investigate what [Fuckface] wrongly maintained was an unjustifiable investigation into his ties to Russia.

Heather Digby Parton calls it a "monstrous abuse of power" on Barr's part. And there's more.

[N]ow we learn that they had been told by Italian authorities about some very credible information that [Dear Leader] had committed serious financial crimes. Barr and Durham realized that it wasn't something they could completely ignore (as much as they probably wanted to) so Barr assigned that case to Durham instead of another prosecutor and opened a criminal investigation.

Durham quietly closed that "investigation" without much fuss.

This is stunningly unethical behavior by an Attorney General.

Update (May 19, 2023):  Parton reacts to the final report.

All Durham concluded was that the FBI should not have opened a full investigation but rather a preliminary investigation based on what it knew at the time. He says that when they got a tip from an Australian diplomat who had a conversation with a [Republican] campaign official saying the Russians were working to get [Fuckface] elected in the days right after the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers, they used the wrong process to start their investigation. That's it. The rest is all smoke and mirrors.

Update (June 22, 2023):  Did John Durham lie to Congress? 

2020 Visions

As Joe Biden accidentally announces his candidacy for president (bringing the total to 16 or 17 Democrats), Bob Hennelly argues against more of the same old politics.

Decades of depressed wages, social disinvestment, undiagnosed mental illness and a deepening housing affordability crisis are the legacy of a bipartisan neglect by a political class, that up until very recently, were entirely absorbed with their own re-election and wealth accumulation.

And only the surreal buffoonery of a [Fuckface von Clownstick] makes this professional political class look respectable. Keep in mind, without the neglect of working-class America by this bipartisan cadre of self-dealing moderates you don’t get [Dear Leader].

[T]he sorry state of the nation’s EMS workforce maybe the best example of the 911 emergency working class Americans are all grappling with. Now is not time for moderation. That’s how we got here.

And yet, Andrew O'Hehir suggests that historically Democrats have stuck to limited options.

It may be that all that can realistically be accomplished in the 2020 election is hitting the pause button, or slowing rather than stopping the political and civic decay of our republic.

Update (March 19):  Everybody "knows" the Democrats can't nominate anyone too left without risking the election. Jim Sleeper notes the media is only too happy to point out the Democrat's socialism problem while ignoring the Republican's fascism problem.

Also, are we to believe Joe Biden deserves support for being the "most progressive" candidate while Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren don't because they are too progressive?

Update (March 23):  Joe Conason notes "socialism" is still used as a pejorative even as "social democratic" policies are common around the world and even in the U.S.

Maybe we should spend less time worrying about confusing propaganda and more on the actual problems and prospects of Americans in a changing world. That would require Republicans to abandon their timeworn scare tactics, and explain how they would advance the pursuit of happiness and the common good.

Update (April 21):  Kevin Robillard and Amanda Terkel want to know: who's electable?

More than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters thought it was more important to nominate the candidate most likely to win, with only 36% placing more importance on ideology, according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll from late March.

Update (April 30):  Joseph Natoli wonders if Democrats are crazy.

While the Republican Party is unified by having given ownership to [Dear Leader], the Democratic Party is once again trying to represent four different political persuasions, namely, Liberal Third Way triage, Leftist anti-plutarchy, Diversity/Identity missionaries, and Climate Change Paul Reveres. We can expect that these four different dramatis personae on the Primary debate stage will tear into each other until they settle down and just tear into an emerging favorite of the polls. It would be crazy to stoke [Fuckface's] fire but I doubt if the Democrats can stop themselves.

Update (May 3):  Potentially good news if this trend holds up.

Update (May 5):  Supporter Norman Solomon describes the difference between Sanders and the current front-runner.

Biden vs. Bernie offers a huge contrast between a corporatist whose biggest constituencies can be found on Wall Street and in corporate media vs. a progressive populist whose biggest constituencies can be found among those being ripped off by Wall Street and discounted by corporate media.

Update (May 6):  Amanda Marcotte disputes what an "electable" candidate looks like.

[The] implication that Democrats have to choose between progressive politics and winning elections remains a sacred doctrine in mainstream media circles. There is no real evidence for this proposition.

The idea is that [moderate] candidates ... will scoop up voters, mainly in suburban areas, who often vote Republican but are gettable because they're economically conservative [yet] basically cool with issues like gay marriage and abortion rights.

The problem is that this category of voters, who would be called "libertarians" in political science circles, don't really exist in American politics. As Paul Krugman of the New York Times noted in February, these fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate. This is in contrast with the consistently liberal (45% of voters), economically liberal but socially conservative (29%), and the consistently conservative (23%).

All of which is to to say that the "centrist" model for a Democrat has it exactly backwards. If the goal is to win over swing voters in Midwestern states, the winning strategy isn't to back an economically centrist candidate like Biden, but a Democrat who appeals so strongly to these voters with progressive economic policies that they're willing to set aside the racial resentment that led them to vote for [Dear Leader].

[V]oters aren't really inspired by playing it safe or moving to the center. Instead, candidates do better by convincing voters that this election is a historic moment and they don't want to be left on the sidelines.

Update (May 17):  Kevin Robillard identifies three camps among Democrats:

Unity: Biden, along with New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and a host of centrist elected officials, are unapologetic about working with Republicans and believe they can still advance Democratic goals even while compromising with the GOP.
Revolution: Sanders promises a political revolution that begins with the American public and then goes to Washington, bringing intense pressure to bear on politicians to adopt progressive priorities.
Change The System: Warren wants to fundamentally alter the rules of Washington’s power structure, weakening the influence lobbyists and corporations have over policy outcomes.

Update (June 1):  Governor Jay Inslee earned the highest rating on the Greenpeace USA Climate Scorecard. Senator Bernie Sanders was second while Joe Biden was scarcely ahead of Fuckface von Clownstick.

Update (June 2):  Keith Spencer revisits a paper by Thomas Piketty and argues that middle-of-the-road is a losing position.

For someone who was not acquainted with Piketty's paper, the argument for a centrist Democrat might sound compelling. If the country has tilted to the right, should we elect a candidate closer to the middle than the fringe?

[But] nominating centrist Democrats who don't speak to class issues will result in a great swathe of voters simply not voting. Conversely, right-wing candidates who speak to class issues, but who do so by harnessing a false consciousness — e.g. blaming immigrants and minorities for capitalism's ills, rather than capitalists — will win back those same voters who would have voted for a more class-conscious left candidate. Piketty calls this a "bifurcated" voting situation, e.g. many voters will connect either with far-right xenophobic nationalists or left-egalitarian internationalists, but perhaps nothing in between.

Update (June 5):  Richard Wolff summarizes American economic history over the past several decades.

[This history] holds lessons for 2020. A return to the past in Democratic Party rhetoric, symbolism, and personalities (such as Biden) is a recipe to repeat political mistakes and losses since 2016. Biden will likely lose for the Democrats as the comparably backward-looking Bob Dole did for the Republicans in 1996 ... . Another lesson is that Sanders is the Democrats' best hope unless and until other plausible candidates take clear, strong positions to Sanders' left. One such position might articulate the working class's sufferings as systemically derived from a declining capitalism and thus propose system change as a solution: such as change to an economy based on worker coops instead of hierarchical capitalist firms. Such positions would provide on the left more attractive, bold and new plans than what [Dear Leader] offers on the right.

Update (June 9):  Bob Hennelly praises Senator Elizabeth Warren's economic ideas.

[T]he reality is that the specificity of her plans, like her student debt elimination proposal, along with her "let’s get this done" entreaty make her engaging. All of her programs, from her green manufacturing proposal to her free college plan are parts of an integrated economic strategy to flip the script, not by half-measures but by bold strokes on the scale of FDR.

Update (June 16):  Andrew O'Hehir thinks there's only about a half dozen serious Democratic contenders and a few others with unique messages.

But the rest of you down there in the Gillibrand-Hickenlooper vortex, a swirling mass from which no light or energy can escape? Get thee gone. Gillibrand will have to carry the Al Franken thing to her grave; I don’t claim that’s fair. Hickenlooper has found out that the "white guy pissing on socialism" lane is already clogged up with Joe-mentum. Bennet, Ryan, Swalwell, de Blasio — whatever your exercise in pointless vanity was meant to prove, your toast is blackened and getting cold. I won’t say “nice try,” because it’s not true. Enough already.

Update (June 19):  Amanda Marcotte says Dear Leader's reelection arguments amounts to "vote for me to stick it to the liberals". But, she doesn't think Joe Biden solves that problem.

This over-the-top hatred of liberals on the right is no doubt why so many Democrats currently think that Biden, the centrist former vice president with a fondness for good-ol'-boy politics, is more "electable," on the grounds that he might not provoke the kind of loathing [von Clownstick] supporters have for more progressive (or more female) Democrats.

But what those Democrats fail to understand is that Biden is highly vulnerable to an even more toxic kind of right-wing trolling, the kind that both stokes right-wing hatred and demoralizes and demobilizes the left: Accusations of hypocrisy.

Update (June 20):  In an interview with David Dayen, Senator Elizabeth Warren argues government should "fight on the side of the people".

[T]he question is who government works for. ... [F]or 40 years now, the mantra in Washington and in most of the Republican Party and a big chunk of the Democratic Party has all centered around Ronald Reagan’s "What are the nine worst words in the English language? I’m from the government and I’m here to help." Ha ha ha. The idea that it’s government that poses the threat to all of the rest of America and must be held at arm’s length, and missing the fact that it’s government that balances out the power of these giant corporations. And without an effective government to enforce antitrust laws—and other laws—we’re all in trouble.

And Andrew O'Hehir suggests the primary will be over quickly, possibly to Joe Biden's benefit.

Update (June 26):  Rob Hager argues Senator Elizabeth Warren is the progressive choice for president.

Update (July 28):  Paul Rosenberg is looking for some offense. He quotes Representative Ilhan Omar responding to being told to go back to where she came from and fix their problems.

[T]he beauty of this country is not that our democracy is perfect. It’s that embedded in our Constitution and democratic institutions are the tools to make it better.

Rosenberg berates the Democratic establishment for being too passive.

Democrats live in fear ... Fear that Republicans will say mean things about them — and won’t vote for them.

Indeed, actual Republicans almost certainly won't vote for them. But there are plenty of other folks out there. Not just independents and "swing voters," but large numbers of non-voters and only-sometimes voters, as well as the Democratic base. Non-voters overwhelmingly support Democrats, as shown in this graphic from last year's "Future of the Party" report from Data for Progress and Justice Democrats:

Furthermore, a broad range of progressive policies have majority support — sometimes supermajority support:

Rosenberg argues that "an offensive stance means setting the agenda — defining both the terms and the subject of debate".

For a cowardly, racist bully like [Manbaby] to pick on a group of four progressive congresswomen of color, and try to make them the scary face of the Democratic Party — that’s a no-brainer. But for the Democratic Party to say, "Yeah, that’s our face. What are you really afraid of, anyway?" That would take understanding, and great courage. It’s the key to winning — not just in 2020, but in terms of America's future.

Update (July 31):  Senator Elizabeth Warren stands up for progressive ideas:

I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.

Update (August 3):  Keith Spencer argues that genuine left politics must be built on class-based analysis in order to solve social problems. And so he criticizes two tendencies found among certain candidates.

[M]uch of American liberalism is trapped politically between two false gods: the utopian technologists of Silicon Valley and the “power of love” crowd exemplified by [Marianne] Williamson. Both are unworkable paths to social change.

Update (August 14):  Sophia McClennen uses polling to suggest centrist Democrats don't really exist anymore and that the more accurate term is corporatist Democrat.

[I]f the largest voting bloc [millennials and Gen Z adults who will comprise 37 percent of the electorate] values meaningful policies over "electability," then doesn’t that actually redefine the very idea of who is electable? Based on the numbers, the most "electable" Democratic candidate will be one whose policies appeal to young voters.

Update (August 25):  Paul Rosenberg argues "hard left" is a term the Right uses to disparage popular policy proposals (listed July 28). He points to research by Rachel Bitecofer that shows the value of motivating base voters and Democratic-leaning independents rather than trying to "win back" certain Republicans.

Update (August 31):  Paul Rosenberg makes a long, detailed case against a "return to normalcy".

A would-be President Biden will not get much more cooperation from the GOP than Obama did, but he will continue to play nice, babbling on about his "good Republican friends" only to have them tar him with everything that goes wrong as a result. All this will make massive midterm losses in 2022 even more likely (à la 1994 and 2010, as I noted here), and will position the GOP to run a more professional and disciplined [fascist] to defeat him in 2024.

None of that is certain, of course. The future never is. But what is certain is that Biden doesn’t give a moment’s thought to any of these grave concerns. He can’t. If he did, he’d have to engage in a much broader discussion of political realities that his entire candidacy is premised on avoiding — not least because his whole political history of defensive political posturing helped to bring about this disastrous state of affairs in the first place.

As just one part of the argument, Rosenberg cites Brad DeLong and Ed Kilgore and their acknowledgement of the failure of the "New Democrats" (neoliberalism).

The descriptive framework Kilgore uses differs slightly from DeLong’s, but the bottom line is the same: a theoretically plausible political economy project failed to find coalition partners, failed to build public support, failed to inspire its base, was met with implacable bad-faith opposition, and thus failed to deliver what it promised.

Put simply: Both men were wrong about the world. As DeLong said, "The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years." But that’s not a lesson that Biden has learned. In fact, Biden has been significantly more mistaken than most.

Update (September 4):  Amanda Marcotte points to the former Vice President's growing list of misstatements as feeding into a "both sides do it" narrative.

[V]oters could be persuaded to back [Fuckface], however reluctantly, if they get it into their heads that the Democrat is just as bad. And Biden's constant truth-fudging will create that opportunity for [Dear Leader]. This worked wonders on Hillary Clinton, who was subjected to oversized media coverage of a relatively minor email scandal, which convinced voters that both candidates were hopelessly corrupt and so they might as well let [the con man] win.

Electability is the quality that matters most to Democratic primary voters, and that's understandable. More than anything else, they want to get [that asshole] out of office next year. But the reality is that Biden, who is betting everything on the premise of his electability, has the most potential pitfalls of any of the competitive candidates in the primary race. Tuned-in voters are starting to see that, and are drifting away from him. The only question is whether enough voters will see the light before it's too late, and Biden has drifted into the nomination — and a possible electoral disaster.

Update (September 22):  Andrew O'Hehir isn't sure Democrats can escape "the ghosts of the past".

[T]he relationship between our two major parties has become asymmetrical: Democrats cling to norms and standards of a bygone era, Biden-style, and also, by their nature, are driven by principles of dialogue, reasoned discourse and compromise. LOL! Republicans are totally over that shit, and have gone full-on ruthless culture war: They know they can’t win a fair fight on issues and policies, but when it comes to semiotic battle rooted in racism, nationalism and cultural division, they consistently hold the upper hand.

O'Hehir fears "passivity and politeness" will prove to be a doomed strategy.

I get it: Democrats understand either consciously or instinctively that the odds are rigged against them, and the pragmatic response is to lower your expectations into the basement and pursue a short-term victory at almost any cost. So let’s at least get this terrifying idiot out of the White House and replace him with a vaguely normal adult; all that stuff about the dying planet and economic inequality and Medicare for All (not to mention trying to build or restore a functional democracy) will just have to wait.

Even with a presidential victory, top-down "revolution" or reform is not likely to withstand counterattacks.

This is a long-term institutional crisis that no presidential candidate and no articles of impeachment can address, especially not within a degraded pseudo-democratic system in which most voters literally do not count, thanks to extensive gerrymandering and the Electoral College. Redeeming or reforming the Democratic Party is an urgent and necessary task, one that many activists both inside and outside the party are energetically pursuing. It cannot be accomplished overnight, even though time is running out for American democracy, and there is no obvious way around that contradiction. Right now, the grim fact is that the Democratic Party has been perfectly constructed to lose, and no one should act surprised if it keeps on doing so.

Update (October 20):  Paul Rosenberg reflecting on how Democrats need to reframe the political discussion, quotes Ian Haney López:

Stoking racial division has been and remains the most powerful weapon wielded by economic titans and their pocket political party for decades.

If Democrats don't name and defeat this tactic by purposefully building cross-racial solidarity, we will continue to lose on every important issue. We may win some elections, but we won't win enough political power to enact the bold policies needed to ensure our families a meaningful opportunity to thrive, whether we are white, black or brown.

Update (November 11):  A hypothetical Sanders vs incumbent match-up got me thinking: 1) Do "centrist" Democrats think Sanders or Warren would lose any states Clinton won? 2) If no, then the election comes down to six states Obama won twice, but Clinton lost--Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. 3) Could Sanders or Warren have more popular policies than Clinton in those states? 4) If yes, then, almost any three state combination won by the Democrats (excluding the one combination of IA, WI, MI) wins the election. Or, out of 64 total paths for those six states (zero to six wins), 46 or about 72 percent are wins for the Democrats.

Update (November 17):  Paul Rosenberg continues to argue that many progressive policy positions are actually more popular than "moderate" positions. While the results of an Iowa poll

suggests the contradictory desire for a moderate who promises fundamental change, Rosenberg suggests that a progressive agenda and seeking common ground could be "one and the same". He notes that support does vary depending on the issue.

There are several possible ways to read these results: Democrats should embrace the top-tier progressive policies, and abandon the rest; they should put them on hold rather than abandon them; they should embrace the top tier and look for other policy approaches toward the same ends, or new lines of argument to make; they should take different approaches to different issues. All of these are arguably reasonable conclusions ... . What’s not reasonable is a wholesale rejection of progressive policies, and an insistence on chasing after illusory bipartisan solutions that Republicans will vote for. A significant number of Democratic voters will rebel against that. It’s just that simple.

Update (November 24):  "Electability" is a favorite horse race issue. Bernie Sanders needs to make his case in the primary, but why should he be any less electable than any other Democrat? Chris Wright argues that Sanders brings forward popular positions on working class issues. He just doesn't get as much attention from the corporate press as other candidates.

[P]eople tend to like politicians with a simple, consistent, populist message, the message that "I'll fight for you." No one delivers this message more forcefully than Sanders.

Update (December 8):  Candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar don't want to send rich kids to college for free. It sounds as if they're standing up for the middle class, but as Alexis Goldstein points out:

Universal public goods, such as higher education, are widely popular. Universal programs are also far more resilient than income-capped programs, when it comes to withstanding reactionary forces like class resentment and racist backlash.

Keith Spencer notes that in the absence of universal citizen's rights, someone needs to decide who's deserving of these benefits. He cites Wendy Brown who explains that neoliberalism has been an attempt to let markets decide everything. Only Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders push back against the "redistribution of crumbs".

Warren and Sanders are directly challenging neoliberal principles, a challenge strongly embraced by their younger supporters. Sanders is the most overt about it. But both Warren and Sanders are talking about public goods, public provisioning and the value of a vastly expanded social state to challenge inequality and address the climate crisis.

Warren's constant reminder that every successful entrepreneur relies on tax-supported educated labor, technology, city services, transportation, communication and other infrastructure is a direct challenge to the neoliberal value of privatizing everything and valuing only what is marketized.

Update (January 11, 2020):  Senator Bernie Sanders appeals to younger votes due to proposals like forgiveness of student debt. Vice President Joe Biden was responsible for making it impossible to get out of student debt through bankruptcy. And who is among the groups with the greatest potential for increased voter turnout?

[W]hat is imperative is that we defeat [von Clownstick], the most dangerous president in modern history.

[T]hat means you're going to have to have a huge voter turnout. You're going to have to get working people excited, you're going to have to get young people excited.

I just don't think that [Joe Biden's] record is going to bring forth the energy that we need to defeat [Fuckface].

Update (February 3, 2020):  Peter Cohen is trying to stay positive.

What we really need in this country – if there is still any chance left of saving it – are three things: (1) the birth of a broad popular movement for structural change; (2) the development of a serious program for Election Reform to take our democracy back from the banks and corporations that both major parties currently serve; and (3) a mass popular rejection of Corporate Media with its management of the political debate and manufacturing of consent. The Sanders campaign is the best vehicle we have for achieving these things.

Update (March 16, 2020):  Amanda Marcotte suggests Bernie Sanders can point to genuine accomplishment.

Sanders scored a remarkable success simply by staying in the race. Biden committed to a version of the Green New Deal (though not one as bold as Sanders' plan), noting that his own state of Delaware "is three feet above sea level". Biden continued to criticize Medicare for All, but committed to a solution for universal health care that involves a public option. Biden even committed to having a female running mate, the kind of headline-grabbing promise that he can't back away from — and he likely wouldn't have made if Sanders had dropped out.

Perhaps the biggest coup for progressives, however, came earlier in the day, when Biden's campaign announced that he now supports making public colleges and universities tuition-free for students whose families make less than $125,000 a year. Perhaps more interestingly, Biden also announced that he supports Sen. Elizabeth Warren's plan to undo a 2005 bankruptcy bill that allowed the predatory banking industry to rake in huge profits while leaving ordinary Americans swimming in debt.

But in light of the national health emergency, "Sanders has done all he can in this race to pull the eventual nominee to the left" and it's now time to end his campaign.

Update (March 17, 2020):  Nathan Robinson makes a powerful case against Biden and for Sanders. But I'm afraid it's too late.

Update (March 29, 2020):  Anis Shivani considers the failures of the Sanders campaign.

Sanders' "political revolution" was never anything more than a revolution at the ballot box. It never had a street component, and was never meant to. It's true that Bernie Sanders himself has been part of grassroots action of every type since the tragic end of the 2016 campaign, passionately standing with teachers on strike or agitating for better conditions at Amazon and Disney, but direct action was never meant to be a part of the political revolution against the conspiratorial elites.

Without a cascading, intensifying and ever more strident street deployment by some of his legions of young supporters, particularly Latinos and other minorities, there was no chance that the DNC machinations could be counterbalanced. That option was never on the cards, and in fact that tells you all you need to know about the political revolution we were supposed to get behind, with the expectation that it would fell the global oligarchy that holds possession of every form of seen and unseen power. Such an event has never happened in world history, so either we were naïve to believe it could happen or we were taken for a ride.

Update (April 8, 2020):  The Democratic nomination for president this year is decided as Senator Sanders drops out of the race. Tara Golshan notes that his campaign is more relevant now than ever.

Some politicians seemed to discover the benefits of a strong social safety net and aggressive government action only as the country scrambled to deal with the coronavirus outbreak and saw the economy shut down. Sanders has been decrying the immorality of the gaps in the American safety net for a lifetime. His presidential campaign was about families in crisis before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Update (April 12, 2020):  Andrew O'Hehir thinks the choice is obvious, but all bets are off.

And so a 77-year-old lifetime politician with a long history of dubious tales and questionable conduct — a human archive of every triangular policy decision and every strategic cutback made by the Democratic Party for the last 50 years — will be tarted up and rolled out on stage in the role of Guy Who Will Take America Back From the Guy Who Made America Great Again.

Only a party that hates itself would have made that choice, and only a party that hates itself would be so morbidly obsessed with the unanswerable question of who other people might vote for, and so unwilling to declare what it wants.

But now that Biden is clearly established as the Democratic standard-bearer, polls show him and [Orangeman] effectively even, with an agonizing seven months of uncertainty ahead, made doubly or trebly uncertain by a public health crisis and the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. By all normal political logic, those factors should spell doom for the incumbent president.

And then there's the even bigger and more troubling question of whether a Biden victory in November — likely in some version of a 4 a.m. Electoral College nail-biter — will do anything to address the deeper structural conditions that made [Fuckface von Clownstick] possible in the first place, or to reverse the immense damage of [this] presidency.

[T]his election will be a choice between the party that hates itself and the party that hates reality. That doesn't strike me as an especially difficult decision, but in the context of 2020 America, it's pretty much a coin toss.

Update (May 20, 2020):  Asad Haider notes that the "Old Left" (who were the New Left in the 1960s) is telling the "New Left" of the 21st century to get in line behind Biden. Haider argues this amounts to giving up on the 100 million non-voters in the United States.

To reprimand young people for failing to muster enthusiasm for voting for the lesser evil ultimately amounts to a refusal to recognize the necessity for a greater idea, for a mobilization for structural transformation. In our age of catastrophe, "lesser-evil-ism" is the most unethical position.

There are signs of hope and inspiration in our present moment: A new generation is mobilizing around an emancipatory idea and attempting to find a way out of the interval. They are uncertain, experimenting, still finding a new way in a forbidding world. But they have that spark, that intuition, that something more is possible, that we have a responsibility to push beyond the boundaries of the weak and stultifying politics of the status quo. This is what real politics is. As the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba has eloquently put it, "Politics is a creative invention."

"The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so," he writes. "People may live differently than they live." The "political attitude" is summed up in the simple yet impatient statement: "Let us do something about the situation!"

Update (June 20, 2020):  Bruce Levine considers "the lesser of two evils".

While the greater of two evils is a risk, so too is a lifetime of fear-based decision making. If we repeatedly deceive ourselves that we are compromising when we are in fact obliterating our integrity, there are consequences. We can become so broken that we are incapable of creating popular movements. We can become so broken that when those Brownshirts start marching, we will lack the strength to kick the shit out of them.

Update (August 23, 2020):  Andrew O'Hehir is "inclined to believe that [the departure of Agent Orange] will actually happen in January, with a less-than-apocalyptic level of histrionics". And yet

America's real problems will remain unsolved, because they created him more than the other way around.

O'Hehir has been saying all along that a "pause" in our decay may be the best we can hope for. He quotes William Goldman:

Nobody knows anything.

But we do know the popular vote doesn't necessarily matter. And despite twinges of regret among a few supporters, O'Hehir knows there is no new argument to be made against Fuckface. He recalls a point made by Masha Gessen.

The so-called institutions of democracy, which the political and media elite have constantly assured us would eventually defeat [Dear Leader], are powerless against those who do not believe in either institutions or democracy. Similarly, a presidential campaign fought on the supposedly clarifying and anti-ideological terrain of "character" and "decency" will have no effect on people who have concluded that character is bullshit and who do not want decency.