Stuff to Read About Lies

Greg Sargent points out that Rudy Giuliani has openly confessed to the whole Ukraine scandal conspiracy.

Rudolph W. Giuliani just confessed to the crime in broad daylight — or, more precisely, in broad cyber-daylight. Yet he did so defiantly, with a middle finger unfurled in our faces, without the slightest concern that it would harm him or his “client,” as he describes President Trump.

How is this possible? Because of the power of disinformation, which has the capacity to convert the most flagrantly corrupt misconduct into virtue.

We don’t talk enough about how central disinformation is to the Ukraine scandal. The extortion of Ukraine was at bottom an effort to enlist a foreign power’s help in waging disinformation warfare in the 2020 election, to Trump’s benefit. Disinformation was central to the 2016 Russian attack on our political system, which Trump eagerly embraced. Now disinformation is being employed to escape accountability for all of it.

Dahlia Lithwick, in a you-absolutely-must-read-this column, says something along the same lines.

The truth does not really have a place in this administration. Attorney General Bill Barr’s pretend investigation into his conviction that federal agencies were illegally “spying” (his words) on the Trump campaign will be a bust. Never mind, they will refocus the umbrage on some attenuated fact about the Steele dossier. The evidence that Donald Trump has, on several occasions, conditioned foreign aid on domestic political favors is now so unequivocal that Republicans have advanced three dozen alternate defenses for it, without even attempting to coordinate a theory beyond the Russian propaganda line upon which they now seem to have settled. Any attempts to pierce the logic of that illogic is pointless, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no option other than to keep seeking and speaking truth into the factual void. Doug Collins somehow kept up his refrain on Wednesday that nobody in the room could agree on the most elementary facts, even as every single fact witness (including those selected by the GOP) and every single legal expert (including one selected by the GOP) agrees substantially on all of the material facts surrounding the Ukraine transaction.

I sincerely urge you to read both columns. I’m not going to try to summarize them further; just read them.

Other stuff to read:

Eric Levitz, Jobs, Jobs Everywhere, But Most of Them Kind of Suck

Charles Pierce, This Highly Organized Right-Wing Militia Is an Ominous Portent. Also at Esquire, Jack Holmes writes The President’s Fans Think He’d ‘Operate More Effectively’ Without Congress or the Courts.

WaPo, Phone logs in impeachment report renew concern about security of Trump communications. Follow that up with comments from Scott Lemieux and Max Boot.

Next?

So Nancy Pelosi has asked committee chairs to begin drawing up articles of impeachment. It’s widely reported that the House Dems want to have the articles voted on before Christmas, although I don’t see Pelosi giving any deadlines.

It’s my understanding that this doesn’t mean the House has stopped investigating, just that the impeachment vote isn’t going to wait for more evidence that might trickle in.

Are the Dems rushing? Maybe, but Josh Marshall argues that the Dems are better off moving quickly rather than dragging things out. Among other points:

… not allowing the President’s obstruction or the court’s lethargy to dictate the pace of events has allowed Democrats to maintain the initiative pretty much throughout. That is critical. It’s kept the White House off-balance and reacting to the Democrats. Just as it does in combat or sports maintaining the initiative is usually more than half of winning an engagement. I make you react to me and while you’re still reacting I pile still more on top of you. I have little doubt that this dramatically assisted House investigators in securing the testimony they did. It also signals and demonstrates strength, which is both politically advantageous and tends to force positive outcomes.

The evidence they have already provides an overwhelming case for removing Trump from office. Of course, there’s little to no chance that will happen. But I think the trial itself could have an impact on public opinion and the 2020 elections, so how the trial procedes in the Senate is important.

Alison Durkee writes at Vanity Fair that Mitch McConnell is fully prepared to shut Democrats out of the trial.

McConnell told reporters Tuesday that he’s preparing a “back-up plan” for figuring out the Senate rules, in case he’s not able to strike a bipartisan deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on how to structure the proceedings. And that plan, apparently, is to try and cut Democrats out entirely. “The first thing Sen. Schumer and I will do is see if there’s a possibility of agreement on a procedure,” McConnell said. “That failing, I would probably come back to my own members and say: ‘OK, can 51 of us agree how we’re going to handle this?’” The Majority Leader added that he wasn’t sure if he’d prefer a bipartisan deal or working solely with Republicans, telling reporters, “it would depend on what we would agree to.” Should both the bipartisan and partisan negotiations fail to figure out the trial procedure, the task would fall to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who will be presiding over the trial. Roberts would submit motions to the Senate about the procedure, which could then be passed with 51 votes.

The Constitution is vague about how impeachments should be tried. This is Article I, Section 3, paragraph 6:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

As I wrote in an earlier post, in the two previous impeachment trials the Chief Justice ran the trial the way any judge would run any trial. The judge determines what evidence and witnesses are admissible, among other things. Judges don’t normally have to submit motions to the jury about procedure, I don’t think. If McConnell breaks with precedent and tries to limit the Chief Justice’s role and authority, what would C.J. John Roberts do? Would he go along? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s a certainty. It’s also the case that if McConnell rewrites the old rules to shut out the Democrats, there might be three Republicans who would say no. Assuming all the Dems vote no, three Republicans is all it would take to stop a rule change.

And if John Roberts is allowed genuinely to precide over the trial, he might compell evidence and witnesses we haven’t heard from yet. Or, he might just go along with whatever McConnell wants to do. Lots of ifs here.

If precedent is followed, the House will select managers to present the case to the Senate. In the past, these managers would assume the role of the prosecuting attorneys at the trial. Would McConnell shut them out, too?

Martin Longman writes,

One thing I’d like to say right now at the outset is that I’d like the House managers who will prosecute the case in the Senate to ask Chief Justice John Roberts to demand the presence of John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pompeo. These witnesses, and a few others at the State Department and Office of Management and Budget, are key to understanding the full parameters of the Ukraine scandal, and there is no reason that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who presides as the judge of a Senate impeachment trial, cannot unilaterally enforce congressional subpoenas on the spot. He can also rule on any executive privilege claims on the spot.

McConnell no doubt knows this also and may try to limit the Chief Justice’s role to just keeping order in the court. To me, this pre-trial jockeying may be the most significant part of the whole process.

Finally, where is public opinion going? The Real Clear Politics polling average has “impeach and remove” at 48 percent and “no impeachment and removal” at 46.2 percent, so it’s close. Five Thirty Eight breaks it down a bit more, showing that a whopping majority of Democrats but hardly any Republicans favor removal; independents are 50-50.  And so it goes.

The Judiciary Committee Is Not Messing Around

What to write about — the way le grand bébé orange just humiliated himself at the NATO meeting in London (see also), or the impeachment hearings? As juicy as the NATO episode was, let’s go with the hearings.

The Juiciary Committee chose to begin by clarifying what an impeachable offense is. Three law professors and constitutional scholars — Noah Feldman of Harvard, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford, and Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina — strongly argued that Trump’s actions were impeachable. “If what we are talking about is not impeachable, nothing is impeachable,” Gerhardt said.

Professor Karlan offered this analogy:

Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, “I would like you to do us a favor? I’ll meet with you, and send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.”

Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he’d betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process? I believe the evidentiary record shows wrongful acts on those scale here.

A high point was this exchange between Ranking Member Doug Collins and Professor Karlan:

Republicans called Jonathan Turley, who seems determined to take over the Alan Dershowitz niche of famous contrarian for hire. His arguement boiled down to the claim that the Democrats were rushing into impeachment with slipshod evidence, but even he conceded that “a quid pro quo to force the investigation of a political rival in exchange for military aid can be impeachable, if proven.”

So what evidence does Turley want? The evidence being kept hidden by Trump and his cronies, of course.

Calling “the abbreviated period of this investigation” both problematic and puzzling, Mr. Turley said Congress had assembled “a facially incomplete and inadequate record in order to impeach a president.” The evidence has gaps because of “unsubpoenaed witnesses with material evidence,” he argued, and it is wrong to move forward without hearing from them.

To get this evidence, Turley thinks the House must go to the courts to argue for compliance. However long that takes. Even Fox News’s Judge Napalitano said that was bogus.

Napolitano said that the House has power of impeachment which supersedes the president’s executive privilege. … “It doesn’t need to go to a court for approval, it doesn’t need to go to court to get its subpoenas enforced.” Napolitano continued. “When the president receives a subpoena—or in this case, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo receive a subpoena—and they throw it in a drawer, they don’t comply or challenge because the president told them to, that is the act of obstruction.”

CNN National Security and Legal Analyst Susan Hennessey called Turley’s claims “nonsense” and worse.

Charles Pierce pointed out that Turley was singing a different tune when the subject of impeachment was Bill Clinton.

Impeach a president* for shaking down an ally for personal political advantage?

Everybody calm down before something gets broken.

Impeach a president for lying about an affair?

If not, anarchy!

See also:

While the other witnesses laid out the case that Trump abused his power by trying to strong-arm Ukraine into caving to his personal demands while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting, Turley argued there was no evidence that Trump broke a specific federal statute and that impeaching him would set a dangerous precedent.

But 20 years ago, Turley made the opposite case. At the time, he was one of several GOP legal analysts pushing for President Bill Clinton to be impeached and removed from office.

“If you decide that certain acts do not rise to impeachable offenses, you will expand the space for executive conduct,” Turley testified in 1998 during Clinton’s impeachment hearings. He added that Clinton’s actions didn’t need to break any laws in order to be considered impeachable conduct.

This is the only hearing scheduled for the Judiciary Committee this week.

The Death Gap

There’s always a lot happening these days. Kamala Harris has dropped out of the nomination race. Phone records obtained by the House Intelligence Committee show that Devin Nunes was an active player in the Ukraine scandal.

Nunes in particular has sought to undermine the investigation by alleging that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Intelligence Committee chairman, had coordinated or otherwise communicated with an intelligence community whistleblower who initially raised concerns about Trump’s apparent efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political foes. But the phone records contained in the committee’s report show that Nunes himself had engaged in his own behind-the-scenes communications with the very people at issue in the whistleblower complaint. Nunes never revealed those communications during the weeks of committee testimony. The congressman has discussed the possibility of suing news outlets, including The Daily Beast, for reporting on his private handling of matters related to Trump’s actions in Ukraine.

So busted.

But now I want to follow up on the last post. Along with all those social disruptions that plague “red” voters, add reduced life expectancy. Paul Krugman writes,

Back in the Bush years I used to encounter people who insisted that the United States had the world’s longest life expectancy. They hadn’t looked at the data, they just assumed that America was No. 1 on everything. Even then it wasn’t true: U.S. life expectancy has been below that of other advanced countries for a long time.

The death gap has, however, widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans. This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol. And the rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy for the past few years.

What I haven’t seen emphasized is the divergence in life expectancy within the United States and its close correlation with political orientation.  …

… A 2018 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at changes in health and life expectancy in U.S. states between 1990 and 2016. The divergence among states is striking. And as I said, it’s closely correlated with political orientation.

I looked at states that voted for Donald Trump versus states that voted for Clinton in 2016, and calculated average life expectancy weighted by their 2016 population. In 1990, today’s red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.

Four years is a pretty big gap. A significant gap, I would say. And that’s a gap that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Back to Krugman:

One thing that’s clear, however, is that the facts are utterly inconsistent with the conservative diagnosis of what ails America.

Conservative figures like William Barr, the attorney general, look at rising mortality in America and attribute it to the collapse of traditional values — a collapse they attribute, in turn, to the evil machinations of “militant secularists.” The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind “soaring suicide rates,” rising violence and “a deadly drug epidemic.”

But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven’t seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy. And even within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.

This is symptomatic of something massively wrong, and it isn’t just racism. This population has been racist going back to the dawn of white people, whenever that was. This is someething else.

Republican Moral Values

Sorry I’ve been absent for a while. This is the first day I’ve had since Wednesday that wasn’t completely scheduled. And last Wednesday Thomas Edsall wrote a column I’ve been itching to comment on, and now I can finally do it.

Edsall writes,

When Attorney General William Barr warned in a speech at Notre Dame on Oct. 11 that secular liberalism had unleashed “licentiousness — the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good,” there was a glaring incongruity.

How could Barr possibly fail to recognize that there is no better example of a man in unbridled pursuit of his own appetites than his boss?

Barr’s hypocrisy aside, his commentary — “the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy” — is part of a renewed drive by social conservatives to demonize liberal elites.

Now, we’ve all been hearing this crap for years, right? I remember Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which I watched because I was too tired to get up off the sofa and change the channel. Buchanan said then,

 The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.

I don’t know where Barr stands on women in combat, but otherwise Barr 2019 and Buchanan 1992 are pretty much on the same page. As near as I can tell from his web site, Buchanan is a Trump supporter now, which is no big surprise.

Edsall goes on to note that the rightie think tank crowd has been cranking out lots of books lately with standard rightie think tank book titles like Straight to Hell: How Liberals are Evil and Destroying America and Want to Eat Your Babies. (That’s not much of an exaggeration.)

Anyway, I take it that these people blame the decline of the influence of organizeed religion (“secularism” in shorthand), the sexual revolution (remember when that was a thing?), feminism, birth control and legal abortion on an “explosion” in the rates of divorce and single parent households, which usually means just mother, no father. And, of course, children who grow up without fathers are doomed to be criminals and layabouts. And speaking of layabouts, how about that welfare state that discourages people from working?

Edsall:

In a 2015 study, Pew, a liberal think tank, reported that the percentage of children under 18 living with two parents in their first marriage fell from 73 percent in 1960 to 46 percent in 2014.

And then there is the fact that it is the well-educated, often secular liberal elites so detested by social conservatives who are reviving the traditional two-parent family, with declining divorce rates and a commitment to combine forces to invest in their children.

Wait, what? Liberal elites are reviving the two-parent family? Yes, indeed. The terrible irony that the Barrs and Buchanans fail to note is that the satanic trends of high divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births that they blame on liberalism has seen the biggest “explosion” in the very demographic group least likely to support liberalism: The white working class. Get this:

December 2015 Pew study found that the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 20 years was 78 percent for a college-educated woman, 49 percent for a woman with some college but no degree and 40 percent for a woman with a high school degree or less.

But note this:

In the 1980s, at the height of the divorce revolution, there was virtually no difference in the divorce rates of women and men by level of education.

Note also that the overall divorce rate has fallen considerably since Pat Buchanan made the culture war speech. This shows us 1990 to 2017.

This article argues that part of the change is the result of millennials marrying later, and making better choices, than we geeezers did back in the day. And this survey from Pew shows that these same millennials score higher on social liberalism and lower on God-believing than the geezers, also. But, as noted above, the less educated you are, the more likely it is you will divorce.

You might remember that back in 2004 the Gee Dubya Bush Administration made a big splash with its “healthy marriage” initiative, in which a ton of money was allocated for “training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain ‘healthy marriages.”’ This desire to prop up marriage followed shortly after the supreme court of Massachusetts ruled that gay couples had a right to marry, so there’s that. But part of the righrtie argument for promoting marriage is that it would reduce poverty; those single, unmarried people tended to be poorer than those who married and stayed married. Married couples are more affluent and financially stable, so, obviously, if poor people got married they also would be more affluent and financially stable.

Of course, as is often the case, the righties mixed up cause and effect. Affluent and financially stable people are much more likely to marry and stay married than those who are not. Poverty is enormously stressful, which makes it hard for the very poor to sustain a relationship. It wasn’t a lack of marriage causing poverty but too much poverty discouraging marriage.

You will not, then, be surprised to learn that the healthy marriage initiative was a dismal failure. Stephanie Mencimer wrote for Mother Jones in 2012,

With congressional Republicans beating the drum about profligate and wasteful government spending, they may want to take a hard look at a federal program pushed by a host of top GOPers during the Bush-era and reauthorized in late 2010, as the Republican deficit craze took hold. Originally championed by Republican lawmakers including Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and current Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a federal initiative to promote marriage as a cure for poverty dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into programs that either had no impact or a negative effect on the relationships of the couples who took part, according to recent research by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

One part of the program offered marriage education classes to unmarried couples with children.

Three years later, researchers reported that the program had produced precisely zero impact on the quality of the couples’ relationships, rates of domestic violence, or the involvement of fathers with their children. In fact, couples in the eight pilot programs around the country actually broke up more frequently than those in a control group who didn’t get the relationship program. The program also prompted a drop in the involvement of fathers and the percentage who provided financial support.

To be fair, it wasn’t all that bleak.

In a few bright spots, married couples who participated in a government-funded relationship class reported being somewhat happier and having slightly warmer relationships with their partners. But the cost of this slight bump in happiness in the Supporting Healthy Marriage program was a whopping $7,000 to $11,500 per couple. Imagine how much happier the couples would have been if they’d just been handed with cash. Indeed, feeling flush might have helped them stay married. After all, the only social program ever to show documented success in impacting the marriage rates of poor people came in 1994, when the state of Minnesota accidentally reduced the divorce rate among poor black women by allowing them to keep some of their welfare benefits when they went to work rather than cutting them off. During the three-year experiment and for a few years afterward, the divorce rate for black women in the state fell 70 percent. The positive effects on kids also continued for several years.

Wait, what? You mean that you can actually help poor families by just giving them money? What would Paul Ryan say?

Thomas Edsall contacted a number of scholars who study social disruptions like exploding divorce rates and what causes them. On the whole, they said the effects of liberal ideology and “secularism” on such disruptions can’t be proved or disproved. What they can measure, however, is the impact of changing social and economic conditions on working class men. One academic said,

My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.

Another wrote,

… sharp declines in the availability of middle class jobs for non-college workers (esp. men) — for example, when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and U.S. manufacturing employment fell by 20 percent in seven years — causes exactly these maladies on which these commentators are focused: a drop in labor force participation, a decline in marriage rates, a rise in the fraction of children born out of wedlock, an increase in mother-headed households, a rise in child poverty, and a spike in ‘deaths of despair’ among young adults, particularly men, stemming from drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and other arguably self-inflicted causes.

There is copious data that an when wages rise and new jobs open up, the rates of out of wedlock births drop considerably. But now that not marrying has become the norm in much of the white working class, the out of wedlock problem may not go away so quickly. Edsall:

In Appalachia four decades ago, “a 10 percent increase in earnings associated with the coal boom led to a 25.5 percent reduction in the nonmarital birthrate.” In contrast, in the sections of the country where fracking boosted the economy, “a 10 percent increase in earnings associated with fracking production led to a 12.4 percent increase in nonmarital births.”

You see the picture. It’s also the case that the researchers pooh-poohed the idea that social safety net programs increased social disruption. Looking worldwide, we can see that countries with the most generous social welfare programs have the least disruptions.

And, again, it’s the white working class — Trump’s people– who are being hit the hardest by the disruptions. Another academic:

Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.

Edsall:

Put another way, the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.

Or look at it this way: The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.

I would also like to point out that in the endless argument about whether Trump support in the white working class is caused by racism or economic anxiety, I once again say, both.

But now the culture warriors have mounted what might — I hope — be their last offensive. And they have focused their hopes on a walking cesspool of corruption and ignorance called Donald J. Trump. Trump is to virtue what a black hole is to matter. He is utterly lacking in any redeeming qualities. And the culture warriors like Barr are reduced to lying, scheming, and probably commiting impeachable acts themselves to protect Trump’s position. And they see themselves as pure and noble knights trying to save civilization of the threat of liberalism.

The capacity of humans to self-bullshit knows no limits.