Tag: vote
The 'America First' Nominee Who Loves America's Enemies

The 'America First' Nominee Who Loves America's Enemies

Glance through any post-election voter interview and you will inevitably find someone who mentions "America first" when explaining his or her vote. They understand the term in varying ways, but the throughline is the belief that Trump is a strong leader who will steadfastly pursue America's national interests.

Sorry, but that is deluded. Even by the strongman standard, Trump is not securing America. His nominees are not just unqualified; they are anti-qualified. If he were attempting to sabotage America's interests, it's hard to see how he would do things differently.

Someone who cared about America's security would never dream of nominating a weekend TV host with no relevant experience in running large organizations to serve as secretary of defense, far less someone who has an alcohol problem, white nationalist sympathies and a history of sexual misconduct. Many Republican senators are minimizing the credible accusations against Peter Hegseth, so perhaps a primer is in order about why character matters.

It matters for all officials if you care about honest, responsible government (an antique taste perhaps). For those in sensitive national security posts though, good character is more than desirable; it's essential. If a defense secretary is drunk during a crisis, lives can be lost. And if he has a history of sexual assault, it's possible, even likely, that there may be more unreported episodes out there that could be exploited by an enemy to blackmail him.

The choice of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence is even less explicable. Her appalling judgment comes into sharp focus this week with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Before she was red-pilled, Gabbard's outstanding trait was warmth toward dictators. In 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad not once but twice. Like so many political pilgrims, Gabbard saw what she wanted to see, not the reality staring her in the face. In 2017, she had every reason to know that Assad had not only used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, but had welcomed Russian assistance in his civil war, and that Iranian-allied troops and Russian fighters had conducted operations against American interests in the region.

No one knows what Assad and Gabbard discussed in their two hours together, but soon after she emerged, Gabbard was expressing skepticism that Assad had really used poison gas, and by the time of her 2020 presidential run, she was citing full-on conspiracy sites that claimed the chemical attacks were false flag operations designed to bring the United States into the war.

Her credulousness — if that's what it is — looks particularly obscene this week, as stories are coming out about the grotesque human rights abuses committed by Assad in Sednaya prison and at other places around Syria. Within hours of Assad's departure, people swarmed the prisons in hopes of finding loved ones alive. At Sednaya, they forced open the doors of the prison morgue and found bodies in conditions reminiscent of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide. The New York Times reported some of the grisly details:

"One woman shrieked at what she found. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn, the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes."

Some of the women prisoners were found with toddlers in their cells, doubtless the result of prison guards raping them. Rape and torture were routine in the prison Amnesty International labeled a "human slaughterhouse." Human rights groups vary in their estimates of the number of Syrians murdered by their designer-clothes-clad, Bentley-driving dictator, but the range is between 13,000 and 30,000 dead at Sednaya alone since the uprising against Assad began in 2011. The total of all Syrians killed since 2011 in the civil war is estimated to be 620,000, with 12 million refugees.

Gabbard demonstrated similar credulousness about Russia and Putin, mouthing so many Kremlin talking points that Russian TV hosts referred to her as "Russia's girlfriend." She repeated the propaganda that the United States and NATO were responsible for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, tweeting in 2022 that "This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns." She has denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt, and repeated the baseless smear (originated in the Kremlin) that the United States was operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

There is something wrong with Gabbard. The pull of conspiracism — particularly anti-American conspiracism — seems to be her overriding mental frame. In this, she and Trump (and RFK Jr. and so many others) are united. If she were merely a member of Congress, her tropism toward murderous dictators would be disturbing, but as head of America's intelligence community, it's utterly insane. This is the furthest thing from America First.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Mike Johnson

Speaker Johnson Fears GOP Majority Will Drop To A Single Vote

Democrats suffered three major disappointments in the 2024 election: (1) Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly lost to President-elect Donald Trump, (2) Republicans flipped the U.S. Senate, and (3) Republicans held their small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Republicans are calling this a "trifecta." To make matters worse, Democratic strategists and organizers are lamenting, Republicans still have a 6-3 supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court — and Trump may have a chance to move the Court even further to the right if any seats become available during his forthcoming second term.

But in an article published on November 27, ABC News reporters Benjamin Siegel and Tal Axelrod stress that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is still overseeing a small House majority. And Johnson won't have a lot of wiggle room when Trump returns to the White House in January 2025.

"President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office in January with a razor-thin GOP majority in the House of Representatives that offers Republicans barely any margin of error," Siegel and Axelrod report. "Overnight Wednesday, one of two outstanding races in California tipped toward Democrats, giving Adam Gray a roughly 182-vote lead over GOP Rep. John Duarte in the inland 13th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley. In California's 45th Congressional District, anchored in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Democrat Derek Tran has a roughly 600-vote lead over Republican Rep. Michelle Steel."

The reporters add, "In Iowa, GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is up by 800 votes in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District, though a recount is unlikely to change the result in the competitive district. Miller-Meeks first won her seat in 2020 by six votes. If these results hold, the House will start with a 220-215 GOP majority — even thinner than the current Congress' margin."

But Siegel and Axelrod point out that the number of House Republicans will "drop to 219 with former Rep. Matt Gaetz's resignation" and "could fall further to 217 depending on the timing of the resignations of Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Mike Waltz, (R-FL) who are set to join the Trump Administration as U.S. ambassador to United Nations and national security adviser, respectively."

Johnson, according to the ABC News reporters, "has pleaded with Trump to avoid taking any more House members for his administration."

During a recent Fox News appearance, the speaker said, "We have an embarrassment of riches in the House Republican Congress — lots of talented people who are very attuned to the America First agenda — and they can serve the country well in other capacities. But I've told President Trump: Enough already, give me some relief."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

GOP Legislator Torpedoes Trump's Nebraska Electoral Gambit

GOP Legislator Torpedoes Trump's Nebraska Electoral Gambit

Nebraska is among the few states in the U.S. that splits its electoral votes, and the area around Omaha — which has one electoral vote — has been leaning Democrat in recent years.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been urging Nebraska to abandon that system and switch to a winner-take-all format.

But Nebraska State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat turned Republican, is, according to the New York Times, pushing back against the proposal.

In an official statement on Monday, September 23, McDonnell said, "In recent weeks, a conversation around whether to change how we allocate our Electoral College votes has returned to the forefront. I respect the desire of some of my colleagues to have this discussion, and I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change."

McDonnell, according to the Times, said he told Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, "I will not change my long-held position and will oppose any attempted changes to our Electoral College system before the 2024 election."

The Nebraska Examiner's Aaron Sanderford notes that "McDonnell's no on winner-take-all leaves Republicans in Nebraska's officially nonpartisan legislature with no path to overcoming a promised filibuster unless a Democrat or nonpartisan senator defects."

"Part of the GOP urgency is wrapped in national polling that shows a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee," Sanderford reports. "Some political observers have argued the 2nd District could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie. Few Democrats were surprised that the fate of winner-take-all largely swung on McDonnell, a former Omaha fire union president who switched to the GOP this spring after facing political pushback from Democrats for backing abortion restrictions."

Sanderford adds, "Several said the abortion debate should have shown Republicans that McDonnell is largely immovable once he has made a controversial position clear. McDonnell said when he switched parties that he would not support winner-take-all. Others said he did what helped him most politically.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

'You Won't Need To Vote': Trump's Explanation Somehow Makes It Worse

'You Won't Need To Vote': Trump's Explanation Somehow Makes It Worse

Last Friday night, Donald Trump appeared at the Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” to tell a crowd of conservative Christians that this was the last time they’d have to bother with voting.

"You won’t have to do it anymore,” said Trump. “Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Since Trump made this statement, right-wing pundits and Republican politicians have pulled out their Trump translators and tried to find a way to pass Trump’s words off as something other than a confession that he intends to do away with democracy. That includes telling everyone that there’s nothing to see here because Trump’s statement was “clearly a joke” according to Sen. Tom Cotton.

Then on Monday night, Trump got the chance to sit down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and explain what he meant … and he made it so much worse.

In this interview, Trump made a lot of excuses. Once again he refused to debate Kamala Harris even though his previous excuse that Barack Obama had not yet endorsed her was no longer applicable. He once again demonstrated that he had no better line of attack on Harris than to complain about what he called her “crazy person” laugh.

Trump also tried to brush off JD Vance’s creepy focus on right-wing natalism in a way that doesn’t make it one bit less creepy.

Before giving Trump an opportunity to extract himself from the autocracy hole he dug at the “Believers Summit,” Ingraham primed Trump by saying that Democrats were attacking him for “ridiculous reasons.” Ridiculous reasons like repeating exactly what he said.

“They’re saying that you said to a crowd of Christians that they won’t have to vote in the future,” Ingraham said.

Trump first responded by claiming that Christians, and particularly Catholics were “persecuted” by the administration of Catholic Christian Joe Biden. Then he rambled into how any Jewish person voting for Harris—or “whoever is gonna run”—should “have their head examined.”

Finally, he got down to explaining his statement about Christians not voting.

“That statement is very simple,” Trump said. “I said vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group.”

“This time vote. I’ll straighten out the country. You won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote. You can go back to not voting,” he added.

This does not make things better.

Ingraham was clearly frustrated by how she handed Trump a ladder and he only used it to dig the hole deeper. So she skipped right past allowing Trump to tell her what he meant and tried to get him to just repeat after her.

“You meant you won’t have to vote for you because you have four years in office,” Ingraham said. “Is that what you meant?”

Trump refused to pick up the lifeline and started talking about gun owners. So Ingraham broke out a full-sized life raft and paddled hard to rescue Trump from his babble.

“Just to be clear–” she began. But by this point, Ingraham was clearly struggling to find a way to get Trump back to safety. “It’s being interpreted, you’ll be surprised to hear, by the left as ‘well, they’re never going to have another election.’”

Ingraham put on her best mocking-the-left tone so that Trump would understand this is supposed to be a bad thing. But as she tried to bring it home, she was obviously concerned that Trump still may not understand what he was supposed to say. And she couldn’t think of how to say it any more clearly.

“He’s saying … he’s saying there’s a … he’s …” she tried before giving up. “So. So can you even just respond to that?”

“I said Christians,” Trump began. Then he gathered himself for another go. “I started off by saying ‘Just so you understand, you never vote.’ Christians do not vote well. They vote in very small percentages. Why, I don’t know. Maybe they’re disappointed in things that are happening, but for a long time—I’m saying, ‘You don’t vote. Go out. You must vote. November 5 is going to be the most important election in the history of our country. Whether you vote early or not …’”

At this point, Trump wandered into talking about restrictions on voting like voter ID and the need for paper ballots. He finally came back around to the neighborhood of the original question.

“I said to the Christians in the room, thousands of them, I said typically Christians don’t vote. Why it is, I don’t know. They’re rebellious. Something’s going on. Don’t worry about the future, vote, you have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. Because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore. Because frankly, we will have such love if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s okay,” Trump said.

Love. It was love all along. Love and an end to pesky voting.

Then Trump put a cherry on top of all this by finishing with, “And I think everyone understood it.”

Despite what Republicans tried to claim, Trump clearly wasn’t making a joke. And despite Ingraham’s best efforts, he could not be dragged into saying something other than embracing what sure sounds like the death knell of democracy. Also, Trump’s claim that Christians vote in “very small percentages” is simply not true.

None of this will stop the Trump whisperers from suggesting alternative interpretations. And honestly, one set of tea leaves makes sense: Trump could be telling voters not to bother voting again in four years because he won’t be on the ballot.

Republicans don’t want to provide that interpretation, because it implies that Trump is concerned about no one other than himself and doesn’t care if the party ever wins a race again once he’s not at the top of the ticket. In fact, Trump would probably find it hugely pleasing to see that the party he had shaped into a worshipful mob could not survive without him.

Selfishness uber alles is not exactly the kind of motto that wins elections.

But even that interpretation beats the obvious conclusion: Trump is telling people not to worry about voting in four years because if he gets back in the White House, voting will never again be an issue.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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