Progressives (Liberals)

If this election turns out to be just between a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath, we will be in a terrible, terrible place as a country. How do we prevent that?

That’s all I am thinking about right now. My short answer is that the Democrats have to do something extraordinary — forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before. And that’s true even if Democrats nominate someone other than Bernie Sanders.

What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders — and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger — lay it out this way:

“I want people to know that if I am the Democratic nominee these will be my cabinet choices — my team of rivals. I want Amy Klobuchar as my vice president. Her decency, experience and moderation will be greatly appreciated across America and particularly in the Midwest. I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart, and if we can blend them together it will be great for the country and reassure markets. I want Joe Biden as my secretary of state. No one in our party knows the world better or has more credibility with our allies than Joe. I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary. No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren.

“I want Kamala Harris for attorney general. She has the toughness and integrity needed to clean up the corrupt mess Donald Trump has created in our Justice Department. I would like Mayor Pete as homeland security secretary; his intelligence and military background would make him a quick study in that job. I would like Tom Steyer to head a new cabinet position: secretary of national infrastructure. We’re going to rebuild America, not just build a wall on the border with Mexico. And I am asking Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark, to become secretary of housing and urban development. Who would bring more passion to the task of revitalizing our inner cities than Cory?

“I am asking Mitt Romney to be my commerce secretary. He is the best person to promote American business and technology abroad — and it is vital that the public understands that my government will be representing all Americans, including Republicans. I would like Andrew Yang to be energy secretary, overseeing our nuclear stockpile and renewable energy innovation. He’d be awesome.

“I am asking Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to serve as our U.N. ambassador. Can you imagine how our international standing would improve with youth worldwide with her representing next-gen America? And I want Senator Michael Bennet, the former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, to be my secretary of education. No one understands education reform better than he does. Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna would be an ideal secretary of labor, balancing robots and workers to create “new collar” jobs.

“Finally, I am asking William H. McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who commanded the U.S. Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014 and oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to be my defense secretary. Admiral McRaven, more than any other retired military officer, has had the courage and integrity to speak out against the way President Trump has politicized our intelligence agencies.

Only last week, McRaven wrote an essay in The Washington Post decrying Trump’s firing of Joe Maguire as acting director of national intelligence — the nation’s top intelligence officer — for doing his job when he had an aide brief a bipartisan committee of Congress on Russia’s renewed efforts to tilt our election toward Trump.

“Edmund Burke,” wrote McRaven, “the Irish statesman and philosopher, once said: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

If Bernie or Bloomberg or whoever emerges to head the Democratic ticket brings together such a team of rivals, I am confident it will defeat Trump in a landslide. But if progressives think they can win without the moderates — or the moderates without the progressives — they are crazy. And they’d be taking a huge risk with the future of the country by trying.

And I mean a huge risk. Back in May 2018, the former House speaker John Boehner declared: “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

It’s actually not napping anymore. It’s dead.

And I will tell you the day it died. It was just last week, when Trump sacked Maguire for advancing the truth and replaced him with a loyalist, an incompetent political hack, Richard Grenell. Grenell is the widely disliked U.S. ambassador to Germany, a post for which he is also unfit. Grenell is now purging the intelligence service of Trump critics. How are we going to get unvarnished, nonpolitical intelligence analysis when the message goes out that if your expert conclusions disagree with Trump’s wishes, you’re gone?

I don’t accept, but can vaguely understand, Republicans’ rallying around Trump on impeachment. But when Republicans, the self-proclaimed national security party — folks like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton — don’t lift a finger to stop Trump’s politicization of our first line of defense — the national intelligence directorate set up after 9/11 — then the Republican Party is not asleep. It’s dead and buried.

And that is why a respected, nonpartisan military intelligence professional like Bill McRaven felt compelled to warn what happens when good people are silent in the face of evil. Our retired generals don’t go public like that very often. But he was practically screaming, “This is a four-alarm fire, a category 5 hurricane.” And the G.O.P. response? Silence.

Veteran political analyst E.J. Dionne, in his valuable new book, “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country,” got this exactly right: We have no responsible Republican Party anymore. It is a deformed Trump personality cult. If the country is going to be governed responsibly, that leadership can come only from Democrats and disaffected Republicans courageous enough to stand up to Trump. It is crucial, therefore, argues Dionne, that moderate and progressive Democrats find a way to build a governing coalition together.

Neither can defeat the other. Neither can win without the other. Neither can govern without the other.

If they don’t join together — if the Democrats opt for a circular firing squad — you can kiss the America you grew up in goodbye.

Hell of a lot more people are dying than die of common colds. Rush is stupid. That's no surprise.

Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Trump:

• Proposed big CDC & NIH cuts
• Killed a USAID pandemic detection program
• Fired the entire pandemic chain of command
• Still hasn’t put anyone in charge of coordinating Covid-19 policy
• Seems mostly focused on the stock market

One interesting aspect to the coronavirus and Trump... he is, by admission, a germaphobe. If the virus spreads significantly in the US, he'll probably have to do his rallies in a NASA space suit.

The administration is already taking additional steps — to protect Trump. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was scheduled to accompany Trump to India, but at the last minute he was told to stay home, CNN reported, because he had a cold and “White House doctors advised against having him travel in such proximity to the president.”

February 24, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 25

The major news today, both at home and abroad, is the spread, containment, and management of coronavirus. I am going to write about its political implications. I am neither a doctor nor an epidemiologist, and cannot weigh in on anything other than what this moment looks like to a political historian.

And, while that sounds like a strange lens through which to see this new disease, the virus is actually quite important for American politics.

By now, everyone knows the key elements of the coronavirus story: a pneumonia outbreak appeared in December in Wuhan, China, and scientists traced it to a new strain of coronavirus. After the disease claimed a number of lives, China issued the largest quarantine in history, keeping about 45 million people home from work and public spaces. Epidemiologists were impressively fast off the mark, isolating the new virus and beginning to develop models for how it spreads and vaccinations for how to stop it. But it has moved quickly. As of 9:30 tonight, there have been slightly over 80,000 confirmed cases around the world and 2,699 confirmed deaths. (Let me reiterate: these are the existing numbers, but there are many reasons why they are not in any way definitive as a measure of health or of the epidemic. I’m just giving a sense of the scope of the crisis here for a political read on it.)

Last weekend, as I wrote here, the World health Organization suggested that the window for containing the coronavirus was closing, but many scientists think the window has already closed.

And yet, the U.S. seems to be unprepared. In May 2018, under then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, the administration got rid of the official in charge of overseeing a U.S. response to a pandemic and disbanded his global health security team. Today Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli went on Twitter to ask people if they, too, were having trouble accessing the coronavirus map maintained by Johns Hopkins University. “"Has the Johns Hopkins map of the coronavirus stopped working for other people, or just me?" Cuccinelli tweeted. "I just tried again, and it looks like Johns Hopkins put the information behind a membership wall of some kind. Seems like bad timing to stop helping the world with this (previously) useful resource. Here's hoping it goes back up soon."

Newspaper columnist Max Burbank shared the popular outrage: “Thanks for inspiring confidence. Shouldn't YOU GUYS have a map of this? Shouldn't the CDC? You know who they are, right? Isn't there anyone in charge of response to this? Or did someone colossally stupid eliminate that position?” American historian L. D. Burnett tweeted: “there is literally an ENTIRE FEDERAL AGENCY working for you that you could ask to provide you and all Americans with the latest information on the Coronavirus.” Health policy professor Howard Forman begged: “PLEASE can someone tell me that this is a parody account and that our Executive branch has a CLUE of what is going on? PLEASE!?” Forman then helpfully included links to useful resources for his followers.

The administration has been uncharacteristically quiet about the crisis, and seems unable to figure out how to handle it. I wrote before about its decision to return 14 infected people from the cruise ship the Diamond Princess to America in the same plane as uninfected people despite the protests of CDC officials, and now officials find themselves unable to find a place to house those people still in quarantine because of the flight. The infected travelers have brought the official count of U.S. cases to over 50, but experts think the number might be higher because we are not testing for it.

In 2014, when 2 health care workers infected with the Ebola virus were brought back to America for treatment, Trump had plenty to say. He tweeted: “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days — now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” The next day he continued: “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back…. People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!” He called for strict flight bans and quarantines and called it “morally unfair” when President Barack Obama sent troops to help contain the outbreak.

This time, though, Trump has been largely silent about the crisis except to say it is under control. On February 16, the Washington Post reported that Trump was worried by a 600 point stock market drop on January 31 after major airlines suspended flights to China. Afraid that strong action against the virus would worry people and thus hurt the economy, he focused on calming the markets by staying quiet, since he sees a strong economy as his primary strength going into the election. “The biggest current threat to the president’s reelection is this thing getting out of control and creating a health and economic impact,” according to Chris Meekins, a former Trump administration emergency-preparedness official.

Today, the administration’s silence changed. It requested $2.5 billion in emergency funding for the crisis (significantly less than the $6 billion Obama asked for to combat Ebola), and Trump, who is on a trip to India, weighed in. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Trump appears to have been pressured into acknowledging the crisis by its growing impact on the economy. The Chinese quarantine has slowed or stopped production there, emptying the pipeline of supplies flowing to American manufacturing and merchants, and this weekend’s news that the virus is spreading outside Asia sparked economic fears. The U.S. stock market dropped 1000 points today, a drop of 3.5%, its worst in two years. Airline stocks led the slide. And now, tonight, which is Tuesday morning in Japan, Tokyo stocks opened down about 1000 points on coronavirus fears. (The market was closed on Monday.)

As I say, I am 100% not going to weigh in on this as a medical issue—I am neither a doctor nor an epidemiologist—but as a political historian I will note two things. First, Trump’s instincts are right: this health crisis will definitely slow down the economy and could trigger a recession, and that would indeed cripple his reelection campaign.

Second, our public safety should matter more to a president than his reelection campaign.

Second, our public safety should matter more to a president than his reelection campaign.

Today, the administration’s silence changed. It requested $2.5 billion in emergency funding for the crisis (significantly less than the $6 billion Obama asked for to combat Ebola),

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians.

Today, the president effectively confirmed that a "purge" is underway, though he suggested the number of people ousted for disloyalty would be modest and wouldn't affect "many" officials. As part of an apparent attempt to justify the hunt for enemies in his midst, Trump pointed specifically to the intelligence community whistleblower who helped expose the White House's Ukraine scandal.

Quote:

"I think we had a whistleblower who was a fake because if you look at the whistleblower as an example, if you look at his report, and then you compare that to the transcripts, it bore no relationship," Trump said. Trump did not say specifically whether or not he expected the whistleblower, who reportedly works for the CIA, would be among those ousted from the administration.

The Republican added, "We want to have people that are good for the country, that are loyal to our country. Because that was a disgraceful situation."

This may have been more interesting than Trump intended. By the president's own telling, the White House is effectively imposing political loyalty tests on officials -- and those who fail to meet the president's standards should expect to be punished. His proof of the purge's necessity is the whistleblower who exposed Trump's illegal extortion scheme.

Except, that doesn't make sense. The whistleblower wasn't a "fake"; at issue is an official who uncovered actual wrongdoing and followed the rules. The whistleblower's formal complaint proved to be accurate and, despite Trump's claims this morning, the document stood up quite well to extensive scrutiny.

And therein lies the rub: the president and his loyalists are on the lookout for possible skeptics because an official told the truth -- and covered actual wrongdoing. It suggests the purge isn't just about identifying possible opponents of Trump's agenda; it's also about rooting out those who may stand in the way of Trump's corruption.

The president has had plenty of time to come up with a sound defense of the White House's purge policy. The one he presented today was more damaging that he seemed to realize.

Brenda Kunneman Commands a ‘Supernatural Inoculation’ to Cure the World of Coronavirus

Earlier this month, right-wing pastor Hank Kunneman proclaimed that God would protect the United States from the coronavirus outbreak because of the Trump administration’s support for Israel and opposition to abortion.