I mentioned the far right’s newfound appreciation for the Taliban the other day, noting that there was a time when the media had a full-blown hissy fit if anyone dared to make the comparison. Here’s a snippet of one random review of Markos Moulitsas’ 2010 book called “American Taliban” which had all of DC furiously clutching their pearls in dismay:
The title of his book pretty much says it all. Moulitsas isn’t simply using an overheated metaphor when he refers to the “American Taliban.” He means it literally. “In their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban,” he writes in the introduction. And yet his evidence never amounts to much more than putting something an American conservative said beside something similar an Islamic radical said, and declaring that they are “clearly” or “obviously” connected: “That fear clearly binds the American Taliban to their Islamic cousins,” or “That sentiment is obviously no different than O’Reilly’s view” (emphasis mine). Moulitsas frequently uses adverbs in place of argumentation, and sometimes you wonder, if everything is so clear and obvious, why Moulitsas felt the need to write the book in the first place.
Goldberg quotes Spencer Ackerman in his new book “Reign of Terror,” in which he explains the through line between our forever war quagmires and Donald Trump:
“Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation.”
This is a very astute observation. Grievance politics are the foundation of the American right and they cling to their perceived humiliation as both a tribal bond and an organizing principle. And this is the same emotional impulse that propels “lost cause” mythology and, yes, Jihadism.
There’s more at both links that are well worth reading.
*post edited to reflect Tom’s earlier post which I did not see… doh.
Caleb Wallace, a leader in the anti-mask movement in central Texas, became infected with the coronavirus and has been in an intensive care unit for the past three weeks, barely clinging to life, his wife, Jessica, said.
Mrs. Wallace said that her husband’s condition was declining and that doctors have run out of treatment options. On Saturday he will be moved to a hospice at Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, Texas, so that his family can say their goodbyes, she said.
Mr. Wallace, 30, has lived in San Angelo for most of his life and works at a company that sells welding equipment. He checked into the Shannon Medical Center on July 30. Mrs. Wallace set up a GoFundMe page that has collected over $35,000, to cover the cost of medical bills.
Earlier that month, Mr. Wallace had organized a “Freedom Rally” for people who were “sick of the government being in control of our lives.”Caleb Wallace, a key figure in anti-mask protests, is hospitalized with Covid-19.Credit…Jessica Caleb Wallace, via Facebook
He founded the San Angelo Freedom Defenders, a group that hosted a rally to end “Covid-19 tyranny” according to a YouTube interview with him.
“They believed the coronavirus was a hoax and they felt that the government was being too heavy-handed when it came to masks,” San Angelo’s mayor, Brenda Gunter, said in an interview.
In April, Mr. Wallace penned a letter to the San Angelo Independent School District demanding they “rescind ALL COVID-related policies immediately,” and questioning the science and efficacy of masks for schoolchildren.
Mr. Wallace’s father, Russell Wallace, said his son firmly believes mask and vaccination requirements are a violation of personal liberties. “After watching all the government overreach here he decided he wanted to do something about it,” Russell Wallace said.
Mrs. Wallace, who is pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, told the San Angelo Standard-Times that when her husband first felt ill, he took a mix of vitamin C, zinc, aspirin and ivermectin — a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms in both people and animals that has been touted as a coronavirus treatment but was recently proved to be ineffective against the virus.
She said her husband respected her own decision to wear a mask. “We joked around about how he was on one side and I was on the other, and that’s what made us the perfect couple and we balanced each other out,” she said.
She added that her three children are up-to-date on their vaccines and that she herself planned to get a coronavirus vaccine after the birth of her baby in late September. “We are not anti-vaxxers,” she said.
Still, Mrs. Wallace said her husband strongly believed the decision to get vaccinated or to wear a mask should rest with an individual and not with the government. “That is one of the few things I agreed with my husband on,” she said.From left, Jessica, Brooke, Aubrey and Kate Wallace talk to Caleb Wallace on a video call on Aug. 19. Mr. Wallace is hospitalized with Covid.Credit…Colin Murphey/San Angelo Standard-Times
Mayor Gunter said Mr. Wallace had an overwhelming love for his city. During the state’s record-breaking winter storm in February, Mr. Wallace and his father volunteered to drive out to residents trapped in their homes.
“When we are called to action, we forget about those differences and just do the right thing,” she said. Shannon Medical Center currently has 70 percent of its intensive care beds full. This August in Tom Green County, which is home to San Angelo, the seven-day average of new cases has risen to the highest level since November 2020, according to a New York Times database.
Russell Wallace, who also had Covid-19, said that he was in the hospital for 13 days, but his condition improved enough for him to return home.
Despite his own illness and his son’s dire condition, Russell Wallace said he still firmly believed that masks are ineffective and that the government should not mandate them or vaccinations. He has, however, decided to “look into” getting the shots.
“Personally for me, I’m not so hesitant about the vaccinations now,” he said. “I’ve stared down that barrel and quite honestly, it scared the hell out of me.”
The family is now asking for donations with a gofundme:
“Caleb won’t make it much longer. He will be moved to comfort care tomorrow and I will get to be there with him until it’s his time to return to our father in heaven,” said Wallace. “I appreciate everyone all the good and the bad. You all have the right to feel the way you feel as Caleb once fought for his beliefs. He was an imperfect man but he loved his family and his little girls more than anything.”
“To those who wished him death, I’m sorry his views and opinions hurt you. I prayed he’d come out of this with a new perspective and more appreciation for life. I can’t say much more than that because I can’t speak for him.”
Caleb is the father to three young daughters, ages 5, 3, and 1. The couple is expecting their fourth daughter next month.
It is tragic. But I have to wonder how many other people are dying because of Caleb’s views, people who couldn’t protect themselves. Like these people:
Helpless to improve her infant son’s breathing as he was about to be intubated, Catherine Perrilloux did the only thing that came naturally to her in that moment, the worst of her life: She looked away and prayed. The boy, known as Junior, was two months old and gravely ill with Covid-19.
“I see a bunch of them crowding around the room with the ventilator machine, and then they pull out the tubing, and I’m just losing control,” Ms. Perrilloux, a dean at a nearby private school, recalled last week in her son’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit. “There’s nothing that you could say to make it better. You can’t do anything. It’s just paralyzing.”
At Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where the intensive care unit has been jammed with Covid-19 patients, scenes like this have played out unrelentingly over the past month. Nurses raced around monitoring one gut-wrenching case after another. One child was getting a complicated breathing treatment known as ECMO, a last resort after ventilators fail, which nurses said was almost unheard-of for pediatric cases. About a half-dozen others were in various stages of distress.
His own kids seem to be ok, so that’s a blessing. But they’ve lost their father. For no good reason.
Again, what a waste. All for the “freedom” to die of this horrible disease. But he owned the libs, defied the woke, and I guess that’s all that matters.
Proud Boys at the second Million MAGA March in Washington, DC in December, 2020. Photo by Geoff Livingston via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
After the September 11 attacks by Islamist extremists, article after article asked, Why do they hate us? They now includes America’s fringe right: white supremacists, Proud Boys, and “the civil war-hungry Boogaloo Bois,” writes Michelle Goldberg.
Goldberg cites a suspended right-wing Twitter account that celebrated the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban as a defeat for liberalism: “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see it.” A white supremacist here, an account linked to the Proud Boys there expressed admiration for the Taliban: “They took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters. Hard not to respect that.”
Donald Trump falsley claimed that in covereage of the 9/11 attacks he’d seen people on TV “cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” Trump’s claims were bogus. The cheers of the fringe right for the Taliban are archived on the internet.
Voices on the right such as Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz find more legitimacy in the Taliban than our own government.
Taliban and Trump should both be on Twitter.
More legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here. https://t.co/VN7oxtCHk8
At least before the devastating terrorist attacks on Thursday, there was a subtler form of satisfaction with the Taliban’s takeover among more respectable nationalist conservatives. They don’t sympathize with barbarism, but were pleased to see liberal internationalism lose. “The humiliation of Afghanistan will have been worth it if it pries the old paradigm loose and lets new thoughts in,” Yoram Hazony, an influential nationalist intellectual whose conferences feature figures like Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel, tweeted earlier this month.
What old paradigm? Well, a few days later he tweeted, “What went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the heads of the people running the show. Say its name: Liberalism.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism” he seems to mean social liberalism, not austerity economics.)
Perhaps it was a sense of humliation at stalemated American incursions that fueled the rise of Donald Trump, Goldberg suggests, citing “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman.
Humiliation is a volatile emotion. Many have written about its role in motivating Al Qaeda. Perhaps it’s not surprising that parts of the right would respond to humiliation by identifying with images of brutal masculinity.
But perhaps post-9/11 wars are not the real source of the American right’s sense of humiliation. Elliot Rodger became an incel hero (“involuntarily celibate”) for killing six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014. Rodger was exacting misogynist retribution on a world in which he “could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.”
Others on the fringe right might find humiliation in the prospect of having to share power in this country with an emerging non-white, multicultural, multireligious, non-patriarcal society of the sort the Taliban wants to eradicate from Afghanistan. Perhaps “the pro-Taliban right, the Proud Boys and incels and MAGA splinter factions” are just trolling in celebrating the Taliban takeover, Goldberg suggests.
Or perhaps they cannot comprehend why the U.S. would not want to be dominated by them.
The United States was founded on an idea, we hear (usually unspecified). Whatever it was, over the course of time and happenstance another idea arose to meet it: we are a nation of immigrants. Like so many other traditional American ideas — like, say, the desirability of democracy and peaceful transfer of power — the “nation of immigrants” notion now is a contested one. As previous waves of immigrants and refugees have found, there is an unwritten caveat to that idea: certain kinds of Americans only support certain kinds of immigrants.
Now that a military airlift is bringing 50,000 Afghan immigrants to the United States, tensions will surely arise. Especially among those Americans particular about the kinds of immigrants we welcome or, in some cases, any at all.
As Republicans level blistering criticism at Biden during his first major foreign policy crisis, some are turning to the nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric perfected by Trump during his four years in office. It’s causing dismay among others in the party who think the U.S. should look out for those who helped the Americans over the last two decades.
On the one hand are partisans who still hold to the notion that America should be a reliable ally to our allies. On the other are those for whom principles are transactional and wedge issues are election-winners. Count the immediate past president among the latter.
“How many terrorists will Joe Biden bring to America?” he asked days after issuing a statement reading “civilians and others who have been good to our Country … should be allowed to seek refuge.”
Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster, said the rhetoric reflects “a general, overall increase” in concern in the country over the risk of terrorist threats after Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban — not just in the short term from those who may not have been properly vetted, but a year or two down the road.
“There’s just a sense that we are less safe as a country as a result of this,” he said.
Others think we should evacuate Afghan allies, sure, but dump them somewhere else. But while some in Congress look askance at bringing Afghans here, the effort to resettle the refugees “is the rare undertaking that is consuming legislative offices of members of both parties,” AP reports.
But immigration remains a go-to wedge issue for others on the right, as precious as abortion and race, and one they will not easily let go.
On the Fox Business Network, Republican J.D. Vance, candidate for Senate in Ohio, accused the Biden administration of prioritizing Afghan refugees over American citizens:
“They put Americans last in every single way, but Americans pay for it all,” echoed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has shot to prominence with incendiary statements.
Trump and his former policy adviser Stephen Miller, along with conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, have taken things even further, using the same anti-immigrant language that was the hallmark of Trump’s 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination.
“You can be sure the Taliban, who are now in complete control, didn’t allow the best and brightest to board these evacuation flights,” Trump said. “Instead, we can only imagine how many thousands of terrorists have been airlifted out of Afghanistan and into neighborhoods around the world.”
Considering the evacuees the Kabul airport suicide bombers saw before detonating themselves, David Frum counters in The Atlantic:
These were not randomly selected men, women, and children either. These were people with technical skills: medicine, computers, electrical engineering. These were people who spoke foreign languages. These were people who could navigate the modern world and its complex demands. These were people who could do work that could fetch dollars and euros and yen and rupees from the world outside Afghanistan.
[…]
Offering refuge in the West to tens of thousands of Afghan allies is a dramatic humanitarian act. It’s a display of power, too—not only the organizational and economic power involved in moving so many people so fast and so far, but also the cultural and social power of the superior attractiveness of the modern world that so appalls the Taliban. Afghanistan needed the people now leaving. The systems that the Western alliance left behind in Afghanistan—computer networks, roads and railways, even the helicopters and munitions the Taliban has inherited from the Afghan armed forces—will rapidly break down without the people whom the Western alliance is removing.
Sorry, Taliban Proud Boys.
Slate’s Aymann Ismail interviews Suzy Cop, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s Dallas office, about resettling immigrants in Texas. The current wave is neither unprecedented nor out of the ordinary for her organization. She’s worked in immigrant resettlement for 20 years.
And what of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, Ismail asks:
Do you interact with the fear that rhetoric represents in people at all?
I don’t see it here on the ground and haven’t heard it from folks. I’ve heard the opposite when people have met refugees. They’re hard workers, they’ve gone through a lot, they persevere, and they want the same hopes and dreams for themselves and for their families as the rest of us. And so once people see that, it’s a totally different mindset that they get into. That initial fear is just because they haven’t come in contact with someone before. It’s something that disappears when they confront someone and see them how they are.
This significant birth contributes to the conservation of this vulnerable species.
The Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden announces the birth of a rare clouded leopard kitten. Following approximately a 90-day gestation period, the OKC Zoo’s two-year-old female clouded leopard, Rukai, gave birth to a female kitten on Friday, August 6, 2021, at the Zoo’s Cat Forest habitat. This is the first successful birth of an offspring for Rukai and her mate two-year-old male, JD.
Because this is such a significant birth, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Species Survival Plan® (SSP) for clouded leopards recommended the Zoo’s animal care experts hand-rear the kitten to ensure she thrives. Immediately following the kitten’s birth, the Zoo’s carnivore caretakers stepped in and began caring for this little cloudie. She was moved to a climate-controlled incubator to help regulate her body temperature and caretakers started round-the-clock bottle feedings of a specialty felid formula and continuous monitoring. Caretakers report the kitten is healthy and doing everything a newborn should be doing – eating, sleeping and growing! Additionally, her eyes are now fully open. Clouded leopards are born with their eyes closed and begin to open them at two weeks of age.
“The kitten appears very strong and healthy, and we are thrilled by the progress she’s making,” said Tyler Boyd, OKC Zoo’s curator of carnivores. “For myself and entire team, the opportunity to care for this offspring, who is incredibly valuable to the conservation of this critically vulnerable species, is a career highlight.”
Clouded leopard parents, Rukai and JD, arrived at the OKC Zoo in December 2019, after being paired together as part of a breeding recommendation through the clouded leopard SSP and the hope is they will continue to breed and their offspring, including this kitten, will contribute to the growth of a genetically diverse population.
The mission of an AZA cooperatively managed SSP Program is to oversee the population management of select species, including the clouded leopard, within AZA member institutions like the OKC Zoo and to enhance conservation of this species in the wild. Each SSP Program coordinates the individual activities of participating member institutions through a variety of species conservation, research, husbandry, management and educational initiatives.
Native to Nepal and Bangladesh, clouded leopards are the smallest of the big cat species. Adult clouded leopards weigh between 30 and 50 pounds and are about five feet long, with approximately half that length being their tail. They are the world’s strongest climbing cats, which gives them an advantage over the other big cats sharing their territory. The species is listed by the IUCN as vulnerable to extinction due to deforestation, poaching and the pet trade. Clouded leopards are protected in most range countries although enforcement in many areas is weak. Precise data on clouded leopard population numbers is not known (they are among the most elusive cat species) but researchers estimate there are around 10,000 clouded leopards in the wild.
As part of the clouded leopard SSP, this kitten will eventually relocate to another AZA-accredited organization to be paired with a mate. This is an important part of the breeding process and making this introduction at an early age is necessary as clouded leopards are often bonded for life. While being cared for at the Zoo, the kitten will remain off public view but we will share updates about her on social media.
It was only six years ago that Hillsborough County Republicans scored Jeb Bush to headline their Lincoln Day fundraiser.
Republicans from across the region packed a glitzy ballroom to hear from the presidential hopeful. Tom Pepin, the local beer distributor, paid $10,000 to sit next to Bush, recalled Art Wood, the chairman of the dinner. To the crowd’s delight, Bush announced that his statewide campaign would be based in Tampa, a nod to the county’s longstanding influence.
“It was one of the best Lincoln Day Dinners ever in state history,” Wood said.
Tonight, during the latest Lincoln Day fundraiser in Hillsborough, local Republicans will welcome U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a brash newcomer from Georgia who lost her committee assignments in Congress after suggesting the Parkland high school shooting was staged.
Greene’s very presence in Hillsborough County is the latest demonstration of how much the local party has changed.
A generation ago, Hillsborough County was a Republican success story. Voters here swung the state — and the country — for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Republicans maintained a vice grip on the county commission and constitutional offices even as Tampa grew into a thriving blue city. Party officials lured the Republican National Convention to Tampa and got Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to headline the 2012 Lincoln Day Dinner.
Democrats now control the county commission and most constitutional offices. Once a bellwether for the nation, Hillsborough has voted blue in four consecutive presidential elections.
Recent setbacks at the ballot box have generated growing dissent among Hillsborough Republican operatives and officials who don’t believe the local party’s leadership is focused enough on registering voters and getting local candidates elected.
“If you were to poll a majority of my colleagues, most would say we really wish the Hillsborough GOP apparatus was more organized and had a more familial feel,” said Rep. Lawrence McClure, a Plant City Republican.
The party lately has been defined by loyalty to former President Donald Trump and bringing in Greene, a staunch defender of the former president, is a continuation of that. Since Trump’s departure from office, the party and its leader, executive committee chairman Jim Waurishuk, have amplified conspiracies that allege the 2020 election was stolen.
Waurishuk regularly has Facebook posts censored for false or misleading content and he maintains, despite evidence to the contrary, that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was carried out by leftist groups. Elected Republicans have called for Waurishuk to step down over his incendiary social media presence.
Local Republican operatives and fundraisers have formed a splinter party, the Hillsborough Leadership Council, to recruit and raise money for local candidates.
“This leadership is the worst I have ever seen in my years being involved with the Republican Party,” said Hung Mai, one of those fundraisers. “It’s an embarrassment.”
Embarrassment is too kind. It’s pathetic. If these people didn’t have th tacit (and explicit) support of the GOP establishment they would lose and the party will regroup. Unfortunately, that’s not happening.
It’s Chris Wallace who seems to have a memory longer than a nanosecond.
Chris Wallace cites Reagan/Beirut to dismiss the narrative that Kabul will permanently damage Biden.
"This is a dark day for the Biden presidency… but to sit there and say it’s an irretrievable turning point in the Biden presidency, I just don't think history bears that out." pic.twitter.com/9OknsscuNL
A suicide bomber drives a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. military personnel. That same morning, 58 French soldiers were killed in their barracks two miles away in a separate suicide terrorist attack. The U.S. Marines were part of a multinational force sent to Lebanon in August 1982 to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon. From its inception, the mission was plagued with problems–and a mounting body count.
In 1975, a bloody civil war erupted in Lebanon, with Palestinian and leftist Muslim guerrillas battling militias of the Christian Phalange Party, the Maronite Christian community, and other groups. During the next few years, Syrian, Israeli, and United Nations interventions failed to resolve the factional fighting, and on August 20, 1982, a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines was ordered to Beirut to help coordinate the Palestinian withdrawal.
The Marines left Lebanese territory on September 10 but returned in strengthened numbers on September 29, following the massacre of Palestinian refugees by a Christian militia. The next day, the first U.S. Marine to die during the mission was killed while defusing a bomb. Other Marines fell prey to snipers. On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber driving a van devastated the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. Then, on October 23, a Lebanese terrorist plowed his bomb-laden truck through three guard posts, a barbed-wire fence, and into the lobby of the Marines Corps headquarters in Beirut, where he detonated a massive bomb, killing 241 marine, navy, and army personnel. The bomb, which was made of a sophisticated explosive enhanced by gas, had an explosive power equivalent to 18,000 pounds of dynamite. The identities of the embassy and barracks bombers were not determined, but they were suspected to be Shiite terrorists associated with Iran.
After the barracks bombing, many questioned whether President Ronald Reagan had a solid policy aim in Lebanon. Serious questions also arose over the quality of security in the American sector of war-torn Beirut. The U.S. peacekeeping force occupied an exposed area near the airport, but for political reasons the marine commander had not been allowed to maintain a completely secure perimeter before the attack. In a national address on October 23, President Reagan vowed to keep the marines in Lebanon, but just four months later he announced the end of the American role in the peacekeeping force. On February 26, 1984, the main force of marines left Lebanon, leaving just a small contingent to guard the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
As you no doubt are aware, Ronald Reagan was driven from office within months.
Not.
He was re-elected in a landslide in 1984. Republicans vehemently defended his bug-out.
When users visit the telemedicine website SpeakWithAnMD.com, they are immediately hit with a warning: “Due to overwhelming demand, we are experiencing longer than usual wait times.”
The demand is for ivermectin, a drug primarily used to deworm animals that has become the latest false cure for Covid-19. And the website, in partnership with the organization America’s Frontline Doctors, whose founder stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, has become well-known in the Facebook groups and Reddit communities where anti-vaccination sentiment thrives.
In those groups, people trade dosing directions and purchasing advice for ivermectin.
“Please consider that even if you can get an Rx for IVM, the pharmacy may not fill it for 1-3 days claiming they don’t have it in stock, which is pure bulls—,” a Reddit user wrote in the ivermectin community this month. “HAVE SOME HORSE PASTE ON HAND,” the user added, referring to the tube form that ivermectin meant for horses comes in.
Originally introduced as a veterinary drug for livestock animals in the late-1970s, ivermectin quickly proved useful in combating certain human diseases caused by parasites, a discovery that won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015. It comes in pills and pastes, in versions meant for humans and for animals.
Ivermectin has been called a “wonder drug” because of its use in treating parasitic diseases, but it has not shown the same results in studies against viruses.
The drug was the subject of research into possible use as a Covid-19 treatment — including a promising non-peer-reviewed study that was later determined to be “flawed” and taken down by the website Research Square, which hosts preprints of research papers that have not yet been published in academic journals.
The groups highlight the challenge public health officials and tech companies face in cracking down on Covid-19 misinformation — and the lengths some people will go to embrace fringe and misleading Covid advice. NBC News obtained access to several groups that are dedicated to ivermectin or have recently embraced the drug. Some groups have tens of thousands of members and can easily be found through Facebook’s search feature.
More than a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic, various drugs have had their moments in anti-vaccination communities and among some conservatives in the U.S. — and ivermectin is not particularly different. But it comes at a time when parts of the country are in another Covid wave, this one fueled by the delta variant of the virus and with a safe and effective option available: the vaccines.
And some people are making big bucks:
The groups suggest ways to buy ivermectin and plenty of encouragement to do so. Some commenters push users to online cattle supply companies or pet stores. Others recommend SpeakWithAnMD.com.
The website advertises consultations for $90 and fills prescriptions through Ravkoo Pharmacy, an online pharmacy that America’s Frontline Doctors advertises as “partners,” who provide “the option to have that prescription delivered right to your door, the same day.” On a SpeakWithAnMD.com intake form viewed by NBC News, prospective patients are asked, “What medication do you prefer?” The user is then presented with three options: “Ivermectin,” “Hydroxychloroquine” or “Not sure.”
It would be sad if they weren’t such hostile creeps who care nothing for the health of those around them. So — not sad. Infuriating.
If there exists a more quintessential inside DC player than Leon Panetta, I’d be hard pressed to name him or her. He’s been kicking around the corridors of power for well over 40 years serving first as a Republican and later as a Democrat in Congress and a member of the executive branch. Leon Panetta is what people in the beltway like to call a “maverick” which translates into someone who goes his own way against the interest of his party. Mavericks are loved by the establishment media for always being willing to condemn their own side thus creating an illusion of bipartisanship where none exists.
Panetta comes by his reputation for integrity honestly, however it’s not quite as heroic as people remember. To his eternal credit he resigned the Nixon White House in 1970 over its egregious racial policies. But he was hardly the lone ranger in his protest. This excerpt from Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland puts his actions into some perspective. The issue bubbled up after Nixon’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Harold Carswell, was revealed to be an unreconstructed racist and Nixon defended him. At the same time staffers at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare were all becoming concerned about the policies they were required to enforce (or not enforce) and Panetta was a leader among them.Advertisement:
But Perlstein reports that it wasn’t until Panetta read an article in the Washington Daily News with the headline “Nixon seeks to fire HEW’s Rights chief for liberal views” that he offered his resignation. And it was after that that he gave a speech to the National Education Association in which he said, “The cause of justice is being destroyed not by direct challenge but by indirection, by confusion, by disunity and by a lack of leadership and commitment to a truly equal society.” Six others resigned with him. Shortly thereafter 200 staffers at HEW petitioned the head of HEW Robert Finch saying they were greatly concerned about the future leadership role of HEW on civil rights.
None of that is to take anything away from what Panetta did and said. Resigning from a government job when you disagree with government policies is honorable and necessary. Indeed, his position stands in contrast to another revered bipartisan maverick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was quite churlish about the whole thing. Perlstein in Nixonland:
On March 1, the New York Times published a leaked memo from Daniel patrick Moynihan. The White House was putting “as much or more time and effort from this administration than any in history” on civil rights, he reassured the boss. But the administration wasn’t getting the credit because the discourse was controlled by “hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides…
The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect. The subject has been too much talked about.”
(One of the maverick Moynihan’s major contributions to American politics was his uniquely destructive paper on the alleged dysfunction of the African American family which informed policies on race for decades. And not in a good way.)
Panetta, however, wasn’t truly reviled by the White House until he did this:
[I]n 1971, Panetta published a book, Bring Us Together, which was meant to be an insider’s look at what he conceived of as Nixon’s deeply flawed civil rights policies. The book was highly publicized, and certainly did not go unnoticed by the Nixon White House.
On May 27, 1971, President Nixon and domestic aide John Ehrlichman discussed Panetta’s book in the Oval Office. Ehrlichman told Nixon that the book made HEW Secretary Finch look “bad” and “weak”. Nixon and Ehrlichman noted that the book did not give any credit to the administration for its efforts towards civil rights reforms. Interestingly, while disagreeing with the content of the book, Ehrlichman told the president that he planned to have his entire staff read the book.
The following day, May 28, Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman also brought up Panetta’s book to President Nixon in the Oval Office. Nixon summarized that the book was “a case history on how to screw the White House” by taking advantage of a “soft” cabinet member, Robert Finch. Nixon had a concern that it would help to create a pattern whereby other potentially dissatisfied administration appointees could quit and then write a tell-all book that would embarrass the White House.
One can certainly understand why the Obama administration would not be concerned by this. After all, Panetta wrote his tell-all book about the Nixon administration during that fraught second term and his position was admirable. They could not be expected to assume that Panetta would be disloyal to them simply because he had the integrity to oppose Richard Nixon.Advertisement:
By the time Panetta joined the Clinton administration he had been a nine-term member of congress and apparently racked up so much experience that he qualified himself for any available job in the executive branch, whether domestic or foreign policy. He was hired first as budget director from which position he relentlessly pushed deficit reduction as the greatest threat to American economic security and won the day when he (among others) persuaded Clinton to abandon his “putting people first” agenda. He was a balanced budget fetishist, never letting up on the fearmongering regardless of the circumstances, an obsession that he continued throughout the Bush years and continues to this day.
Ultimately he was tapped to become Clinton’s chief of staff after a series of mini-scandals, a job he did well and held until January 1997. One year later the Lewinsky scandal broke and Panetta was one of the first to throw “resignation” on the table, an act that made Republicans rub their hands together gleefully and form their crusade to force Clinton out of office (not incidentally, the way Nixon was forced out of office.) This was just days after the affair was revealed:
Former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta is already speculating about a possible Clinton resignation.
“If these are baseless charges, it’ll be OK. On the other hand, if there’s something there, and it leads to him having to step out of office, it may be time to do some repair work and that may not have the consequences you would expect,” Panetta said.
If the charges are true, Panetta said, it would be better for the Democratic Party “if Gore became president and you had a new message and new individual up there.”
Perhaps the Obama administration didn’t see that as a further sign of self-serving “maverickyness.” After all, he wasn’t alone in making that snap judgement which, in hindsight, was a premature capitulation to a daft partisan witch hunt. Still, a pattern was discernible. Once out of office, Panetta had publicly taken both presidents he served to task before they were out of office.Advertisement:
If there’s one thing on which Panetta prides himself, it’s his devotion to the notion of bipartisanship and centrist solutions. Back in 2008, when the new Obama administration was attempting to fulfill its campaign promise to “transcend partisanship” Panetta was an obvious choice. He had long term relationships in government and was respected by both parties. Prior to the election he was quoted all over the media talking up, you guessed it, deficit reduction:
Leon Panetta, Clinton’s first budget director, says that “if we continue to run these large deficits, not only bond traders but the securities markets are suddenly going to awaken with concern about whether or not the administration is doing anything to discipline the budget.”
If that happens, Panetta says, “it’s just a matter of time before they start to put pressure on a new administration.”
He said this in August 2008 as the economy was falling into an epic financial crisis. The Obama transition team apparently felt they had enough deficit fetishists on board (and they did) so they tapped Panetta for CIA and later, Defense where he seemed to have done an adequate job. He left the administration in 2013.
And then he wrote another book. And in that book he condemns President Obama in no uncertain terms for his alleged unwillingness to confront the threats we face abroad, painting himself once again as a heroic truth-teller within the administration who tried as he could to change course and keep the babies safe.
Tommy Vietor, the former spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council, says that based on “talking to my friends back at the White House … they are going out of their way to avoid a messy public fight.” But Vietor adds: “Secretary Panetta was very clear back in 2011 that he wouldn’t allow troops to remain in Iraq without the necessary protections from the Iraqi government, and I think it’s reasonable for the White House to remind people of those statements.”
According to another senior administration official who has worked with Panetta in the past, the level of anger at him goes well beyond Vice President Joe Biden’s mild criticism of Panetta’s book as “inappropriate.” Officials were incredulous when the former Pentagon head sought to justify his suddenly public slaps at Obama as evidence of his loyalty, telling “CBS This Morning” host Charlie Rose on Wednesday: “It’s exactly because I am very loyal to this president and because I want him to succeed that I think it’s important to raise these issues now … So that hopefully in 2½ years, you know, we can make sure that he really does have the kind of legacy that I think he deserves as president.”
“That’s an incredibly patronizing statement. That isn’t loyalty. It’s a reinvention of history. It doesn’t comport with reality. I can’t see how this helps the administration’s foreign policy,” this official said. The official also added, cuttingly, that while Hillary Clinton could legitimately claim to have been a hawk on Syria, advocating arming the rebels, Panetta could not. “Hillary was really telling the truth when she said she wanted to arm Syrians, but I don’t know anyone who remembers that Panetta was particularly vocal about that. He raised more questions about it than advocated it.”
It’s impossible to know who is telling the truth. But it’s not impossible to acknowledge that Leon Panetta, for all his apparent talent at a wide variety of government jobs, is all about Leon Panetta. Where he was once a hero for resigning over an issue of principle, it’s hard to escape the realization that he has parlayed that early admirable moral stand into a habit of burnishing his own reputation, at the expense of the presidents he works for. Like the other “mavericks” of our time — John McCain and Joe Lieberman come to mind — he is concerned about one thing and one thing only: his own sense of righteousness. They could have seen this coming.
"You said 'you shouldn't be negotiating with the Taliban.' Trump did that too, to be clear. So, I mean, was it wrong when he did it?" pic.twitter.com/rP7MNWVQFX
On Thursday, suicide bombers killed scores of people outside the Kabul airport, including at least 12 American service members. Congressional Republicans snapped into action, demanding that President Joe Biden resign or be impeached. It’s the latest outburst in a string of political opportunism. For weeks, Republicans have been all over cable TV, lambasting Biden for withdrawing troops. They’ve professed dismay that thousands of jailed Taliban fighters were released from prison, that al-Qaida operatives are still in Afghanistan, and that the American president accepted a Taliban deadline to get out. All of these complaints are phony. Nearly everything the Republicans are decrying happened last year. But Republicans defended or ignored it, because the president who engineered those concessions was Donald Trump.
On Feb. 29, 2020, the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. The deal also required the Afghan government to release 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters. Hawks called the agreement weak and dangerous, but Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, advised them not to speak out against it. In March 2020, at hearings of the House Armed Services Committee, some lawmakers worried about the deal, but most, including Reps. Jim Banks and Matt Gaetz, said nothing about it. Another Republican member of the committee, Rep. Mo Brooks, expressed his impatience to pull out, noting that American forces had long ago “destroyed al-Qaida’s operational capability” in Afghanistan.
In July 2020, the committee took up the National Defense Authorization Act, which would fund the military for the next year. Democratic Rep. Jason Crow presented an amendment that would make the Afghan pullout contingent on several requirements. These included “consultation and coordination” with allies, protection of “United States personnel in Afghanistan,” severance of the Taliban from al-Qaida, prevention of “terrorist safe havens inside Afghanistan,” and adequate “capacity of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces” to fight off Taliban attacks. The amendment also required investigation of any prisoners, released as part of the deal, who might be connected to terrorism. In short, the amendment would do what Trump had failed to do: impose real conditions on the withdrawal. Crow told his colleagues that he, too, wanted to get out, but that Afghan security forces weren’t yet “ready to stand on their own.”
Gaetz dismissed these warnings. The Taliban was already taking over the country, he argued, and imposing conditions would just get in the way of the pullout. “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan,” he said.
Eight months later, Biden is completing the withdrawal, and Republicans have done a 180. They act as though they had nothing to do with the pullout or its consequences. “It’s humiliating that the Taliban now controls not just Afghanistan’s presidential palace,” but the U.S. embassy, says Banks, “and it’s all happened on Joe Biden’s watch.” Having voted not to hold Trump accountable for the withdrawal’s execution in last year’s defense bill, Banks vows to hold Biden accountable in this year’s bill. Gaetz now says Biden pulled out prematurely.
To cover their hypocrisy, the Republicans are rewriting history. Brooks says the Taliban’s triumph “would never have happened under President Donald J. Trump.” In reality, Trump guaranteed it by removing as many troops as he could. McCarthy says he knows “for a fact” that Trump wouldn’t have let the Taliban advance from “city to city,” though Trump allowed just that. Scalise says Trump “made it very clear with conditions he put in place that he was not going to let the Taliban take control of the country,” but Trump continued to withdraw troops regardless of conditions, making clear that the Taliban would take control.
McCarthy expresses indignation that Biden “allow[ed] the Taliban to dictate to America when we depart.” But Trump’s 2020 agreement, which McCarthy told critics to read carefully, did the same thing. The difference is that Trump agreed to get out by May 1, whereas Biden postponed that date until Aug. 31. “I never thought there would be an American president in my lifetime who would kowtow to a terrorist group,” Banks raged in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, but “that’s exactly what this president is doing: accepting the Taliban’s redlines and deadlines.” Ingraham completed the farce by adding: “Imagine what the Democrats would be saying if any of this had ever occurred under Donald Trump.”
When Trump withdrew more than 10,000 troops, Brooks and other Republicans said that was fine, because al-Qaida had been virtually extinguished in Afghanistan. But when Biden began to withdraw the remaining 2,500, the same Republicans freaked out. “Al-Qaida and ISIS-K still exist and are growing in Afghanistan,” says Banks. As a result, he warns, terror attacks are coming to the United States “without a doubt.” Scalise agrees that Biden has put the homeland at risk, now that “the terrorists have a country.”
McCarthy even blames Biden for Trump’s release of jailed Taliban fighters. In at least three TV appearances this week, he implied that the release, which the Trump administration authorized and forced through, actually took place more recently. America is in danger, he says, because “you just had 5,000 prisoners released. They know how to come here. They have a mission on their hands.”
Republicans had a chance last year to prove they were serious about imposing conditions on the Afghan pullout. Everything they’re now complaining about—coordination with allies, severance of the Taliban from al-Qaida, adequate preparation of the Afghan security forces, vetting of prisoners to be released—was in the Crow amendment and the vetoed defense bill. Lawmakers who were serious voted for the amendment and the bill. Those who didn’t, and who are now attacking Biden, are just opportunists.
The only reason they are getting away with this is because the media is parroting their bullshit without context.
That is how we got into this mess in the first place.
