The Night of Steve Schmidt’s Carpet Twitter Bombing

[PGage]

Anyone who has logged on to Twitter overnight or this morning will have seen this, but I post it here for the record. 

I think Schmidt gets too much credit but he is one of the few Republicans who maintained his Never Trump status, and articulated it with passion and skill. He went off last night, apparently triggered my Meghan McCain either calling him a pedophile or liking a post that called him a pedophile (I joined the bar fire in progress and never did claw my way back to the exact co-writing story. While his take down of Meghan (I paste here two representative Tweets) and of Palin are satisfying, the most important substance is what he has to say of John McCain, both his tolerance of Putin cronies and henchman in the highest ranks of his campaign, his primary responsibility for choosing Palin, and his fear of Palin and refusal to distance himself from her and her growing movement after he lost the election. 

What he doesn’t say, but to me is strongly implied, is that his fear of Palin is not just rooted in the risk of getting “Primaried” by the Tea Party, but in a fear that they had compromising information about his relation with Putin or Putin-items.

The link is to a summary of the tweets, but it is most effective to find the three or so long threads he posted and read them in sequence.

https://www.politicususa.com/2022/05/08/steve-schmidt-goes-off-and-obliterates-meghan-mccain.html

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[PGage]

Schmidt continues to settle all family business. He repackaged much of his Tweet Storm from early Sunday morning into a coherent essay on sub stack, which appears to be the start of a newsletter which is (for now) free.

https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth

He adds to his previous broadsides the coup de grace that John McCain lied when he denounced a story in the NYT in 2008 about his close relationship with a DC lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. According to Schmidt, Both John and Cindy McCain initially told Schmidt that the story was untrue, and Schmidt prepared them for a news conference in which they denied the allegations and condemned the paper. Schmidt says that later on in the campaign McCain admitted to Schmidt that he had been lying, and had had a long relationship with the woman, and that McCaine was in a panic that this would get out and sink his campaign. Schmidt does not name her, but it is clear to whom he is referring. See that story in this morning’s paper: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/business/media/steve-schmidt-john-mccain.html?referringSource=articleShare

Three main themes emerge from all of this for me:

1. While McCain had great personal courage, despite the best efforts of Jon Stewart to portray him otherwise, he was a political coward.

2. McCain was complicit in the corruption of the US political process, especially (though likely not exclusively) involving Republicans, by Vladimir Putin and other Russian oligarchs, especially those fronting for Putin in Ukraine. As Schmidt writes: “The story of American corruption in Ukraine is a disgrace, and in part has led to the human disaster in Ukraine. The corruption did not start in the Trump era, but years before. It started in the K Street sewer firms where Roger Stone, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort and Rick Davis thrived.” Nite that Schmidt has fingered Davis as the person most responsible (after McCain himself) for the Sarah Palin VP selection.

3. As Meghan McCain has no doubt belatedly discovered, never bring a knife to a gun fight with Steve Schmidt.

[David Bruggeman]

I wonder whether this might encourage someone to dig into the Keating Five scandal of the 1980s to re-evaluate McCain's involvement and subsequent rehabilitation.

David

[Kevin M.]

It has been fun to watch, but feuding Republicans won’t affect any actual government policy, so it’s just a waste of shade 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Tom Wolper]

No. When Trump took a shit on McCain in 2015 by saying “I prefer heroes who don’t get captured,” and paid no political price for it, McCain became a footnote and nothing is to be gained by looking into his biography.

[PGage]

It won’t effect the electoral prospects of current Republicans, but it will impact the historical evaluation of McCain, and (one has some hope) an eventual reckoning on the role of Russian money on US politics.

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[JW]

> Anyone who has logged on to Twitter overnight

> or this morning will have seen this, but I post it

> here for the record.

I didn't see anything before this post, and I think one tweet afterward.

That means that I'm either using Twitter right or using it wrong.