The Undeciders
Top Republicans are balking at Trump...but just can't figure out the rest of it
Sept. 9: Bush fails to protect America (again) … Cheney endorses Harris … Big conservative star accused of using anti-sex-trafficking grift to facilitate rapes … “Trump Train” trial starts …
“I’m the decider,” then-Pres. George W. Bush famously mortifyingly said in 2006, referring to deciding who got to work in the White House. Bush was defending his right to keep Don Rumsfeld as defense secretary and Karl Rove as anything.
But people were asking Bush to explain why. Which he couldn’t. So he fell back on having the right to decide. Today, as a private citizen, he’s even more entitled to follow his own thinking about who should be in the White House. But weirdly, now he’s the undecided.
Bush said on Saturday he has no public opinion on who America should elect as president. He’s not campaigning for either candidate and won’t even say who he’ll vote for. Jump ball, folks! Too close to call!
Former Vice Pres. Dick Cheney on Friday said he’s voting for Vice Pres. Kamala Harris. But no word on whether he’ll campaign or fundraise for Harris.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said on Friday she’s endorsing not just Harris but also Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) in his race to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Former Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice last month endorsed…uh…international engagement. But she still can’t figure out which presidential candidate is more isolationist!
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) called out Rice for fence-sitting:
“You’re not fighting against ‘isolationism.’ You’re fighting against Trump and you need to say this out loud. No more straddling the fence, Republicans. You’re for Trump or against him. Pick a side.”
Other anti-Trump Republicans chimed in similarly, Raw Story reported, pushing Rice to pick a (Harris) side.
In defense of Bush and Rice, the presidential race is really a coin toss, people. Six of one, half a batshit of the other.
Bush’s office was asked to explain his silence. “President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago," according to a statement Saturday from the office that Bush still has even though he retired from presidential politics years ago.
But also, did he really retire? Here’s Bush last year pushing “the importance of freedom in building peaceful societies.” Can’t figure out which wholesale war-crime legacy that’s about — no matter how much Iraq my brains!
But that’s presidential politics!
Here’s Bush last year, “Paying tribute to the brave souls who gave their lives for our freedom at Kennebunkport’s Memorial Day Parade” even though no one gave their lives for our freedom at Kennebunkport’s Memorial Day Parade. Sanctifying war, even fictional Kennebunkport war, is presidential politics.
And here’s Bush pushing PEPFAR, his global HIV/AIDS relief program that still exists and therefore is still part of presidential politics, just like that from which Bush didn’t retire.
In short, Bush is retired from “presidential politics” when it comes to deciding who should preside, but not when it comes to polishing his legacy on Iraq’s war dead freedom or AIDS.
He’s still pro-”freedom,” still pro-PEPFAR, and still pro-lying. Because presidential politics doesn’t exist in a hermetically sealed bubble, and Bush is still very much involved in Congressional politics, which is tied directly to presidential politics.
Presidents can succeed or fail depending on who controls Congress. And sure enough, Bush reportedly is still holding Republican fundraisers…behind closed doors, of course, because he loves democracy so much he doesn’t want voters to know what he has to say about it to rich dudes.
And as your loyal TFN reported yesterday, Bush is also directly making campaign donations to Republican candidates, some of them open Trump boosters. In swing districts. Think that’s got nothing to do with presidential politics?
Perhaps the biggest point missing from yesterday’s report was the real way Bush is endorsing Trump without officially saying so. Remaining silent implies that the contest is a close one, that neither candidate falls so extremely outside the lines of American political discourse that they merit an alarm-sounding even from ostensibly not-really apolitical former presidents.
But this isn’t just about Bush and Bush World. Former Vice President Mike Pence said he wouldn’t endorse Trump — despite Trump’s awesome conservative achievements — or vote for Pres. Joe Biden. Hmmm! Former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) said last week he won’t vote for Trump or Harris.
But unless they’re out there banging the Democratic drum up and down the ticket every day between now and November, they’re still fence-sitting. It’s just a question of how deeply their fence-sitting asses are impaled on the stakes. And the stakes are painfully high, sweet Newsfuckers.
Because it’s not just the White House. If Trump wins, a Republican Congress will let Trump have his way. With us. When they’re president, Republicans just let them do it.
So if any Republican wants to get credit for not getting nasty Trump goo on their hands when they cast their precious ballot in November, they damn well ought to explain why they’re not urging donors and voters to reject Trump and why they’re not working their asses off to build a Democratic Congress capable of checking him.
Honestly, only Pence has the excuse that him endorsing and campaigning for Harris wouldn’t influence even one single vote.
Yes, Liz Cheney is endorsing Allred in Texas, the only congressional race I could find where a prominent Republican is backing a Democrat. But where was Cheney during the Democratic National Convention (DNC)? Endorsing Taylor Swift.
At least Kinzinger showed up for the DNC. But look at what he actually said: “Democrats are as patriotic as us.” Maybe he hasn’t noticed, but these days that’s an insult, sir.
And what are the odds against that unquantifiable patriotism being exactly equal?
Kinzinger used his DNC platform not to boost Democratic congressional candidates, but to Trumpwash conservatism: “The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.”
My dudezinger, that’s conservatism.
Cheney, too, used her Democratic-provided media platform yesterday to claim that “it’s important for people to recognize he’s [Trump’s] not a conservative.”
Oh, yeah? Ask Pence or Hogan if Trump’s conservative. Ask the moms who didn’t want to be moms. Ask the billionaires.
Congressionally fence-sitting Trumpwashers also want people to think Trump has fundamentally changed the party…which let him do it. Here’s Kinzinger:
“Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party. His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.”
If that’s true, then where are Kinzinger’s endorsements of the congressional Democrats running against those strength-sapped, spine-softened, fever-whipped, value-untethered Republicans?
“[A]ll we’re asked to do is to summon the courage to stand up to one weak man.”
There are hundreds of races.
Kinzinger hasn’t donated a single dollar to a single Democrat. His last donation was to former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-NC), presumably because of her strength, spine, and low-grade fever.
Trump is not uniquely heinous when it comes to violating democratic norms. He just took Republican precedent to the logical next step.
It was Bush supporters who resorted to violence in the 2000 Florida vote count. It was “conservative” Supreme Court justices who stopped vote-counting to install their president.
It was Bush and Cheney who politicized the Justice Department to gin up fake voter-fraud prosecutions to justify very real vote suppression.
It was Bush and Cheney who gave us Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who dismantled legal checks against dark-money checks and erased shields protecting voters of color and terminated abortion rights and rewrote the Constitution to elevate presidents above the law.
Kinzinger gushes over Trump’s Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and Liz Cheney has loved up both sexual abuser Kavanaugh and Barrett.1
They love 99% of what Trump does. At almost every point of opposition, prominent Republican rejection of Trump is personal. Their political goals remain the same and they will keep pursuing them when Trump is out of the way.
Trump went after Dick Cheney’s daughter, so now Cheney supports Harris. Despite Cheney endorsing Trump in 2016, when we all knew what Trump was.
Trump went after Bush’s brother in 2016, so then Bush was political, endorsing his brother in the 2016 primary. Today, Bush’s own party is coming for PEPFAR, so that program he praises.
It’s personal. Meaning: It’s selfish. See? Conservatism!
MEA CULPA Meanwhile, the media — TFN included — pay undue attention to these people. In TFN’s case, it’s to try to warn that someday soon they’ll use the power we’re giving them now against us.
But why are we infinitely more fascinated with those who rarely get it right than we are with those who consistently get it right?
Why are Kingzinger and Liz Cheney bigger stars than hundreds of Democratic members of Congress who not only got the Trump impeachments right but also managed to figure out the right answers on Barrett, Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, abortion, and feeding people? Why do we celebrate people who don’t want Trump as commander-in-chief, but willing to let him amass a political army in Congress?
Shouldn’t people who get shit right almost all the time be vastly bigger stars, with bigger TV contracts and media deals then people we gush over for clearing only the lowest imaginable bar?
“Sound of Freedom” Star, Trump Advisor, Conservative Hero Obviously Predictably Plausibly Accused of Sexually Abusing and Raping Multiple Women Who Were Not Among the Victims in the Film Made About His Heroic Efforts to Help Victims of Not Him
The New York Times reports this morning that yet another Republican obsessed with sex is obsessed with sex. And this time it’s a big one. Not Donald Trump big, but Tim Ballard big.
Ballard isn’t just a former advisor to then-Pres. Trump. He was the star of last year’s monster Christian-movie hit “Sound of Freedom,” a documentary that totally missed documenting the fact that Ballard is a monster. Allegedly!
Ballard is the founder/bullshit artist behind Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which was neither underground nor a railroad but apparently was quite an operation. Ballard tried to tie it to the Mormon Church, another organization that’s covered up sex abuse, and which cried foul.
OUR was all about Saving The Precious Wee Children™ from the horrors of sex-trafficking, horrors which allegedly were exacerbated by Pres. Joe Biden sending engraved invitations to child-trafficking migrants. Meanwhile, at OUR, behind the scenes — metaphorically underground, as it were — Ballard was railroading women who worked for him into non-consensual operations of his nasty body parts.
Ballard’s scam utilized child-sex hysteria and moral panic to justify having his female workers pretend to have sexy time with Ballard. Y’know, to smoke out the real predators. Allegations from multiple women, according to the Times:
“Ballard recruited them to act as his romantic partner in undercover operations in which they would pose as wealthy sex tourists, a tactic he referred to as a ‘couple’s ruse.’ It had two purposes, he told them: It provided an easy excuse to avoid having sexual contact with the sex workers, and some people might be more open to confiding in a woman.
“But many of the women say that Mr. Ballard turned the ‘ruse’ into an opportunity to assault them.”
For some non-consenual fucking reason, the Times never uses the word “rape” to describe Ballard’s actions, even with an “alleged” clinging to it like an unwanted suitor. Or rapist. Even though they describe Ballard’s alleged actions as 100% rapes:
“Six women filed lawsuits accusing Mr. Ballard of sexually assaulting them, with some describing situations in which he used his strength to overpower them despite their explicit pleas to stop.”
There’s literally no definition of rape that’s more rapey than that description of rape. A criminal investigation reportedly is under way, but we’ll see whether the GOP cares, given the growing ranks of rank rapists in the GOP ranks.
Ballard was a guest on Rudy Giuliani’s broadcast from this summer’s Republican National Convention and featured on stage at February’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Ballard told the Times the women coordinated their lies about him to get his money. Thoughts and prayers, bro.
Shitty Journalism Watch
THE NEW YORK TIMES I don’t normally join in the pile-ons against the New York Times, for a number of reasons not worth going into now. Point being, the bar for me to join in is pretty high.
And yet here we fucking are.
Supporters of Donald Trump are going on trial today in a civil case resulting from their harassment of a moving Joe Biden campaign bus in 2020, using their own vehicles to try to force the bus off the road and endangering the people on board. Plaintiffs say the organization of political intimidation and harassment violates the Enforcement Act. Also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act and not because the KKK helped write it.
The city of San Marcos, TX, has already settled a lawsuit for allegedly failing to provide appropriate protection. Officials admitted police failed to meet the famously “high standards” of San Marcos, TX, police, and coughed up $175,000.
Here’s how the Times framed the story on its homepage this morning:
For some perspective, imagine them describing a mugging that way: An “encounter” or “confrontation” … “between” two sides.
“Trump supporters attacked Biden supporters.” Unfucked that for you.
EVERYONE All the medias today will be telling you that House Republicans released a report blaming Pres. Joe Biden and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris for the 2021 deaths of 13 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the chaotic U.S. departure.
Which is technically true; the House Republican report does blame Biden and Harris. But it would be equally valid, and maybe even morely valid, to frame headline the report as exonerating Biden and Harris.
Why? Because the report makes clear that there’s no actual wrongdoing here. Just because the report’s authors conclude culpability does not oblige the media to ignore the fact that the report itself is does not establish culpability. In fact, it’s devoid of smoking guns, which is weird, given the GOP love of guns.
Are Biden and the guy who agreed to the withdrawal — then-Pres. Donald Trump — to blame for how the U.S. handled things? Of course. The buck stops there, no matter what country it secretly comes from.
But — just like with Benghazi and the Alejandro Mayorkas impeachment, and Hunter Biden’s porn collection, and so much more — this latest report has zero indication of doing something wrong. The closest thing to a gotcha is that Biden allegedly persisted with withdrawal plans despite the Taliban violating the Trump deal like everyone knew they would because Trump and Taliban. Which, yeah, and?
Trump and Biden had both committed to getting out... even if the Taliban weren’t Boy Scouts [insert vile Boy Scouts joke here].
As for Trump, the GOP report blames other people for stuff Trump did, because that’s the job.
TCB
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I didn’t immediately find anything on Neil Gorsuch and then I stopped looking because there’s no such thing as an afterlife.
Thank you, Jonathan, for your long excellent rant on these republicans who are speaking up against the carnival barker but are not helping to rid their party of the maga representatives and those who aren't speaking out publicly against same circus clown but are helping to keep same magas imbedded in Congress. Yeah Dick Cheney is voting for Harris. That's only 1 less strike against him. There are many more strikes I won't easily forget and neither should anyone else.
I don't trust *anyone* who still identifies as Republican. They may deplore trump but they haven't changed their retrograde policy stances.