Have I mentioned that Republicans are all suffering from a mass case of arrested development? When they aren’t crying over Dr. Seuss and Mr Potato Head, they’re acting like 6th grade schoolyard bullies. Yeah…
Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity ridiculed and laughed at CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter for wearing shorts during a television hit, claiming that the sight of Stelter’s “fully exposed” thighs left them “traumatized.”
During Sunday’s broadcast of his program Reliable Sources, Stelter did a somewhat lighthearted segment on news broadcasting during the coronavirus pandemic, pointing out the “ups and downs” of TV hosts and analysts patching in from in-home studios.
At one point, the CNN host said he could “relate” to some of the “embarrassing moments” that have gone viral, sharing an image of himself wearing a suit jacket and tie but no pants while noting he only had only two minutes’ notice before airtime.
Carlson then decided to end his primetime show on Monday night by poking fun at the sight of a pantsless Stelter, using an image of a weightlifting Chris Cuomo to help set up his joke. (Carlson has regularly tweaked and derided Cuomo over his habit of posting images and videos of his workouts.)
“We told you Chris Cuomo was the only CNN anchor who likes showing off his chiseled physique. We were wrong,” the Fox News host quipped. “On Sunday, the dwarf king aired footage of himself—oh, his chief minion rather—wearing no pants!”
(“Dwarf king,” by the way, is Carlson’s favorite nickname for CNN president Jeff Zucker. Carlson has also referred to Stelter in the past as Zucker’s “house eunuch.”)
“The footage shows the little media hall monitor—calves and thighs fully exposed—when he appeared for a television report on CNN. Your move, Chris Cuomo!” Carlson added before laughing maniacally at his own segment.
Signing off, a still giggling Carlson told his fellow Fox News star: “Hannity, see what you can do with that.”
“OK, now you just traumatized me with Humpty Dumpty and I’m going to have that image seared into my memory for the rest of my life,” Hannity moaned, using his preferred monicker for Stelter.
“Did you have to ruin my life? Ohhh, that is traumatic,” the Fox host added as Carlson snickered. Hannity wrapped up the bit by dramatically waving his hands over his face as if he felt faint.
Carlson—who was accused of “fat-shaming” Stelter in 2019 after he sent him jelly doughnuts in a prank—and Hannity aren’t the only Fox personalities who have taken ad hominem potshots at the CNN host over his looks. A few months ago, Fox host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery likened Stelter to a potato and said he was “ham-headed.”
There’s been a snotty streak on the right as long as I can remember. Bob Dole was a master of the insulting zinger. Rush Limbaugh was a very nasty piece of work and there’s no need to mention Trump the insult dog. But I don’t remember it being this juvenile before. Or this stupid. What’s going on here?
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): We gotta be very real with the American people, I don’t like how we’re scaring people unnecessarily. And that is that unless you have an immune system that is compromised, and you are older, and you have other underlying health issues you’re not going to die 99% from this virus, correct?
DOUG COLLINS: That is correct Sean, it’s good to be with you again.
HANNITY: Alright so that’s the point, I mean they’re scaring the living hell out of people. And I see I seeing them again as like oh, okay, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax
Hey, we’ve only lost 525,000 people so far! And they all died to make Trump look bad, especially the tens of thousands of people under the age of 65 who took one for the team.
That point of view came directly from the White House, I’m sure. recall:
Dave Roberts says he’s already mad about how the media is going to report the voting rights debate and he’s right. I am too:
I’m already dreading how the democracy reform debate will play into the media’s worst both-sides tendencies.
Viewed through the lens of partisan politics, it just looks like both parties fighting for policies that will get them more votes. That’s the “savvy” take.
In reality, voter fraud, of the kind Republicans claim to be addressing with their wave of state-level voter-suppression bills, is a myth. In this debate, the GOP is acting purely for partisan interest, against the public interest. Meanwhile the flaws Dems mean to address with HR1, DC statehood, etc., *really are* problems. They really do distort the fairness of the system. In this debate, the Dems are acting simultaneously for partisan interest & for the public interest. That just breaks “savvy” brains.
So you can look at this through a partisan lens, in which case, “both sides.” Or you can look at this through a substantive policy lens, in which case *Dems clearly have the better of the case*. Dems are, in this debate, correct — supported by evidence & basic American values.
US political media types are gripped by the bizarre (often sub rosa, rarely articulated) belief that if they judge one of the sides superior on the merits, they are thereby “taking sides” in the partisan struggle. Oh noes, bias!
It will just be much, much easier — socially, professionally, psychologically — for political journalists to do the “both sides, partisan squabbling” thing & stay away from the merits. All the dysfunctional media incentives point that direction. So here I am, pre-pissed!
It’s clear that the media hasn’t learned much about how they contribute to the degradation of democracy with this “both-sides” style of reporting. It’s become critical.
Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today:
All across the country, Republican legislatures are working to steal every future election through a bevy of new voter suppression laws. As Stacey Abrams tweeted yesterday:
This week, there is a coordinated attack on voting rights. GOP-led legislatures in GA, AZ & NH are pushing dozens of bills to make it harder for people of color & young people to vote. We voted in Nov & instead of listening, they are trying to shut us out of the process.
This is — of course — not a coincidence, but Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire. These new voter suppression laws could very well hand the Republicans the Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. We are in the middle of a full-scale war for the future of Democracy, and Republicans currently have the upper hand.
THREAD: Today, Georgia's GOP-led Senate will vote on #SB241, which would END no-excuse vote by mail. In 2020 alone, over 1.3 MILLION Georgians chose to vote by mail – now, in response to historic turnout, Republicans are trying to restrict OUR voting access. #gapolpic.twitter.com/PUJ1si6J3p
The Republican response to losing the House, Senate, and White House over the last four years is not to reevaluate their strategy or broaden their appeal. They are doubling down on stopping Black, Brown, and young people from voting. Fox News reported that:
Heritage Action for America, a conservative nonprofit tied to the right-leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation, on Monday will announce that it plans to spend at least $10 million on efforts to tighten election security laws in eight key swing states.
This is an emergency and it requires all hands on deck. And we’re going to have to work hard to ensure that the media doesn’t turn this into a typical he said/ she said issue.
My second dose of vaccine is Wednesday. The end of the pandemic is still months away. And a return to normal? If anything, it will be a new normal.
A daily walk has helped keep me sane over the year-plus of COVID-19 quarantine. I walk fast, just over four miles in an hour. It must look like a fast march because yesterday a guy in his yard called out, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”
The song identified with World War I is from just over a hundred years ago. Having the song title shouted at me set the tribulations of our present age in broader context. If you had been born just early enough to have remembered that war, say, in 1912, what might you have seen in your life? I made a short list.
WWI Spanish Flu pandemic Lynchings by the thousands Advent of broadcast radio Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight “Talkies” Great Depression bread lines
The New Deal Rise of Nazism and fascism WWII Pearl Harbor The Final Solution Hiroshima and Nagasaki The beginning of the Cold War Polio epidemics Berlin airlift Television Cuban Missile Crisis March on Washington JFK assassination Bloody Sunday Watts riots MLK assassination RFK assassination Moon landing Watergate Iran hostage crisis Invention of personal computers The end of the Cold War Clinton impeachment September 11 attacks
You’d have been 89 in 2001 if you’d lived to see the World Trade Towers come down.
I don’t know whether to feel better about the Great Recession, Trumpism, the covid pandemic, and the Jan. 6 insurrection or apprehensive about what comes next.
When finally I looked, it turns out “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was first performed in 1912.
John Birch Society bumper stickers 1990s to 2010s via Reddit.
A pair of articles consider where conservatism has gone in the last half century. Or hasn’t, as the case may be.
Written by a professor at Patrick Henry College, “hands-down the worst of the right-wing religious ‘colleges,'” a friend observes, a Real Clear Politics column offers conservatism a path to redemption. She found the piece both “wonderful” and “terrifying” that there was so much to agree with in it.
Mark T. Mitchell writes about revitalizing conservatism as an agent of stewardship. His soothing tone is enticing, as is much public-facing conservative scholarship, especially in an age when conservative policy-making has been dismissed, replaced as an animating force by culture-warring.
Mitchell calls for conservatives to turn from the dark magic of Trumpism (what he calls Trump’s “strange magnetism”) back to righteousness, to actually conserving:
To be sure, some conservatives might claim that they are interested in conserving traditional values or American hegemony or perhaps some abstract notion of freedom. But even when these things are named, the language and the disposition are less about conserving and more about fighting. Saying, “We’re going to fight for family values” is not the same thing as doing the hard work to cultivate the practices and institutions necessary for thriving families.
In short, the language of conserving — of stewardship — is foreign to many conservatives. Thus, we have a significant group of people who call themselves conservative but who have lost the inclination (as well as the practice) of conserving. Recovering this disposition is a key component to revitalizing American conservatism.
Conservation, stewardship of the natural world should be a conservative cause. “Callous disregard for the natural world represents a moral failing, and chanting ‘drill, baby, drill’ suggests an appalling disregard for the natural world and a petulant demand for a way of life that is, in its present form, not sustainable,” Mitchell writes.
I feel my defenses lowering.
“We have inherited many good things,” Mitchell intones. “To despise one’s inheritance – as is the current fashion – is a profound act of hubris and ingratitude,” he continues, slowly waving an open hand.
You don’t need to confront the sins of the past. These aren’t the issues you’re looking for.
Mitchell wants conservatism to return to its small-government faith, to see “concentration of power in any form — political or economic” as dangerous, but without addressing the imbalances of both that are the legacy of centuries. Conservatives should embrace “local culture, local food, local democracy, and local economies” the way Wanda and Vision inhabit their own Westview, New Jersey. Conservatives should strive to eliminate the welfare state. They should “reduce barriers and create opportunities for the working poor to acquire real property and enter the middle class.” Give them just enough property not to notice they remain economically and politically disempowered and how hard conservatives are working to keep them that way.
It is seductive and meant to be. One message for the public and a subtler one for believers, as Rick Perlstein and Edward H. “Ted” Miller of Northeastern University explain at The New Republic.
“The Republican Party is facing what many observers are describing as a William F. Buckley moment—a make-or-break opportunity to purge the racists and conspiracy theorists,” they begin. Butt the racists and conspiracy theorists never left. Buckley never did except by dying.
In Ronald Reagan’s statements one may hear Robert Welch and the John Birch Society:
Such evidence of Welch’s influence on Reagan tells a truer story of how the modern right evolved. Its founding act wasn’t purging the extremist conspiracists like Welch. Instead, the far right better represented the “mainstream” right’s vanguard, according to the organizing metaphor of a forthcoming book from John S. Huntington. Or it was, to borrow the title of a groundbreaking Princeton dissertation by David Austin Walsh, but one component of the “Right-Wing Popular Front.”
To take one crucial example, it is generally agreed that the transformation of Sun Belt states like Texas into Republican bastions was a key driver of the ideological shifts that led to the presidential election first of Richard Nixon in 1968, then of Reagan in 1980. And in Texas, according to a forthcoming study by historian Jeff Roche, it was Birchers as much as establishment Republicans who drove that shift.
Roche’s book is called TheConservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right. That term, “New Right,” refers to the key addition to the conservative coalition that made Ronald Reagan president, whose signature innovation was aggressively prospecting for new social issues, enraging ordinary citizens on the ground, and turning them into vectors for recruiting the otherwise apathetic into electoral politics. That was a method the John Birch Society mastered before the New Right even earned the name.
From sex education to abortion to feminism to homosexuality, Birchers saw creeping communism everywhere and in each a new cause célèbre. When Reagan won the presidency, “the only thing that changed was the people around him worked harder to keep his wackiness from the public.”
Conservatives learned to speak to two audiences at once, Perlstein and Miller write. The extremist fringe shops around “fantastical horror stories about liberal elites” in hopes they might find their way (in Overton Window fashion) into mainstream dialogue and enlist new recruits. QAnon today functions similarly, setting up tables downtown “urging none-the-wiser citizens to fight the scourge of global sex trafficking.” Rush Limbaugh turned telling daily horror stories into a decades-long career. Rupert Murdoch turned them into a media empire.
Conservatism reconstructed along Mitchell’s born-again-stewardship model might indeed be more marketable, even successful, my friend suggests. But not now and not soon. And not while actually purging itself of its animating dark magic. They are still busy trying to harness it.
The Georgia senate voted today to roll back no excuses absentee voting and make it harder to cast an absentee ballot for any of those still qualified. This wasn’t something they did for the pandemic and now they are going back to normal. They had no excuses absentee voting for 15 years:
Any registered voter has been allowed to cast an absentee ballot without having to give a reason since 2005 under a bill passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Georgia is one of 34 states that doesn’t require an excuse to vote from home, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
If the bill becomes law, about 2.8 million of Georgia’s 7.7 million registered voters would remain eligible to vote by absentee ballot, Dugan said.
State Sen. Nikki Merritt, D-Grayson, said efforts to reduce voting access in SB 241 are based on perceptions, ignoring the reality that the presidential election was accurate.
“The purpose of 241 and all of the vote-limiting bills we have before us is to validate a lie. It is to prevent massive voter turnout from happening again, especially in minority communities,” Merritt said. “Don’t find yourselves on the wrong side of history.”
But state Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, said lawmakers needed to respond to the concerns of their constituents.
“When an election result is not believed, when people believe results have been tampered with, the people can lose faith in their government,” Brass said. “We still need the people of Georgia to believe in the process, and right now they are unconvinced.”
The extreme fatuousness of that bullshit excuse cannot be overstated. Trump lied about losing the election over the vociferous objections of all the local Republican election officials so in order to “restore confidence” they have to make it much harder for Democrats to vote.
My fervent hope is that despite the fact that they still allow their voters over 65 to cast absentee ballots, that their onerous requirement for driver’s licences and ID will create difficulties for those voters too. It’s not like old white people are any better at jumping through these insane hoops than old Black people are.
Republicans should burn in hell for this abject bullshit. They know that what they are saying is ridiculous but it isn’t going to stop them. They will hang on to power by any means necessary.
Update: Oh look, another one
Four months after Iowans voted in record numbers, Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed legislation cutting the state’s early voting period and closing the polls an hour earlier on Election Day.
The Iowa Legislature approved the measure and sent it to Reynolds’ desk late last month. Every Republican present for debate in the House and Senate voted for the legislation. Every Democrat voted against it. Reynolds, a Republican, signed the law Tuesday.
II wonder if they voted to close the polls an hour earlier because of Trumps INANE insistence that the results must be announced by midnight on election night — presumably ensuring that any votes not counted by then should be thrown away.
To the COVID Tracking Project which will no longer be tweeting the number every day, much to my regret. It has been the single most useful bit of information on the spread of the pandemic out there and I’ll miss it, particularly since we may be looking at yet another surge coming our way, even as people re getting vaccinated in large numbers. It was sponsored by the Atlantic to provide information we weren’t getting from the government at the time. They’ve decided to stop now that the government is doing its job.
The following is their last daily tweet thread and I thought it was interesting.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.2 million tests, 41k cases, 40,212 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 839 deaths. This is our final day of data collection after a very long year.
The project was initially created to track testing. The first few days, states reported just a few thousand total tests. Today, states reported 1.2 million tests. The single-day high for the year was December 5 at 2.3 million. Cumulatively, we’ve tracked 363 million tests.
We ended up tracking other metrics. Cases reached heights we never could have imagined in the early days. The 7-day average got to 250 thousand cases per day in early January. Today, states reported the fewest number of cases since October 6, before the winter surge.
Hospitalizations have also fallen from highs over 130 thousand down to just over 40 thousand today.
Deaths have tracked the other metrics, at a delay, as they have through the pandemic. This is the first day we’ve seen fewer than 1000 deaths reported since November 29, more than 3 months ago.
It’s impossible to take in the sweep of the pandemic. But on this day last year, fewer than 20 people were known to have died from COVID-19 in the US. There were only 574 cases. Now, 10 states have seen more than 1 in 500 of their residents killed during the pandemic.
Our data collection ends today, but the CTP will continue publishing accountability work. We want to use our knowledge of the nation’s data to show how we might fix the structural problems we’ve identified.
We have many thank yous. First, to the frontline healthcare workers, who risked their lives to treat this emerging disease.
Second, thank you to the health department officials who gathered up the data that we compile. We know that we are merely the last step that this data takes. What you all have done, despite funding cuts and impossible hours, is the definition of public service.
We couldn’t have done this work for an entire year without being able to give stipends to some of the people who worked on it full-time. Thanks to our funders—and the folks who donated the software that we ran on. https://covidtracking.com/about
Our project’s key value is a culture of gratitude, saying thank you even for things that are a normal part of the job. In this year where so much has come at all of us, it has helped to remember that at the very least, we have each other to be thankful for.
In the beginning of the pandemic, @edyong209 told us that natural disasters bring people together, but pandemics tear people apart. We like to think that CTP was an active protest against those divisions.
And—this is @alexismadrigal and @kissane—we have to thank CTP’s contributors. This project came out of nothing. You became its blood and bones. We know how much you sacrificed—jobs, school, kidtime—and how much it sometimes hurt to handle the numbers that defined this year.
This assertion will invite contradictory dissents. On the one side, culture wars were bound to abate during a pandemic and economic downturn. The other response is: Are you kidding? If culture wars are over, why is Dr. Seuss all over Fox News?
To take the second point first: Sure, cultural conflict will forever be part of American life. Our habits, mores and assumptions are always in flux, especially given the United States’ exceptional religious, racial and ethnic diversity — along with our long-running feuds between big cities and the countryside. We battle even when there’s a surface cultural consensus: Think of the early stirrings of feminism in the 1950s and the furor unleashed by the Beats.
But what matters is how politicized these conflicts become. Republicans and conservatives have used culture wars as a way of encouraging working-class voters to cast their ballots on the basis of social, religious and racial issues rather than on economic questions.
Ever since the 1960s, the GOP has chipped away at the New Deal coalition by insisting that when the word “elitist” is used, it is a reference to cultural trendsetters and professors, not corporate titans.
And when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Princeton, Harvard Law School) claimed that Republicans are now the party of “working class men and women” in an interview on Fox News, he spoke of how their wages were being “pulled down” because they were competing with “people coming illegally.” Thus did undocumented immigrants become the class enemy.
A member of the party that has done everything it could for the past four decades to destroy organized labor, Cruz even had the temerity to say that Democrats “don’t represent unions anymore.”
His words came a day after Biden offered one of the most pro-union speeches ever given by a president. “Unions put power in the hands of workers. They level the playing field, they give you a stronger voice for your health, your safety, higher wages, protections from racial discrimination and sexual harassment,” Biden said. “Unions lift up workers, both union and nonunion, and especially Black and brown workers.”
Of particular note here is how Biden linked the inequalities of class and race. Here again, he’s fighting against wedge politics aimed at dividing middle- and working-class voters along racial and ethnic lines — and immigration status.
Now, you could argue that Biden’s relentless attention to the pandemic, and the work of economic relief and recovery, is simply common sense. And it is. These, more than any others, are the issues by which he will be judged.
But the president and his team have exercised enormous discipline in keeping the national conversation focused on bread-and-butter assistance to the vast majority of Americans. It’s one reason his $1.9 trillion aid package that cleared the House and then passed the Senate on Saturday with only Democratic votes polls so well. (The House is expected to ratify the Senate version this week.)
And whenever he could, Biden has tried to shift the conversation about the pandemic away from cultural conflict and toward the practical work of ending the scourge.
I think that has been effective so far. I suspect it could work well with a big infrastructure bill as well. Whether it can do that with the voting rights bills is a question. That one is so fraught with culture war implications that I’m not sure it can be avoided. But it has to be done anyway. It’s is an existential issue.
Former president Donald Trump, and now his allies, keep trying to turn mask-wearing into a cultural question linked to personal liberty. Biden calmly but pointedly speaks for the roughly three-quarters of the American public that sees mask-wearing not as some esoteric form of compulsory virtue signaling but as part of everyone’s responsibility to help prevent the spread of covid-19.
The right wing tried to make a new flash point out of Biden’s rebuke to “Neanderthal thinking” after Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi lifted mask-wearing requirements. “You know, this is Mr. Unity,” sniffed Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Stanford, Yale University Law School). “And yet, if you disagree with him, you’re a Neanderthal.”
But it hasn’t stuck, and Biden cares more about getting people to wear masks than in pushing the fight further. In any event, most Americans know how deadly it was to politicize mask-wearing in the first place, and it’s excruciatingly hard to turn Biden (D-University of Delaware, Syracuse University College of Law) into an elitist peddler of cultural radicalism. And, yes, since racism and sexism are often blended into culturally divisive appeals, a 78-year-old White guy is harder for the radical right to demonize than, say, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.
No wonder anti-Biden paraphernalia sold so poorly at the CPAC meeting, as The Post’s David Weigel reported. “I can’t give the Biden stuff away,” mourned merchandizer David Solomon.
As for Dr. Seuss, Republicans might yet help Biden turn that controversy into an economic question, too. After all, their resolute opposition to Biden’s proposal to help Americans in economic trouble makes them resemble no one so much as the Grinch, before his heart began to grow.
I think this is largely correct. But there is a difference between the culture war being political and having it centered in government. I take his point that Biden is not directly engaging in that fight and I think that’s great. But it’s political, whether we want it to be or not. How the government deals with issues of equality, equity, freedom etc can’t be separated from these arguments.
But Biden is good at talking about this stuff from the perspective of common values and basic decency which takes a lot of the toxic acrimony out of it and that is a huge relief not to mention an effective way of getting things done. Let’s hope he can keep it up.
