Category: Political issues

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Well then, here we are. The politics of the American election changed completely in one afternoon. There are two things on my agenda for the day after Biden’s announcement. The first is to heap scorn on the political media for its savage treatment of Biden while merrily changing Trump’s diapers. And the second is to laugh my ankles off at Republican rage over suddenly finding themselves in a Boeing 737 Max over Новосибирск with both engines on fire.

As usual, a historian, not the media, gives the best account. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote this morning:

“In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy. He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.”

I did not watch the Biden-Trump debate. Biden had done just fine at the State of the Union address on March 7. The uproar in the next day’s papers took me by surprise. In the coming days, though, it was clear that Biden was in fact fading pretty fast. It was possible that the White House had been covering up for him. It inevitably took some time for Democrats in Washington to work out a plan, but the timing was good, with Biden’s withdrawal coming a few days after Republicans had finished making fools of themselves in Milwaukee and right in the middle of their vulgar con-man-plus-hillbilly triumphalism.

Even with a propaganda network that would have made Goebbels proud, it takes time for Republicans to demonize the opposition. They spent years demonizing the Clintons, so effectively that even some Democrats fell for it. Republicans didn’t have much on Biden other than his age, so they went after his son. Then in one afternoon, Republicans’ entire investment in demonization became worthless. No wonder Stephen Miller had a screaming fit on Fox News and Trump complained that now they have to start over.

All of a sudden, after making Biden’s age (81) their biggest issue, Republicans are left with a 78-year-old who falls asleep in front of cameras.

Heather Cox Richardson again:

“The Republicans’ anger reflects that fact that if Biden is off the ticket, they are in yet another pickle. Just last week, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump, who is 78, for president. Having made age their central complaint about Biden, they are now faced with having nominated the oldest candidate in U.S. history, who repeatedly fell asleep at his own nominating convention as well as his criminal trial, who often fumbles words, and who cannot seem to keep a coherent train of thought. Democrats immediately pounced on Trump with all the comments Republicans had been making about Biden. Republicans have already suggested that Trump will not debate Harris, a former prosecutor. ”

As for the media, they were right about Biden. But that doesn’t get them off the hook if they keep normalizing the fascism of Donald Trump. Is the New York Times capable of a little shame in the form of straightforward truthtelling about Trump? We’ll soon find out.

As for Kamala Harris, I think we should wait and see what happens between now and the Democratic convention, which starts August 19. It’s not over until the convention makes the nomination official. It seems that some of the Democrats whose position matters most want to hold off on endorsing anyone and waiting for the convention — Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffreis, and Barack Obama. That seems wise.

The media, always eager to attack Democrats, will now go on and on about “disarray” and “chaos.” That’s nonsense. The party process is working exactly as it should. In fact it’s working better than it was before, because the Biden campaign and the DNC never really allowed any other options during primary season.

It’s Nancy Pelosi whom I will be watching most closely. She knows every congressional district in the country. She has her own polling information and respects the media about as much as I do. She has no agenda other than winning. If Democrats can win both the House and Senate in November, it’s a sure bet that they’ll win the White House as well.

Update: Jonathan Rauch, in the Atlantic, reminds us that one of the responsibilities of political parties is to select strong, qualified candidates and to stand in the way of weak, corrupt ones. The Democratic Party did this, whereas the Republican Party has been hijacked by Trump. Just think: When Trump is gone, what will the Republican Party have left? Pretty much nothing but shame, irrelevance, and a rage that will accomplish nothing. The Atlantic piece is “The Party Is Not Over: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian reports today that Fiona Hill is returning to the U.K. to work for the new Labour government. She will be one of three advisers who will oversee a strategic defense review. In the U.S., Hill first came to our attention when she testified during Trump’s impeachment trial, having worked in the Trump White House, where she was called “the Russia bitch.”

The Guardian writes:

“Notably Hill and the other members of the review team will report not just to John Healey, the defence secretary, but also to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.”

A few years ago, I reviewed Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here.

Oh, how I envy the U.K. right now. Not only is their election now behind them, they have a Labour government after fourteen years of Tory abuse. And they have Fiona Hill to help figure out how to deal with the Russians.

I have a particular respect for Fiona Hill partly because we have a mutual friend at the Brookings Institution, where Hill worked after the Trump White House. My friend sent her a link to my review of her book, which she read. She sent a reply to my friend: “This is wonderful. Please thank him. I am so glad that the book resonated this way with him. I was unaware of the Paul Krugman quote, but I guess it makes sense. My Dad and his friends would sit around on weekends talking for hours about practical things like this as I listened in as a kid. At the end of every discussion someone would say—well that’s everything settled then, we just need a bit of progress ….”

The Paul Krugman quote that she is referring to is Krugman’s frequent statement that reality has a distinctly liberal bias.

Need some cinematic therapy? This film should do it for you. A fascist president refuses to leave the White House and claims a third term. You already know the story, but to improve your mental health you need to see the ending. The last fifteen minutes of this film are priceless. The problem is that, as the credits start to roll, you realize that in the real world it’s not over.

This film was released in April and had been streaming for several weeks at a cost of $20 to $30. When the rental price came down to $5.99 from Apple, I finally watched it. There may be other streaming sources as well.

Some reviewers accused this film of holding back on the politics. I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s clear enough who’s who. The rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 81/70, which no doubt means that right-wingers took offense and voted down the audience rating.

John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 24, 1963. Less than five years later, Kennedy’s brother also will be dead. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It’s all so predictable. As Democrats, liberals, and all responsible people hasten to condemn political violence, the worst type of Republicans rush in with yet more violent rhetoric to blame Democrats and liberals and thereby — knowingly and intentionally — to encourage more political violence, as they have been doing for years, because they understand very well who it is who benefits from chaos.

Though some Republicans did respond with the usual “thoughts and prayers” after gun violence, from others it was hell fire and damnation.

“Biden sent the orders,” said a Republican member of the U.S. House from Georgia. I cringe to imagine what other conspiracy theories are flooding right-wing social media right now.

J.D. Vance, who hopes to be Trump’s candidate for vice president and who obviously hopes to profit from what happened, said, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Frank Pavone, a right-wing activist and former Catholic priest, said, “We recall the words that President Trump always says to us: It’s not that they are coming after him,” Pavone said. “They are coming after us — all of us — he’s just standing in the way.”

We already were in a state of chaos because of the media’s feeding frenzy over Biden’s age and mental state. The powerful images from the Trump rally in Pennsylvania will amplify the MAGA lust for scapegoats and for retribution for their loss in 2020.

I have no idea where things stand now. In such a state of chaos, few things are predictable other than the likelihood that nothing good will come of it.

Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ross Douthat has another head-scratcher of a column today in the New York Times, in vague and inconcise language as always. It’s “Do the Democrats Really Think Trump is an Emergency?” I had to reread it twice (ouch!) to even figure out what he’s trying to say. (William F. Buckley and George Will taught conservative writers that pompous writing sounds smart.) But I think that what Douthat is trying to say is that, if Democrats really think Trump is dangerous, then Democrats would make big concessions to Republicans to try to win them away from Trump.

Has Douthat forgotten that Democrats gave Republicans pretty much everything they wanted in bipartisan immigration legislation, but that it was Republicans who killed the legislation, because Trump wanted them to? As NBC News wrote, “But Trump’s hammering of the deal, while he uses immigration as a campaign issue, and his demands that Republicans reject it won the day.” Or what about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed 69-30 in the Senate and 228-206 in the House? It’s not that infrastructure was a concession to Republicans, it’s that Republicans touted “Infrastructure Week” the entire time Trump occupied the White House, but it was Democrats under Biden who eventually got it done.

Just what kind of concessions from Democrats does Douthat have in mind, then? Is Douthat’s memory faulty about the concessions that Democrats have made (or offered), or is it that he thinks ours is? Does Douthat think that Democrats are ever going to make concessions to the likes of the right-wing crazies who have paralyzed the House, or, heaven help us, to Trump?

I’m very serious about using the word “delusional,” which means holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality. Douthat’s model of external reality is highly defective here, both in what he conveniently forgets and in what he foolishly imagines any politically or morally sane person ought to concede to people who are not sane, politically or morally. Douthat never suggests any particular concessions. He only repeats the false notion that Democrats keep moving to the left, apparently never having bothered to read the Democratic Party’s platform.

Every time in the past when some pissed-off conservative has attempted to lecture me for being a liberal, I have observed that they have no idea what I think or what my principles are. Rather, what they think I think is what right-wing propaganda has told them that liberals think. It’s a simple tale, designed to be self-evidently stupid, and designed to enrage conservatives. I don’t expect to ever meet a conservative — even an educated one like Douthat — who is capable of actually understanding, and representing honestly, what liberals actually think. I should hasten to add here that not all liberals think alike, and that when liberals organize politically, we organize into coalitions. Though what liberal college students think matters, the thinking of liberal college students, still in their intellectually formative years, would be much easier to target and demonize than the sources, the histories, the examples, the values, and the philosophies on which most liberals actually base their principles and their politics.

Douthat misunderstands, or misrepresents, external reality because arguing for conservative ideas leaves him no choice. I am still waiting to encounter a conservative mind that can unconvince me of my observation that conservatives lie about things (or misrepresent things, if you prefer a milder word) because defending the indefensible is impossible. They lie, even to themselves, because they have to lie. They could be honest and say that they want to return to aristocracy, or put an end to democracy, or preserve the “traditional” hierarchies of race and sex and caste, of privilege and peonage, of lords and serfs and oligarchs, of dominance and submission. A few even do. But being too honest about what conservatives actually want to do with power won’t get you into the New York Times, or win many elections, in France or even Alabama.

Update 1: We’ve normalized this kind of absurdity, though we shouldn’t. On the same day that the New York Times is running conservative nonsense like the Douthat column above, they’re also running this: “Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat: Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to try to short-circuit the election system, if he does not win.”

So we’re expected to make concessions to the people who would bring us this kind of Trumpian emergency — trying to short-circuit the election system, again? Is it too much to expect that Republicans make some concessions to the law, to the Constitution, and to the very democracy that has enriched them and that goes much too far in trying to tolerate them and satisfy them?

There are not enough editors in the world, I’m afraid, to keep conservative “voices” like Douthat’s from trying to gaslight us. Mr. Douthat can write whatever he wants, but no one is required to publish it.

Update 2: While we’re talking about concessions to Republicans, let’s not overlook this, in case you missed it.

Mark Robinson is the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. He was caught on video saying, “Some folks need killing. It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!” Robinson was introduced by a preacher, who said, “Who’s behind President Biden, and that administration? Is it Obama. Is it Clinton? Read your Bible. It is the Devil.”

The Washington Post today rounds up some of this lovely conservative thinking today in “Pro-Trump Christian extremists use scripture to justify violent goals.”

The post writes:

“At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing conclave now dominated by pro-Trump factions, far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, onstage with Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon, welcomed the crowd ‘to the end of democracy.’

“‘Amen,’ Bannon said.”

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, was in the backwater city of Winston-Salem yesterday for the groundbreaking on a small project backed by the Department of Transportation — a $4.8 million pathway for bicycles and pedestrians that will link downtown with the city’s medical center. That’s small potatoes as transportation projects go. But Buttigieg is a hard-working guy.

In the turmoil that has arisen over President Biden’s debate performance last week, Buttigieg is one of the people mentioned as Biden’s replacement. Buttigieg is a wonk, a highly effective secretary of transportation, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and a Rhodes scholar. I was happy to stand out in the July sun to see him in action.

Earlier in the day, both Buttigieg and Governor Cooper were in Raleigh for the start of a bigger project. That’s a railway project that will connect Raleigh to Richmond and then onward to Washington and beyond.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, while in Raleigh Buttigieg dinged Trump without naming him: “Every one of those projects — and the 57,000 others that are funded, and counting, through President Biden’s infrastructure package — is really about one simple purpose, which is to make everyday life easier for the American people. … I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is in contrast to what we’ve seen before, a prior administration that declared ‘Infrastructure Week’ every year without any results until it became a punch line, a byword for all talk and no action.”

Events like this force the local media to turn out whether they want to or not. The backwater media would much rather be writing about chicken sandwiches, petty real estate deals, and third-tier chefs in crummy and overpriced local eateries that won’t last a year.

Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina

There is much that could be said about whatever form of madness it was that happened during last night’s Biden-Trump debate. But the thing that matters most is that the media have made up their hive mind. What Trump is, what Trump has done, and what Trump intends to do no longer matters. The media, in ecstasy from the smell of blood, have found their victim, and it is Biden.

I wrote this to a friend this morning:

“I did not watch the debate last night. I am horrified at what I am reading this morning, a media ghoul feast like I’ve never seen before. The media being what it is, and the American people being what they are, I can’t imagine how Biden and the DNC can reverse this kind of press (and it must be nine times worse in the TV media). The media will do the Republican party’s work for them from here on, and Russia here we come. Everything other than Biden’s age will be drowned out; Trump’s age and what he is and what he has done doesn’t even matter anymore. We’re now in a manic psychic-epidemic mode, led and fed by a hyperventilating media, doing to Biden, and to history, what we did to Jimmy Carter, revising him into a failure. Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president would be a guaranteed way to lose. Nobody likes her, including me; she was a mistake in 2020. The only person who has the political ability to do what would need to be done in a mere four months is Gavin Newsome. Lots of people must have stayed up all night in Washington gaming out a plan, or at least I hope they did. Biden did great during the state of the union speech three months ago, while Trump has been rambling about sharks and not remembering people he has known for years. I don’t understand this. But it was clearly the miracle straight from hell that Republicans needed to sell Hitler to the American people. The media will be fine with it, because doomscrolling will bring back the 2016-2020 glory years. God save us.

“I feel like the world just got turned upside down. Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in ages. I stopped at a greasy spoon and had a (terrible) breakfast. There was a group of old farmer guys talking. In the previous two election years, they’d have been angry, repeating Fox News talking points. Yesterday there wasn’t a bit of that. They were laughing, having a good time, and not a bit of anger, talking about cows, broomstraw, and how people used to know their neighbors. I was pulled toward the conclusion that Republicans simply have not been able to stir up enough rage and provide enough fear-inducing talking points to get the deplorables to bother to vote in November. Now I’m afraid that has all changed.”

There are sane voices (including Biden’s). But sane voices will be drowned out in the media stampede. This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning:

“It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

“It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has.”

Who knows at this point how the Democratic Party will respond. Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party is one thing. But Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party and a depraved and savage media is another.

Update:

A few media watchers get it right, but pretty much no one pays attention to them. Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: “CNN fails the nation.”

After the Trump guilty verdict yesterday, we got all the batty outpourings of Republican rage that would be expected. Axios wrote, “A profound sense of rage — and an insatiable thirst for revenge — is permeating virtually every corner of the Republican Party in the wake of former President Trump’s historic conviction.”

Trump himself, for the cameras, went through the motions of displaying rage, but am I the only person who got the impression that an addled Trump only half understands what just happened? One person in particular, though, totally gets what happened. That’s Donald Trump Jr.

“Such bullshit,” Junior said. “The Democrats have succeeded in their years long attempt to turn America into a third-world shithole. November 5 is our last chance to save it.” Junior’s rage is real. If you’ve watched any of his podcasts (I’ve watched only snippets), he works himself into a deranged, spit-flinging lather.

There is a psychotic, and genuine, hatred in his rage. He is a fiend and probably was born that way. Remember the photos of Don Jr.’s and Eric’s African safari in 2012? According to one report, “In one of the photographs, Donald Jr. displays a smug grin while holding the sawed-off tail of the dead elephant, knife in hand.”

Despite the show of Republican rage, you can be sure that, behind closed doors, Republicans know that Trump’s days are numbered. The problem for MAGA world now is how to keep the movement going. Several people have tried to get anointed as the new Trump, Ron DeSantis in particular. DeSantis failed. Nikki Haley, actually, has the best numbers. But though Haley might be suitable to lead a somewhat chastened establishment GOP, she is not at all suitable to keep the MAGA cult going after Trump is out of commission. A very common way for authoritarian strongmen to keep the regime going is have a family dynasty. Think Juan and Isabel Perón, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Don Jr.’s dream — I would even say plan — is to be the new Trump.

I have a prediction. In the coming months, no matter what the courts do or don’t do to Trump, and no matter whether or not Trump’s mental state becomes an issue, look for the Trump family to do everything they can to shift MAGA loyalty to Don Jr. as Trump Sr.’s hopes fade.

Donald Trump Jr. will run for president in 2028. The mainstream media again will fall for it, and another Trump will get another free ride in the media because of all the hits and ratings.

MAGA wants revenge, and Don Jr. is the only mutant with any hope of providing it.