Category: National

• So, former CIA Director John Brennan, a harsh critic of Donald Trump, has lost his national security clearance. Others will likely follow. It’s a new chapter in White House retribution and an old chapter in media-diversion strategy.

 

Here’s a bottom line that’s as telling as it is sobering: a former CIA director loses his security clearance, but Ivanka Trump keeps hers.

 

• There are better ways than “Truth isn’t truth” to rationalize qualms about letting your client sit down with a special prosecutor. But that’s how Rudy Ghoul-iani, who should be assigned legal counsel, worded it. Maybe he’s wary of “alternative facts.”

 

• “Trust me, I’m like a smart person.” That was vintage Donald Trump in the early days of his presidency. Even by then, we already like knew enough of the reality TV huckster’s mental acuity. In short, he’s neither smart nor “like smart.” He’s actually unlike a smart person.

• “The Trump presidency is worse than Watergate.”

No, that’s not partisan hyperbole from Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Tom Steyer. That’s the reflection of Carl Bernstein, who’s uniquely qualified to comment. “The heroes of Watergate were Republicans who demanded that the president be held accountable,” recently assessed Bernstein.

Yeah, tell that to Mitch McConnell and Brett Kavanaugh.

• Senate confirmation hearings on Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, will begin in a few weeks. Look for this 20-year-old quote to play prominently: “We believe an indictment should not be pursued while the president is in office.”

That was Kavanaugh in 1998, when he was a member of Ken Starr’s team that was investigating President Bill Clinton. If Sen. Kamala Harris doesn’t bring it up, it’s because Sen. Cory Booker already had.

• Lines continue to blur between certain media and the White House. Is Sean Hannity an adviser–not just a Trump-channeling cheerleader? The other day he turned his (three-hour) radio show over to guest hosts: Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow. They brought their Robert-Mueller-Russian-investigation-criticism talking points in defense of their Oval Office client.

Is Larry Kudlow just on loan from Fox?

And not that Trump needs help in doubling down to his white nationalistic base, but that’s what Fox News’ Laura Ingraham did the other day. As in: “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people.” The operative word: “foisted.” In short, we’re not becoming more diverse; we’re being made less white. Has the WHITE House ever seemed more redundant?

• The bottom lines for under-siege, mainstream media or Trump-supporting media: You’re either the enemy of the (Trump base) people or you’re the enema of the (Trump base) people.
• It’s now official; Slovenia natives Viktor and Amalija Knavs are now American citizens. Yes, those Knavs–the parents of Melania Trump, who had sponsored their green cards. It’s what is known as family-based immigration. It’s also known, as we know from President Trump’s disparaging commentary, as “chain migration.”

What’s the takeaway? If you’re Lady Maga’s parents, some chain links matter more than others.

• It speaks volumes, doesn’t it, when the lead item–from AOL to the network news–is what is being said and alleged by former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman and how the White House is responding. The president, for example, called her a “low life.” The biggest issue should be Omarosa’s tapes–regardless of embarrassing or scandalous content. Situation Room security was that easily breeched?

Otherwise, it’s all, frankly, about blatant opportunists who actually deserve each other and use the media and a presidential forum to further their own agendas. We deserve better–from an unqualified, overpaid, token African-American “adviser” to an unqualified, pathologically unhinged, dangerous Oval Office cult figure.

• The era of Trump tweets has brought into focus, like never before, the reality that words truly matter. And it’s not all tweets. We still don’t know, unless a translator breaks ranks, what was said between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Here’s hoping they did a better job than the United Nations’ translator in 1956. That’s when the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev further fanned the flames of Cold War fears by declaring: “We will bury you.” That, as it turned out, was the English version. In Russian, it translated to “We will outlast you.” But the Cold War didn’t do nuance.

Here’s hoping the translators at the Trump-Putin summit exchanged notes.

• America’s relations with Turkey are, as President Trump recently noted, “not good at this time.” Part of that is an American pastor still held on espionage charges. Another part is a function of the U.S. abruptly and unilaterally doubling the rate of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Turkey. Only two years removed from a coup attempt and with an economy that’s in crisis, Turkey–that most, uh, incongruous of NATO members–would shock nobody by turning to Vladimir Putin for help.
• In 1970 the U.S. was the world’s biggest oil producer. Not exactly nostalgia producing. Then it was surpassed by the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia. Now America is on pace to reclaim that distinction. What happened in the midst of enlightened self-interest that began prioritizing pollution awareness and alternative-energy agendas?

In short, innovation that wasn’t limited to wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars. To wit: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. We know this is right in somebody’s MAGA wheelhouse.

From vigilante-victim Trayvon Martin to Staten Island choke-hold-victim Eric Garner to Stand Your Ground-victim Markeis McGlockton, there are obvious and valid reasons why the “Black Lives Matter” movement has been resonating. Racial profiling, targeting, stereotyping: It’s a familiar, lamentable litany of a country still in search of “post-racial America.”

Having said that, however, the movement would resonate even more across the racial spectrum if it didn’t also manifest itself as “Black Lives Selectively Matter.” If a cop is involved, it matters–and it should–although cops, most notably in Baltimore, are not always white.

But what about black gangbangers in Chicago taking out each other as well as innocent bystanders? And, yes, the killing fields of Chicago pre-date Rahm Emanuel. This war-zone dystopia is not a function of police bigotry–any more than the Tampa drowning death of Je’Hyrah Daniels was.

“Black Lives Matter” has to be seen as a subset of “All Lives Matter” to truly matter in a society where the culture of guns and violence cruelly and tragically impacts everyone.

It was disturbing—as well as embarrassing—to see Tampa nationally highlighted, as it were, as a media demonizing, Qanon-friendly venue for that vintage Donald Trump rally. No, it wasn’t a casting call for a “Deliverance” sequel. It wasn’t that nuanced. And it makes a back-in-the-day George Wallace rally seem relatively civil with its states’-rights code words and dog whistles that were meant to arouse an anti-elite movement well shy of a media-targeting lynch mob.

All presidents have had issues with those in a position to publicly criticize them. Of course, they did. It comes with the territory of being elected, being accountable, being political, being fallible and being part of a constitutional democracy with an iconic free speech amendment. If you can’t take the political heat, get the hell out of this sometimes-combative democracy’s kitchen.

But no president, including Richard Nixon of “enemies list” infamy, has ever made violence-embracing assaults on the mainstream media a top presidential priority. With good reason. Viciously attacking a free press is more than unpresidential. It’s un-American and unpatriotic.

What this vocabulary-challenged president does is not tongue and cheek pushback. It’s not even expediently partisan rhetoric normally heard in a primary. No, this is self-serving, inflammatory, down-right scary abuse of the world’s preeminent bully pulpit.

Media scapegoating and targeting is not just a strategic White House distraction. It’s also unconscionably unfair to put CNN’s Jim Acosta in the presidential cross hairs. At some point, frankly and tragically, we could be talking about the late Jim Acosta who was seen–up close and personal–by too many Trump channelers as “the enemy of the people.” The Capital Gazette murders can’t be seen as purely coincidental in this parlous-press environment. Trump controls the echo chamber from hell.

Would that it were pure bluster when Trump bragged that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone” and “wouldn’t lose voters.” He’s the Rev. Jim Jones in the Oval Office.

As if Trump’s performance in Tampa wasn’t revolting enough, Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down the next day by not publicly disassociating herself and the White House from “enemy of the people” slander. She flat-out would not–and she was asked directly to do just that by Acosta.  But she did fire back with bullet points about unfair media treatment of the White House. But no backing down on “enemy of the people” rhetoric that most of us once thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history with the rest of Josef Stalin’s authoritarian rhetoric.

There are no quick fixes or easy answers here—beyond an electoral awakening in 2018 and 2020. The threat to the media constitutes an existential crisis. The right response is to continue to do our jobs. As TV journalist Christiane Amanpour told writers at the recent Television Critics Association, “By continuing to put the truth out, that’s how we fight back.”

And may the truth set us free. All of us.

• Rudy Ghoul-iani says President Trump’s tweets are merely opinions.  Hardly official—and hardly an order. For example, Trump said Attorney General Jeff Sessions “SHOULD stop this rigged witch hunt.” He didn’t say: MUST. You have to wonder what former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson thinks of Trump’s Twittered “opinions.” He was fired by tweet.
• Maybe a major media boycott of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ dismissive, insulting sham press briefings and Trump’s “Triumph of the Will” pep rallies would be better than, in effect, enabling this inciteful, “enemy of the people” theme.
• Will Trump interview with Robert Mueller? Why would a savvy attorney, with his client’s best interest uppermost in mind, allow such a perjury time bomb? Because the client in question is the pathologically narcissistic Donald Trump, and he is his own ultimate adviser.
• When the White House rolled out the intelligence chiefs to address foreign media tampering and domestic anxiety, it was cause for concern—and more anxiety. Not just because America remains vulnerable, but because there’s still an obvious disconnect between top intelligence officials and Trump, who remains largely disengaged and creates his own Russian reality. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, for example, still doesn’t seem like an Administration insider. That’s unconscionable. In fact, he still seems uninformed about the details of the Trump-Putin one-on-one and incapable of a deep-diving assessment of the dangers we face. That’s beyond disturbing.
• It seems as if Trump tweets are getting nastier when it comes to the media and the Mueller investigation. One conclusion is that even this unhinged president senses a day of reckoning fast approaching. So, he ups the rhetorical ante to undermine the credibility of the results, knowing full well that his fawning fan base–a sizable, but still minority part of the electorate–remains all in.
• So, the Russian Foreign Ministry has announced—on Facebook—that it has named Steven Seagal special representative to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia. Isn’t that part of Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s job? But, then, Huntsman never played a hitman in the movies.
• Need I.D. to buy groceries? Only in a billionaire-populist, reality-show performer universe.
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Tokyo Rose, only not nearly as personable.

Some stuff—OK, a lot of stuff—you just can’t make up. To wit: In the context of more mass killings and the ongoing legality of assault weapons, we now are lamenting the reality of trying to “rebottle the genie” of 3-D gun kits. How the hell did we get from the Second Amendment to “print and shoot?”

Amid all efforts to combat interference in our democracy, there remains a constant—amid all the technological manipulation—that is far more fundamental. The best defense is an electorate that is involved, informed and motivated. The bar isn’t that high. If you’re not outsourcing your ideology, your values and your vote, and you’re not channeling a cult figure for validity, you’re doing your part.

We now know that nearly 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016. For context, that’s more Americans that were killed in the Vietnam War. The entire Vietnam War.

• Gwen (“and the men”) Graham has an obvious demographic advantage. And it seems like Jeff Greene and Phil Levine might split a certain primary vote. Here’s some Graham advice for maintaining that presumptive, front-runner status: Prioritize what you will do for Florida. Let your surrogates underscore your gender and motherhood, how you are pragmatically Democratic and how you have a win over a Republican on your resume. And then don’t campaign with Bill Clinton.
• So, Bernie Sanders has endorsed Andrew Gillum for governor. We get that. What we hope we don’t get is disappointed, Gillum voters becoming no-shows in the general if their Sanders-backed candidate doesn’t make it out of the primary. There’s precedent, as we well know, from 2016.
• Interesting that one of the two minority “No” votes on the Clearwater City Council’s (3-2) vote to move ahead with a strong-mayor initiative was cast by the incumbent, less-than-strong mayor, George Cretekos.