The Post tells us how the campaign to discredit the FBI in hopes of protecting the most corrupt incompetent mendacious malevolent president we’ve ever had has picked up steam lately.

This is Republicans and “conservatives” trying to discredit the FBI, which is quite a turn-up for the books. Time was, the FBI and the Republicans were best buddies and their common enemy was anyone to the left of Gerald Ford. The FBI has a long long history of treating everyone on the left as suspect and “UnAmerican”…but now suddenly everything is switched, all to defend a guy who is both criminal and hateful in every possible way.

If I were a Republican I would be doing the opposite, because I would not want to be tainted by this horrible man. Flake and Corker seemed for awhile to feel the same way, but it surprises me that more of them don’t. It surprises me that they’re so keen to tie themselves to a lying mean bullying sexist racist shit like him.

For months, efforts to discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign flickered at the fringes of political debate.

Now, the allegation that FBI and Justice Department officials are part of a broad conspiracy against President Trump is suddenly center stage, amplified by conservative activists, GOP lawmakers, right-leaning media and the president himself. The clamor has become a sustained backdrop to the special counsel investigation, with congressional committees grilling a parade of law enforcement officials in recent days.

All to defend that terrible man. It’s just nuts.

The partisan atmosphere is a sharp departure from the near-universal support that greeted Mueller’s selection as special counsel in May — and threatens to shadow his investigation’s eventual findings. Trump, while vowing to cooperate with the special counsel, has also encouraged attacks on Mueller’s credibility, tweeting that the investigation is “the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. political history.”

That’s the part that surprises me: the “partisan” aspect. However partisan one is, I would think moral squalor at the Trump level would override that.

The controversy, percolating for months, escalated dramatically in early December with the revelation of text messages in which one of Mueller’s former top investigators, Peter Strzok, called Trump an “idiot” last year and predicted Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide.

As the deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, Strzok played a critical role in both the Clinton email investigation last year and the Russia probe before he was removed by Mueller this summer.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who met with Fitton earlier this year and has for months alleged that the FBI was working against Trump’s election, said in an interview that many of his Republican colleagues now share his view that there has been an orchestrated effort against Trump.

“I’ve had all kinds of Republicans come up to me and say, ‘This is unbelievable, it looks like the FBI was trying to put its finger on the scale here,’ ” Jordan said.

But, see, it’s not clear that that’s because they were “partisan” or favoring the Democrats or political at all, because most of what’s wrong with Trump is to do with Trump, not with politics at all. Strzok called Trump an “idiot” – well he is an idiot, and Republicans and conservatives can see that just as well as Democrats and lefties. It’s not inherently partisan to see Trump as both an idiot and an ignoramus, and thoroughly unqualified to be president, before we even get to his issues of temperament and character and morality.

Trump is busy demonstrating his swampy disgustingness today.

.@FoxNews-FBI’s Andrew McCabe, “in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017

There is resistance.

More than 40 former U.S. attorneys and Republican and conservative officials are pushing back against efforts to discredit the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In a pair of letters, the groups say Robert Mueller and his team must be allowed to continue their work, unimpeded.

The 22 former U.S. attorneys, who served under presidents from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama, say it is “critical” to the “interests of justice and public trust to ensure that those charged with conducting complex investigations are allowed to do their jobs free from interference or fear of reprisal.”

Seeking Mueller’s removal “would have severe repercussions for Americans’ sense of justice here at home and for our reputation for fairness around the world,” they wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump on Friday that was coordinated by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Another letter signed by 20 former members of Congress and other top U.S. officials says efforts to discredit Mueller’s work “undermine the institutions that protect the rule of law and so our nation.”

“We urge the Administration, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and the American public, to support the work of Special Counsel Mueller to its conclusion, whatever it may be,” reads the open letter signed by officials including former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, former State Department counselor Eliot Cohen and former George W. Bush administration ethics lawyer Richard Painter.

Buncha long-haired crazies, right?

No Baby Jesus’s Pretend Birthday truce for Mean Donnie: he’s bullying the deputy director of the FBI now.

The F.B.I.’s embattled deputy director, Andrew G. McCabe, an unlikely lightning rod who has been attacked repeatedly by President Trump and congressional Republicans, is expected to retire after he becomes eligible for his pension early next year, according to people familiar with his decision.

While Mr. McCabe’s plans to leave aren’t unexpected, his decision should take some of the pressure off Christopher A. Wray, who was confirmed as F.B.I. director in August. Mr. Trump has complained to confidantes that Mr. Wray has not moved fast enough to replace the senior leadership that he inherited from his predecessor, James B. Comey, whom Mr. Trump summarily dismissed in May.

A White House official said in a statement this week that many senior leaders of the bureau were “politically motivated” and said Mr. Wray was the “right choice to clean up the misconduct at the highest levels of the F.B.I.”

All this, let’s not forget, because Trump played footsie with Putin in order to steal the election and now he hopes to get away with it by bullying top people at the FBI who are investigating his theft of the election. It could hardly be any more corrupt and degrading, although I suppose he could have had a few people killed to make it even worse.

Trump this afternoon between rounds of golf:

How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017

That vulgarity is from the phone of the president of the US.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017

It looks as if he hopes to make sure McCabe won’t get full benefits, but the Post says he can’t:

In fact, as a career civil servant, Mr. McCabe, 49, has protections and cannot be pushed out by the president.

I hope Trump drops dead over the two scoops of ice cream tonight. Or it could be while he’s watching Fox later on, or while he’s watching Fox again in the morning…but no later than that. We need to be rid of the poison.

From Occupy Democrats:

Image: Trump pointing at us in the manner of a recruiting poster, with caption

I LIED TO YOU

BILLIONAIRES COME FIRST

SO YOU LOSE YOUR HEALTHCARE

The Times shares a disgusting little vignette of life with “President” Trump:

Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.

Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.

But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.

No foreigners, god damn it! We don’t want all these stinkin foreigners stinkin up our beautiful country with all its beautiful golf courses and Luxxury High Righzez. Our country is for not-foreign white people with beautiful golden hair.

Then he started reading from the doc, which listed how many dastardly foreigners had received visas to come into the beautiful US in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

That’s the president of the US. That’s the squalid reality we’re living in. Everybody’s meanest ugliest racist uncle is the president.

Kelly and Tillerson tried to explain that many of the visas were just temporary ones for visits, but then Kelly and Miller turned on Tillerson, blaming him for all these filthy foreigners, causing him to blow a gasket.

It’s a miracle they haven’t melted us all down for soap yet.

Tempers flared and Mr. Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.

For not moving quickly enough on the ethnic cleansing.

The meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.

It reflects everything – his “visceral” racism and general loathing for people he sees as inferiors, his rage and hatred and lack of control, his grandiosity and cluelessness about the extent of his power, his hideous urges, his authoritarianism, his filthy temper – his thoroughgoing badness on every dimension.

Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Mr. Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thought-out goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.

But mostly of his own hateful malevolent nature. He boils with loathing, and it bursts out of him all the time (think April Ryan and that press conference and the way he spoke to her). He’s that mean drunk at the bar who empties the room.

Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.

“He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”

He thinks they’re dirty. He’s that literal-minded. That’s what all the gold is about, maybe – purity and Cleanness, along with Expense. Gold people are white and clean, and poor people are brown and dirty.

Happy holidays.

Oh gawd.

There’s such a thing as a presidential coin. Presidents give them out as little presents. Trump decided they weren’t flashy enough so he came up with his own new design.

The presidential seal has been replaced by an eagle bearing President Trump’s signature. The eagle’s head faces right, not left, as on the seal. The 13 arrows representing the original states have disappeared. And the national motto, “E pluribus unum” — a Latin phrase that means “Out of many, one” — is gone.

Instead, both sides of the coin feature Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

The presidential seal has been replaced by an eagle bearing President Trump’s signature. The eagle’s head faces right, not left, as on the seal. The 13 arrows representing the original states have disappeared. And the national motto, “E pluribus unum” — a Latin phrase that means “Out of many, one” — is gone.

Instead, both sides of the coin feature Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Mere words can’t do justice to its ugliness. The Post kindly put it next to three of the previous type for a snapshot.

Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post

So ugly, so vulgar, so inappropriate (the campaign slogan! his name in three places! the garish colors!), so narcissistic.

Yascha Mounk at the NYRB takes a less optimistic view, pointing out how far the Overton window has shifted in the past 11 months.

[W]hile many of the violations of basic democratic norms that President Trump and his collaborators have perpetrated over the past twelve months would not have been foreseeable before he took office, most of them had come to seem all-but-inevitable by the time he actually committed them. Trump’s unwillingness to dissociate himself from his most radical supporters was evident throughout the opening months of his presidency. The firing of FBI Director James Comey was preceded by a series of outrageous attacks. Even Trump’s endorsement of Roy Moore in the Alabama special election seemed inevitable by the time he tweeted his support.

These realities make it all the more infuriating that we are now hurtling toward yet another constitutional crisis, and that supposedly moderate Republicans are once again refusing to do anything about it.

Isn’t it though. We read stories in the Post about Republicans in Congress who are disgusted shocked appalled by Trump and yet…they never do a damn thing about it.

For the better part of a month, Fox News and other conservative media outlets have been smearing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, all but calling him an enemy of the American people. Over the past week, a series of senior Republicans have joined in the chorus of delegitimation, with a host of voices—from Mike Conaway, who leads the investigation of Trump’s campaign on the House Intelligence Committee, to John Cornyn, who heads the Senate equivalent—insinuating that it is time to wrap up the special counsel’s investigation.

In short, they’ve been clearing the path of brambles so that Trump can careen madly down it and fire Mueller at the end.

I fear that there is a simple reason for skepticism about whether Congress will defend the rule of law: over the past year, Republicans had a comparatively easy way to police this particular red line without overtly opposing Trump. “Obviously,” they could have said, “the president would never do anything as crazy as this; but if he did fire Robert Mueller, I would have to support congressional action to reinstate him.” Indeed, following that rationale, they could easily have signed onto bipartisan legislation that would have stopped Trump from being able to fire Mueller in a fit of rage in the first place.

Instead, virtually all of them refused to comment; the few who did actively conspired in undermining Mueller. (When former attorney general Eric Holder claimed to speak “on behalf of the vast majority of the American people,” when he said that “any attempt to remove Bob Mueller will not be tolerated,” for example, Senator Cornyn replied, simply, “You don’t.”)

Yes he does – but that’s not the point; the point is that Cornyn spurned Eric Holder’s warning about firing Mueller. Remember what Mueller is investigating? Russia’s interference with the election. The Overton window is out of sight somewhere over the horizon.

Painter and Eisen on the ways Trump can and cannot impede Mueller.

Mr. Trump could install someone at the Department of Justice to oversee Mr. Mueller’s investigation, a minder who could control (and cut) Mr. Mueller’s budget, eliminate some of his team or curtail the scope of his investigation. Mr. Mueller seems safe as long as his current supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is in place; Mr. Rosenstein just vouched for the special counsel before Congress. But the president has reportedly grumbled about Mr. Rosenstein and could replace him with a crony who would be more willing to interfere.

As Nixon tried to do. It didn’t work out for Nixon, but he didn’t have a Republican Congress…and Republicans weren’t as cynically indifferent to law and morality then.

The president may also try to pardon away the special counsel’s investigation. Mr. Trump could grant pardons to individuals who have already pleaded guilty, such as Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. this month. Or Mr. Trump might do so prospectively, to those who may be targets, such as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or his son Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Trump might even issue one to himself (he reportedly asked about it), whether individually or as part of a blanket pardon of all those involved in the Russia investigation.

And then we would know we were stuck in a tinpot dictatorship. It would be terrifying.

They can talk smack about Mueller, and they are, but it’s a hard sell when Trump is such a puffed-up turd of a man and Mueller is not.

Trump could just fire Mueller. He said the other day that he’s not planning to, but so what, he says all kinds of things (that’s what makes him such an expert on all the things), and he could say the opposite tomorrow, or just do it without saying anything.

The drumbeat of distortions and threats will, sadly, continue and must be promptly rebutted by commentators, Congress and the public. Democracy demands defense with analysis, opinion and the readiness for public protest (one of the co-authors, Mr. Eisen, has been involved in organizing these efforts). Peaceful force is something that Mr. Trump has made clear he understands. We must continue to deploy it, lest the president achieve by debasement what our collective efforts have thus far prevented him from doing directly: stopping Robert Mueller’s investigation.

I wish us all the best of luck.

The UN told Trump to go fuck himself.

The United Nations general assembly has delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump, voting by a huge majority to reject his unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The vote came after a redoubling of threats by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, who said that Washington would remember which countries “disrespected” America by voting against it.

Jesus. Who else talks like that? Bullies, that’s who. “You will respect me or else.”

Despite the warning, 128 members voted on Thursday in favour of the resolution supporting the longstanding international consensus that the status of Jerusalem – which is claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinians – can only be settled as an agreed final issue in a peace deal. Countries which voted for the resolution included major recipients of US aid such as Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although largely symbolic, the vote in emergency session of the world body had been the focus of days of furious diplomacy by both the Trump administration and Israel, including Trump’s threat to cut US funding to countries that did not back the US recognition.

But only nine states – including the United States and Israel –voted against the resolution. The other countries which supported Washington were Togo, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands, Guatemala and Honduras.

Ouch. Micronesia – says it all, dunnit.

35 countries abstained, including a lot of allies like Australia and Canada.

While support for the resolution was somewhat less than Palestinian officials had hoped, the meagre tally of just nine votes in support of the US and Israeli position was a serious diplomatic blow for Trump.

On the one hand he’ll hurl insults about it, on the other hand he’ll blame it all on Hillary and Fake News and The Swamp. What he won’t do is learn anything or feel chastened.

Speaking to the assembly before the vote, Haley – who earlier in the week told members that the US “would be taking names” – returned to the offensive.

She never left the offensive. She’s stuck in the offensive as long as she works for that excrescence.

“I must also say today: when we make generous contributions to the UN, we also have expectation that we will be respected,” she said. “What’s more, we are being asked to pay for the dubious privileges of being disrespected.”

Who’s “we”? She doesn’t represent the whole of the US, and Trump certainly doesn’t. US payments to the UN don’t come out of Trump’s pocket, and he doesn’t get to take UN votes personally.

While Thursday’s resolution was in support of existing UN resolutions on Jerusalem and the peace process, the clumsy intervention by Trump and Haley also made the vote a referendum on Trump’s often unilateral and abrasive foreign policy.

You know, the foreign policy designed to insult and alienate everyone on the planet except for Netanyahu – that “foreign policy.”

Updating to add:

Trump Admin threat to retaliate against nations that exercise sovereign right in UN to oppose US position on Jerusalem is beyond outrageous. Shows @realDonaldTrump expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone—qualities usually found in narcissistic, vengeful autocrats.

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) December 21, 2017