Today's Tweet

I wonder if Mr Dobbs has ever heard of this Trump guy.

Made a slight change pic.twitter.com/pFzflvkNby

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) January 4, 2020

Who They Are

WaPo - Stuart Stevens:

Here’s a question: Does anybody have any idea what the Republican Party stands for in 2020?

One way to find out: As you are out and about marking the new year, it is likely you will come across a Republican to whom you can pose the question, preferably after a drink or two, as that tends to work as truth serum: “Look, I was just wondering: What’s the Republican Party all about these days? What does it, well, stand for?”

I’m betting the answer is going to involve a noun, a verb and either “socialism” or “Democrats.” Republicans now partly define their party simply as an alternative to that other party, as in, “I’m a Republican because I’m not a Democrat.”

In a long-forgotten era — say, four years ago — such a question would have elicited a very different answer. Though there was disagreement over specific issues, most Republicans would have said the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today it’s not that the Republican Party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.

Republicans are now officially the character doesn’t count party, the personal responsibility just proves you have failed to blame the other guy party, the deficit doesn’t matter party, the Russia is our ally party, and the I’m-right-and-you-are-human-scum party. Yes, it’s President Trump’s party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted.

A party without a governing theory, a higher purpose or a clear moral direction is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate that exists only to advance itself. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.

This is a sad fall. In Ronald Reagan’s America, being born an American was to win life’s lottery; in Donald Trump’s America, it makes you a victim, a patsy, a chump.

Trump didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will. He did something far easier: He looked at the party, saw its fault lines and then offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger. He bet that Republican voters didn’t really care about free trade or mutual security, or about the environment or Europe, much less deficits. He rebranded kindness and compassion as “PC” and elevated division and bigotry as the admirable goals of just being politically incorrect. Trump didn’t make Americans more racist; he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. In short, he let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.

This paranoid element in the party has existed for decades, since the Joe McCarthy era, when some Republicans who saw dark forces threatening the country argued that only radical action by “true” Americans — white, Christian, conservative — could safeguard the nation. Barry Goldwater revived the theme in 1964, and George Wallace won five states with it as a third-party candidate in 1968. I worked in every Republican presidential campaign from 1996 through 2012 and assumed that those guys had long been vanquished and that optimism and inclusion had prevailed. I was wrong.

This impeachment moment and all that has led to it should signal a day of reckoning. A party that has as its sole purpose the protection and promotion of its leader, whatever he thinks, is not on a sustainable path. Can anyone force a change? I’m not optimistic. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote in 2016, while Mitt Romney lost with 47.2 percent in 2012; no wonder Republicans have convinced themselves that the path to victory and power lies with angry division. Having ignored the warning signs for years myself, I know the seductive lure of believing what you prefer while ignoring the obvious truth.

Which is this: We are a long way — more than a half-century — from 1968, much less 1952. The United States is now a diverse, chaotic collection of 330 million people, a country of immigrants and multiculturalism that is growing less white every day. It is not some gauzy Shangri-La of suburban bliss that never existed.

I’d like to say that I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to the challenge of this moment. But there have been too many lies for too long.

Trump has not remade the GOP in his own image.

He is the near-perfect reflection of what that party has become.

Hear What They Say

...but be sure to watch what they do.

Business Insider:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Friday morning, just hours after the US military killed the top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, that "the world is a much safer place today." Some allies and partners suggested otherwise, however, and Pompeo's own government agency advised Americans to flee Iraq.

"The world is a much safer place today," he said. "And I can assure you that Americans in the region are much safer today after the demise of Qassem Soleimani."

His comments came as the State Department urged American citizens in Iraq to leave immediately.

"Due to heightened tensions in Iraq and the region," the US Embassy in Baghdad said in a security alert Friday, "the US Embassy urges American citizens to heed the January 2020 Travel Advisory and depart Iraq immediately."

"US citizens should depart via airline while possible, and failing that, to other countries via land," the embassy instructed.

The Emoluments

The CREW scorecard

Today's Tweet

Gonna be OK.

live video of Jared handling Middle East peace pic.twitter.com/6MfuarWdPi

— shauna (@goldengateblond) January 3, 2020

I get the feeling 45* has been relatively silent on this because he's scrambling for a way to tell his boss he had to do it - or "the generals made me do it" - or whatever boot-licking ass-kissing bullshit he thinks Vlad might believe.

Shooting For Jesus

WaPo Editorial:

Lives were saved when a member of the volunteer security team at a Texas church fatally shot a gunman who had opened fire on the congregation during a Sunday morning church service. Thanks and praise for his skilled actions are due Jack Wilson. But what must not be forgotten or forgiven is that two innocent people were shot to death in a house of prayer by a man who — despite a troubled and violent past — had access to a gun because of this country’s lax gun laws.

“Keith is a violent, paranoid person with a long line of assault and batteries with and without firearms. He is a religious fanatic, says he’s battling a demon . . . He is not nice to anyone.” That is how one of his ex-wives described the gunman in 2012 as she sought a protective order against him. Keith Thomas Kinnunen, 43, who killed church deacon Anton Wallace, 64, and church security volunteer Richard White, 67, at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Tex., had an extensive rap sheet in numerous places across the United States. Included in his troubled history was the 2012 determination by an Oklahoma judge that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial on charges he attacked the owner of a doughnut shop; he was committed to a psychiatric facility. In 2016, he was arrested after being spotted acting suspiciously near an oil refinery in New Jersey while armed with a shotgun; he ended up pleading guilty to criminal trespass.

None of that prevented him from getting a firearm. Exactly how is unclear, but Texas has one of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws with no requirements for background checks when the seller is not a licensed dealer. That irrational permissiveness needs to be addressed, but gun advocates — cheered on by President Trump — instead seized on the terrible events to promote their agenda that the answer to gun violence is more guns. So much for not politicizing tragedy. And never mind the rates of suicides and homicides in Texas, or that the state has been home to some of the country’s deadliest mass shootings.

First: Three dead - including a parishioner who was a security volunteer. And that's what gun-humpers are calling a win?

Second: I guess it's OK to jump on the tragedy and talk about the politics when the ammosexuals deem the situation some kind of proof of their position that gun violence is how you stop gun violence.

Today's Tweet

With a touch of Eternal Sadness.

When the birds start singing fire engine sounds... 😧
Credit: Gregory Andrews, Newcastle. pic.twitter.com/g11BMry1HC

— Isobel Roe (@isobelroe) January 1, 2020

Today's GIF

A good reminder to start the new year.

It says, "We the people" not "We the acreage".

DIRT DON'T VOTE

Tweet Scoring

45*'s belligerent tweets:

5,889 - attacking someone or something 

2,405 - attacking Democrats specifically

2,065 - attacking investigations

2,026 - praising himself

1,710 - promoting bogus theories & beliefs

1,308 - attacking news organizations

   851 - attacking minority groups

Tune For The Day

That's How Every Empire Falls - (John Prine) cover RB Morris

A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don't see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That's how every empire falls.