Tag Archives: Nancy Pelosi

Screw China, let’s Taiwan on

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By Noel Holston

From The Washington Post’s August 3 editorial page:

“However much the 82-year-old Ms. Pelosi might want a capstone event for her time as speaker — before a likely GOP victory in November ends it— going to Taiwan now, as President Xi Jinping of China is orchestrating his third term, was unwise.”

I don’t ordinarily disagree with the WaPo’s editorials. Like MAGAs  who turn to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity to get their daily marching orders, I depend on the left-center Post to tell me who to vote for and what issues to support — or to at least ratify what I’m already thinking. Not only do I read the Post with my morning coffee, I drank java the Post recommended.

But I part company with its editorial board on Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Let Xi be pissed. We need to show support for this most Western of Eastern democracies every which way we can.

President Biden, instead of doing “damage control,” should’ve hopped on Air Force One and been in Taiwan to fist bump Pelosi as she departed.

Secretary of State Anthony “Winkin’” Blinken should have been there on Joe’s heels if not his plane.

And then. . . and then, the wave. We should steady stream of American politicos and icons, both singles and groups, including:

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus

Stephanie “Flo” Courtney

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Snoop Dogg

George Takei.

The Congressional Anti-Bullying Caucus

Tom Hanks

Beyonce

The Boston Red Sox

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band

Dolly Parton

Kelly Clarkson

The Texas Southern Ocean of Soul Marching Band

Spongebob

The Congressional Shellfish Caucus

Tool

Dwayne Johnson

Elmo

The Beach Boys

The Congressional Rice Caucus

Ted Danson

George Clooney

George Clinton

Lizzo

The Log Cabin Republicans

The Squirrel Nut Zippers

Oprah

Clint Eastwood

And if “President” Xi starts World War III over all this tourism, so be it. We either do the right thing or we don’t.

Which reminds me:

Spike Lee!

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

Why Is Florida At the Front Of the Pandemic Response Line?

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Sometimes, even the great Washington Post buries the lede.  Disguised in a terrific story with a bland headline that only a supply chain manager could love (“Desperate for medical equipment, states encounter a beleaguered national stockpile”) was this disturbing and fascinating pandemic response story: “Florida Is Only State to Receive Everything It Asked For” 

That’s the salient nugget Political Wire chose to highlight from the Post story, even though it was buried in paragraph twelve of the Post’s 2,500 word tome. Political wire got the headline prioritization right.

While the Post’s headline and lede didn’t promote the most ethically troubling part of its reporting, the three reporters who worked on the article, Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sen, and Beth Reinhard, certainly did great reporting about the differences in how various states say they are being treated by Team Trump during the pandemic response. 

Beyond the widely publicized problems that hotspot states like New York and Washington have been having with the Trump Administration’s response, the Post piece documented how other states also are struggling due to lack of adequate federal help:

Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.

Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.

“The governor has spoken to the president daily, and the entire congressional delegation has been working as one for the betterment of the state of Florida,” said Jared Moskowitz, the emergency management division’s director.”

“Florida has been an exception.” While my jaw dropped when I got to that part of the article, the Post shrugged it off:  “Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines.”

How about this for a potential “political line?” Unlike the underserved New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maine, the fully served Florida is one of the six states widely considered a “battleground state” that will determine the outcome of Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

“Those will be the six most critical states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, told Newsweek.

“There will be others that’ll be important in varying degrees,” he said, “but those will be ones we’ll ultimately look back on and say, ‘How many of them did Democrats win back and were they able to win enough to win the presidency?'”

Given Florida’s undeniable status as a crucial swing state in Trump’s 2020 Electoral College calculus, it’s critically important for any news publication to pose this very legitimate question:  Is lifesaving equipment being distributed based on patients’ needs or political needs?

I’m open to the possibility that there is an epidemiologically sound explanation for why Florida has been at the head of Team Trump’s pandemic response line, while bright blue hot-spot cities like Boston and New York City are not.  Skeptical, but open. But to ignore the obvious political angle, not pose that legitimate question to Trump officials, and bury the Florida exception in paragraph twelve is baffling.

What’s even more puzzling to me is why people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi apparently aren’t raising the same legitimate question. Because the reckless game Trump seems to be playing here is not just ethically untenable, it’s also politically perilous.

Impeachment Blahs?

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One thing I always try to keep in mind anytime there’s an issue or event requiring more than an hour of the public’s attention is: how high is the entertainment quotient here?

Take impeachment, where for all the headlines, all the indignation on cable news and all the chanting at rallies like the one I attended last night in downtown Duluth, (+2 degrees, but “Hey, hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go”), there doesn’t seem to be the same pitch of fervor that I remember back when ’70s-era Republicans were telling us every president did what Richard Nixon did, so get over it.

A lump of beautiful coal for you, Donnie boy. Duluth. Dec. 17.

Good public entertainment requires juicy dollops of suspense, excitement, hilarity or prurient appeal. Mix and match as you see fit.

But other than Trump’s Stephen Miller copy-edited letter to Nancy Pelosi, the antics of Rudy, Lev and Igor and the fools-at-court blithering of Doug Collins, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and other House Republicans, hilarity is in pretty short supply with this impeachment drama.

Likewise any prurient appeal. Especially if like me you’re still trying to bleach your neurons of the image of Donny having his way with a porn queen.

There’s been too much inevitability about this episode to really grab and hold an American audience. Going way back, everyone familiar with Trump’s career as a fraudulent real estate buffoon (of the casino-bankrupting variety) knew he was such a reckless fool it was inevitable that sooner or later he’d screw the pooch so badly he’d get himself impeached. We’re just amazed it took this long.

But now we’re dealing with the House’s long inevitable vote to actually do the deed, and that’s rolled in with the very high expectation that Mitch McConnell will cook the Senate trial into a quickie nothingburger putting a “fully exonerated” Donald on the road to reelection against a creaky, bumbling Joe Biden.

As loathsome a national embarrassment as Trump is nothing galls me more than the fact that there has never been even an hour of reckoning for Mitch McConnell. You know the system is in shambles when he flat-out says things like he said to Sean Hannity last week, about how he, the jury foreman, is tightly coordinating his trial duties with the defendant, right before, during and after he takes that oath to be impartial … and there’s no legal downside.

There are various ideas being floated to force a series of votes on things like the witnesses (Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, John Boltobn) Mitch doesn’t want anywhere near the trial cameras.

There’s even an interesting idea whereby Pelosi and Adam Schiff don’t even formally send the articles of impeachment to McConnell to begin a trial. They do this on the grounds that (pick one) McConnell has disqualified himself by his public remarks to Hannity and/or the obvious fact that Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, is still running around try to get Scorsese-worthy Ukrainian wise guys to invent a tale or two about those Biden bastards. In case you’ve forgotten, that presidential attorney Rudy who is being paid by his “translators” Lev and Igor, the former of whose wife recently came in possession of a $1 million check from a Russian gangster.

Point being, the plots to pollute the next U.S. election and obstruct Congress are clearly still going on. So … instead of a sham trial led by a guy who has said he’s in the bag for the defendant, Pelosi and Schiff hang on to these articles and announce they’re contining the dozen or so inquiries slogging through the Trump-crippled U.S. court system.

Wait long enough and the SDNY may spit out its case against Rudy, Lev and Igor … and Principal #1. Or maybe … really maybe … in June the Trump-toady Supreme Court will go all Nixon on him and compel him to release his tax returns.

Whatever. As effective as the Democrats have been in telling the story of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, the Senate trial, hobbled and gelded by Moscow Mitch, is going to need several twists of plot to go boffo at the box office.

It Has Always Been, and Still is About Russia, Stupid.

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In the interest of generating Must See TV I’m delighted to see that House Democrats, i.e. Adam “Shifty” Schiff and “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi, will allow staff/lawyers to question witnesses when the impeachment inquiry hearings go public next month. This at least mitigates the numbing tedium of 20-30 Congress-types preening and fulminating for their five minutes in the international spotlight.

Tight, cross-referenced questioning by practicing attorneys will help Schiff and Pelosi lay out a fuller, more comprehensible story of what the hell has been going on, simplifying things for the easily-distracted and confused general public.

Put another — simpler — way, the carefully strategized and coordinated (re-) questioning of people like Ambassador Bill Taylor, former Ukraine Amnbassador Marie Yovanovich, veteran Russian expert Fiona Hill and yesterday’s witness, Lt. Col. AlexanderVindman — and others — holds great potential to pull the many, varied elements of the Trump corruption saga into a tighter focus, a focus that has always begun and remains on … Russia.

Schiff in particular has long been hip to the all-important “compromised” factor involving Trump and Russia. Namely, as Schiff repeated constantly in the months prior to the Mueller Report, Trump’s money-laundering for Russian gangsters has been a fundamental staple of his personal finances. He owes Putin a lot.

Not a stupid fellow — unlike fellow Californians Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes — Schiff has long expressed confidence in the remarkably well-documented if not as yet fully confirmed story of Trump’s deep indebtedness to Putin-approved gangster “investment” in projects all over the world, from Panama to Azerbaijan to Soho (Manhattan). (My apologies for the much-abbreviated list.)

Full confirmation of that corruption — the remaining 2-3% of the story that isn’t demonstrable today — awaits acquisition of Trump’s tax records or interrogation of Trump’s Deutsche Bank handlers — the folks who doled out Russian gangster money to Trump via Deutsche Bank’s “private banking” operation.

The current Pelosi-led strategy to avoid confusing the issue with all that — weird Russian names, off-shore accounts, spy vs. spy vs. spy covert ops and such — is completely understandable.

Having been handed a vividly clear and re-re-re-re-re-corroborated tale of a flagrant, mob-style quid pro quo shakedown of Ukraine, the Democrats have no good tactical reason to cloud public comprehension of the matter with chatter about Oleg Deripaska, Dimitri Firtash and Semion Mogilevic. The latter being the Don Corleone of Russian organized crime and one of the two men, Putin being the other, to whom Firtash would report. Ukrainian oil gangster Firtash being the guy (he posted a $174 million bond as he fights extradition to Chicago for a bribery charge) who has been bankrolling the two Ukrainian goombahs — Lev and Igor. Those two being the farcical duo Trump’s “personal attorney” Rudy Giuliani has been cavorting around with as he tries to convince someone (either Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity will do) that the Ukrainians and not the peace-loving Russians are the true guilty party in that U.S. election interference stuff. Interference that, if not wholly responsible, was without question directed at putting Donald Trump in the White House.

And so … well you see how quickly the Mario Puzo-deep chain-of-characters narrative roars off into the weeds.

As I’ve said before, unless you follow this story with true, nerd-like obsession, its easily to bewildered. But the point here is that it appears Schiff and Pelosi understand this, and are setting up a public process — a TV spectacle — that cleans up the messy storyline and focuses in, for the easi(er) comprehension of reasonable people, on Trump’s latest but hardly worst act of corruption.

Whether this makes a whit of difference to Senate Republicans or Trump’s base, I have no idea. But as bad as the Taylor-Lewis-Yovanovich-Vindman testimonies have been behind closed doors, nothing gets better when they tell the same stories on national TV. Which is to say and I believe in tipping points. The moment when the craven, mostly-clueless Republican herd makes a 90-degree turn away from the cliff and suddenly sees great, indisputable merit in replacing Trump with a “true conservative”.

Larger point being this: I have faith that Schiff and Pelosi, armed with a deep from the get-go understanding of the entirety of the Russian compromise of Trump, have the means, motive and opportunity to roll Mike Pence (and certainly Mike Pompeo) into this fresh, tight narrative.

Even better for my and your viewing pleasure, the World Series will end tonight and we won’t have to click back and forth between Alex Bregman and Alex Vindman.