|
Republicans Defend Trump's Decision to Give Putin Office Space at White House |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 26 July 2019 12:54 |
|
Borowitz writes: "In a sign that Donald J. Trump's control over the Republican Party is now complete, congressional Republicans on Thursday defended his decision to give the Russian President Vladimir Putin office space at the White House."
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexei Nikolsky/Getty)
Republicans Defend Trump's Decision to Give Putin Office Space at White House
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
26 July 19
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 n a sign that Donald J. Trump’s control over the Republican Party is now complete, congressional Republicans on Thursday defended his decision to give the Russian President Vladimir Putin office space at the White House.
A newly emboldened Trump told reporters that he had furnished Putin with a corner-office suite and secretarial staff to use whenever the Russian President is in town. “He says he plans to be here more and more,” Trump said.
Putin, who moved file boxes into his new office on Thursday afternoon, said he looks forward to many productive hours at the White House with few, if any, interruptions.
“At the Kremlin, people are always sticking their heads in my office, asking me questions,” he said. “President Trump just spends all day watching TV.”
At the U.S. Senate, a visibly angry Senator Lindsey Graham called allegations that there was anything improper about Trump giving office space to Putin “totally unfair, disgusting, and vile.”
“Vladimir Putin has worked harder to run the U.S. government than all of the Democrats in Congress put together,” Graham said.
 |
|
FOCUS: Banks Sued for LIBOR Collusion - Again! |
|
|
Friday, 26 July 2019 11:34 |
|
Taibbi writes: "What if a sizable portion of global economic activity rests on magical thinking?"
The Bank of England in the financial district of London. (photo: Stefan Kiefer/Shutterstock)
Banks Sued for LIBOR Collusion - Again!
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
26 July 19
What if a sizable portion of global economic activity rests on magical thinking?
 wo summers ago, the head of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority, Andrew Bailey, made news when he announced that LIBOR – the leading benchmark for setting global interest rates – had a “sustainability” issue. The rate is supposed to measure the rate at which banks borrow from each other, but Bailey said it wasn’t based on real borrowing.
“The absence of active underlying markets raises a serious question about the sustainability of the LIBOR benchmarks,” he said. “If an active market does not exist, how can even the best run benchmark measure it?”
These comments by a senior British regulator were draped in enough jargon that they barely reached non-financial audiences. Still, it was jarring.
LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, helps set rates for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial instruments, including swaps, annuities, credit cards, mortgages and other products. If Bailey was right, it meant a sizable portion of global economic activity rested on magical thinking.
A secondary concern involved manipulation. If banks were inventing numbers to submit to the LIBOR committee, could they not also be manipulating rates to line pockets? Bailey didn’t delve in that direction, but the possibility certainly seemed to exist that the world’s major investors – including localities and pension funds – were being systematically ripped off.
At the time, I joked Bailey’s comments might inspire a pan-civilization lawsuit called Earth v. Banks. It hasn’t come to that did, but a class of investors and retirement funds including Putnam Bank and the Hawaii Sheet Metal Workers Pension Fund did recently bring an antitrust suit alleging just such a scheme. The July 1 complaint is an amended version of a class action suit originally filed earlier this year.
The action against JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Barclays, and numerous other banks uses both documentary evidence and data to argue that banks have been purposefully depressing interest rates. The idea would be to lower payouts to investors who are contractually due to receive LIBOR, while lessening costs for LIBOR borrowers, many of whom are banks.
LIBOR was once set by the British Bankers’ Association. It’s now managed by the Intercontinental Exchange, owners of the New York Stock Exchange, which rebranded it “ICE LIBOR.” Since February, 2014, ICE LIBOR has been “the world’s most widely used benchmark for short-term bank borrowing rates.”
Every day, by 11:40 a.m., a panel of 18 of the world’s biggest banks tells ICE how much they estimate they’d have to pay to borrow from other banks, by answering the following question:
“At what rate could you borrow funds, were you to do so by asking for and then accepting inter-bank offers in a reasonable market size just prior to 11 am?”
LIBOR was originally created during a time when banks were borrowing a lot of cash from each other. Beginning in the nineties and early 2000s, however, banks began to use other venues, like the Treasury Repo market, to obtain financing when needed. Interbank lending tapered off.
Because of this, for years and years, when banks on the LIBOR panel submitted numbers, they were apparently just submitting guesses based on what they believed it would cost to borrow, if they actually were borrowing.
Jerome Powell of the Fed’s Board of Governors and Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Association wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in August, 2017, putting it this way:
“… banks no longer borrow much in those markets. In essence, banks are contributing a daily judgment about something they no longer do.”
The authors added a lack of real data means, “submissions by panel banks are largely based upon judgment (as opposed to transactions).” A Fed official later wrote that some LIBOR submissions were based on “no transactions at all.”
In other words, banks were guesstimating. Why? After the crash, regulators sniffed out two motives for manipulation.
The first cases involved suppressing LIBOR in 2008 and 2009, to create an artificial impression of market stability during the crisis. In one incident, the Bank of England was accused of asking Barclays chiefs to “just do it” and push LIBOR lower, so as to reassure the public.
In a second, more grotesque form of corruption, individual traders at various banks goaded LIBOR submitters to move rates to protect certain investments. In an infamous case involving the Royal Bank of Scotland, traders were nabbed in texts offering LIBOR submitters everything from sex to “sushi rolls from yesterday” to drop LIBOR “like a whore’s drawers.”
Even though these two problems were ostensibly corrected, LIBOR was apparently still being contrived. As evidence, the suit points to published statements from the banks themselves, including members of the The Alternative Reference Rates Committee.
The AARC is a group of “market participants” that includes Bank of America, Citigroup, Barclays, Rabobank, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, and UBS, among other banking institutions. Formed by the Fed after the 2008 crash, the AARC was designed to “help ensure a successful transition from US dollar (USD) LIBOR to a more robust reference rate.”
In other words, in a typical post-crash absurdity, many of the banks asked to help reform LIBOR were the same companies that earned giant regulatory settlements for abuse of LIBOR. As plaintiffs put it:
“Many of the same banks that provided the reason for reforming and replacing BBA LIBOR in the first place… were in a position of control over reforming and replacing the benchmark.”
This ]committee of market “participants” in September of 2018 published the following:
“LIBOR is increasingly based on the expert judgment of panel banks due to the declining amount of unsecured, wholesale borrowings by banks… the scarcity of underlying transactions also makes LIBOR potentially unsustainable…”
The AARC quote suggests the banks themselves were cognizant, both in-house and in consultation with each other, that LIBOR for some time has been based on “judgment” instead of “transactions.”
The complaint includes charts comparing LIBOR rates to various other market indicators dating back to 2014, including credit default swaps, treasury repurchase general collateral (“GC”) rates, and the yields on the banks’ own bonds. They found the rates were not only consistently mismatched, but mismatched in the same direction – LIBOR was lower in each chart.
How would banks make money by moving LIBOR down across the board? The suit argues the answer lay in the individual banks’ treasury departments, which are responsible for funding other operations within the bank. Plaintiffs argue that the banks’ funding desks have been using interest rate swaps to convert long-term fixed rate borrowings to holdings indexed to LIBOR.
“For example, in 2016,” the suit reads, “Bank of America reported that by swapping fixed-rate liabilities for USD ICE LIBOR liabilities, the firm was able to earn more than $2 billion dollars over and above what it would otherwise have earned.”
This is not easy to follow, but the gist is banks have been taking large sums borrowed on fixed rates and using swaps to make their interest payments more based on LIBOR. Because they have some control over LIBOR, which has been kept artificially low, they end up paying less. Conversely, any investor who is receiving LIBOR in return – this can include anything from pension funds to bond funds to other banks – will get paid less.
“Defendants conspired to depress USD ICE LIBOR rates during the Class Period,” the suit reads, “with the purpose and effect of depressing payments by Panel Bank Defendants on USD ICE LIBOR Financial Instruments…”
The public has already had time to grow tired of hearing several absurd iterations of the LIBOR scandal. We’ve heard it was rigged to make markets seem safer, then that it was rigged to make a bunch of twenty-something trading sociopaths bigger bonuses.
Two years ago, we learned LIBOR was probably not based on reality, an assertion that by now is not even really controversial (witness Bloomberg describing LIBOR last month as “just a made up number, or an aggregate of made-up numbers”).
The new concept: LIBOR is not just made up, but has been kept systematically low to tilt the entire lending landscape in favor of megabanks. It’s hard to conceive of a settlement broad enough to compensate for years of that kind of activity.
LIBOR is set to be phased out in 2021. If you read the financial press closely, you’ll note occasional semi-panicked comments to the effect that no one has a good plan for replacing the rate written into trillions of dollars of contracts.
Here and there you’ll find the 2021 compared to Y2K, an unavoidable changeover whose consequences are unknown. “Now, like then, words like apocalypse and panic are being spoken and written,” wrote Forbes last October.
There’s some sentiment for changing out LIBOR for the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR), which measures the cost of borrowing cash collateralized by Treasury Securities. SOFR, however, measures secured borrowing, while LIBOR is supposed to measure unsecured borrowing, a significant difference. People who made investments expecting to receive LIBOR may not be happy with getting SOFR instead. It could be a mess, all over the world.
As Forbes put it, sorting all of this out before 2021 is “a full employment act for Wall Street analysts and lawyers.”
The new lawsuit is probably just the beginning of many serious legal battles. If LIBOR’s past is any guide, it will throw us a few more curveballs before the end.
|
|
|
FOCUS: Nadler and Pelosi Are on a Collision Course |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51243"><span class="small">Betsy Woodruff, Sam Stein, Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 26 July 2019 11:06 |
|
Excerpt: "The Judiciary Committee chair is facing immeasurably difficult political pressures as he navigates a post-Mueller world."
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY). (photo: Jim Watson/Getty)
Nadler and Pelosi Are on a Collision Course
By Betsy Woodruff, Sam Stein, Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
26 July 19
The Judiciary Committee chair is facing immeasurably difficult political pressures as he navigates a post-Mueller world.
 ep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) finds himself at the most delicate point of his tenure atop the House Judiciary Committee.
With his star witness, Robert Mueller, having testified to less-than-stellar reviews, the longtime New York Democrat is pinched between a growing pro-impeachment chorus and a House Speaker hell-bent on pumping the brakes on such talk.
Publicly, his colleagues and his party’s leadership praise his handling of oversight into the Trump administration. But behind the scenes discontent is mounting over what some view as a less-than-smooth process in handling investigations into President Trump and his advisers.
“There is constant battling. The speaker is very much directing the major decisions,” said one Democratic lawmaker. “I think this is a strategy [by Nancy Pelosi] to try and slow-walk this process and shift some of the attention away from her not moving forward. She puts it on the Judiciary Committee, saying, ‘Oh they haven’t yet done all the investigative work yet. They are being meticulous and taking their time.’ It’s a way to slow-walk it.”
All committee chairs and House speakers have disagreements over jurisdiction, power, and strategic direction. But the relationship between Nadler and Pelosi is particularly sensitive now given the stakes of the issues they’re tackling. The special counsel’s office has closed, its report made public, and its director, Mueller, has testified on Capitol Hill about its contents. Now that the Russia investigation, as the American public understands it, has all but come to an end, both leaders are left answering questions about what comes next.
For Pelosi, the answer is simple: Stay the course. For Nadler, that course is becoming increasingly difficult to trek with members from his own committee, and constituents back home, calling not only for impeachment proceedings but for tougher posture toward a White House that seems hell-bent on making his oversight work impossible.
As more lawmakers have come out in favor of impeachment proceedings even after Mueller’s sometimes-shaky testimony, Pelosi has remained unmoved. After course-correcting the caucus on the impeachment messaging earlier this year, sources say the speaker is not ready to relax her watchful eye over Nadler’s committee, fearful the caucus could once again nosedive into chaos.
Those close to Nadler say the chairman works in tandem with Pelosi on strategy and messaging, often to the chagrin of his fellow committee members who wish he would act more forcefully on his pro-impeachment impulses. His defenders argue that talk of tension is overblown, fed often by aggrieved party members who dish to the press. They also say he has successfully balanced the demands of the Democratic base and the push by Pelosi’s office to implement a more methodical approach.
Former Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) said she believes Nadler “would be in full impeachment mode” if he were just operating on his own. But he’s restrained himself, colleagues say, in order to help manage a caucus with diverse opinions on the matter.
“I think the chairman has been very meticulous in kind of a chess game strategy. He is working very closely with House counsel to make sure we are positioning ourselves in the strongest position; that we are doing it in a way that strengthens our hand in the litigation,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI). “From the outside that can look frustrating and maybe not everyone understands the legal intricacies. But I think the chairman recognizes that the Speaker’s instructions are to continue to hold the president accountable and to collect all of the information you need.”
The next steps in that accountability process are set to come soon, with Nadler’s team intensifying their efforts to get Trump’s former lawyer, Don McGahn, to testify. Following Mueller’s hearing Wednesday, Nadler said the committee was prepared to sue for access to the grand jury material related to Mueller’s report and to enforce a subpoena for McGahn. Two aides familiar with that effort said while the committee is in the throes of preparing the suit, it will also try to negotiate directly with McGahn about appearing in public for questioning.
But while Nadler is spearheading the committee process, he isn’t always the one in the driver’s seat.
Following the release of the Mueller Report in April, the Judiciary Committee began negotiating with the Department of Justice for access to the unredacted report and its underlying documents. During that process, according to three sources familiar with the situation, Pelosi stepped in, telling the committee it needed to fight to get those documents released to the entire House. Two of those sources said they believe that intervention led to the initial breakdown in talks between the Judiciary Committee and DOJ. (The committee ended up obtaining both the unredacted report and some of its underlying documents and members have viewed them over the last several weeks at DOJ).
Adding to the complexity of Pelosi and Nadler’s relationship is its history–or limitations thereof. A former lawmaker noted that when Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) helmed the committee for Democrats, he rarely pushed back against Pelosi’s agenda. Conyers left Congress in late 2017 during a sexual harassment investigation, and now Nadler has taken his place. The New Yorker, the lawmaker noted, is much pluckier than his predecessor.
The Judiciary Committee has been at the front lines of the fight between Congress and the Trump administration. But a host of other committees share executive branch oversight responsibilities. If impeachment proceedings began, all those investigations would move under House Judiciary. Instead, half a dozen other chairs–all with healthy egos–are in on the action, and see little incentive to fork over the spotlight to Nadler. People familiar with the Judiciary Committee’s inner workings believe Pelosi is not keen on consolidating work under one chair.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that Pelosi has resisted centralizing all of this under House Judiciary,” said an aide to a Democrat on that committee. “She’s made her position clear, although she’s never said it out loud: that impeachment would be a political loser for Democrats. And so she is very much in control of the caucus.”
Other Hill denizens view Nadler as frustrated, firmly under the thumb of Democratic leadership and unable to advance an impeachment cause he instinctively supports. Staffers and members close to the committee have frustrations too. Some say Nadler has been captured by shiny objects–trying to do too much with too little. Others fear that the chair is overly concerned with the threat of a primary challenger back home—from a challenger who has targeted him on his handling of impeachment
Three staffers who spoke to The Daily Beast over the last month said several lawmakers have expressed privately that they feel the committee is moving too slowly, and thus far failing to zero in on key priorities. Others point to episodes that, in retrospect, seem to be head-scratchers. At the top of the list is Nadler’s abortive effort to make Attorney General Bill Barr answer questions from committee staff rather than members. Barr refused point-blank, offering instead to come to a hearing before the full committee. Nadler refused, and the House moved forward to hold him in contempt.
In an interview, Cicilline defended the decision, saying it was important to establish that the committee controlled the construct of the hearings and not the witnesses. But months after the fracas, Barr still hasn’t spoken to the lower chamber and some wonder: What was gained?
“The whole thing about the staff interviewing Barr was stupid,” said the senior aide. “Was that a hill to die on? A hill that no one understands!”
While Nadler navigates the tricky politics of impeachment and intramural Democratic fights, he remains a perennial thorn in Trump’s side. On Wednesday night, several hours after Mueller finished testifying, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani sent The Daily Beast a garbled, unsolicited text message, complete with emojis, reading, “This is like a Grade B horror movie with Nadler and [Adam] Schiff the stars. Remember the hand keeps coming up and you have to bat it down 4 or 5 times.”
Giuliani, who repped the president during the Mueller probe, would repeat this analogy—of Nadler and impeachment as the zombie hand popping out from the dirt—several times on Wednesday and Thursday, including in a Hannity segment that Trump would then tweet out.
Stressing that Trump’s legal team sees Nadler as a primary antagonist in this stage, Giuliani added: “Nadler played according to script and was arguing with Pelosi for impeachment. That’s the hand sticking out of the grave.”
The president, for his part, doesn’t expect the congressman to let up any time soon, either. In fact, he has nursed a personal grudge against Nadler for decades.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump would bring up Nadler in conversations without any prompting, just to trash him, per two people with knowledge of the internal discussions. In one instance, one of the sources recalled, the future president made a point of cruelly mocking Nadler’s stomach-reduction surgery.
|
|
Why They Hate Bernie |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43875"><span class="small">Branko Marcetic, Jacobin</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 26 July 2019 08:42 |
|
Marcetic writes: "Remember the frenzied, paranoid style of right-wing anti-Clintonism? The lies, the conspiracy theories, the deeply personal disgust? Well, it's back - only this time it's migrated to the Democratic Party and its unhinged attacks on Bernie Sanders."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Why They Hate Bernie
By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
26 July 19
Remember the frenzied, paranoid style of right-wing anti-Clintonism? The lies, the conspiracy theories, the deeply personal disgust? Well, it’s back — only this time it’s migrated to the Democratic Party and its unhinged attacks on Bernie Sanders.
here’s shocking news out of MSNBC: its ever-more-conservative team of analysts aren’t fans of Bernie Sanders.
“Just as a woman, probably considered a somewhat moderate Democrat, I — Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl,” former New York prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah told the panelists of last weekend’s Up with David Gura. “I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is, but I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate . . . I don’t understand young women who support him.”
Cue smiling and nodding from fellow panelist Zerlina Maxwell.
“We’ll leave it there,” concluded host Gura.
The fact that MSNBC — a network, owned by union-buster and habitual labor rights violator Comcast, that one of its own journalists has criticized for turning into a propaganda arm of the national security state — is hostile to Sanders is not a surprise. If you’d tuned in to the second Democratic debate in June, you would’ve been treated to a pre-show featuring Claire McCaskill (fresh off losing her Senate seat by turning sharply right and alienating and ignoring traditional Democratic voters) running Sanders down and, together with Chris Matthews, making excuses in advance for why Joe Biden would perform poorly (credit where credit’s due: Biden did indeed do horribly). And, if you watched it to the end, you would’ve seen someone at the network audibly scoffing as Sanders made his closing statement.
So MSNBC’s dislike of Sanders is nothing new. What’s significant about Rocah’s statement is that it perfectly sums up the attitude of much of the centrist Democratic establishment when it comes to Sanders.
While in the real world, Bernie Sanders — a politician with a 100-percent Planned Parenthood lifetime rating who’s spent a career speaking out and fighting for the rights of women and other working people — has been preparing this presidential run since 2016, shadowing him has been another Bernie Sanders. Unlike the real Sanders, who was once dubbed an “honorary woman” by feminist Gloria Steinem, this shadow Sanders is an unreconstructed misogynist, and an egomaniac to boot. He’s also a dangerous, authoritarian demagogue, the mirror image of Trump, and just as beholden to Vladimir Putin. Oh, and he’s deeply racist, too.
For the most part, this alternate reality exists solely on Twitter, where self-identified Democrat, liberal, and centrist users routinely vent their rage at the antics of the sinister, online-only Sanders they’ve willed into existence like a cyber Candyman. From time to time, however, it bleeds into the real world.
Just consider some of the idiotic Sanders-related “controversies” we’ve already had to sit through during this election cycle. In February, online outraged erupted because Sanders, for the third year in a row, delivered a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address, this time after the official Democratic rebuttal by Stacey Abrams. This was construed by the anti-Sanders online space as a way for him to “upstage” and silence a black woman.
That outrage was fanned by former Clinton campaign alum Zerlina Maxwell — the same Zerlina Maxwell smiling and nodding as a former prosecutor declared her evidence-free claim that Sanders didn’t care about women. When Kamala Harris — whose actually unsavory record as a prosecutor Maxwell, speaking on MSNBC in 2017, declared off-limits for criticism because “we need to give her a chance to shine or not shine” — turned out to be doing her State of the Union rebuttal before Abrams, Maxwell helpfully clarified: “Pre speech is fine. Post speech or after Abrams is not.” Maxwell would later issue a drearily predictable criticism of Sanders’s announcement, claiming he didn’t mention race or gender until twenty-three minutes into his speech, which turned out to be an easily disprovable lie. She later clarified that “talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as talking about race and gender.” (In fact, Sanders did both).
This was just one element of a constant parade of dishonest, sometimes mutually contradictory attacks on Sanders. Former Clinton campaign staffers complained to Politico about “his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders” using a private jet during 2016 . . . to campaign in as many places as possible for their candidate. Others complained he didn’t campaign for Clinton enough — a widespread belief in online anti-Sanders fantasyland.
When a woman accused Joe Biden of inappropriate touching, some speculated the accusation was orchestrated by Sanders. Commentators would habitually parse his words in the most uncharitable way possible to suggest he was a bigot. He was said to have hired an “attack dog” and a “bully” — aka an award-winning journalist — as his speechwriter, with one Atlantic piece suggesting a secret arrangement blending campaign work and reporting that had gone on for months, a story that quickly fell apart. The list could go on and on. All the while, Democrats and their boosters demanded party unity and ferociously objected to even the softest critiques of other candidates’ actual voting records.
“I’m not necessarily an anti-Bernie guy, especially not when it comes to his policies,” one ex–Clinton staffer told Vox. “But he has this self-righteous attitude to himself.”
These have been only marginally less desperate than the bog of innuendo, half-truths, and lies anti-Sanders zealots wallow in in extremely online spaces like Twitter. One user edited a video of Sanders telling schoolkids about the history of bigotry in the United States to make it seem like he was uncritically feeding them racist stereotypes. His quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass was “cultural appropriation,” and offensive because he (i.e., Douglass) didn’t explicitly mention race. And did you know Sanders once used the word “niggardly,” a Middle English word that has nothing to do with the racial slur? Let’s not forget, he’s also a Russian agent.
Something curious has happened here. In their visceral dislike of Sanders, whose record and words they cherry-pick and distort, whom they imbue with sinister motives and conspiracies, and whom some can’t even fully explain what it is about him that sets them off, liberals and centrists are, ironically, aping the very same hatred the Right has long held for a different set of politicians: the Clintons.
Throughout the Clinton years and beyond, conservatives were driven into a frenzy by the occupants of the White House. The Right associated them with all manner of outlandish conspiracies, such as the supposed “murder” of Vince Foster. Just as Sanders’s “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union — actually an official mayoral trip as part of a sister city program Sanders had set up with a Russian city — is constantly trotted out today to attack him, the Right tried to make hay of the fact that Clinton once traveled to the country in the 1960s. Right-wing columnist George Will opined that Clinton wasn’t “the worst president we ever had, just the worst person who was ever president.”
“I openly admit that I just don’t like the man, and my disgust is both personal and political,” wrote Trent Lott, one of Clinton’s congressional nemeses.
This rage and delusion was particularly aimed at Clinton’s first lady, later senator from New York. Conservatives distorted and took out of context her academic writing to claim she wanted kids to be able to sue their parents and that she hated the American family. They projected a variety of negative traits onto her personality: that she was angry, aggressive, a Lady Macbeth figure. Her comments that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies” were construed as anti-homemaker, even as Barbara Bush got a pass for saying pretty much the same thing. One right-wing columnist called her the Democratic equivalent of Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Communist Party’s secretary of ideology. A New Republic writer who later became a Trump supporter declared her a “false feminist.” It was all part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Clinton complained was out to get her and her husband.
It’s hard not to read evaluations from the first lady’s 1990s detractors without getting a hint of déjà vu.
“A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,” complained Arianna Huffington, then a fervent Clinton administration critic.
“There’s just something about her that pisses people off,” said Sally Quinn, another longtime critic. “You don’t even know why you hate her.”
“People can’t really articulate what it is that they can’t trust,” Clinton-enemy-turned-ally David Brock complained in 2016. “Unfortunately, it’s a mythology that’s part of the culture now.”
The Right’s hatred for the Clintons was rooted, sometimes consciously but often not, in their perception of the couple as the embodiment of 1960s counterculture liberalism — the decade, in the eyes of conservatives, where everything went wrong. Of course, in reality, the Clintons were anything but: Hillary had been a Goldwater girl, they crossed a picket line on their first date, and, as president, Bill was a “wild, drunken Republican dream,” as Time magazine memorably put it. Clinton desired many of the same things the Right did, but they felt a deep, internalized hatred for him and his wife anyway, which they sometimes openly acknowledged they couldn’t explain. It’s a striking parallel with Sanders, who has fought and continues to fight lonely battles for virtually everything Democrats and liberals say they want, yet is now the target of never-ending hatred from those same quarters.
It wasn’t always like this. Sanders used to be beloved by many liberals and Democrats, even establishment ones. MSNBC’s Joy Reid was once a fan of Sanders, calling him “the great clarion voice in the Democratic Party,” before transitioning to attacking him full time, even claiming in 2017 that he mistreated his wife. In fact, the network loved having him on during the Obama years to serve as the voice of ordinary progressives, offering him unqualified praise as late as 2014 for being a “bipartisan dealmaker” and securing “genuine progressive victories” as a senator.
What happened? One answer is that many prominent Democrats and liberals don’t actually want the things they say they want — whether it’s because it might alienate their donors, hamper their future money-making prospects, or both. Another answer is that, until 2016, Sanders wasn’t considered a threat to Democratic politics as usual.
The Democratic establishment was fine with Sanders when he was just a lonely voice fighting for progressive values, as long as the gravy train for consultants, lobbyists, donors, and former politicians kept on running. But once he went from just a voice in the wilderness to the head of a movement that threatened to upend this arrangement, something had to be done. This was why the prevailing media narrative around Sanders swiftly changed as his chances increased over the course of 2016. Where he was at first a rumpled wonk whose support consisted of “aging Grateful Dead hipsters, environmentalists and professors,” he quickly became a charismatic yet empty demagogue who lacks understanding of policy and is backed by an army of naive, misguided youth.
It seems that Democrats in the age of Trump haven’t just adopted the playbook of the Right to attack the Left. They’ve also taken on the conspiratorial, frenzied style of antagonism that drove conservative hatred of the Clintons, too. Establishment Democrats may not be able to put their finger on what they don’t like about Sanders, but it’s pretty clear to the rest of us.
|
|
