The Ukraine pseudoscandal the Trumpists concocted against Joe Biden

"Joe Biden is this year's Hillary." says Michael Moore (Michael Moore Says Dems Finally Have 'President Donald Trump On The Run' With Impeachment MSNBC 10/02/2019):

Moore in these comments from several days ago seemingly reluctantly says that even though the Ukraine accusations against Joe Biden are bogus, Biden's response was lacking in the kind of fighting posture it needs to have. "Trump is on the run," he says. "They [the Democrats] need to chase him down."

• These two recent articles discuss the bogus Ukraine accusations and the Biden campaign's response: Jane Mayer, The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine New Yorker 10/04/2019
• Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck, Biden Faced His Biggest Challenge, and Struggled to Form a Response New York Times 10/05/2019 (Note: This article has a notable amount of stenography of information coming from Biden' campaign)

Both raise a central dilemma in responding to political disinformation, also known as lies. That is that responding to false claims also spreads the false claim itself. And serious commentators and news sources taking a dishonest claim seriously enough to refute it can itself convey an aura of seriousness to the false claim that it doesn't deserve.

Political scandals are not entirely new. Not by a few millenia. But the term itself I first picked up from a piece by historian Sean Wiltentz, Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election? The American Prospect 12/19/2001. He defined the concept this way:

... an ambiguous or outright false scandal that acquires the appearance of the real thing in the media through the dogged repetition of charges and investigations. Genuine scandals, such as the Iran-Contra affair and the pilfering by former Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, have touched members of both major parties in recent years. But likewise, both parties, aided by the media, have helped to perpetuate pseudo-scandals related to campaign finance or other matters of alleged behind-the-scenes financial favoritism. The 1991-1992 pseudo-scandal over the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and President George Bush's alleged illicit dealings with Saddam Hussein (promoted by, among others, New York Times columnist William Safire and vice presidential candidate Al Gore); the 1992 uproar over the House Bank overdrafts (promoted by, among others, Newt Gingrich); the false Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate scandals (promoted by observers and operatives all across the political spectrum, from Jerry Falwell to Christopher Hitchens)--each has exemplified the exploitation, for ideological or partisan purposes, of justified public concerns about the modern nexus of money and political influence.

He distiguishes his pseudoscandals in American politics from the previously normal kind of scandal-mongering and political propaganda:

Recent pseudo-scandals have relied on the manipulation of the courts, congressional committees, and the now-defunct Independent Counsel Act in order to harass elected and appointed officials with flimsy accusations. And the pseudo-scandal masters have managed to gain the subtle and often unwitting but crucial complicity of the independent mainstream news media. Without the credibility provided by law and journalism, the new style of pseudo-scandal might simply be dismissed as partisan maneuvering. Coated with a gloss of objectivity, however, pseudoscandals gain a respectful hearing, vastly reinforcing the blatant tub-thumpers, fake inside-dopesters, and latter-day [Westbrook] Peglers who appear on the cable networks and talk-radio shows as well as in the newspapers. [Pegler was a notorious and thoroughly obnoxious far-right columnist.]

Although the focus of today's pseudo-scandals is primarily political money, the direct historical antecedent is the media-friendly demagoguery pioneered by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, [Daniel] Boorstin wrote, showed "it is possible to build a political career almost entirely out of pseudo-events." It is nearly forgotten today that McCarthy worked gleefully and sometimes woozily, during and after hours, cultivating "the boys" of the press over drinks and gossip. News-hungry reporters, in turn, developed a fascination for McCarthy: Love him or hate him, he was great copy. "Newspapermen were his most potent allies, for they were the co-manufacturers of pseudo-events," Boorstin observed. "They were caught in their own web. Honest newsmen and the unscrupulous McCarthy were in separate branches of the same business." [my emphasis]

Parts of the quoted analysis seem a bit dated after nearly 18 years. When he talked about "political money" as being the main pseudoscandal of the moment, he's presumably not referring to legitimate questions about the influence of campaign donations and dark money, the roles of which have increased geometrically since the Citizens United decision of 2010, one of the most destructive, bad decision by the Supreme Court since Dred Scott.

The reference to Banca Nazionale del Lavoro refers to the scandal once known as Iraq-Gate. (Link is to 2014 Britannica article) That one doesn't seem to fit too well into the pseudoscandal framework. There were legitimate reasons to investigate it. Even though in the end (Britannica):

Four years were spent investigating Iraqgate. (Clinton Administration] Attorney General Janet Reno released a 119-page report in 1995 summarizing the findings of nearly 20 prosecutors and investigators. They found no evidence of a conspiracy or a cover-up in the Bush administration. Although it can be argued that poor policy decisions were made over Iraq on the part of the Bush administration, there was no evidence that the [Reagan] administration acted illegally.

That one was actually a sideshow to the Reagan Administration's support of Iraq in its long, bloody war with Iran, complicated by the Iran-Contra scandal and its bizarre premises. Iran-Contra was unfortunately a very real scandal, and the failure to hold officials who broke the law in connections with it accountable was a major stepping stone to the Trump Traversty we're living today.

Which brings me to the New York Times report and the Jane Mayer pieces. Several things can be true and once. And are in the case of the Biden-Ukraine pseudoscandal, according on what is in the public record at this point:

• The accusations that the Trump team is pushing in this case are bogus and constructed in extereme bad faith: "There is no evidence behind Mr. Trump's claim that Mr. Biden intervened inappropriately with Ukraine to help his son" (NYT)
• Hunter Biden's role at the Ukrainian oligarch's oil company was an obvious effort to curry favor with the Obama Administration
• Accepting such a position was ethically dubious on Hunter Biden's part
• Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Biden played any role in securing that position for Hunter, even though the intent of the oligarch involved may have been to curry favor with the US government
• On the contrary, Joe Biden on behalf of the Obama Administration pushed the Ukrainian government to reinstate the prosecutor that had been investigating the company with which his son Hunter was associated, the opposite of what one would expect if Biden were trying to protect that company
• It is, probably unfortunately, legal for close family members of senior elected officials to take positions that create an appearance of undue influence on the officials
• It's unfair that Joe Biden has to respond to transparently manufactured charges of illegal/unethical behavior on his part
• But he does have to respond to them
• The corporate media's habit of trying to set up Both Sides Do It interpretations of every controversy is especially toxic when pseudoscandals are in play

Unfortunately, when conspiracy theories like this Ukraine pseudoscandal become a practice assumption for large numbers of people, responsible media can't afford to ignore them, as they can and should if they are confined to an isolated minority of kooks or cultists.

That said, kooks and cultists can't always be ignored when reporting on public affairs, either. Especially in the US right now, where the President's hate-filled rants are inspiring far-right stochastic terrorism. Especially when the kooks and cultists have arsenals they are fantasizing about using: David Neiwert, Militiamen and nascent neo-Nazi terrorists jump to attention when Trump tweets about 'civil war' Daily Kos 10/04/2019.

Jane Mayer's article is a good one in showing how the Radical Right injects manufactured propaganda falsehoods into the mainstream and works the weaknesses of the corporate press to give the story an appearance of factual legitimacy. As Wilentz wrote in 2001, "the pseudo-scandal masters have managed to gain the subtle and often unwitting but crucial complicity of the independent mainstream news media." The corporate media should have gotten much more savvy about this by now.

The amount of stenography in the New York Times article is hard to miss, since they explicitly quote Biden campaign sources so much. But it does point out that the Ukraine pseudoscandal is only one difficulty in the Biden campaign:

In addition to the attacks from Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden's top rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, each outraised him in the third quarter by about $10 million. And as Ms. Warren has emerged as Mr. Biden's most formidable competition, Mr. Sanders, her main challenger for progressive support, just had a heart attack, casting uncertainty over whether he could siphon votes from Ms. Warren, as the Biden camp had hoped. [my emphasis]

The Biden campaign obviously and understandably wants to keep the focus where it should be, on Trump's illegal solicitation of foreign intervention in the US Presidential eleciton:

His communications aides contend that most voters were more focused on what Mr. Trump did to prompt the impeachment inquiry than on the false claims themselves. And they pointed to the former vice president's forceful attacks on Mr. Trump at a news conference Friday to argue that he was now ready to do battle with the president.

But they also seem to be promoting one of Biden's longtime themes to invoke sympathy for him, his family tragedies:

Mr. Biden was even blunter, and angrier, in private after news first emerged that Mr. Trump had exhorted the Ukrainian government to investigate him and his son.

"I can't believe this guy is going after my family like this," he told Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, as the two campaigned in Iowa, Mr. Coons recalled. ...

But Mr. Biden is confronting an almost unimaginable situation: the president he hopes to challenge is facing impeachment for urging another country to help smear him. What's more, the House inquiry centers on what Mr. Biden values most in his private and public life: protecting his family and honoring institutional norms. Several Democrats close to Mr. Biden say he did not take on Mr. Trump sooner in large part because of his reverence for congressional prerogatives - he did not want to immediately insert himself into the House's jurisdiction. But Mr. Biden also sought to address the attacks on his son on his own terms rather than sit for hastily arranged television interviews that would have forced him to answer questions about Hunter Biden's work that few of his own aides dared pose.

I share Paul Krugman's reaction to this article, which shows how Biden's faith in an impossible level of bipartisan cooperation with a Republican Party that has degenerated into a cult-like state itself:

Until recently I wondered whether Joe Biden's seeming naivety about the GOP, his insistence that he could work with Rs, was a pose. But it's now clear that he really was clueless about the ruthlessness of his opponents. Not a good sign https://t.co/UsznZjGfzN

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 6, 2019

I would also note that in that last bit of stenography quoted, the sources still seem to be proceeding from an assumption that impeachment is something that the Democrats should have avoided if they could.