Hard-hitting 44 second video From the Republican Accountability Project, a group of Republicans for democracy. Several will no doubt work for for the Liz Cheney for President campaign in 2024. Their message couldn’t be clearerfor 2022. Or more welcome.
StrongMedicine for a deadly, highly contagious disease, American fascism.
This ad is apparently eleven months old, (it has less than 70,000 views on youTube). They are currentlyrunning it as an ad on FOX, during Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends. Good luck convincing the Trump death cult that these are not all fake clips manipulated by vicious commies, but, more power to the Republican Accountability Project.More timely now than when they created it right after the riot at the Capitol.
“You fucking did this!” is what Liz Cheney snarled at Jim Jordan, pushing him away as he tried to take her arm as they fled from MAGA rioters sacking the Capitol.
Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2012 in a wave of Tea Party candidates, an organized, well-funded “grassroots” expression of popular rage that exploded onto the national scene as a protest against Obama’s dictatorial plan to expand health care insurance coverage for struggling Americans. The Tea Party was fueled by the lie, funded by the same super-wealthy folks, that Birtherism was a true fact, that Obama was not only Black, and a secret Muslim, but not even eligible to have run for president, having been born in Africa. He was illegitimate and a liar.
Into this Tea Party Congress stepped the highly intelligent, ultra-right, former Ivy League debating champion Ted Cruz, the right wing billionaires’ obvious choice for president in 2016. He was the last man standing, before his billionaire backers the Mercers saw that Cruz couldn’t win the nomination, threw their money behind Trump, and put their network at his disposal, including ultra-right wing strategist Steve Bannon and supremely brazen attorney Kelleyanne Conway. Bannon and Conway, it should be noted, were both revealed to be members of the Council on National Policy. Bob Garfield and Anne Nelson, researcher and writer who exposed the powerful, secretive, nonprofit CNP, discuss:
GARFIELD: All right. Let’s now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump’s ascent?
NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn’t one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn’t reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem – which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton’s presidency, which was unacceptable to them.
GARFIELD: Oh, I – I’m sorry, I just – I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.
AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).
NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –
GARFIELD: We have a shopping list.
NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.
GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump’s deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing – well, so then he was elected, more or less – and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump’s 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?
NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory.
Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.”
So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person – when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID – she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation
SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.
NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They’ve added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.
As for the man Trump rebranded as Lyin’ Ted, who kicked off the January 6th MAGA “Green Bay Sweep” to keep Trump in office, after days of yelling about “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” he’d narrowly held off a challenge for his Senate seat by Beato O’Rourke in 2018, as the New York Times noted:
Republican strategists and insiders said Mr. Cruz’s narrow victory did not mean that Democrats stood to make substantial gains in Texas. Rather, they believed it had more to do with Mr. Cruz himself, one of the most divisive political figures in the state, and the anti-Trump energy of Democrats.
here’s a highlight reel on brilliant, unlikable Ted’s nuanced, evolving views of Donald, compiled by the staff of Meet the Press (I was somehow thwarted from posting the clip I filmed in its original form, but here is my free ad for the NBC show starring Chuck Todd, in an audio workaround)
The enormous crowd that surged toward the siege and overran of the Capitol police, while planned as a Hail Mary option for the “Green Bay Sweep”, hurried to the Capitol to riot without police interference. The whipped up crowd had been promised “will be wild!” and it sure enough had been, so far. The best was yet to come.
They stormed straight down to the Capitol without encountering lines of police, as marches everywhere always do, because the Stop the Steal organizers had not applied for or obtained a permit to march from the mass rally at the Ellipse down to theriot at the Capitol.
No planned march, hence minimal police presence along the unannounced parade route.
Any emotional mass march is always closely supervised by police, if authorities know about it, if the proper papers have been filed, if the law has been followed.
So the path of the quick march of incensed patriots, down to fight like hell and take the under-policed Capitol and give courage to fainthearted Republicans in Congress to “Stop the Steal”, was very different than anything you’d ever see on any parade route in DC, or in any other city or town, or in any rural or suburban area, for thatmatter.
The Trump riot was not an overwheming law enforcement failure. It was lawless by design. Had the law been followed and a permit sought for the march, enabling authorities to protect the public and prevent traffic nightmares, the riot would have been prevented. Defeating the whole purpose of inciting the violence and making the leader and MAGA nation look weak!
Yeah, so we didn’t apply for a stinkin’ permit, boo fucking hoo. Yeah, we planned to teach those f-ing traitors a lesson, so we kept our secret, illegal plan quiet…
Duh!
“What don’t you motherfuckers get about ‘by any means necessary’ or the ‘ballot or the bullet’? Next time the boys will go down there armed with their sacred Second Amendment… and we’ll see what those weak, corrupt, elite, lying, cowardly blood drinking pedophiles have to say then…”
First a well-done light-hearted highlight tour of the career of Tea Bagger Ted Cruz, the most universally hated person in theSenate (with apologies to also-ran Josh Hawley) from Trevor Noah’s Daily Show.
And a more serious discussion of Cruz’s Trump-related craveness, and his direct involvement in Peter Navarro and the war room’s “Green Bay Sweep” strategy to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory due to “unprecedented allegations of fraud” believed by FOX nation.
Cruz executed the opening play in the “sweep” on January 6 as the start of a coordinated Hail Mary, with the clock about to run out, to once more try to flip votes in swing states. The idea was to get Republican state legislatures all on the same page, attempt to decertify Biden electors, creating no winner in the Electoral College and throwing the presidency to the House to extra-constitutionally keep cuddlyTrumpie as president.
A final word on this snarling, squirming far-right billionaire-backed fuck nut nexttime I sit down to open his disgusting can of worms .
Nothing at all unusual here, but it seems that the ads promoting false claims of a stolen election that enriched Facebookin the months after Facebook removed the safeguards they’d installed through election day, (safeguards that damaged Facebook profits) stopped on January 5th. The day before the peaceful protest at the Capitol during which 140 police officers were injured, the ads, $50,000,000 worth, paid for by donations to Trump’s “legal defense fund,” suddenly stopped running. Get over it, nitpicking libtards, this is how real men dominate.
Shortly before the first anniversary of the Trump riot to stop the certification of Biden’s win, Ted Cruz, on the floor of the Senate, with cameras rolling, referred to the organized, planned, violent siegeand sacking of the Capitolas a terrorist attack.
A strong argument could be made that participating in a long physical battle with cops and leading a phalanx of criminal tresspassers into the closed to the public Capitol to stop the People’s business is, even without being part of a larger seditious conspiracy, anact of terrorism.Using violence to frighten and intimidate political opponents is the definition of terrorism.
Understandably, this term, applied to their own faithful, coming from one of their own, put MAGA nation into full rage mode. Tucker Carlson pulled no punches bullying Cruz to back down. Lyin’ Ted, as he does, immediately began reassuring FOX nation that only Blacks, Muslims, Antifa and other commie traitors can ever be rightfully called terrorists, an angry MAGA mob can only ever bepatriots, since they arealwaysrighteous in their rageandfight on the side of the angels.
Fortunately for him, the supple Cruz was able to whine and grovel his way out of the fatal accusation of having spoken truthfully, as all great statesmen and moral leaders are sometimes called upon to do.
‘A Reflection of Where Our Party Is’: Republicans Avoid Jan. 6 Observances
Subheadline:
Elected Republicans stayed away from the Capitol during a day of solemn remembrance on the anniversary of the attack carried out by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump
The party of Lincoln, yo, and of our first female president, Liz Cheney, the only elected Republican who showed up for a moment of silence on the first anniversary of Trump’s patriotic riot to overturn an election he lost, at the polls, in the Electoral College and in countless courts.
The GOP line, of course, is that power-crazed commie puppet pedophile Dems are cynically politicizing something that Dick Cheney used to call a kerfuffle.
Heaven help us all.
One of very few Republican members of Congress who made a statement that did not blame the Democrats for the deadly MAGA riot, a representative not running for reelection, issued a statement the Times called “blistering”. You be the judge.
“Any reasonable person could have seen the potential for violence that day,” he said. “Yet, our president did nothing to protect our country and stop the violence. The actions of the president on Jan. 6 were nothing short of reprehensible.”
Here’s a link to the Times story. Read it andweep:
When a hate group tells you who they are, believe them.
Wikipedia informs us that the Bannon-scented neo-Nazi, anti-globalist, international militant right-wing militia training network, The Base (considered a terrorist organization by three of our major allies) is not to be confused with Al-Qaeda, which issometimes translatedfrom Arabic as “The Base”.
And is it wrong to have a crush on the most right-wing representative in the Congress?
As we come up to the first anniversary of Trump’s gentle, peaceful, patriotic riot at the Capitol, after weeks of frustrated, manic arm-twisting of Republican election officials in several states, desperate Oval Office meetings with Q-Anon Trump dead-ender loyalists like Mike “Lock Her Up!” Flynn (who urged martial law) Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell, personal attorney Rudy, and the MyPillow CEO, after replacing leadership at the Department of Defense right after the election and instituting a new rule for deploying the National Guard, and finally, right before certification of Biden’s win, assembling a large angry mob, whipping it up and sending it to the Capitol, a ragtag team of co-conspirators, including “alt-right” Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon and several demented authoritarian-leaning legal scholars/conspiracy theorists, sitting in a nearby war room to engineer the blocking of Joe Biden’s presidency by a coordinated plan of objections to certified electors, enabled by an insane “legal” stand by Mike Pence, by a riot, by any means necessary, it’s hard to avoid thinking about it as I drink my coffee today.
You’ll recall that immediately after the riot, when order was finally restored, the rioters allowed to go in peace, and the constitutionally mandated session continued, 147 Trump loyalists in the House, and something like a dozen in the Senate, tried to carry out the mad plan they’d hatched with Trump, insisting that since, as Lyin’ Ted Cruz put it, polls showed that millions of Americans believed the boldfaced lie that the election had been stolen, so there had to be a ten day freeze so yet another investigation could take place to prove a counter-factual case they had lost in court more than 60 times since Biden’s clear victory in the election.
The Trump appointee in charge of cyber security for the election announced, as Barr had informed Trump before parachuting out of the administration just in time, that there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed any election result anywhere. Trump promptly fired his disloyal appointee, expressed great disappointment in Barr and kept doubling down on his lie that he’d been robbed.
Right after the riot a bunch of Trump’s cabinet, including the moronic Betsey DeVos and McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, immediately resigned in protest, with days left in their terms (none will comment now, per their actual loyalties and common interests).
After the riot marquee Republicans, top Trumpers, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, people who’d resisted acknowledging that Biden was the president-elect, for crucial weeks and months leading up to the final day to overturn the election results and the riot, all denounced their enraged leader for launching his reckless and desperate attack on a joint session of Congress doing their constitutional duty.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey, all I can say is count me out, enough is enough,” said Lindsey Graham, from the floor of the Senate immediately after the January 6 Stop the Steal riot. “If you’re a conservative this is the most offensive concept in the world — that a single person could disenfranchise 150,000,000 people.”
You can parse this for obvious bullshit, clearly the most offensive concept in the world to a modern, American conservative is the idea of millions of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, big city dwellers, college students, unionists, liberals, progressives, socialists, anti-racists, minimum wage earners and poor “whites” voting for politicians who will not reflexively favor the super-wealthy and corporations, thereby ousting the “conservatives” from power. Hence John Roberts casting the deciding fifth vote to overrule president George W. Bush and a united Congress (98-0 in the 2006 senate) to make partisan/”racist” voter suppression laws the new constitutional norm (unless you can successfully prove in federal court that they are ONLY racist, and intentionally so, of course, as the Founders intended).
But back to Lindsey, who like his buddy in the House Kevin “not as upset as some people” McCarthy, and even Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell, condemned Trump’s mad, violent plan to maintain power. Trump still hates McConnell, the man who made his biggest achievement, the Trump Court, possible, for belatedly congratulating Biden on his win, for not having Trumpie’s back about the Big Lie being TRUE. McCarthy headed to Mara-Largo where he was reminded of the irresistibly delicious taste of his master’s nether sphincter, he came back fighting the Steal, his story changed to 100% incoherent. Here’s the highly principled, persecuted single white male from South Carolina’s current stance on the man who tried to do the thing most hateful to conservatives:
“It’s his nomination if he wants it, the Republican base appreciated him, we don’t appreciate all the things he does sometimes, but from a policy point of view of he was the most successful president, from a conservative’s point of view, since Ronald Reagan. It is his nomination if he wants it and he will be in the White House in 2024 if he wins a disciplined campaign,” Lindsey Graham told the FOX audience last week.
Ominous though it is that Trump would be back in the White House in 2024, before his imagined inauguration on January 20, 2025, it’s Lindsey, it’s live TV, it’s FOX. So, shit yeah, the night of the 2024 election, when partisan officials installed in Republican-controlled swing states, pursuant to Trump’s Big Lie and his then illegal plan to undo the last “STEAL” by appealing to partisans to bend the then-law just a little, declare Trump the president, he will immediately take power, the day after the election, and woe unto his many enemies.
I have to say, abhorrent as I find her hard right political views, as creepy as I find her facial resemblance to one of the most evil men in American history, I find myself loving Liz Cheney every time I hear her speak. She is clear and cuts to the chase: an American president who incites a riot to try to cling to power, after months of increasingly inflammatory lies and manipulation, making extra-legal efforts in several instances clearly criminal (come on, fellas, give me a break … you just have to say I got 11,780 fucking votes…), and allows that riot to continue for over three hours as he calls at least one Senator/co-conspirator to make sure he’s still going to do his part to block Biden, must never have power again.
For his part, the former president, who, while increasingly beleaguered, is the current leader of the Republican party with their full backing (including paying all his legal fees) is planning an alternate program for January 6. He will tell his delusional version of the story: there WAS massive voter fraud, the INSURRECTION was on ELECTION DAY, his conspiracy was only launched to right a TERRIBLE wrong, that Blacks and others who hate him, Muslims, disloyal Jews, Mexican rapists, Communists, the Chinese, the Italians, Ukrainians and Venezuelans, somehow corrupted weak Republicans like the two traitors in Georgia and too many others to name, to PERPETRATE THE BIGGEST CRIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!! ARE YOU FUCKING LISTENING TO ME, YOU GODDAMNED WEAK LOSER MORONS!!! WE WERE ROBBED, I WAS ROBBED AND WHEN YOU ARE ROBBED YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORM LYNCH MOBS TO GET BACK WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM YOU AND AVENGE THE THEFT. KILL MY ENEMIES! SECOND AMENDMENT, ARTICLE TWO, I’M STILL THE PRESIDENT — KILL THEM!!!
Meantime, in response to numerous lawsuits and civil and criminal investigations the Orange One does what he’s always done, spend a vast fortune of other people’s money to use the courts to delay and avoid justice. His son and daughter have filed frivolous motions to quash subpoenas for their testimony, which will delay things for at minimum a few months. Others in his orbit site phantom privilege to defy subpoenas and wait for a 6-3 Trump Supreme Court to hopefully back them up, eventually.
For now, in the wake of a year when a billionaire psychopath was Time’s Person of the Year, instead of say, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who, judging by the video of his smart move to protect the Senate from being overrun by enraged “tourists” who’d innocently broken in, possibly saved Mitt Romney’s life, we need to focus on justice being done.
As for the crowd Goodman’s quick thinking turned aside — why not kill a RINO who voted his conscience at one of the fake, evil, witch hunt impeachments of the defrauded, persecuted Leader? Death for the one public act of integrity performed in a long political career, in my opinion, is a little harsh, even if the man is an entitled vulture capitalist by trade, one who continues to vote in a Trumpist/McConnell bloc to thwart all proposed legislation, to prevent it even being debated in the senate. Preventing debate is key for Republicans — if they get to the merits of the argument WE LOSE! filibuster now, filibuster tomorrow, filibuster forever! [1].
There are good reasons for optimism, in spite of our recent history and the wild success of Charles Koch’s reborn John Birch Society Republican Party. We now know for a fact, verified by the sworn testimony of eye witnesses, what all of us were pretty sure of right after the long riot. Trump loved the mayhem, felt the love of that angry crowd during what he described as a love fest, watched it all on live TV with a little stirring in his pants. He ignored numerous urgings, from FOX news, from at least two of his children, from elected Republicans hiding from an exuberant mob of rioters, to call off his peeps. He did so reluctantly, lovingly, after more than three hours had gone by, the National Guard standing down and standing by. During the deadly assault, Liz Cheney informs us, he called at least one Senator, to make sure the plan was in place, that the Senator would do what they’d agreed on to Stop the Steal. No conspiracy, no quid pro quo, no collusion, total exoneration, I’m not a liar YOU ARE A LIAR, the real BIG LIE is your LIE, I don’t stink, YOU STINK, I know you are but what am I?
Is it sad to love Liz Cheney? I don’t feel bad. She is behaving heroically, putting democracy, in this instance, ahead of the willful destruction of our form of government, flawed though it most certainly is. In spite of the infamous spinal flexibility of corporate Democrats, I am feeling hopeful.
The story seems to be changing now, finally. That a third of Republicans surveyed support a violent mob’s right to object to what they’ve been convinced was a crime is troubling. That the courts can still be weaponized for agonizing delay, intolerable. But that two Republicans can stand for values higher than sheer power, and that the evidence pointing toward justice, in a court of law, appears to be so overwhelming, are very encouraging signs for 2022 and beyond. Peace be upon us all.
[1]
“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” – George Wallace
Of course, a discerning reader of the NY Times article on the apparent uselessness of vaccinations (4,600% increase on the heavily vaccinated island of Puerto Rico!) will note the references to the great poverty of the island, and how health professionals have left in droves for better pay, and how the severely strained system really doesn’t have the resources to afford decent health care for most of its citizens, especially during a pandemic surge. Plus, the place is nearly bankrupt! Creditors are circling, getting ready to pounce. Anyone with ambition and the ability gets the hell off of Puerto Rico, apparently.
The headline and subhead strongly suggest that vaccines don’t really work against this new strain anyway. But the reader also learns about the culture on Puerto Rico where parties are held everywhere between Thanksgiving and January 6. January 6, I know, it has a special significance for the people of Puerto Rico that I don’t recall. The date rings a bell for another reason I can’t quite put my finger on.
So, a new strain of coronavirus that is five times more infectious than the original, if much less often deadly — and almost never deadly for the vaccinated — is sweeping Puerto Rico, as it is sweeping the world, and the NY Times headline is: vaccinated people getting covid in droves.
Might a better headline have been:
Impoverished US Island feels disproportionate impact of Omnicron, in spite of high vaccination rates, due to poor health services and a culture of partying continuously for over a month
The NY Times serves an important purpose and sometimes publishes great things. Sometimes you have to look past the headline, and the first few paragraphs, and take the time to read between the lines, right down to the last paragraph, focusing on what they often leave out. At such times you just have to say: what the fuck is your fucking agenda, fucking Grey Lady?
gratuitousblahg 