Month: August 2021

From a nurse, on twitter:

Tonight I helplessly held the hand of and stroked the hair of a beautiful 14 year old girl as she exited this world. She was looking forward to starting high school and eventually becoming a veterinarian. It was so senseless! I truly believe she could have been saved if her parents had not forbidden us from intubating her. A free vaccination would have prevented it all! This little girl was robbed of her whole life and of fulfilling all of her dreams. She had been with us 9 days and was able to communicate well until taking a turn for the worse yesterday.

About 2 hours later we were unable to save a 25 year old mother of 1 who was 15 weeks pregnant. She had refused the vaccines because of the lies about them causing infertility and harming her baby. Liars killed her, her baby and robbed a 2 year old little boy of hismommy and sibling. Not to mention robbing a husband of his wife and child. Those were 2 of 4 deaths we had tonight with the oldest being 45 years old! It was the 1st time since late March we have lost more than 3 covid patients in a single shift.

Then we find out this morning a coworker had 2 of her tires cut in 1 of our employee parking lots overnight! Fortunately, security caught and was able to detain the asshole until police arrived and took him into custody. Fuck the big orange buffoon, DeSantis, Facebook, Fox news, antivaxxers, magas, Dr Mercola, Robert Kennedy Jr, all parents who believe these killers over proven science and ALL other killers who spread anti vaccine lies. I can’t deal with people right now! I love you guys!

Originally tweeted by Jessica M. MSN, FNP-C (@Jessicam6946) on August 14, 2021.

Slate’s Jordan Weissmann reflects on the census data released last week:

Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.

The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.

Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.

In addition to the Republican, unprincipled, white-knuckled war on democracy, the problem for Democrats remains that the structure of the Constitution gives those rural states in the middle of the country two senators each, while no matter how populous coastal states become, they get only two. Thus also, presidencies won without winning the popular vote. And popular-vote presidencies like Joe Biden’s hamstrung by a Senate over-representing Republican-controlled states and under-representing the rest.

I may have more to say on this later, but like it or not Democrats have to do better at winning elections out where they do not now.

“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” then-DNC chair Gov. Howard Dean said in 2006. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” What Dean said 15 years ago is true today: You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

And if you do show up to play and expect to compete, you’d better have game.

Somewhere in the last week, I saw a commentary on how right-wing money men are willing to compete everywhere, year after year to advance their ideology. They don’t spend, they invest. Not only in right-wing talk radio, but in Spanish-language right-wing talk. And even in markets with an significant Asian demographic. They’re playing the long game. So did the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the left flounders. The left-wing talk model does not work as well, this comment went, because it does not stimulate the lizard brain the same way. So what are Democrats doing that does work or might work at counter-programming out where Democrats give conservatives a too-easy pass at winning both U.S. Senate seats and state legislatures?

Somebody like Dean has to take a long-term (not election-cycle) view of advancing progressive ideas out where the buffalo roam.

All these unvaccinated people gathering together in the midst of a surge of a deadly contagious disease. Dying to own the libs.

These people are nuts. https://t.co/y85xx0F8Jp

— digby (@digby56) August 14, 2021

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There are some things no amount of guns and money can fix. That should not be an earth-shattering revelation. Just last week, I recalled John Kerry’s famous coda to the Vietnam War, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

After 20 years, the Graveyard of Empires has claimed another. U.S. diplomats this morning are evacuating our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan by helicopter:

Helicopter after helicopter — including massive Chinooks with their twin engines and speedy Black Hawks that had been the workhorse of the grinding war — touched down and then took off loaded with passengers. Some dispensed flares overhead, a new addition to Kabul’s skyline.

Those being evacuated included a core group of American diplomats who had planned to remain at the embassy in Kabul, according to a senior administration official. They were being moved to a compound at the international airport, where they would stay for an unspecified amount of time, the official said.

Finger-pointing is inevitable. Memories are too short. That which we would rather forget, we forget.

At the time of our exit from Vietnam, untold numbers had been killed. Millions of civilians and combatants. After decades of U.S. training and investment, the South Vietnamese Army was soon in disarray. The U.S. left behind as much as $5 billion dollars in U.S. equipment (in 1970s dollars). Tens of thousands of abandoned M-16s ended up in the hands of revolutionaries across the globe.

As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan in the last weeks, it will happen again. Somewhere in the last week, I saw a photo of Afghan Army personnel in U.S. military vehicles supposedly fleeing for the Iranian border. The U.S. has attempted to destroy or extract what it can, but the speed of the Taliban advance means we will inevitably repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. Already the Taliban are seizing billions in U.S. military equipment.

David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper write in the New York Times:

If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban. The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed it might happen in 18 months, not weeks.

Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.

Taliban inside General Dostum’s house. pic.twitter.com/yVj1hu3gUd

— BILAL SARWARY (@bsarwary) August 14, 2021

Something else our short memories have forgotten: The U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda, not to spend 20 years fighting the country’s civil war. But we did.

President Biden issued a statement addressing that history on Saturday:

America went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to defeat the forces that attacked this country on September 11th. That mission resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden over a decade ago and the degradation of al Qaeda. And yet, 10 years later, when I became President, a small number of U.S. troops still remained on the ground, in harm’s way, with a looming deadline to withdraw them or go back to open combat.

Over our country’s 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in U.S. history. One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.

Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute takes Biden to task for the manner of our withdrawal:

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.

Mr. Biden believes that further expending U.S. resources in Afghanistan is “a recipe for being there indefinitely.” He rightly notes that President Trump had left him few good options by making a terrible deal with the Taliban. That’s a fine argument, but it explains neither the hastiness nor the consequences we are now observing: the Taliban overrunning swaths of the country, closing in on Kabul, pushing the Afghan security forces and government to the brink of collapse and prompting the Pentagon to prepare for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy.

A responsible withdrawal needed more time and better preparation. History will record Mr. Biden, a supposed master of foreign policy for decades, as having failed in this most critical assignment.

And yet, for all our best intentions, that failure was inevitable the moment the U.S. engaged in nation-building in a country that is not a nation but cluster of regions governed more by tribal leaders and warlords than by Kabul.

Recently, I watched a hair-raising film chronicling a real battle between U.S. and Taliban forces. The Outpost (2019) retells with frightening realism the Battle of Kamdesh in 2009. As Wikipedia tells it:

In 2006, PRT Kamdesh – later renamed Combat Outpost Keating – was one of several U.S. Army outposts established in Northern Afghanistan. Located in a remote valley surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains, the base was regarded as a deathtrap; the troops stationed there faced regular Taliban attacks, culminating in one of the bloodiest American engagements of Operation Enduring Freedom. The film tells the story of the 53 U.S. soldiers and two Latvian military advisors who battled some 300 enemy insurgents at the Battle of Kamdesh.

Most staggering was that at one point we learn that local villagers did not know the U.S. troops were not Russians. They were just the latest foreign occupiers.

What happens next in Afghanistan could be an unspeakable tragedy. One simply delayed by 20 years of futile U.S. efforts to forestall the inevitable.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for the inevitable?

UPDATE: This.

Afghan People throwing shoes and stones to Afghan Army who ran away like cowards without even showing a little resistance to #Taliban.
For this is USA spent $88b to train them?pic.twitter.com/tZtURS8678

— Shama Junejo (@ShamaJunejo) August 15, 2021

I’ll just leave this here:

Why Kansas why?! pic.twitter.com/BunsRrnC5H

— WKC (@WashingtonFanKC) August 13, 2021

It’s not just the deluded conspiracy theorists. It’s the cynical politicians:

It wasn’t that long ago that major media outlets were publishing stories proclaiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) “won the pandemic,” or deserved an apology from pundits and public health experts who have panned his laissez faire approach to the coronavirus. But those notions have aged poorly, as Florida struggles with spiking Covid-19 hospitalizations that DeSantis seems particularly unequipped to handle.

Comments DeSantis made to reporters on Wednesday in an attempt to downplay the grim reality that Florida currently leads the nation in Covid hospitalizations for children were case in point. Instead of implementing policies to address the issue, DeSantis banned mask mandates in schools. On Wednesday, he went as far as to suggest — citing no evidence other than anonymous anecdotes — that families of school-age children should be more worried about children contracting respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

“COVID, I view as a very minor risk,” DeSantis said. “RSV is a little more serious and it just shows certain things that are focused on versus not. I’ve had doctors tell me that parents have come in with kids who were sick that have gotten a negative COVID test and a positive RSV and the parents were relieved at that.”

It’s not COVID-19 in kids. It’s RSV. pic.twitter.com/huZBgY1LCO

— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) August 11, 2021

DeSantis’s remarks are at odds with data from his own state Department of Health showing that RSV cases have decreased in recent weeks and can currently be counted on one hand. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported earlier this month that Florida had more than 30 Covid-stricken kids in the hospital each day between July 24 and 30.

That press conference came one day after DeSantis expressed confusion about officials from his own state requesting ventilators and smaller breathing devices from the federal government — equipment needed to prevent the state’s hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

ℹ Florida COVID-19 Update for August 10, 2021

🔴 Total Confirmed Hospitalizations: 14,787 pic.twitter.com/T3thlJwHyL

— Florida Hospital Association (@FLHospitalAssn) August 10, 2021

DeSantis — who last week admonished President Joe Biden, “why don’t you get this border secure and until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about Covid from you” — made comments on Tuesday to reporters seeming to indicate that he’s either oblivious to the ventilator request or trying to intentionally mislead people about it.

“I would honestly doubt that that’s true, but I’ll look because we have a lot of stuff that we stockpiled over the last year and a half through the Department of Emergency Management,” DeSantis said. “I’ve not had any requests across my desk. I have not been notified of that.”

A short time after, NBC reported not only that the request had been made, but that the federal government had already sent the breathing gear to Florida.

In a written response to an email sent by Vox, Weesam Khoury, communications director for the Florida Department of Health (DOH), claimed, “to be clear, there is not a shortage of ventilators in Florida,” adding that the request is “a proactive measure to ensure there are consistent resources available in the state stockpile for deployment” made by “health care facilities.”

[…]

Dr. Jonathan Reiner of the George Washington University School of Medicine said during a recent CNN appearance that if Florida were a foreign country, the federal government would consider banning travel to it.

“The viral load in Florida is so high right now, there are really only two places on the planet where it’s higher,” Reiner said. (Those two places: Botswana and Louisiana.)

In a Talking Points Memo piece arguing that DeSantis “is the nation’s worst Covid governor,” Josh Kovensky details how DeSantis enabled the ongoing Covid surge with his two-front war on mask mandates and vaccine mandates:

As all of this preventable carnage began, DeSantis shrugged it off with a series of orders that, epidemiologists say, poured gasoline on the already more contagious Delta variant. He has made national news this year by banning two mandates that public health officials have said are needed to keep hospitalizations down: vaccine and indoor mask requirements. The Florida government has prohibited businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccines, and has forbid schools from instituting mask requirements.

Notably, DeSantis’s vaccine mandate prohibition includes cruise ships — a policy MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has characterized as the “single most deranged Covid policy we’ve seen.” But a federal judge earlier this week ruled that Florida can’t bar cruise companies from requiring proof of vaccination.

Likewise, DeSantis’s mask mandates ban is being challenged in court by parents and ignored by at least one school board. DeSantis has responded by saying the Florida Board of Education might withhold paychecks from board members and administrators who enforce mask mandates, which in turn has prompted the White House to suggest it might try to step in. (On Thursday, the DeSantis administration backed down from its threat to withhold pay.)

Biden indirectly took aim at DeSantis during a speech earlier this month, saying, “Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new Covid-19 cases in the entire country. We need leadership from everyone … I say to these governors, please help, but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way.”

“Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new Covid-19 cases in the entire country. We need leadership from everyone … I say to these governors, please help, but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way” — Biden pic.twitter.com/dPDnGAJ38u— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2021

On Thursday, news broke that just days into Florida’s school year, 440 students in Palm Beach County have already been asked to quarantine because of Covid-19 exposure. And Friday morning brought reports of four Broward County teachers dying of Covid in a single day.

But DeSantis seems undeterred.

“It’s airborne. It’s aerosolized,” he said of the delta variant on Thursday. “So we just have to understand when that’s happening these waves are something you just have to deal with.”

DeSantis Press Secretary Christina Pushaw dismissed research linking mask mandates to reduced Covid-19 spread in an email to Vox, writing, “Governor DeSantis will continue to protect individual rights from unscientific mandates promoted by overreaching politicians who are desperate to give the appearance of ‘doing something’ even if it has no effect.”

What explains DeSantis’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the gravity of the Florida Covid case spike and stop working against public health best practices? The answer to that question is up for debate, but one factor may be a belief that reversing course would undermine his brand as the governor who stuck it to the libs by thumbing his nose at the Dr. Faucis of the world. That brand has established DeSantis as the non-Trump frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

After all, it was just last month that DeSantis was selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merchandise on his website.

As Fauci has conducted local and national interviews obliquely criticizing DeSantis’s policies, DeSantis has continued to downplay the surge, saying last week that “this is our COVID season.” Meanwhile, hospitals in the state are reporting “unprecedented” wait times for beds.

Press Secretary Pushaw pointed to the fact that Covid-19 hospitalizations dipped this week in the Jacksonville area, writing to Vox, “COVID cases in the areas of the state that were earliest hit in this wave, such as Jacksonville, have already started their decline as predicted — without any government authority imposing non-pharmaceutical interventions.”

“Governor DeSantis continues to support vaccination for Covid-19 as well as promoting monoclonal antibody treatment for anyone who tests positive and is at risk of severe illness from Covid-19,” she continued.

It’s possible that as the news grows more dire, Floridians will adjust their behavior and/or get vaccinated if they haven’t already, prompting new cases to begin trending down again. But even in that scenario, the fact remains that by stubbornly working at cross-purposes with public health experts, DeSantis has made Florida’s Covid-19 problem worse than it had to be.

“The Governor of Florida is violating the rule of holes… When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” pic.twitter.com/tqgLzhlcFL

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2021

The GOP is a zombie party, led by King of the Undead, Donald Trump:

Eight years after working to persuade voters who opposed their presidential nominee to give them another look, Republican leaders are opting for a different approach this time around: making it harder for those voters to cast ballots at all.

Mitt Romney’s 4-percentage-point loss to then-President Barack Obama in 2012 triggered a months-long introspective that was presented at the party’s summer meeting in Boston. It called for Republicans to do a better job of reaching out to nonwhite voters who had overwhelming supported Obama and given him a second term.

Yet as the Republican National Committee gathers in Tennessee for this year’s summer meeting, there is zero attempt to produce any such “autopsy” of Donald Trump’s 4-point loss to Joe Biden in November. Instead, party leaders are increasing their calls for “election integrity” ― a push that echoes Trump’s endless lies that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him.

“It’s gone from an autopsy to an assault on democracy,” said Stuart Stevens, a top aide in Romney’s 2012 campaign. “Instead of doing the hard work of getting people to vote for you, let’s make it harder for people who aren’t going to vote for us to vote. That’s what it is.”

The reason for the lack of any formal review, Republicans said, is simple: A former president who does not hesitate to attack members of his party who do not show him absolute fealty.

“They don’t want to piss him off,” said John Ryder, a longtime RNC member from Tennessee who left the 168-member body as it was being taken over by Trump loyalists following his 2016 election.

Romney, a lifelong Republican, was never going to sabotage his party because of a critical report, added one top RNC member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Trump’s not Romney,” the member said. “There are repercussions for saying what’s apparent to most Americans.”

Instead, the RNC created a special committee to track its efforts at “election integrity” ― legislation in states around the country that adds voting restrictions disproportionately affecting poorer and minority communities. The committee met Wednesday and hopes to release a report next week. RNC officials and members said that the issue is the priority for its base, who remain loyal to Trump and who, polling shows, say they believe his easily disproven lies that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud.

“Wherever I go in Florida, it’s the number one thing people ask me about: election integrity,” said Florida RNC member Peter Feaman.

Sally Bradshaw, for more than a decade a top aide to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and one of the authors of the 2013 post-mortem, said she was appalled by the party’s continued embrace of Trump and his most loyal followers.

“Here’s what the base wants to hear? That’s not what public service is,” she said. “Rather than trying to persuade, they’re just trying to manipulate the system. It’s their only way to win. It’s the only option they have. And it’s sickening.” 

You’ll recall that the GOP autopsy in 2012 recommended the party greatly increase its outreach to racial and ethnic minorities as well as women generally. Then Trump came along with his open racism and total disdain for decency and he won:

It’s a lesson that appears to have stuck. Party leaders today ― including potential 2024 candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ― blame migrants entering the country for recent surges in COVID-19 infections, rather than the true culprits: Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Stevens, who worked on both of George W. Bush’s successful presidential campaigns prior to serving as Romney’s chief strategist, said that for too many Republicans, Trump’s popularity with the party base came as a relief after Priebus’s attempts to expand the party.

“They thought: ‘We don’t have to pretend to care about that shit anymore. We can just win with white people,’” he said. “’Thank God. That was exhausting.’” 

Despite Republicans’ optimism about beating Obama in 2012, history suggested it was always a steep climb. Incumbent presidents in modern times rarely lose, which is why Trump’s loss in 2020 was remarkable.

He became just the third post-World War II president to lose reelection and the first since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, the White House and the Senate in a single term. Trump’s loss also extended the GOP’s dismal record in presidential races to seven popular vote losses in eight tries.

Still, Republicans have not commenced an analysis of why Trump lost, notwithstanding the exhaustive study of the 2012 election that had been far more difficult to win.

Stevens praised the 2013 report’s recommendations, despite its criticisms of Romney’s campaign, comparing it to earlier attempts to expand the party, such as former RNC chair Ken Mehlman’s apology to the NAACP in 2005 for the GOP’s decades-long reliance on the racist “Southern Strategy.”

“It was not just a political necessity, but a moral mandate,” he said.

Bradshaw, a lifelong Republican who left politics entirely during the Trump years and now runs a bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida, said the lack of any such review for fear of angering a man who tried to overthrow American democracy after losing his election speaks volumes.ADVERTISEMENT

“It’s why I left the party. Because it’s a cult of personality, not a problem-solving party,” she said. “There’s no long game. There’s no ‘how to grow the party.’ The Republican leadership now is just about the preservation of power in the short-term. The Republican Party is not about ideas anymore. And I’m sad about that.”

Party officials, though, point to their success with nontraditional Republican candidates in the 2020 election in House races, with women and Latinos helping put the party within striking distance of taking back that chamber in 2022.

And the current RNC member who spoke anonymously said leaders are simply being practical. They need to prepare for the midterm elections, and publicly antagonizing Trump is not the way to do it. Besides, RNC leaders are fully aware of what happened in November.

“Trump lost the election. He lost the election that he could have won, with some minor changes,” the member said. “He took a very divisive path, and it cost him the White House. And it ultimately cost the party the Senate. Nobody has to explain that to people. You don’t need a long report to explain what’s obvious.”

But Ryder said the RNC has evolved to a point where a significant number of its members actually believe Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he says are readily debunked just by looking at vote totals in historically Republican suburbs populated by college-educated whites all over the country.

He said he personally has found legislative districts in Tennessee that that went for GOP Senate candidate Bill Hagerty but also for Biden at the top of the ticket. “Trump lost because he alienated a lot of Republicans. As long as they’re absorbed in this myth that the election was stolen, you’re not going to understand what happened.”

Ryder added that he does not know, at this point, how the party will get past Trump if it refuses to acknowledge why he lost.

“It’s not healthy at all. If you’re a football team and you lose a game, you review the game film and say, OK, what went wrong? A wise political party looks at that. You’ve got to look at it with clear eyes and a clear head.”

I wish I could read something like this and believe that they will fail spectacularly and sanity will assert itself. For some reason, I am anything but sure of that. I wonder why?

Not COVID. Compassion fatigue. This piece by Ryan Cooper speaks for me:

In June and early July, it seemed like the U.S. nearly had this thing beaten. But now the stubborn entitlement of a reactionary minority is delaying the return of normal life indefinitely, and putting the lives of others — in particular, all the children under 12 and those with compromised immune systems who cannot get vaccinated  — at risk. Surveys have repeatedly shown that vaccine refusal is largely a partisan phenomenon.

Some have argued that attacking anti-vaxxers is ineffective, or worry that it will lead to dangerous conflict. But a furious reaction is healthy, natural, and frankly overdue. Liberals should embrace their anger, and stand up to those who are deliberately prolonging the pandemic.

Here’s where we stand as a country. The vaccines are proving to be somewhat less effective against the Delta variant, but still provide strong protection against infection, very strong protection against hospitalization, and almost complete protection against death. The highly-vaccinated states in the Northeast have so far seen only a relatively modest increases in cases, small increases in hospitalization, and few deaths.

But as noted above, the least-vaccinated states are in dire straits. Nationally, about 70 percent of people above 18 have gotten at least one shot, but the 30 percent of vaccine refuseniks are concentrated in conservative states — though I should note that only about a third of Republicans (presumably the hard core of dedicated partisans) say they will not get the vaccine.

Florida, Texas, and the other Gulf states are this way mostly because of conservative propaganda. Right-wing pundits and politicians have fulminated not only against the vaccines, but also against pandemic control measures of any kind. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded that there be no requirements to get the vaccine the same day a Houston hospital was setting up overflow tents for COVID-19 patients. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently threatened to withhold the salaries of public school administrators who refused to obey his order banning masks in schools. Republicans are openly signaling that their midterms strategy will be to blame Biden for any new mask mandates or other requirements their own irresponsibility caused.

In the process, these men have put the suppurating moral core of movement conservatism on display: the idea that conservatives should always get to do exactly what they want, and that everyone else should also have to do exactly what conservatives want. The need for responsible behavior starts with you and ends with me. In particular, they view the prospect of having to do anything whatsoever to protect others — even if they protect themselves in the process — as an intolerable imposition on their personal freedom.

This explains their bizarre behavior regarding masks — in the initial stages of the pandemic, conservatives shrieked that mask requirements were an imposition on their liberty. Then when things got better and mask requirements were relaxed, they continued to shriek at anyone who personally chose to wear a mask (if not physically attack them). After a recent school board meeting in Franklin, Tennessee, anti-vaccine nuts openly threatened violence against medical professionals for testifying in favor of masks in classrooms.

One often hears the argument that one should be indulgent of anti-vaccine lunatics — that instead of criticizing them or coercing them to get the vaccine by banning them from air travel, restaurants, and so on, one should be compassionate or calmly rational. In the first place, there is no evidence that this actually works. Epidemiologists have been trying every possible argument for months now and it’s made no difference, because conservative vaccine refuseniks are listening to Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, and Bret Weinstein (the ones who haven’t died, at least).

More broadly, this attitude is reflective of a deeply baked-in defensive ideology among liberals that helplessly legitimizes conservative grievance. Democrats have been bending over backwards to appease conservative rage for 40 years — convincing themselves that they had to submit to Reaganism, attack their own core constituencies, retreat from civil rights, cut welfare, and so on, to win back the white working class. We see this today in moderate Democrats scolding Black Lives Matter activists to pipe down because they might alienate white voters.

But appeasing conservative grievance all this time has only strengthened their bottomless sense of entitlement and victimhood. At this point the whole right-wing project of stealing elections and setting up a one-party state depends on liberal cowardice — the solid majority of the country that supports democratic institutions, not to mention ending the pandemic as quickly as possible, simply lying down and taking it. Witness D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who anxiously instructed residents of her city not to come out and counter-protest against the putschists on January 6 (for fear of inflaming conservative rage), thereby leaving the Capitol open to attack.

What’s more is that pushing hard on responsible COVID measures is good politics in the here and now. Polls show a large majority of Americans support both vaccine mandates and virus control measures to fight Delta and save lives. Standing up for that platform puts Democrats on the winning side of a culture war battle and drives a wedge deep into the Republican base (which is not at all uniformly against vaccination).

It is not 1988 anymore. Conservatism is a distinctly minority phenomenon, and is becoming more so with every passing year. I for one have had it up to here with the shrieking anti-vaccine maniacs who are doing their level best to put more children in intensive care. They should be exiled from society until they get their shots, and their efforts to intimidate people against controlling the pandemic should be met with massive resistance.

The Great Florida Hope is being pimped by Fox News:

Early in Florida’s vaccine rollout, during a period marked by confusion and images of seniors in long lines desperatefor a shot, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office devised a pitch to air a more flattering view. In mid-January, his staff took the idea to Fox News.

The timing was perfect. Producers for Fox & Friends, the network’s top-rated cable morning news show, were already inquiring about DeSantis’ availability.

A plan came together in a flurry of emails and phone calls over several days. DeSantis’ team provided a senior, a location and the talking points. Fox News would bringthe cameras and its audience. No other media would be allowed in.

When Fox & Friends viewers tuned in Jan. 22, they heard applause live from St. Petersburg as a 100-year-old World War II veteran received his first coronavirus vaccine. Standing nearby, DeSantis cracked jokes about the senior’s good looks and boasted that Florida was leading the country in vaccinating older residents.

“I honestly think he could host the show with the chops we saw from him at the vaccine site,” a Fox producer wrote afterward in an email to Meredith Beatrice, DeSantis’ deputy director for communications at the time.

The details of this staged news event were captured in four months of emails between Fox and DeSantis’ office, obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through a records request. The correspondences, which totaled 1,250 pages, lay bare how DeSantis has wielded the country’s largest conservative megaphone and show a striking effort by Fox to inflate the Republican’s profile.

From the week of the 2020 election through February, the network asked DeSantis to appear on its airwaves 113 times, or nearly once a day. Sometimes, the requests came in bunches — four, five, even six emails in a matter of hours from producers who punctuated their overtures with flattery. (“The governor spoke wonderfully at CPAC,” one producer wrote in March.)

There are few surprises when DeSantis goes live with Fox. “Exclusive” events like Jan. 22 are carefully crafted with guidance from DeSantis’ team. Topics, talking points and even graphics are shared in advance.

Once, a Fox producer offered to let DeSantis pick the subject matter if he agreed to come on.

By turning to DeSantis to fill the many hours of airtime once devoted to former President Donald Trump, Fox has made Florida’s hard-charging leader one of the country’s most recognizable Republicans. Thathas given DeSantis a leg up on others who may seek the party’s nomination for president in 2024. A recent nationwide poll of Republican voters put DeSantis atop the field if Trump doesn’t run again. No other prospective candidate was close.

“He’s been given the first Fox audition for 2024, which also means he gets to set the bar,” said Adam Goodman, a veteran Republican media strategist. “That means all the other competitors, when they have their chance to have their day on Fox, there’s a measuring stick that they’re going to be up against, and that’s the governor of Florida.”

DeSantis’ office declined to make someone available for an interview about his media strategy. In a statement, spokesperson Taryn Fenske said: “While other networks were busy lauding states whose governors have either retired in disgrace or are undergoing a recall, Fox News was willing to hear our perspective and report the facts.”

Through a spokesperson, Fox News said the network “works to secure interviews daily with headliners across the political spectrum which is a basic journalism practice at all news organizations.”

It is not clear which came first after Trump lost — Fox’s focus on DeSantis or his meteoric rise. But internally, Fox producers acknowledge, in no uncertain terms, just how the network views DeSantis.

One producer told DeSantis’ team it was the mission of Fox’s midday host, Martha MacCallum, to “look forward and really spotlight the STARS of the GOP” and “she named Gov. DeSantis as one.”

Another put it this way in an email to Beatrice: “We see him as the future of the party.”

Fox News owns a significant space in DeSantis’ swift political ascent. It was through Fox that Trump discovered DeSantis — a little-known congressman from the Jacksonville suburbs who became one of the president’s fiercest allies. An endorsement for governor soon followed, paving the way for DeSantis’ takeover of Tallahassee.

DeSantis disappeared from Fox’s airwaves after entering the governor’s office in 2019, a tactical pivot from national politics. His absence didn’t go unnoticed. Early in 2021, a producer for Fox’s best-known personality, Sean Hannity, pointed out DeSantis wasn’t making his regular appearances on the show.

“Hoping we can get him on soon and there isn’t any issue!” the producer wrote.

Since Trump’s defeat, DeSantis is a Fox regular once more. In the first six months of 2021, DeSantis had scheduled as many appearances with top Fox hosts Hannity (8 times), Tucker Carlson (6) and Laura Ingraham (7) as he had meetings with his lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nuñez (7), according to his public calendar.

Meanwhile, the governor has not met one-on-one this year with Surgeon General Scott Rivkees, the state’s top public health official, his schedules show.

In that time, he has also granted interviews to Fox’s growing competitors, Newsmax and One America News Network, and, during hurricane season, the Weather Channel. While some Republicans venture onto CNN and MSNBC, DeSantis has not.

The competition within Fox to land DeSantis is stiff. After one producer was told DeSantis wasn’t available that week, she quickly replied: “He made time for Tucker last night!”

DeSantis is selective. He favors the friendlier hosts and larger reach of Fox’s morning show and primetime lineup. Dozens of appeals by Fox’s newsier daytime programs and lesser-watched weekend shows were turned down. After four appearances in five days on opinion-themed Fox shows, DeSantis received requests to go one-on-one with Chris Wallace, the Fox News Sunday host known for his probing questions, and with Bret Baier, the network’s well-regarded chief political correspondent.

“I will let you know as soon as possible,” Beatrice told Baier’s producer.

“We appreciate the request and will get back to you,” press secretary Cody McCloud responded to Wallace’s team.

The email chains ended there. DeSantis didn’t go on either program.

Representatives for Fox have publicly made clear that the network’s morning show and nighttime political commentators are not held to the same editorial rigors as the news division. DeSantis has used this to his advantage.

One night in January, Fox scheduled DeSantis to discuss COVID-19 as Maria Bartiromo guest hosted evening “Fox News Primetime.” Hours beforehand, Beatrice sent Fox a graphic that showed Florida favorably compared to California and New York — “locked down states,” as they were called on the chart — and encouraged the network to use it.

Fox did. In the middle of Bartiromo’s interview with DeSantis, a graphic appeared on the screen with the sametitle and even the colors chosen to depict each state. There was no indication from the broadcast that the chart had originated in the governor’s office.

DeSantis is counting on the pandemic being in the rearview mirror and, with the help of Fox, being seen as the guy who didn’t succumb to all that pansy-assed “mitigation” instead hanging tough and showing those pointy-headed doctors who’s boss.

I wonder what Dear Leader thinks about all this?

I guess I’m not done.

Rewatching this QAnon patient (below) and consider the accelerating environmental crises and political ones afflicting the planet, the more it seems what ties them together is the same self-centric philosophy behind Covid denial. Simon and Garfunkel famously parodied that view: “I am a rock | I am an island.”

So many of these poor, delusional fools need psychiatric help. This is no different than ranting on a corner about the end of the world. https://t.co/8335vMjhZk

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) August 14, 2021

On New Year’s Day 2009, David Dayen saw the philosophy already fully formed. “Conservatives may have dwindling ranks, increasing illegitimacy and the headwind of a very well-liked incoming President eager to implement a popular agenda to deal with,” he wrote. One could see the “me-first” philosophy in the tweet of T-PartyTexas congressman John Culberson (replaced by Democrat Lizzie Fletcher in 2019): “Texans core belief =leave me alone: gov’t stay away from my home, my family, my church, my school, my bank account & my guns.”

Covid denial. Climate denial. Biden denial. It’s all driven by the belief that the individual is supreme and society an annoyance. It drove Trump to attempt a coup. He wants what he wants and he wants it now. As do his followers. Sharing is for weaklings and simps. Ayn Rand’s sick philosophy conquers the world. And ends it.

https://twitter.com/JessicaCalarco/status/1426210910989848576?s=20

“There is no such thing as society,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said during the “greed is good” Reagan era (1987). Thatcher tempered that statement by adding, “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” Like a global game of “telephone,” that admonition that we have a duty to look out for our neighbors has morphed since then into Me and Mine, screw you. Donald Trump and his family live by it, making him the patron saint of metastasized, post-T-Party conservatism.

And so, in the fullness of time, nations slip beneath the waves, the planet bakes, Japan and Europe drown, Australia is plagued with mice, men slaughter women and girls, Covid evolves to kill millions more, and none of it has anything to do with the Almighty Me.

Several eye-catching environmental headlines sparked some map searching and perhaps soul-searching. Earth is a big, little planet with everything connected to everything else in some way. From miles away the other side of the planet. You once had to read National Geographic for news like this because, well, it was not news. That was then.

Monday’s report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states unequivocally that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions are behind the rapidly changing environment, global warming more rapid than previously predicted:

A heat wave that killed hundreds this summer in the US Northwest and British Columbia would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis, researchers found. It made Hurricane Harvey’s devastating rainfall roughly three times more likely to occur and 15% more intense, scientists said. Harvey dumped more than 19 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana in 2017, triggering devastating floods in the Houston area.

The IPCC says heavy rainfall that used to occur once every 10 years now occurs 30% more frequently.

Several hikers were injured by lightning northeast of here on Friday when a fast-moving storm swept over an exposed ridge in Grandfather Mountain State Park. Seven felt the effects of a nearby lightning strike, but only four sustained injuries. All were able to hike out:

The lightning strike in North Carolina occurred a day after lightning struck a group of beachgoers at a beach in the Bronx in New York City. A 13-year-old boy died in that incident, which occurred during a fast-moving storm.

Between 20 and 29 people have died from lighting in the U.S. each year during most of the last decade, according to the National Weather Service.

In 2020, there were 17 lightning deaths, and the deadliest year since 2010 was in 2016 when 40 people died.

One wonders if these fast-moving storms will become more frequent.

Three volcanoes are erupting simultaneously in Alaska’s Aleutian chain:

“Alaska has a lot of volcanoes, and we typically see maybe one eruption every year, on average,” Matthew Loewen, a research geologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, told NBC News. “To have three erupting at once is less common, but it does happen.”

Devi Lockwood provides New York Times readers with a glimpse of life in remote locations where climate change is restructuring once stable lives. The ideas editor at the website Rest of World visits the island nation of Tuvalu east of the Solomon Islands. Rising seas and water scarcity are slowly making the 10-square-mile country to ponder relocating its people.

Far to the north in Igloolik, Canada, Inuits there have given up walrus hunting. Warmer waters and melting ice have driven the animals too far offshore for hunting. Polar bears, once a rare sight, have been driven closer, and now raid people’s food caches.

The sighting of an iceberg offshore of New Zealand’s South Island in 2006 was “a whisper from Antarctica” that the southern continent was melting even then. Now, changing ocean currents are sending plastic pollution farther north where it enters the food chain, killing northern birds. Geir Wing Gabrielsen studies environmental pollutants at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, Norway, Lockwood writes:

Plastic is now found not only in Arctic surface waters but also on the ocean floor and in sea ice. Dr. Gabrielsen has witnessed other changes in the ecosystem. Fjords that used to be dominated by polar species now have Atlantic species. Species that used to be farther south, like capelin, herring, mackerel and Atlantic cod, are more prominent than polar cod.

The fires and drought in the American West manifest in restaurants is Mendocino, Calif. closing their restrooms to guests. Wells have run dry. The town is trucking in water so scarce that diners must use portable toilets instead:

“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner at Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-of-town diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a time when we don’t have water at all. And only the people with money would be able to afford the right to it.”

The interconnectedness of life on this planet is expressed most immediately and visibly in the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over four million greenhouse-gas-generating humans. Trumpist politicians are only grudgingly admitting that reality, especially in Florida. There this week, a mother died having held her newborn child only once before the virus killed her.

So many of these poor, delusional fools need psychiatric help. This is no different than ranting on a corner about the end of the world. https://t.co/8335vMjhZk

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) August 14, 2021

As if the environment and the pandemic were not enough, this country faces both serious political and mental health crises as well. All seem driven, ultimately, by the conceit that we are all islands unto ourselves, that our actions are ours alone, and that we have no duty to or responsibility for our neighbors on this planet, be they next door or on the other side of the world.

The Me Decade that became the Me Century could end us all.