World news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      'Corrosive to democracy': what do Trump's baseless claims really mean?

      by

      No one ever really expected Donald Trump to concede the election.
      After all, he told the world he wouldn’t. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said back on 13 September. “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win,” he said in 2016.
      But even after he won in 2016, he continued to spread lies about voter fraud, falsely saying that between 3 and 5 million people voted illegally. He also falsely claimed he only lost the state of New Hampshire because people were illegally bussed in from out of state. He created a panel to look into these kinds of issues, stacked with some of the country’s most prominent voter fraud conspiracy theorists. The commission, beset by infighting, dissolved without producing evidence of anything.
      Now, after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, the president is returning to voter fraud to explain his loss. With flimsy evidence, his campaign has touted a slew of baseless lawsuits across the country. These efforts are unlikely to change the outcome of the election. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” a senior Republican official anonymously told the Washington Post.
      But Trump’s claims and the lawsuits are not, and have never really been about, changing vote totals. By fanning the spectre of voter fraud, Republicans are laying the foundation for questioning the legitimacy of a Biden presidency and any election in which an opposing candidate wins. They are sowing doubt not just about the 2020 election, but whether America’s voting system – the foundation of American democracy – is sound.
      Beyond this election, these efforts to sow doubt about election results will also augment a long-term Republican effort to justify making it harder to vote for swaths of the electorate. In a democracy, where governing power is rooted in the consent of the governed, this is deeply dangerous.
      Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested this week that Democrats shouldn’t lecture Republicans about the need to concede because Democrats had challenged the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency since 2016. But the morning after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton conceded the race, acknowledging she lost and saying she hoped Trump would be a successful president.
      “Part of democracy is accepting the legitimacy of the election. We know that because we put so much stock in concession speeches. Not that concessions have any legal impact, it’s because they signal the peaceful transfer of power,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It signals to the rest of the world that you can lose an election here and no one loses their head.”
      “Seventy million people voted for him. He’s telling 70 million people he was cheated out of the presidency. That can’t help but be corrosive to democracy,” she added.
      There’s already some evidence Trump’s effort is working.Eighty per cent of Americans believe Biden won the election, but about six in 10 Republicans believe so, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Seventy per cent of Republicans also said in a survey this week they didn’t believe the election was “free and fair”, a stark jump from the 35% who said the same before the election.
      On Saturday, even after every major media outlet called the election for Biden, Trump supporters said they didn’t know if they could trust the results, even from Fox News, a network often criticized for cozying up to the president and amplifying his misleading messages.
      “I trust our locality. But when I heard what’s going on in Detroit, and the bigger cities – I heard they were even burning ballots. I don’t know if it’s true or not,” said Eva Niemela, who traveled to the Michigan state capitol to attend one of several “Stop the Steal” rallies happening across the country by Trump supporters. (Ballots were not burned in Detroit.) More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump attacks Fox News: 'They forgot the golden goose'

      by

      Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of tweets denouncing Fox News, accusing the network of having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there”.
      “They forgot the Golden Goose,” Trump wrote in a tweet posted at midday on Thursday:

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      .@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

      November 12, 2020

      The tirade was posted after the president, who has refused to acknowledge his election loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, retweeted multiple comments from supporters, many of which expressed the view that they would instead be relying on right-wing cable channel and website Newsmax.
      Late on Thursday, the top story on Newsmax.com was headlined “Sen. Ted Cruz to Newsmax TV: ‘Media Don’t Get to Decide Presidency’.”
      Among Trump’s retweets was one by a user called “Appalachian Christian”, who said: “Suit yourself Left Fox 4 NewsMaxxxxx.”
      Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Biden and has warned its readers that Trump’s claims of victory are false.
      On Monday night, Fox host Neil Cavuto cut away from a campaign event hosted by the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the Republican National Committee headquarters when McEnany said that Trump’s campaign team “wanted every legal vote to be counted”.
      “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said from the studio.
      Trump on Monday claimed without evidence that the network’s “ratings have completely collapsed.”
      Trump’s embrace of Newsmax has however translated into a ratings boost, with viewership jumping from an average of 65,000 people before the election to 800,000 viewers of its prime time shows this week, according to Nielsen data quoted in the New York Times, which reports that the NewsMax app was the fourth most popular on the Apple App Store on Thursday.
      Later on Thursday, however, Trump tweeted his praise for two Fox hosts, both long-time Trump loyalists, touting a “must see” segment by commentator Sean Hannity and a “confirming and powerful piece” by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs. More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Biden and the climate crisis: fight for net zero | Editorial

      by

      There is no question that Joe Biden’s win will make a big difference to international efforts to deal with the climate emergency. A US president who recognises global heating as an “existential threat” will be a vital extra pillar propping up the teetering edifice of climate diplomacy. Four years of Donald Trump have done huge damage to the US’s reputation. But the world’s biggest economy, and second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (after China), remains vastly influential. With President Biden in charge, the prospects for next year’s Cop26 talks in Scotland, when drastic emissions cuts must be agreed if the world is to stand a chance of avoiding catastrophic heating, are already brighter.
      President Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris agreement was a key plank of his nationalist “America first” agenda and an act of sabotage against both the UN climate process and the principle of a rules-based international order. It also gave cover to the world’s other climate vandals: Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia and Australia. With Mr Biden, that cover is gone, and ecocidal policies such as Amazon rainforest destruction and coal-power expansion should come under renewed and relentless pressure. It is striking that the president-elect put climate at the heart of his phone calls with foreign leaders.
      The path ahead is anything but smooth. A green stimulus package on the scale promised by Mr Biden’s campaign is unlikely to pass through Congress, with control of the Senate hinging on two undecided seats in Georgia. Conservative judges are a further roadblock. Legislation to limit emissions and punish polluters is certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court. Fossil-fuel companies and other vested interests remain a formidable force. Nor can public support be taken for granted. Most voters are on board in principle, recognising the dangers of unchecked global heating. But the changes in lifestyle that will be needed to meet new targets, including reductions in meat-eating and flying, are challenging in the US as in other rich countries.
      Still, Mr Biden’s presence in the White House will be a huge opportunity, and one that the environmental movement and its supporters must seize with every hand they have. Global heating is a fact, not a hypothesis or ideology. It is not just the vast majority of Democrats who want their politicians to do more to tackle it, but also a sizable minority of Republicans. Younger people are the most anxious. Mr Biden will perform a valuable public service simply by doing the opposite of his predecessor, and telling the truth.
      Democrats have shown that climate can be a unifying force within their party. Mr Biden’s climate taskforce was chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman and star of his party’s progressive wing. Now, if they are to create sufficient momentum, Democrats must look beyond the ranks of committed green supporters, as the writer Arlie Russell Hochschild did in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, about environmental politics in Tea Party-supporting Louisiana. Already, Mr Biden has signalled that the harm caused by pollution to poorer Americans will be among his priorities.
      In recent weeks China, South Korea and Japan have all announced net zero emissions targets. Rapid falls in the price of renewables have made the process of weaning away from fossil fuels far less painful than most experts predicted. Climate protesters have shown how effective they can be in mobilising support for strong action. Now that the election is over, they must keep pushing Mr Biden and other legislators as hard as they can. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Longest-serving Senate Republican joins call for Biden to receive briefings

      by

      The longest-serving Republican in the Senate has joined the call for Joe Biden to receive daily intelligence briefings, with those briefings currently withheld from the president-elect because the Trump administration refuses to acknowledge Biden’s victory in the election.
      Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was asked by CNN whether Biden should have access to classified briefings. “I would think – especially on classified briefings – the answer is yes,” Grassley said.
      The comment came after the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, said that Biden’s victory should be recognized. “We need to consider the former vice-president as president-elect. Joe Biden is the president-elect,”DeWine told CNN on Thursday morning.
      Even senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump ally who has publicly told the president “do not concede”, agreed with the idea that Biden should get presidential-level security briefings.
      “I think so,” Graham told reporters at the Capitol.
      As basic acknowledgements of reality, the comments from DeWine, Graham and Grassley were not notable – but as practical concessions of victory to Biden they were exceptional.
      Most Republicans have refused to state the fact of Biden’s win plainly, instead treating Donald Trump’s effort to erode faith in the election result, with baseless accusations of voter fraud as a legitimate legal inquiry.
      The Biden camp has not waited for Trump’s blessing to put the presidential transition into gear. The Democrat has appointed a coronavirus taskforce and named longtime aide Ron Klain as his incoming White House chief of staff.
      Biden has also reached out to foreign allies and signaled that the US withdrawal from multilateral alliances to fight everything from the climate crisis to the coronavirus – a retraction Trump made under the banner of “America first” – would be reversed.
      Trump, meanwhile, remained bunkered in the White House. He has not made a public statement, apart from on Twitter, since he inaccurately declared victory in the election one week ago. Trump has celebrated victories in states that were recently called –North Carolina and Alaska – while insisting that earlier calls of states he lost were invalid.
      In addition to floating dozens of fruitless lawsuits, Trump’s team is applying pressure behind the scenes to get Republican state legislatures to take action to slow the certification of results in key states. The move is a long-shot plot to sabotage the electoral college system that scholars have called a coup attempt while judging it to have an extremely small, but not zero, chance of payoff.
      Democrats decried the Republicans’ failure to defend the election and condemned what they called Republican inaction on a coronavirus relief bill as the US set a ghastly record of 143,231 new daily confirmed infections.
      “Stop the circus and get to work on what really matters to the American people,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday. “It’s like the house is burning down, and they refuse to throw water on it.”

      Republicans in Congress are under visible pressure not to break the wall of silence about Biden’s election win. A second Republican senator backpedaled on Twitter Wednesday night after telling a local Oklahoma radio station he would “step in” if Biden did not begin receiving the intelligence briefings by the end of the week.
      In an interview with local KRMG, first picked up by the Hill, the Oklahoma senator James Lankford was asked what he thought of the refusal by the office of the director of national intelligence to brief the president-elect until another arm of the bureaucracy certified Biden’s victory.
      “There is no loss from him getting the briefings, and to be able to do that,” said Lankford. “And if that’s not occurring by Friday, I will step in as well, and to be able to push and to say this needs to occur, so that regardless of the outcome of the election … people can be ready for that actual task.”
      In his suggestion that the “outcome of the election” was still in doubt, Lankford made himself an ally to Donald Trump’s cause of overturning the election or, failing that, spoiling public faith in it, as a means of weakening Biden.
      Republicans have been unable to produce any evidence of voter fraud in any state, despite the lieutenant governor of Texas offering $1m out of campaign coffers to anyone who can provide such evidence.
      A postal worker who signed an affidavit alleging voter fraud retracted the accusation after it was revealed that he was the beneficiary of a GoFundMe account established by Republican donors and filled with more than $130,000.
      The presidential transition process is stalled, meanwhile, with Biden aides shut out of office space, vetting of Biden appointees unable to begin and Biden himself excluded from the presidential daily briefing.
      It has been the custom of the White House to share the presidential daily briefing with the president-elect during the transition period ever since the advent of the briefing in the 1960s, David Priess, the author of a book on presidential briefings, told NPR. The briefing contain intelligence findings and analysis of potential threats and opportunities.
      Trump himself began to receive daily intelligence briefings soon after the 2016 election, but then revealed he usually skipped them, believing he did not need them, explaining on Fox News: “You know, I’m, like, a smart person.”
      An open letter signed by four former homeland security secretaries from both parties warned on Wednesday that delaying the presidential transition endangered the country.
      “At this period of heightened risk for our nation, we do not have a single day to spare to begin the transition,” the letter said. “For the good of the nation, we must start now.”
      Former House intelligence committee chair Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, echoed the warning.
      “Our adversaries aren’t waiting for the transition to take place,” Rogers tweeted. “Joe Biden should receive the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) starting today. He needs to know what the latest threats are & begin to plan accordingly. This isn’t about politics; this is about national security.” More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Barack Obama: 'Americans spooked by black man in White House' led to Trump presidency

      by

      Donald Trump “promised an elixir for the racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House”, Barack Obama writes in his eagerly awaited memoir.Those Americans, Obama writes, were prey to “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.In A Promised Land, which comes out on Tuesday, Obama continues: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”Penguin Random House reportedly paid the former president and his wife, Michelle Obama, $65m for books about their time in the White House. The former first lady’s memoir, Becoming, came out in 2018 to widespread acclaim.Excerpts of Obama’s book have run in the press – the remarks above were reported by CNN – and the former president is due to speak to CBS in two interviews on Sunday. The New York Times has also run a lengthy review. The 768-page volume is the first of two, covering Obama’s rise to the US Senate and then the White House as the 44th president, from 2009 to 2017. It has been a struggle to write.“I figured I could do all that in maybe 500 pages,” Obama wrote in an excerpt published by the Atlantic on Thursday. “I expected to be done in a year. It’s fair to say that the writing process didn’t go exactly as I’d planned.”Obama also says he is “painfully aware that a more gifted writer could have found a way to tell the same story with greater brevity (after all, my home office in the White House sat right next to the Lincoln Bedroom, where a signed copy of the 272-word Gettysburg Address rests inside a glass case)”.A Promised Land heads for the shelves as Trump refuses to concede a clear electoral defeat by Joe Biden, Obama’s vice-president, deepening dangerous political divides.Obama considers Trump’s rise, from reality TV host and political gadfly, champion of the “birther” lie which held that Obama was not born in the US, to outsider candidate, GOP nominee and norm-shattering president.Obama recalls his first presidential election and the storm over his healthcare reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), two years later. He echoes many observers in detecting the roots of Trumpism in the surprise rise of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who became John McCain’s running mate in 2008 and two years later fanned the flames of the Tea Party, the rightwing movement which railed against the ACA.“Through Palin,” Obama writes, “it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks – were finding their way to centre stage.”Obama wonders whether McCain would have picked Palin had he suspected that “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.“I’d like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently. I believe he really did put his country first. We’re better than this.”Reviewing Trump’s rise to power, Obama considers how Trump seized on a growing inclination among Republicans to dispense with evidence and polite political convention, in the name of simply opposing the first black president.“In that sense,” Obama writes, “there wasn’t much difference between Trump and [House speaker John] Boehner or [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true … in fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.”As the Biden presidency approaches, Republicans seem likely to hold the Senate. Among Democrats, much hope of legislative progress rests with how the new president will be able to deal with the notoriously hardline Senate leader.Obama writes that he chose Biden as his emissary to McConnell in part because of his own “awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice-president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of co-operation with (black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do”.Obama discusses his famous roast of Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, on the same night a Navy Seal team was preparing to find and kill Osama bin Laden. He also details two surprising offers of help from Trump – to plug the Deepwater Horizon oil well, in 2010, and to build a pavilion on the White House lawn. Both were turned down.In the Atlantic excerpt, an adaptation of the preface to A Promised Land, the former president comments on the 2020 election, during which he campaigned for Biden.“I’m encouraged by the record-setting number of Americans who turned out to vote,” he writes, “and have an abiding trust in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in their character and capacity to do what is right.“But I also know that no single election will settle the matter. Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting.”But at the end of a year marked by national protests for racial justice, Obama’s thoughts and comments about race and his presidency will no doubt earn particular attention. At one point, CNN reported, he writes of watching television with his wife Michelle, and catching “a glimpse of a Tea Party rally”.“She seized the remote and turned off the set,” Obama writes, “her expression hovering somewhere between rage and resignation. ‘It’s a trip, isn’t it?’ she said … ‘That they’re scared of you. Scared of us.’” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      The Media Finds a Way to Brand AOC a Fascist

      by

      An article in Politico offers its scary take on a tweet by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the authors claim “terrified Trumpworld.” The headline informs us that “AOC wants to cancel those who worked for Trump.” The article ends by quoting one Trump loyalist who qualifies AOC’s assault as “literally fascism.” Newsweek upped the ante on the fear factor, with this headline: “Fox News Contributor Compares Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Nazi Germany over ‘Trump Sycophants’ List.”

      What did this totalitarian, terrorist assault via Twitter consist of? And what dire consequences might it lead to? Here is Ocasio-Cortez’s text: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.” Politico quoted a White House official who compares AOC’s request to ostracism: “I believe there is a life after this in politics for Trump officials, but the idea that a sitting member of Congress wants to purge from society and ostracize us should scare the American people.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Ostracism:

      As practiced by the ancient Greeks: the exclusion from public life those who have committed a serious offense against the community. As used by today’s politicians and media: the expression of a wish to hold the honorable people in government accountable for their participation in offensive policies, in violation of one’s civic duty to thank them for their contribution.

      Contextual Note

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet literally urged Democrats to make the effort of preserving any ephemeral material evidence of commitment by members of the Trump administration to the extreme policies the same political personalities might later seek to deny. She specifically referred to social media when she identified the nature of such evidence: “Tweets, writings, photos.” Nothing about ostracism and nothing about lists of names, as some have claimed.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Why should she think this is important? There are two serious answers to this question. The first is that plausible denial has become an artform for politicians, who prefer not to be reminded of positions they have taken in the past that subsequently become unpopular. Ocasio-Cortez worries that future Republican opponents of Democrats will cosmetically seek to ameliorate their image by deleting evidence on social media of their unqualified embrace of Donald Trump’s extremism.

      The second is that Ocasio-Cortez wishes to make life difficult for Republicans in future elections. She knows they will try to rebuild their party in the shadow of Trump, who will still be there to snipe at them. Trump is the prince of chaos. If, as many foresee, the party attempts a shift away from Trump’s populist wing toward its traditional neoliberal center, numerous influential Republicans who accepted to play on Trump’s team will be caught in the cross-currents.

      That will be embarrassing. In other words, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sees both a moral issue about accountability and a strategic political issue that will serve in future electoral campaigns for Democrats. Nothing in her text, apart from the insulting but appropriate epithet “sycophants” suggests a desire to ostracize or purge anyone.

      Politico and other media make no attempt to analyze this dimension of the question. Instead, they misrepresent it not only as an outrageous, undemocratic, disrespectful aggression on Ocasio-Cortez’s part, but one with fascist overtones. On Twitter and elsewhere, it has produced suggestive chatter about “making lists” that evoke Nazi Germany (following the dictates of Godwin’s law). Even the usually astute Saagar Enjeti on The Hill’s “Rising” complained that AOC was making a list. But as a Republican, Enjeti may have had his own motives for doing so.

      Historical Note

      In the age of social media, plausible deniability has become an essential item in every politician’s toolbox. But denial need not always be plausible, as Trump has repeatedly demonstrated. President-elect Joe Biden has also provided outstanding examples of not very plausible denial of his past positions. When reminded of his active role in promoting George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq during the primaries, he implausibly denied the well-documented fact that he actively supported that war.

      Troves of public evidence exist of Biden playing the paradoxical role of a Democratic leader backing the dishonest and murderous policies of a Republican president. A year ago, Vox reminded its readers that “his record, well documented in speeches on the Senate floor, congressional hearings, and press interviews from 2001 through his time in the White House, is that of a senator bullish about the push to war who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public.”

      Biden’s mendacious claim that he opposed the Iraq War may have lacked plausibility for anyone enterprising enough to consult the public archives, but it didn’t prevent him from being nominated by the party and elected by the people. Denial can work. He had an easier job plausibly denying Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault since there was no video of it in the archives, but even that required a concerted effort by The New York Times to make it plausible enough to disappear as a serious campaign issue.

      One reason Biden could successfully lie about his support for the Iraq war was President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to challenge Biden on that issue. Trump is still engaged in Iraq. And in Washington, the reigning orthodoxy is to consider all US wars legitimate. It might even be deemed insulting to the troops for a commander-in-chief to admit that all presidents have shown an alacrity for sending them into harm’s way on unfounded pretexts. It’s part of their job profile.

      A Trump ally targeted by AOC’s tweet and cited by Politico offers one very pertinent insight: “They argue that if the Bush-era politicians and staffers who led the country to war in Iraq survived without being purged from politics, media and corporate America, then Trump’s advisers won’t either.” There’s nothing to fear.

      Barack Obama famously refused to consider any investigation into the manifest war crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. He cited the importance of looking forward rather than backward. That seems to have defined the pattern for future administrations. Every administration’s sins must be forgotten, if not forgiven. That is precisely the argument Saagar Enjeti seems to be making: that bad policies are made by good people who may just have been obeying orders (even when giving them). Like Obama’s “look forward, not backward” approach, Enjeti argues: “Let’s take down the temperature.” In other words, let bygones be bygones.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is nevertheless making a serious and pragmatic point that Democrats would be wise to carefully listen to and act on. In any election, negative facts concerning the opponent will have a much greater impact in terms of vote-getting than the discussion of positions on political issues. Material evidence, including deleted tweets, will be usable. That is so fundamental a principle that most politicians nowadays totally neglect the issues and focus exclusively on their opponent’s flaws.

      As for worries about being ostracized, the Politico article makes it clear that the entire complaint from the Republicans and the media is nothing more than political theater. A close adviser of Trump cited in the article points to the comfortable post-political career of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. He boasts about his own opportunities to make money as a consultant and author, thanks to his experience at the Trump White House. The adviser then offers this comforting thought: “Bush left office very unpopular, people thought thousands of people died in an unnecessary war and he was responsible for it. Everybody forgets that now that he’s an artist who doesn’t do partisan politics.” So, even if ostracized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, life is pretty good.

      The adviser adds one more telling remark referring to junior staffers in the White House: “You have breathed rarefied air.” In other words, you belong to a protected realm at the core of the oligarchy, where there will always be connections, cash and opportunities to go for an exciting new ride as you accompany other prominent faces and suck in even more rarefied air.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      'Great expectations': how world leaders reacted to Biden and Harris's election win – video

      by

      Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election on Twitter, and spoke of ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ in later statements.
      Biden’s key foreign policy priorities are cooperation in the fight against coronavirus, a commitment to rejoin the UN Paris climate agreement and, more broadly, to promise a change in tone toward traditional US allies. 
      Russia and China are yet to congratulate the president-elect, as the outgoing president, Donald Trump, is yet to concede defeat
      Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden More