monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon will head to Alabama next week to campaign for the embattled Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore, he told CNN Tuesday.

“I look forward to standing with Judge Moore and all of the Alabama deplorables in the fight to elect him to the United States Senate and send shockwaves to the political and media elites,” Bannon told CNN.

Only now are so many of you realizing that sometimes men are unfairly accused of sexual misdeeds, and reconsidering "Believe the Woman" Only now are you getting worried about allegations getting out of hand.

Picture traveling back in time a year, and telling people that by the end of November 2017, sexual harassment allegations had not really derailed the Trump presidency, but had effectively ended the careers of NBC’s Matt Lauer, PBS’s Charlie Rose, NBC’s Mark Halperin, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Vox editorial director Lockhart Steele, NPR news chief Michael Oreskes, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, and former New Republic president and publisher Hamilton Fish.

I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised.

I've repeatedly referred to him as a pig, and those comments were piggish but they were not a confession that he actually did what he was bragging about.

Has he ever done such a thing? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were so.

I would prefer just about any other Republican to be president, but he's the one in the White House. If the Dems had run someone like Jim Webb, I would have voted for him, but they ran HRC, and in 2020 them may run Warren, or even Franken and so I'll be voting Trump again.

Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, appears to be taking deliberate steps to hollow out the cabinet agency he leads for reasons that have not been fully explored. That includes, of course, an endorsement of the White House’s proposed deep budget cuts to the State Department.

Yesterday, however, Tillerson insisted there’s nothing to worry about. Foreign Policy reported:

Quote:

The U.S. secretary of state also defended the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts of about 30 percent, calling the State Department’s recent annual budgets of about $55 billion a “historic outlier,” and describing the planned cuts as “just a reality check.” He said the administration is cutting the State Department budget in part because it expects to resolve some global conflicts that presently take up department resources.

“Part of this bringing the budget numbers back down is reflective of an expectation that we’re going to have success in some of these conflict areas, of getting these conflicts resolved and moving to a different place in terms of the kind of support that we have to give them,” he said, without specifying the conflicts he expected to resolve.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that: Tillerson made a similar pitch in March. In fact, Rachel noted on the show at the time that the Secretary of State made the case that Trump could dramatically cut the State Department’s funding because “there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S. will be directly engaged in.”

This is bizarre for all kinds of reasons.

First, Tillerson hasn’t been able to identify any “conflict areas” that will suddenly be “resolved” in the very near future. Second, if the goal of the State Department is to diplomatically prevent future crises, slashing the department’s budget is the opposite of what the Trump administration should be doing.

Third, if Tillerson’s pitch were true, and ongoing international crises were poised to effectively disappear, the White House could take steps to reduce defense spending, too. Instead, Trump World is doing the opposite, demanding vastly larger military budgets.

But even if one were inclined to put all of this aside, Tillerson’s argument is burdened by bad timing. Around the time he shared his vision of resolved global conflicts, North Korea successfully launched a highly dangerous ballistic missile.

The secretary’s bosses at the White House, meanwhile, also appear determined to escalate tensions with Iran.

All of which leaves us with a straightforward question: what in the world is Rex Tillerson talking about?

To date, Trump has made over 1,600 false or misleading claims as president. Routinely, the lies are demonstrably false, often laughably so. But this actually serves his ends. It is impossible to disentangle this from his constant effort to undermine the news media, seen again in today’s NBC tweet. In many cases the attacks on the media are outlandishly ridiculous, dating back to the tone-setting assertion that the media deliberately diminished his inaugural crowd sizes, even though the evidence was decisive to the contrary. Here again, the absurdity is the whole point: In both the volume and outsize defiance of his lies, Trump is asserting the power to declare the irrelevance of verifiable, contradictory facts, and with them, the legitimate institutional role of the free press, which at its best brings us within striking distance of the truth.

Press critic Jay Rosen has surmised that Trump represents something broader, “an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country,” which “takes many forms.” To wit: When conservative activist James O’Keefe got busted trying to bait The Post with a false accuser of Moore, to discredit the believable charges against him, O’Keefe skipped over questions about whether he had employed the woman, instead citing laughably meaningless video “evidence” to cast further doubt on The Post’s commitment to reporting the truth. Those who claim O’Keefe is now “on the defensive” miss the point. He isn’t trying to win an argument. The goal is to render fact- and evidence-based inquiry itself a cause for suspicion.

Trump is not responsible for O’Keefe’s antics, but they are fellow travelers. Margaret Sullivan, summing up the mindset they are both trying to achieve in their followers, quotes Hanna Arendt: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” Others with similar missions have gravitated to Trump. Brian Beutler points to former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s deep admiration for history’s most successful wielders of the power of disinformation as agitprop.

It was also unclear whether Britain would demand that the President delete them – or whether her criticism would be raised with the US government in any way.

But, the spokesman said: “Britain First seeks to divide communities through their use of hatefulnarratives which peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people

“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents - decency , tolerance and respect.”

But if the Democratic Party chooses to continue to protect its members against harassment allegations, it needs to be honest about the choice it’s not making: the choice to be an institution that actually reflects the better world it says it wants to create.

Franken’s bafflement is something else again. He hasn’t admitted to any of the behavior he’s accused of — he says he doesn’t remember groping a woman in a photo line, and that he remembers a 2006 incident “differently” from the way Leeann Tweeden wrote about it in a November article. But at the same time, he’s apologized to Tweeden and other victims for making them feel uncomfortable. It’s something of an “I’m sorry if you were offended” level of apology, but it raises the discomfiting possibility that the incidents that have come out publicly are just run-of-the-mill for Franken.

On Monday night, he told a local TV station that he doesn’t know if more women will come forward with allegations, because he wasn’t expecting any women to come forward with allegations, period. That could mean that Franken is trying to defend himself against shoes he knows are going to drop in the future — or it could mean he simply never registered occasions when his behavior overstepped boundaries or made women uncomfortable.

The second possibility shouldn’t be reassuring. To the contrary: It would be an indication that a self-declared progressive feminist — a “champion” of women, as he put it in his initial response to Tweeden’s allegations — did not see “caring about the comfort of women interacting with you in casual settings” as part of the job description.

We know, now, that none of the things those men did in public changed the fact that they scared the women around them into victimhood and then into silence.

Progressives have been intellectually aware, for years, that genuinely caring about women means allowing them to be comfortable in public and professional spaces — not feeling that they have to be on their guard against predation at all times, and not obliged to accede to coercion by powerful men. But the predation of powerful men and the presence of coercion in progressive circles, just like anywhere else, was an open secret anyway. And now the idea of the “open secret” — the sin that everyone knows about but that has no consequences for the sinner — is crumbling.

There are plenty of self-identified progressives who say the Democratic Party shouldn’t have to make that choice — that the things Moore stands accused of ought to overshadow any criticism of Franken, that the presence of Trump in the White House absolves any sins of Pelosi in defending Conyers. That’s a choice that the party can make. It can choose to define itself by its members rather than its ideals. It just shouldn’t be surprised if the force of outrage against serial predation dwindles, without an institution willing to honor and embody it.

You should send your bonafides to Dara Lind at Vox.

She doesn't seem to know what she's talking about either.

More accurately, I'd say that the right-wing is looking to weaponize women's complaints and use them to destroy as many left-wingers as possible.