Republican Hypocrisy--1990's and Now

 I may be one of the few who remember the scandal which plagues the Clinton administration in the 1990s.  No, not Monica, but Charlie Trie and John Huang.

Anyone interested can read this collection of Post articles, For those too lazy   busy to do the reading, the capsule summary is that the Democrats accepted donations from various individuals, either Chinese or Chinese-Americans, which might have violated or indeed did violate laws on permissible political donations.  The Republicans pointed at sleaze, claimed the money originated in China, were intended as bribes for favorable treatment and friendly attitudes by the government, and must be investigated by a special counsel.

If I recall, because I'm too lazy to research, the scandal eventually petered out with. Some cases ended in not guilty findings, some in plea bargains, some were more smoke than fire, some were fuzzy areas in the laws.

I'm now reading Andrew Weissmann's "Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation".  I'll comment on the book another time, but what's striking is the degree to which the Trump campaign welcomed Russian aid, specifically the hacks of the DNC and DCC.  Granted there's a difference between money and other kinds of aid, but I don't remember Republicans criticizing the campaign for doing so.  

If You've Lost Fox?

 Kevin Drum blames Fox for much of the partisanship of the last 20-30 years.  

Jack Shafer at Politico believes the former guy is being abandoned by the network.

No Fax Macine

Politico has an interview with Judge Luttig, a former circuit court judge appointed by a Republican, about his involvement in reinforcing VP Pence's position on 1/6. He was resisting an appeal from a friend to do something to help Pence, saying he had no platform from which to speak, and quotes himself as saying:

Oh my gosh, Richard, I don't even have a job, much less an official one. I have no platform from which to speak.” I'm out here in Colorado at 6 in the morning. I don't even have a fax machine.

As it turned out, he did get something out, by learning how to tweet a statement in 18 tweets (he'd just gotten a twitter account a couple weeks before), a statement which the media picked up on.

Incompetence

 Bob Somerby notes that the texts Donald Trump Jr. sent to Meadows (and others) show that Trump's associates didn't expect a takeover of the Capitol.  Elsewhere Eric Trump said in an interview that the Trump campaign was too incompetent, too inexperienced to collude with Russians, which only confirms a Dana Milbank column of months ago. 

I think that's true.  Everything I've read about the former guy and his White House operation suggests he and they really didn't know what they were doing. So my assessment of Jan 6 is that it was throwing a bunch of darts at the wall, hoping that one of them would find a bulls-eye. 

MFP and CFAP Political Effects

The bottom line of a study trying to assess whether the MFP and CFAP payments resulted in more votes for Trump in 2020:

We find the MFP and CFAP programs generated 677,512 votes for Republican candidate Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election with an estimated cost-per-vote-gained of $66,124

I say it's the bottom line, but the next sentence says the added votes didn't swing any states; rural voters were already pro-Trump. 

Landslide by Michael Wolff

 Wolff's book gets some 1-star reviews on Amazon, partly for bad writing and for finding Trump to be innocent of bad designs.

Needless to say that's not what I get from it. While there's some problems (many references to Giuliani's drinking and farting) and often the sourcing is clear, he moves the narrative along.  His conclusion about Jan 6 rings true: there was no plan because the "adults" had deserted Trump and those who were left in the White House were incapable of forming a plan, much less executing it. 

That reminds me of Dana Milbank's take from the Mueller report--while the Trump team wanted to collude with Russia, they were too incompetent to do so. 

The Former Guy and Competence

 Dana Milbank IIRC summarized the  Mueller Report as saying the former guy's campaign was too incompetent to execute collusion with the Russian government; they wanted to but couldn't.

That's funny, and sad.

I'll summarize the FBI's investigation of 1/6 by saying the former guy's team was too incompetent to put together a conspiracy.  

The Lab Leak Possibility

 For what it's worth, which is nothing, my memory is that early on the theories of the origin of the virus were the wet markets in Wuhan and a weaponized virus from the Wuhan lab, a theory according to something I read this week which was being pushed by Bannon. 

So when I read the Vanity Fair article, this passage strikes me as off:

 But on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Seems to me the ODNI was trying to suppress the Bannon--weaponized theory since they left open the lab-leak possibility.  And part of the push-back by US scientists was denying there was evidence in the virus genome of human manipulation, which would be a smoking gun for the lab leak. 

The other aspect was the determination by Trump and politicos after the virus hit the US to tie it to China--"Wuhan virus" etc. There's past precedent for using a location's name to identify a virus, but not for using it to attack the location.    So there were two triggers for Democrats to push back. The push back was perhaps as lacking in nuance as the Bannon/Trump positions.

Now I'll go back to reading the Vanity Fair article.

Why Didn't Trump Go to the Capitol?

 Sometimes what doesn't happen is more informative than what does.

Take Jan. 6.  Trump promised his people at the rally that he would walk with them down to the Capitol.

He didn't?  Why? Why lie to his devoted followers who'd come from all over the country to hear his words and support his cause?  Why take the risk they'd turn on him for lying to them?

If the gathering at the Capitol was going to "peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard" there wouldn't seem to be much reason for Trump to cop out, to be a p***y as he calls his critics.

Just maybe he suspected that it wouldn't be peaceful? Just maybe he thought there might be some danger there? Just maybe he knew there could be violence and he was fine with that?  Or just maybe he's a coward? 

End of Trump?

 I may have said I would have preferred no impeachment trial.  Instead I would have preferred a censure plus passage of a bill(s) to tighten the laws which Trump violated or found very elastic.  Hopefully we'll still going to get some tightening, if nothing else.

Maybe we can now allow Trump to fade into the dustbin of history?