Tag: GOP

5 ways Trump and his supporters are using the same strategies as science deniers

While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.

From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.

As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.

View the complete November 27 article by Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, on the Conversation website here.

Former government ethics chief lays out 39 ways the Republican Party is destroying democracy

AlterNet logoWalter Shaub is a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics who served under President Barack Obama and briefly under Donald Trump. Shaub resigned from the position in July 2017 in frustration, saying he could do no more to curb ethical violations within the Trump administration. He cited the administration as proof that there was a need to strengthen the ethics program. On Sunday, he posted a thread on Twitter outlining the dangerous precedents being set by the Republican Party in its truly unethical handling of its mad king Trump.

Walter Shaub

✔@waltshaub

1/ Senate Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent that threatens the republic itself. I’m not naive enough to think they would hold Democratic presidents to the low standard they’ve applied to Trump, but all future presidents will be able to point to Trump to justify:

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View the complete November 25 article by Walter Einenkel from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

How Trump keeps making it tougher for his GOP impeachment defenders

Washington Post logoUp against the wall, Donald Trump has always reached into his ready arsenal of aggressive tactics. Confronted with challenges that would make many people search for a way out, he punches back, insults those who speak against him, tosses up falsehoods and distracting stories he knows will get big play in the news media and offers frequently shifting alternative narratives.

Now, facing the likelihood that he will become only the third president ever to be impeached, Trump is deploying his full playbook — even as his statements repeatedly undercut the case Republican defenders in Congress have made on his behalf.

“It makes it more politically difficult for us,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), “but it doesn’t change how we’ll vote on impeachment.”

View the complete November 22 article by Marc Fisher and Mike DeBonis on The Washington Post website here.

Back-to-back losses in key governors’ races send additional warning to Trump and GOP ahead of 2020

Washington Post logoWhen Kentucky’s Republican governor lost his bid for reelection two weeks ago despite President Trump’s active endorsement, the president and his allies brushed it off by declaring that Trump had nearly dragged an unpopular incumbent across the finish line.

On Sunday, a day after another Trump-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate fell in Louisiana, the president and his surrogates barely mounted a defense.

In a barrage of 40 tweets and retweets by Sunday evening, Trump didn’t mention Eddie Rispone’s loss to Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), even though the president had held two campaign rallies in the state in the 10 days before the election aimed at boosting his chances.

View the complete November 18 article by David Nakamura on The Washington Post website here.

Republicans fumble when confronted with Trump’s witness intimidation — and one even faked a phone call: report

AlterNet logoOne of the biggest problems Republicans face as they struggle to defend President Donald Trump from impeachment is President Donald Trump himself.

That was as evident on Friday as it has ever been when, in the middle of the House Intelligence Committee’s hearing with former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the witness that Trump had attacked her on Twitter while she was testifying.

Schiff said that this behavior constitutes witness intimidation. While there was some dispute about whether the tweets would mee the legal standards for such a criminal charge, they could clearly be considered witness intimidation in the scope of articles of impeachment.

View the complete November 15 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

CNN’s John Avlon Completely Destroys GOP’s New Impeachment Strategy: ‘These are Zombie Talking Points’

An internal memo which has been circulating among House Republicans has been made public, having been obtained by outlets including CNN and Axios. This memo outlines four points of evidence which will serve as the crux of the GOP’s argument against impeaching President Donald Trump. But the strategy presented in the plan, according to one CNN commentator, is comically bad.

Appearing on CNN’s New Day Tuesday, John Avlon completely shredded the GOP strategy — which will lean on the president’s “state of mind” in his conversations with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“These are zombie impeachment talking points,” Avlon said. “This is slavish devotion to Donald Trump’s bar which is, ‘I did nothing wrong.’ And they’re going sort of in search of brains because the arguments they’re making are really easy to blow up.”

View the complete November 12 article by Joe DePaolo on the Mediaite website here.

Here are 11 absurd conspiracy theories conservatives must believe in the Trump era

AlterNet logoAs Donald Trump and his conservative defenders begin to construct a conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff  personally orchestrated a massive conspiracy to entrap Trump in Ukraine, it’s worth noting just how many conspiracy theories you have to believe in just to be a standard Republican these days. Political parties in all eras have a number of questionable orthodoxies, but the sheer number of conspiracy theories that make up mainstream Republican ideology is remarkable. A quick rundown would include but not be limited to;

1. The belief that 10,000 climate scientists all around the world are either stupid, or engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy to concoct bad science in order to receive…more government grant funding. And that no other scientists are exposing it.

2. The belief that there is a giant conspiracy across all of news media to make Republicans look bad and elect Democrats–in spite of continually unfair press coverage of candidates like both Bernie Sanders *and* Hillary Clinton–in exchange for…what? It’s never really clear.

View the complete November 10 article from the Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Paul Krugman: Republican lawmakers would rather ‘collude with foreign powers’ than see Democrats back in power

AlterNet logoResponding to the conventional wisdom that Republican lawmakers defend President Donald Trump because they are afraid of his wrath — mainly expressed via Twitter attacks — Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman claimed it goes beyond cowardice and into something much deeper — the fear of losing power over Democrats.

In a series of tweets on Thursday morning that highlighted reporting in USA Today that Republicans in Kentucky are searching for ways to overturn the voting on Tuesday and hand the governorship back to ousted Matt Bevin, the NYT columnist said the GOP no longer cares about what is right or legal.

“Seeing a lot of pieces about why GOP politicians are standing behind Trump even though they know he grotesquely abused power and betrayed US interests. Usually framed in terms of primary challenges, etc. But is this overthinking?” the columnist suggested.

View the complete November 7 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

New poll finds Trump’s base is slipping — a sign that there’s still hope for humanity

I’ve been waiting almost three years to see some significant slippage in the president’s approval numbers among Republicans, and I’ve been consistently disappointed. This isn’t political disappointment. It’s more about maintaining some small amount of faith that humanity can survive through the end of my son’s natural lifetime without a class of scientists culling the herd and moving out to colonize space.

I need some sign that the mass of humanity has a future, and Republicans who respond to surveys just don’t afford that kind of confidence. But I got a glimmer of hope with my morning coffee on Friday morning. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll (see full results here) provided what I’ve been looking for:

Trump is the first president since the early days of modern polling more than 70 years ago never to have achieved majority approval in office, and his average rating is 21 points below the average for his predecessors dating to Harry Truman at this point in their presidencies. Closest to Trump was Jimmy Carter, at 48 percent average approval.

View the complete November 1 article by Martin Longman from the Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Stand By Your Man

The impeachment vote wasn’t just another party-line exercise. It’s about to get ugly in Washington.

DEMOCRATS CALLED IT A sad and solemn day – a prayerful one, even. Republicans made it a day of outrage. Democrats wanted to talk about the substance of the allegations against President Donald Trump. Republicans railed against the process. Democrats said they were upholding their oath to the constitution and democracy; Republicans said Democrats were trying to undo a democratic election.

There’s little left on Capitol Hill that is conducted in a bipartisan manner, with most legislation being approved or defeated with few or no crossover votes. But as the House voted Thursday to formalize an in-progress impeachment inquiry, it became clear that this was not just another party-line exercise. It’s the start of something very ugly and very personal, with Trump characteristically in the center of it all.

“The names are bigger than the rest of the question” about whether Trump committed impeachable offenses, says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute of Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, New York. “For lack of a better phrase, facts are going to take a back seat to rooting. No matter what happens, you’re with your guy.”

View the complete November 1 article by Susan Milligan on the U.S. News and World Report website here.