Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

These Are Really Sorry Letters – The Georgia Coup Apology Letters

We finally have access to the apology letters written by Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro that they agreed to write as part of their plea deals in the Fulton County election subversion case. There’s another from a guy named Scott Hall. But you’ve never heard of him. So we’re not going to discuss his other than to say his letter was pretty good and ran five paragraphs.

Here’s Sidney Powell’s.

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What Is an Attack?

As I reread my post below about staying on the attack, I realized I hadn’t defined what it means to “attack,” perhaps not even entirely to myself. Attacking isn’t saying mean things or criticizing someone or calling them out. An attack is something that compels a response. If it doesn’t do that it wasn’t an attack or not one that mattered. Don’t hold me to a universal definition. Some attacks are designed to overawe an adversary to the point they’re unable or afraid to respond. But this basic definition helps us understand what counts and what doesn’t.

In politics today we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t matter. Criticizing Trump, insisting how outrageous the latest statement is — none of that matters. It’s true. It doesn’t compel a response. A big part of Trumpism is driving cries of outrage. Those cries may be good for other things. It’s not an attack. It’s not an action in any political context.

Always Attack! Some Thoughts On Politics in a Time of Trumpism Prime Badge
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Back in August 2015, based on a TPM Reader making the connection, I described how a concept from the world of military intellectuals — the OODA Loop — helped explain the uncanny power of Donald Trump’s impulsive and thoroughly un-theorized way of engaging in political fights. It’s not the point of this discussion, but I need to explain the basic OODA Loop concept to have it. So I’ll summarize it quickly: In any fight or combat, each side is in a process of seeing what’s happening, understanding it, making a decision how to react based on it and then attacking. John Boyd, the military theorist who devised the concept, called this Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — OODA. If you move fast enough, you can act and thus change the observed reality to something new while your opponent is still in the process of making sense of and reacting to the old one. Conventional military theory captured the same insight, albeit in a less analytic way, in its emphasis on taking and maintaining the initiative. Act and make your adversary react to you, not vice versa.

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Beneath the Headlines in Gaza, Tel Aviv and DC Prime Badge
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I wanted to give a quick update on American and Israeli wrestling over the pace and duration of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The U.S. has been pushing the Israelis with increasing vigor to end the campaign in Gaza in early January. It has also been demanding greater consultation and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. We want to know exactly what your plan is, basically. Publicly the Israeli government has been saying that its campaign will take as long as it takes. As much as it appreciates U.S. support it won’t agree to any arbitrary timetable.

In practice, however, something else appears to be happening on the ground and in the air.

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Spend the Election With Us

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We May Be At This for a While Prime Badge
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Frequently I will hear from TPM Readers who tell me that they fear and believe authoritarianism is on the rise both in the United States and abroad and, critically, that it is on the cusp of winning. This is an understandable fear and belief, and it may be right. But I do not think it is the most accurate assessment of the information before us. Rather than Team Democracy battling back against and defeating Team Authoritarianism, or vice versa, in a final confrontation or series of final confrontations, we’re seeing something different. We have a new model in which we no longer have parties of government of right and left but rather a civic democratic party and an authoritarian populist party. There’s a good chance they’ll be contesting elections for a while, even as the authoritarian populist party is trying in various ways to end them or radically change how free they are.

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Is West Virginia Okay?

I’m not sure what can be done about West Virginia, a sad thing since it’s a state born in refusal to commit treason on behalf of the Confederacy, a good thing. In any case, the headline of this article is that the West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner is the state’s top elections officer. He’s now running for governor. And in a recent debate for the GOP gubernatorial nomination he said the 2020 election was stolen and … well, it was stolen by the CIA, folks.

But it gets worse.

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More Thoughts on the University President Brouhaha Prime Badge
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As you probably heard, Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has now resigned over the antisemitism Q&A backlash. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has responded by saying, “One down. Two to go,” referring to the presidents of Harvard and MIT who were also there that day for the questioning. This is one of those viral public episodes that we are all generally stupider for having been in any proximity to. No one has acquitted themselves well here. At least we now have the bad people clarifying who they are.

I want to just share a few thoughts on this topic in no particular order.

  • I don’t know all the details. But this episode didn’t come in a vacuum for Magill. There had been a series of antisemitism vs Islamophobia-type dustups at Penn of late. And the general impression was that she had managed to offend or at least not satisfy either side with her responses. That’s not passing any judgement on her. It’s just noting that her position was likely already tenuous. This likely is the final straw in her case. That doesn’t mean it’s fair or that it was deserved. It’s just context for understanding what happened and why, at least based on what I know now, I don’t think we shouldn’t be expecting the same at the other two schools.
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About That University President’s Viral Video Prime Badge
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You’ve almost certainly now seen or heard about the congressional hearing with elite university presidents (Harvard, Penn, MIT) coldly arguing the need for context and invoking technical criteria when asked whether it would violate the university’s code of conduct to call for the extermination of Jews. The viral clip is genuinely jarring.

When I watched it I found myself asking not why are these administrators such terrible anti-Semites but how did you three possibly find yourself in this situation giving these answers?

Let’s start with some important stage-setting. First, the clip was posted by Rep. Elise Stefanik, a consistently odious and mendacious weasel who represents a district in Upstate New York. Stefanik is very much that person you’ll see melodramatically huffing and puffing in a congressional hearing demanding yes or no answers to gotcha questions that don’t have yes or no answers. And yet here … well, even for a weasel with gotcha questions, she seemed to have gotten them.

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Folks, They Found the Tape
Annals of the Florida GOP's Top Threesoming Power Couple

We have a new development in the case of the Zieglers, the power couple from the Superfreak faction of the Florida GOP. Initial reports noted that Christian Ziegler claimed he had videotaped the sexual encounter which his unnamed accuser later alleged was rape. He said he taped it; deleted it; then finally uploaded it to Google Drive. A kind of odd chain of events. But that was his story. The first reports said police hadn’t been able to find it.

Now they’ve found it.

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