Tabby Friday
- Worth a read (although it will likely make you mad), via Lawfare: Goodbye to All That (My resignation from the FBI).
- Via The Independent: CBS staff in turmoil over ‘Trump shakedown’ after Stephen Colbert and The Late Show are canceled. The next place to watch: what happens to The Daily Show?
- Via Politico: Kilmar Abrego Garcia describes ‘severe beatings’ and ‘psychological torture’ in Salvadoran prison.
- Via The Intelligencer: Who’s Afraid of Zohran Mamdani?
- Via CNN: Obama’s blunt message for Democrats: ‘Toughen up’. All well and good. But I must confess, I would like to see a whoooole lot more leadership from Obama than I have.
- Via The Independent: Trump claims he never ‘wrote a picture.’ His sketchy Epstein lie has now been exposed.
- Via Gabe Fleischer at The Preamble: MAGA Outrage Over the Epstein Files Grows. This includes the dumbest rich-guy nonsense: “Trump and Epstein eventually had a falling-out in 2004 when they vied for the same Florida mansion, which Trump succeeded in buying.”
- The piece points to this 2019 WaPo piece that describes, in detail, Trump’s relationship with Epstein: Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partied together. Then an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion came between them. It is just a reminder that their relationship has been well well-known quantity.
- While trying to have it both ways is not unusual for politicians, the recent spending package seems to be especially fertile ground for GOP members of Congress on that maneuver.
- And speaking of Trump and Epstein.
“Trump claims he never ‘wrote a picture.’ His sketchy Epstein lie has now been exposed.”
I saw what you did there.
Anyone who thinks pedo-gate represents some kind of turning point for MAGA voters is fooling themselves. What I’m mostly reminded of is the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, where right-wing media was struggling to come up with a message (I remember a clip of Janine Pirro condemning the attack), and Trump ended up leaving office with the worst approval-to-disapproval ever recorded by Gallup for an outgoing president, except for Nixon just before resignation. After the dust settled, however, the right coalesced around a defense and he was able to recover to his original (mediocre) level of popularity.
I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here. The scandal could hurt him politically (though even there I’m a bit skeptical), just not with the hardcore base. It’s swing voters we need to pay attention to.
Who writes pictures?
@Kathy: It occurred to me when I saw the headline that if he ever said this under oath, he could avoid perjury charges on technical grounds that he was correct he didn’t “write” the pictures. (It’s a bit like the definition of sexual relations during the Lewinsky scandal, just a lot weirder. No one ever accused Clinton of not knowing how to speak English.)
@Kylopod:
I don’t know… this could be the point where they shift from opposing pedophiles to supporting ephebophiles, while still opposing pedophiles.
And perhaps a redefinition of sex trafficking.
Ultimately, the twin Libertarian goals of lowering the age of consent and legalizing prostitution might become a major party platform.
The drawing by Trump shown at the link is actually pretty good. There’s an alternate history for you, Kathy, Trump sells the family business and tries to make it as an artist. He’s a good hustler, maybe he’d have made it.
MAGA voters will deliver a reckoning after the administration releases documents that implicate trump directly in Epstein pedo-gate wrongdoing… which is not going to happen.
@gVOR10:
How about this instead:
A physician travels back in time with some mifepristone and misoprostol, and doses mama Taco so it appears she had a miscarriage.
After all, pretty good doesn’t cut it. He has to be the best ever. And going to art school to learn things like composition? He knows more about writing paintings than anyone!
@Kylopod:
Probably not with core Trumpian MAGA.
But there’s the QANON-MAGA segment that may be influenced.
The questions is, how many are that overly-online group?
Not big, I suspect.
But every possible abstention is a gain if it plays out in the mid-terms, and longer term if erodes the MAGA activist base to an extent that allows relatively sane Republicans a chance for survival.
(The key word being “relatively”: think McConnell or Ryan, or such. Even Elon? lol)
@Kathy: Art critic annoyed by inspirational posters in every office goes back in time to make sure the artist never gets accepted into art school. Success, also he accidentally altered history to create the holocaust.
Bonus points if you can make it seem natural that a book of original-timeline Hitler’s cat comic strip falls into Jim Davis’s hands and he copies it for Garfield, which was better in the original German.
Re Mamdani: WIKI has a good page on Real Wages. It has a nice graph showing Nominal and Real wages from 2006 to last year. Real wages have gone up about 10%, actually coming down since a peak driven by COVID. That’s an average rate of less than six tenths of a percent per year. The MAGA are entirely justified in believing they’ve been screwed by the establishment. But they’ve been conned into voting for the people who screwed them. The WIKI page also has a graph plainly showing the uncoupling of wages from productivity, starting in the 70s, after JFK cut the top marginal rate, and when we started electing Republicans again at the national level and ended Les Trente Glorieuses. Gains have largely gone to the top.
Mamdani represents the same disaffection with our elites. Dem elites are likely less confident in their ability to deflect and appease their base. It’s understandable that the NY establishment fears what Mandami may represent. But it’s what Dems need to regain dominance.
And would somebody explain to those people that Sweden doesn’t have Gulags.
I don’t think the Ellisons are so dumb as to expect that Colbert and his mockery of Trump will disappear after The Late Show goes away. But perhaps Trump is that dumb. Perhaps he’s still stuck in his attention to legacy media.
If the show has become “expensive to produce” it’s because Stephen has to be paid. None of the rest of it is that expensive. So what I expect to see is that Colbert forms a production company and produces it via streaming. Does anybody think he won’t be more popular than Joe Rogan? That he can’t make more money than Alex Jones?
Honestly, Mr. Beast look out!
@gVOR10: I could not agree more. The moment is becoming ripe. We need to not waste it by squabbling over minutiae, like Democrats so often do.
Get people elected, then squabble of the fine details of policy.
@Jay L. Gischer: Conan’s podcast success, which is now on YouTube and SiriusXM, is a model that I expect Colbert will pursue if he wants to keep working.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The four late-night guys, Colbert, Kimmel, Seth and Fallon had a podcast together during the pandemic. AI believes the Smartless podcast hauls in 100 million. YouTube and Spotify are the new TV.
@gVOR10:
Though, tbf, Swedish real wage levels have not done that well recently.
Though working out the exact comparisons to the US has a lot of “bugger factors”.
otoh, Sweden does have a far better social services/health provision; if you had to pick a country to be middle income and get ill or unemployed, Sweden is your better bet.
Interestingly, that is not based on wealth taxes or similar (the rich in Sweden have no prospect of being expropriated into poverty), but on rather high universal taxation.
Which provides high universal benefits.
As to gulags, MAGA seems to have developed a hysterical vision of the “oppression” of the “white conservative middle class” in Europe, by taxation and curbs on fredom of speech, which is utterly delusional.
Never mind Sweden: consider Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, etc.
Europe is as boisterously argumentative as ever.
And often combines this with an appreciation for social policy that goes across the political spectrum: there are few either conservative or populist parties in Europe that propose dismantling social spending.
Trivia: the USSR didn’t formally have gulags, rather they had GULAG. An acronym made from the Russian words for Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps.
@JohnSF:
The GQP has gone so far to the right, that anything slightly to their left gets termed Communism.
@Kathy:
Which is always funny to some more traditionalist European conservatives, who frequently tend to regard US Republicans as a weird variety of “liberal”.
I mean: a republic, a constitution, separation of powers, no established church, formal equality, universal suffrage, free markets, free speech, judicial supremacy, etc etc.
Liberalism or what?
lol