Month: September 2021

President Donald Trump just dropped bombshell news on the matter of election integrity by predicting that officials will “decertify” the 2020 presidential election.

Discussing consequences for the “rigged” election, Trump told Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit, during a Friday afternoon interview, “I do believe they are going to decertify the election.”

“They know it was rigged,” he added after a week of damning reports alleging vast voter irregularities in Maricopa County.

Addressing the Arizona canvassing report published by Liz Harris which claimed that the number of “lost” votes identified in Maricopa County is 173,104, or the equivalent of nearly three Sun Devil stadiums, she said during an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” this week. “2.5 times that stadium is the number of people in Maricopa County whose votes were lost.”

In addition to missing votes, the report also identified 96,389 “ghost” votes which are described as “mail-in votes that likely could not have been physically cast by the voter that the vote was registered to,” because of address changes.

“These voters did not have a secondary mailing address and were either unknown to the residents who lived at their voting address since September 2020 or were known but confirmed to not have lived at the residence since prior to the election, and often had not lived there for many years.”

The combined number of “lost” and “ghost” votes, as well as many more inaccurate votes were discovered by canvassers, brings the total vote discrepancies to 269,493 – and that’s just one county in the state of Arizona.

Trump called Liz Harris a “patriot” for her findings, praising the report that alleges hundreds of thousands of “lost” or “ghost” votes.

On the matter of Arizona, Trump added “I lost at a very close number, but we were way up ahead,” and someone is “going to have to ask Fox,” about their curious early call for Arizona to go to Biden.

Is he serious? Who knows? But it doesn’t matter. His people will believe it.

He also called out the mainstream media for not wanting to cover the issue of alleged election irregularities. “Our media is corrupt as can be, but the people know what’s going on and another poll came out. 70 some percent thought the election was, to put it very nicely, tampered with,” said the 45th president.

He’s talking about a poll of Republicans that was taken right after the election. But it hasn’t changed much since then:

The survey of 1,552 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 30 to Aug. 2, found that66 percent of Republicans continue to insist that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump,” while just 18 percent believe “Joe Biden won fair and square.” Twenty-eight percent of independent voters also said they think Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, as did a small 3 percent of Democrats.

While those who continue to hold this unsubstantiated view about the election are in the overall minority, representing just 29 percent of total respondents, the number has remained relatively unchanged over the last several months. Since January, similar surveys have found that between 27 and 29 percent of people believe the election was rigged.

29% of “people”still believe The Big Lie. Of course, Trump only thinks his followers are people and they are still with him. And the Republican party is happy to see him flogging it because it gives them the excuse they need to pass laws that suppress the votes of their political enemies. It’s a sick symbiosis.

These stories are becoming more common:

An Alabama man just days away from his 74th birthday died last week after 43 hospitals in three states couldn’t accept him due to overfilled ICUs. Now his family is encouraging people to get vaccinated. Ray Martin DeMonia suffered a cardiac event last week, and after his family tried to get him a bed at a variety of hospitals, staff at an Alabama hospital managed to find him a one at a Mississippi hospital—almost 200 miles from his home. “In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non-COVID related emergencies,” his family wrote in his obituary. “He would not want any other family to go through what his did.”

In Alabama, there were 60 more patients than there were ICUs as of Thursday. Over half were positive with COVID-19, according to USA Today—a deadly example of the Delta variant’s rise.

And yet, it seems that many in media think that while this is a problem, it’s equally a problem that people in blue states are being “overly concerned” about COVID.

Here’s an academic tweeting about his article in the NY Times, ostensibly about our “goals” with COVID but really is a typical “both-sides” article, drawing an equivalence between people who are refusing to get vaccinated people who are insisting on keeping masks and other mitigation strategies in place even though they have a high vaccination rate.

The fact that one group is killing people and the other is simply telling people to wear a mask for a while longer doesn’t seem to enter into this conversation.

This article I wrote w @jenkinshelen focused on forcing ourselves to ask a hard question: “What are our goals?”

We used masks as one example, but could’ve used others

In this thread I’ll use Yale and their 99% vaxxed to ask “What are Yale’s goals?”

First, in our article we point out that if ‘zero covid’ is the goal, one set of polices follow. If drastically reducing severe disease, another.

And that failing to state our goals is creating a lot of confusion, and why expert advice can be so different and conflicting.👇

Why focus on Yale? ICYMI, lots of stories/tweets this weekend about their 99% vax rate and low cases.

Yale is 99% vaxxed, yet maintaining their strict masks/testing/limited gatherings.

I think it’s a fair question for them, and others – what is the goal they are trying to achieve?

Appears to be ‘zero covid’ on campus, which is fine if that’s their goal, it’s just unstated.

4/n

Why important to state the goal? So people know what they’re working towards. Not stating the goal can erode trust, which breaks down effectiveness of the controls.

And is there an off-ramp? Not clear.

5/n

If Yale has all of these controls in place now, even w 99% vaxxed and low cases and spread, are they essentially saying – without saying it – that their goal is zero cases, and may not have a logical off-ramp?

(What @jenkinshelen and I wrote as “sleepwalking” into policy)

I know people on this site don’t like having this conversation, but these questions are happening on campuses right now and need to be answered very soon.

**And the questions aren’t coming from ‘anti-maskers’ or some easy to write-off ‘fringe’ group**

(The positive notes I’ve gotten about our article from smart, balanced people I greatly respect is yet another reminder that what happens on twitter is not the real-world.)

Back to Yale. Maybe Yale’s goal is not ‘zero covid’. Maybe it’s something else. (Again, we don’t know because they haven’t told us.)

What might their policy be?

Maybe Yale’s goal is ‘all controls until x happens’, which is also fine, but they never define what ‘x’ is.

Is it “99% vax + all controls” until:
-Cases drop on campus? Or maybe CT? or US? (and to what level?)
-or maybe test (+) hits some threshold?
-or 100% vax on campus?

-or maybe they’re waiting for 80% vax in CT? or some other %?
-or no ongoing spread on campus?
-or local hospitalizations hit some level?
-or maybe they’re tracking deaths?
-or “wait to see what our peers do”?
-or….??

Because they haven’t defined their ‘off ramp’ goal, the likeliest end game is the end of controls will happen when eventual backlash hits from faculty/students/parents.

“We kept these controls in place until we caved to public pressure” is a poor strategy.

Much stronger to say: “We’re waiting til x”, and then define, and defend, what ‘x’ is. Then collectively work toward that goal.

But, whatever your goal is, it’s past due for everyone to be transparent about their goals or it will lead to pushback and *confusion*

And, again, if you think pushback on this is coming from unreasonable people, you haven’t been plugged in to the conversations swirling off twitter.

This chorus will grow in the coming weeks/months… from very reasonable people.

This isn’t just about Yale, of course, this could be asked of Harvard where I am, or any other university.

It’s also being asked at businesses. “If 99% of employees vaxxed in an office, still need controls in place?”

The answer depends on the goal. Eliminate any and all spread in the office? Or reduce risk of a severe outcome to levels of risk that were previously ‘acceptable’ in society?

In our article, we also took this more broad – what is the country’s goal?

“If the goal is zero spread, which we think is not realistic, then the country would need to keep many of the most restrictive measures in place”

We noted that keeping the most restrictive measures in place is “an approach that has serious public health consequences of its own.”

(This last reality has been ignored all too often)

We also note that “If the goal is to minimize severe disease, some states with high vaccination rates might already be there.”

And that “Low-vaccination states would still have work to do before loosening restrictions.”

But, “Treating the country as a whole just doesn’t make sense right now because of the widespread differences in vaccination rates.”

Big picture: whether Yale, businesses, the country as a whole…

“We shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook with “easy” decisions today. At some point, the country needs to have an honest conversation with itself about what our goals really are.”

Originally tweeted by Joseph Allen (@j_g_allen) on September 12, 2021.

As I said. It’s a “both sides” article pretending to be about how we need to “make a decision about what we want.” Most of us would like to live — and eventually go back to some semblance of normal life. And we’d also like to spare vulnerable people from being exposed as much as possible and deny the virus the ability to mutate into something that makes the vaccines ineffective.

I might understand this insistence that the “overly cautious” are being irrational if it weren’t for the fact that COVID has twice now, first with the Alpha and now with Delta spread all over the country. We may see this winter that the places with high vaccination rates, notably the northeast and the west coast, don’t have the terrible outbreaks of Delta that we have seen in the south and what looks like a coming outbreak in the midwest. That will be very valuable information. And once kids are cleared for vaccinations a lot of parents are going to feel more confident that their communities can relax some of their mitigation measures.

But people move around in this country and the virus is global. It’s not as if your “region” is totally secure. Unless the vast majority of the country is vaccinated, which doesn’t seem to be happening, it’s understandable that people would still be cautious. They’ll relax once we know more and feel secure that these assumptions about spread are correct. It’s still early days.

And let’s face it, the other problem is the real issue. The “under-concerned” are killing people. Let’s keep this in perspective.

Update: Read this piece by Parker Molloy about this “both sides” analysis from last spring. Even with the massive deaths we’ve seen from Delta, they are still doing it.

He gave a paid speech to a cult. On 9/11. Before announcing a pay-per-view boxing match. Once again, on 9/11.

Whenever people on the right pretend to be outraged about some perceived breach of decorum (see: the freak out over Biden glancing at his wrist after a ceremony), just remember this gross, ghoulish nonsense that they’re totally on board with.

Originally tweeted by Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) on September 12, 2021.

No one ever asks, “How do you plan to pay for it?” when it’s weapons and war. Funny, that. Deficits are of little concern except for investments in our economy.

A friend whose career was in banking regulation has serious doubts about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Last I heard in his podcast, Nick Hanauer had his doubts that MMT was right. But he was sure our current economic models are wrong.

Pretty sure Manchin is working with those current models. $3.5 trillion is too much, but he cannot say why. Inflation is “running rampant,” whatever rampant means. “Shouldn’t we be prepared” for geopolitical challenges going forward, he asks? But when they arise, would he ask how we pay for those challenges?

“When the government spends more than it taxes away from us, it makes a financial contribution to some other part of the economy,” says MMT economist Stephanie Kelton. “Their red ink is our black ink. When you look at it this way, it becomes clear that every deficit is good for someone. The question is, For whom?”

By injecting money into the economy with the touch of a computer keyboard in 2020, the U.S. had its shortest recession in U.S. history, Kelton argues. And that’s a bad thing? The real limit on spending, she argues, is inflation.

“Instead of asking, How will we pay for it? we should be asking, How will we resource it?” Kelton argues. So long as we do not outstrip our ability to resource our spending, we can keep inflation in check.

“Kitchen table” economists may think that’s crazy talk. Like time running slower the closer one travels to the speed of light.

“You can’t draw a straight line between the twin towers falling and America entering a protracted nervous breakdown,” Michelle Goldberg wrote days ago. “It’s hard to draw a direct line from the reaction to 9/11 to Trump,” New York University professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat told CNN’s Stephen Collinson.  Maureen Dowd looks back on 9/11 and sees men in charge in the wake of the attacks “seized by a dangerous strain of hyper-masculinity; fake tough-guy stuff; a caricature of strength.”

The last superpower standing had been publicly emasculated by a stateless, nukeless enemy half a world away armed only with box cutters and murderous purpose. The response in Washington was to treat radical Islam as the existential threat it was not. Wider America whose manliness had been questioned lost its collective mind and reached for the civilizational Viagra to show the Muslim world who’s boss.

“All of that empty swaggering ended up sapping America and making our country weaker,” Dowd writes:

After the respite of Barack Obama, Donald Trump became president. When Trump was running in the Republican primaries, focus groups reported that the quality voters most admired in the reality show star was “balls.” (He even referenced his anatomy during a debate.) His fans were posting memes of him as Rambo, quite an upgrade for Cadet Bone Spurs, and Trump himself tweeted a picture of himself as a shirtless Rocky. All this, even though he would later hit the White House bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests.

After riling up his supporters on Jan. 6 to swarm the Capitol, and telling them “we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you,” Rambo/Rocky retreated to the Oval Office to watch the chaos on TV.

Trump’s faux tough-guy routine led to the lethal political divide on masks, which undermined our ability to beat the virus. When Trump got Covid, he was happy to accept all the special medications he could get from his large team of doctors at Walter Reed. Yet he continued to act as though Covid was a minor annoyance, signaling to his red-state supporters that masks were for wimps.

Our response to 9/11 was, as much as any other motivation, a gut-level reaction to America having its mahood questioned. Those who led the country in its wake needed to reclaim it. Immediately. They sacrificed any moral high ground to the need for retribution. They sold out our values because they’d been kicked in the balls. Even if the line is not direct.

Goldberg adds:

The attacks, and our response to them, catalyzed a period of decline that helped turn the United States into the debased, half-crazed fading power we are today. America launched a bad-faith global crusade to instill democracy in the Muslim world and ended up with our own democracy in tatters.

What we see in electing a man so insecure in his own skin that he obsessively uses words like strongly, in Trumpists’ violent outbursts at being asked to wear masks, in the authoritarian rhetoric nearly ubiquitous on the right, and in displays of military-style firearms in public and in Republican campaign ads, may be seen as a manifestation (pun intended) of insecurities and inadequacies exposed like the foundations of the Trade Towers on 9/11.

Meanwhile, our current crisis continues apace. Mainly because there remains almost 40% of the population either unable to get vaccinated (kids mostly) or unwilling. Something had to be done:

Just a day after President Biden issued broad mandates aimed at encouraging American workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, federal health officials released new data showing that unvaccinated Americans are 11 times as likely as vaccinated people to die of Covid-19.

Three large studies, published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also highlighted the effectiveness of the shots at preventing infection and hospitalizations with the virus.

The research underscored a deep conviction among scientists that vaccine hesitancy and refusal have prolonged the pandemic. The administration’s new plan should stem the flood of infections and return the country to some semblance of normalcy in the long term, several experts said in interviews.

“It’s going to fundamentally shift the arc of the current surge,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health. “It’s exactly what’s needed at this moment.”

The new data also may help bolster confidence in the nation’s vaccines, which has eroded amid unexpected reports of breakthrough infections.

One of the studies looked at more than 600,000 virus infections in 13 states, representing about one quarter of the U.S. population, between April and July. The researchers concluded that Americans who were not fully vaccinated were far more susceptible to infections, illness and death from the virus.

Even after the Delta variant became dominant in the United States over the summer, the vaccines’ protections remained strong: Compared with vaccinated adults, those who were not fully vaccinated were 4.5 times as likely to become infected, 10 times as likely to be hospitalized and 11 times as likely to die of Covid.

The cumulative data have made it clear that the nation cannot hope to end the pandemic with some 37 percent of Americans not having received a single dose of Covid vaccine, researchers said. Cases and hospitalizations are only expected to rise as Americans move indoors into homes, schools and offices in the fall.

Apparently, trying to stop this interferes with some people’s freedom to die and take others with them. But the rest of us would like to live and go back to some semblance of normal life. Sorry.

FYI:

Much of the misery could be prevented, the new C.D.C. research found. An analysis of 32,867 patient visits in nine states found that even as the Delta variant predominated, the vaccines had an overall effectiveness rate of 86 percent at preventing hospitalizations, though they were less protective for adults aged 75 and over.

Moderna vaccines had the highest efficacy rate, at 95 percent, compared with 80 percent for Pfizer-BioNTech and 60 percent for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The shots’ effectiveness at preventing infection declined somewhat, from 91 percent to 78 percent, as the variant spread. The Moderna vaccine had an effectiveness rate of 92 percent against infection, compared with 77 percent for the Pfizer-BioNTech shot and 65 percent for Johnson & Johnson.

We got Moderna in my household. I’m glad we did…

For those of you who may have been too young to remember just how disgusting many Americans became in the wake of 9/11, I’ll just reprint this grotesque pile of offal from Peggy Noonan in September, 2002:

The story is over. It’s yesterday’s headline.

Everyone involved has begun to recede back into normal life insofar as they had normal lives. But before it becomes just another strange memory of 2002, a worthy wave goodbye.

Eunice Stone of Georgia is reportedly recovering from the chest pains that led her to check herself into a local hospital. The diagnosis was stress. The three young Muslim men with whom she had her now-famous encounter have reportedly announced they will not sue her, which is certainly gracious of them.

I wasn’t there, but I listened to everyone who spoke of it and watched the story closely. And it’s not hard to imagine what probably happened that day at Shoney’s.

Three young Mulsim men walk into the middle-class chain restaurant in a Georgia town. They are dressed in what customer Eunice Stone apparently understood to be Mideastern dress. As for Sikh, Saudi, whatever, she probably didn’t know. She probably knew as much about Muslim culture as the three young Muslim men knew about American Indian culture. Which is to say: probably nothing.

So they’re all in a small southern town, at a local chain restaurant, and when the three young Muslim males walk in, the locals—Southerners, Americans, neighbors—look at them. Maybe hard. Maybe up and down. Who are those guys?

And here we might ask: Who are the Southerners? They are likely, being Southerners, Americans who take a rather protective and even loving interest in their country. They are painfully aware that America had, just one year before, been brutally attacked by groups of people who were young Muslim males. They left 3,000 dead—innocent people, civilians, young people just starting out. It grieved a great country. It grieved them.

The Southerners know, for they keep a close eye on the news, that there are now in our country cells of young Muslim males loyal not to the United States but to the grievances and leadership of terror masters. They mean us ill. A bunch of men allegedly meeting this description were arrested last week in Buffalo, N.Y. More are said to be lying low in Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and other states. They move among us with confidence, taking advantage of the freedoms we guarantee, and taking advantage too of our cultural reluctance to jump to conclusions based on a person’s look or sex or ethnicity.

So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.

And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.

But it’s the anniversary of Sept. 11, and now we’re trying to be alert, to look out for things.

So the Southerners eyeball the young Muslim males, and the young Muslim males feel the vibe.

And they don’t like it. They resent it.

Here they had two clear choices: Try to understand the emotions of the people around them—people who’ve been bruised, who’ve seen their country take a roundhouse right from history—and choose to be polite and friendly. The young Muslim males could smile and nod, for instance. This probably would have gone far in making progress between peoples, for one thing we’ve all read about the terrorists of Sept. 11 is that they never bothered to be nice. They tended to treat the Americans with whom they interacted with Sullen Dead Face—the inexpressive look young men put on so it will be hard for you to read them. Because they don’t want to be read. Because they want to convey an air of some menace.

They could have introduced themselves to the waitress, mentioned they’re on their way to medical school. They could have been quiet, minded their business, chatted softly.

But they didn’t bother to be nice. They wanted things on their terms.

So they took option two.

They sensed the questioning within the gazes, and they thought it would be amusing to show these stupid and uneducated Southern people, these dumb crackers, these yokels, who was boss. You think we’re bad guys? We’ll show you bad guys.

And so one of them or a few of them said the things Eunice Stone says she overheard. Talk about explosions, references to Sept. 11, talk about how Sept. 13 will be even bigger.

And Ms. Stone, alarmed, put herself on the line. She called the police and told them what she’d heard. She was interviewed by them repeatedly and exhaustively. She did everything she could to see that the young Muslim males were stopped.

The young Muslim males took off in their cars, driving south. They were stopped in Florida, where police closed a highway for an entire day as robots searched their car. The young Muslim men, the police said, were not entirely cooperative. They had attitude. Certainly in their interviews after they were released, after nothing was found in their cars, they displayed plenty of attitude. They were an unsympathetic bunch, in both ways. They showed scant sympathy for those they’d inconvenienced and alarmed, and they also inspired no sympathy for their plight. Later, a sister of one of the young men went on CNN to declare that this was the South, and you know how the South is: “It has a reputation of racism.”

I thought, as I watched this: It has a reputation for patriotism, too. It’s why Southern men and women join the armed forces in such high numbers, and why, if the sister were ever attacked by a terrorist, they’d risk their lives to save her sorry, sanctimonious little . . . Well, as I watched I got a little mad.

The South’s reputation for patriotism may be why Eunice Stone put herself on the line, and wound up overwhelmed by insults and unwanted fame, in the hospital, and ultimately being patronized—We won’t sue you—by the three young Muslim males.

But they were right about one thing, and it’s a big thing. This really does appear to have been a story about bigotry.

There was someone who was prejudiced, who made assumptions based on newspaper reports and urban legends; there was someone who didn’t like “the other” and assumed bad things about them; there was someone who was insensitive, lacking in compassion and aggressive.

And it wasn’t Eunice Stone. It was the three young Muslim males, the young would-be doctors, the college-educated men, who thought they’d have some fun with their social, intellectual and moral inferiors.

That was the urbane, respectable Peggy Noonan writing for the Wall St Journal defending racism and bigotry.

14 years later, Donald Trump ran for president and won with a promise to ban Muslims from entering the country.

This piece by Jonathan Chait could not be more pertinent. He discusses how we have belatedly begun to absorb the understanding that the country’s reaction to 9/11 was twisted and incompetent. And then he addresses one aspect of it that has frustrated me for the last 20 years:

[T]here remains one important post-9/11 belief that has yet to undergo significant revision: the comforting fallacy that George W. Bush won the 2000 election more or less fairly.

Bush won the election because five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overruled the Florida State Supreme Court and blocked a statewide ballot recount. A consortium of newspapers undertook its own recount. By an unfortunate accident of timing, those results came out in November 2001, when post-attack hysteria was at an apogee. A broad bipartisan consensus held that the paramount national imperative was to unify behind a president protecting the country from existential and ongoing threats. At the time, public pressure to rally around Bush and suppress any questions about his legitimacy was so intense that the mere decision to publish the findings at all provoked controversy.My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.

Newspapers generally handled this pressure by presenting their results in the most delicate, Bush-friendly way. The Washington Post headlined its story, “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush.” The New York Times report was headlined, “EXAMINING THE VOTE: THE OVERVIEW; Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.”

These summaries were at best oversimplistic, and at worst outright false. But they registered in the public consciousness so deeply that most people believe those conclusions to this day.

The actual results of the recount was that Al Gore’s narrow winning margin would have been provided by a cache of “overvotes ” — ballots that were discarded by machine counts because they registered two votes for president, but which were revealed by hand inspection to show a clear choice. (These voters had marked Gore’s name, and then wrote his name in, causing the machines to discard them as a double vote.)

The result of the recount would have depended on whether the officials conducting the recount examined these overvote ballots. It can’t be proven either way. The major newspapers chose to assume that the overvotes would have been ignored in a recount, triggering a Bush victory. That assumption allowed them to fall back on the (then) safe and comforting conclusion that the recount would not have changed the outcome.

But it was just that — an assumption. The national media made no effort to test this assumption. Only the Orlando Sentinel bothered to ask Terry Lewis, the judge who had been overseeing the recount, about it. Lewis replied that he likely would have examined overvotes, a method that would have resulted in Gore winning. But none of the major media paid any attention to this significant finding or saw fit to revise the conclusions they had splashed out.

It’s difficult to convey to those who didn’t experience it the overwhelming force of the pro-administration Zeitgeist. I did not work in a major media newsroom at the time, so I can’t report firsthand on the calculations that caused those outlets to leap to a pro-Bush conclusion they hadn’t bothered to substantiate. I did work for a center-left opinion magazine, and I had to push back as hard as I ever had to resist my editor’s desire for me to publish a story ratifying the pro-Bush interpretation of the recount. The story that ran questioned the official narrative while backing into its important conclusion that Gore probably would have prevailed. My conclusion was almost apologetic:

The media’s impulse to exonerate Bush is understandable. Nobody wants to appear sour or partisan, or to shatter the unity necessary to prosecute the war on terrorism. But accepting the finality of the election and unifying against enemies abroad does not necessarily conflict with the idea that the president holds office due to bungling compounded by deliberate wrongdoing. We really ought to be able to hold both ideas in our heads at once.

Even Al Gore himself did not feel emboldened enough to supply a pro-Gore interpretation of the recount, instead nodding to the importance of rallying around Bush’s leadership in the emerging war on terror. “As I said on Dec. 13th of last year, we are a nation of laws and the presidential election of 2000 is over,” he wrote in a statement. “And of course, right now our country faces a great challenge as we seek to successfully combat terrorism. I fully support President Bush’s efforts to achieve that goal.”

The perspective of history renders Gore’s nonanswer much more revealing than it seemed at the time. His answer turned the subtext of the media’s coverage of the issue — Bush’s status as unchallengeable leader against the terrorist threat — into the text.

Twenty years on, not only does the impulse to follow Bush’s foreign policy look worse, but so too does the impulse to overlook the method by which he gained his office. His party’s terrifying will to power, including mobs shutting down a legitimate government proceeding over groundless fears that Democratic cities would manufacture fake votes, was an eerie precursor to its future. The truth we’ve suppressed is that Bush not only misused his office, but never should have held it in the first place.

He did not win that election. And the interjection of the Supreme Court in spite of the Constitution’s clear pathway to settling such disputes was a first shot across the bow by a Republican party that had already shown with the Clinton impeachment that it had little respect for democracy and was headed in a very radical direction.

Here’s a piece I wrote back in 2007:

[S]ince I first started writing on-line, one of my recurring themes is that the modern Republican party has become fundamentally hostile to democracy.(And we already knew they were crooks.) This was first made obvious to me back in 1994, when Republican leader Dick Armey famously stated “your president is just not that important for us.” They went on to impeach that president against the clear will of the people.

But the biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount. I know it seems like ancient history to go back to that but it is extremely important to remember just how outrageous their tactics were: the Gore campaign used legal tactics and the Bush campaign didn’t. There was the “bourgeois riot” and dirty trickster Roger Stone directing the street theatre from a van. (Here’s a list of what the Village Voice termed the five worst Bush recount outrages.) They used every lever of power they could to count illegally cast overseas ballots. They operated a hypocritical and situational media campaign that the press completely failed to properly analyze until it was too late. And after they did they helpfully told those who objected to “get over it.” And I guess we did.

The Republicans have been remarkably good about keeping their mouths shut about the Florida shennanigans, pretending that Jeb Bush’s electoral apparatus gave them no unusual help. Still, I was surprised to see a former Florida recount icon show up on the Lehrer News Hour last week to argue that the US Attorney firings were completely above board. His name is Michael Carvin and he was the lawyer who argued the Bush case before the Florida Supreme Court. Here’s his picture. I’m sure many of you will remember him:

The Newshour failed to identify him as one of the Florida recount team and instead named him merely as a former Reagan official. But he didn’t fail to carry the Bush water one more time:

MICHAEL CARVIN: I really think this is much ado about very little. I’m not saying that they haven’t mishandled this from a public relations perspective. They clearly have.

But the notion that firing eight U.S. attorneys with White House personnel involved is somehow shocking is like saying you’re shocked to discover there’s gambling in Casablanca. I don’t know where these people have been.

There’s not one member of that Judiciary Committee who hasn’t called the White House or the Justice Department and said, “My cousin or my law school roommate wants to be a U.S. attorney.”

So the notion that these kinds of appointments and removals in Walter’s administration — they fired all 93 in one slot — the notion that is isn’t influenced by the fact that the president needs his team in place, both at the main Justice Department and in the field, is really quite silly and quite counterfactual.

This would be typical Carvin. For instance, here’s something he said after Bush v Gore was decided:

The new deadline for all recounts to be submitted to Katherine Harris was 5 p.m. Sunday, November 26. Now, that Sunday afternoon you could watch any of the television coverage and see that Palm Beach was still counting. And by late afternoon you heard various officials in Palm Beach acknowledging that they were not going to be finished by five. Now, we maintain that was completely illegal, because the law said you had to manually recount all ballots. [See Village Voice top five outrages for why this is such a slimy position for him to take.]

But as five o’clock approached, we heard that the secretary of state was going to accept the Palm Beach partial recount — even though the Palm Beach partial recount was blatantly illegal. We were told that the secretary of state’s view was that unless Palm Beach actually informed her — in writing or otherwise — that the returns were only a partial recount, she could not infer that on her own.

So we made some calls to a few Republicans overseeing the Palm Beach recount. We told them to gently suggest to the canvassing board that it might as well put PARTIAL RETURN on the front of the returns that were to be faxed up in time for the deadline. The reason we gave was clarity — that the words PARTIAL RETURN would distinguish those returns from the full count that would be coming in later that night. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think the Palm Beach board did in the end write PARTIAL RECOUNT on the returns. We all know that the Secretary of State, in the end, rejected them. [By rejecting them, he means that she said that a partial return missed the deadline altogether and all the previously uncounted votes that were counted in the partial recount were never added to the tally. This had the effect of never allowing Gore to take the lead.]

I think the board members probably agreed to write the PARTIAL RECOUNT notation for two reasons. First of all, I think they hadn’t slept in 48 hours, so I think they’d sort of do anything. Second of all, I don’t think they or anybody else would have suspected that it would actually make any difference. Who would imagine that without the simple notation of PARTIAL RETURN the partial count would have been accepted as a complete count by the secretary of state? Even while the television showed them still counting?

But I don’t think it was Machiavellian to suggest to the board that it write PARTIAL RECOUNT, because that is what it was. I think it would have been sort of Machiavellian to suggest to pretend they were not partial returns. [Talk Magazine, March 2001, p. 172

I know that virtually nobody cares about this anymore, if they ever did, but this was so full of nonsense that it amazed me that he got away with saying it. And the tale he tells, bad as it is, is still obviously not the whole story.

They were clearly colluding with Katherine Harris’ office throughout and they determined that she could reject all of the Palm Beach county votes they had counted by 5pm with this little gambit. Everything depended on not allowing Al Gore to ever take the lead or their whole PR campaign would start to fall apart.

It’s a small thing, I know, and probably one of thousands of such small acts of illegal and inappropriate collusion between Jeb Bush and the campaign during the recount. But it happened and we knew it happened. And it was done by people like Michael Carvin, former Reagan Justice Department official who now implies that the US Attorney scandal is nothing because everyone knows that the Bush Justice department is an enforcement arm of the Republican Party and that’s perfectly normal.

That is just how these people think. It’s why they hunted Clinton and Reno like dogs for eight years, determined to find evidence of wrongdoing. They either assume everyone does it because they do or they know they can innoculate themselves against accusations of their own bad acts by getting to the punch first. (And harrassing Democrats is rewarding in and of itself.)

I wrote to reporters Don Van Atta and Jake Tapper about this Carvin tid-bit when they were covering the media recount for the NY Times and Salon (and Tapper was writing a book about it.) Tapper was uninterested, but Van Natta called me and I told him where to find the quote. (Talk Magazine is not on lexis-nexis.) Then came 9/11, the recount story was pretty much shelved and the entire country was told we had to gather around the president.

But then, we had been told that from the beginning, hadn’t we? The media were complicit in this, helping the Republicans along every step of the way during the recount with constant rending of garments about a constitutional crisis and fantasies about tanks in the streets if things weren’t settled instantly. (The deadlines! My god, the deadlines!) And when it was all done, they told us repeatedly to get over it.

And here we are, six years later, actually debating whether the Bush White House has been manipulating the electoral system. For god’s sake — of course they have been. This administration was installed through crude manipulation of the rigged levers of power in the Bush family’s political machine and they see such outrageous conduct as perfectly legitimate.

Indeed, I’m sure they believe “it’s not Machiavellian” to use the Department of Justice to rig the vote — it would be Machiavellian not to.

George W. Bush Reads 'My Pet Goat' in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' from Michael Moore on Vimeo.

I don’t want to be too uncharitable on this anniversary of 9/11. But with both Bush on the scene and Trump putting out inane statements, it’s hard not to be.

I’ll just leave this newsletter by Eric Alterman here:

I want to look at just one rather small question: What the heck was happening with George W. Bush?

I choose this because with all that attention to that fateful day, nobody seems to know the answer to that particular query. Even after 20 years, we have no credible and consistent account of why Bush and his entourage took the actions they did that day. No less disturbing was the mainstream media’s eagerness to allow all the various inconsistencies in the stories Americans were told to go unexamined, as if it would have been somehow unprofessional to ask too many uncomfortable questions. Personally, I have always believed that Bush may have had a breakdown of some sort that day, but that journalists were so nervous about the fearful implications of accurately reporting this possibility, they all simply ignored it. Recall that when the congressionally appointed 9/11 Commission—chaired by the Republican ex–New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean—took testimony from Bush, he would only agree to appear together with Dick Cheney, and no recordings or transcripts were allowed. What were they trying to hide? We still don’t know.

Recall that on August 6, when Bush was handed an intelligence briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.,” he allegedly replied, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now,” and went back to “clearing brush” on his mini-ranch. This reaction is of a piece with the widespread impression that he was totally unprepared to be president, having been little more than a professional greeter for the Texas Rangers and a largely figurehead governor of that state. At the time, historian Fred Greenstein noted that “there was a widespread view in the political community that Bush was out of his depth in the presidency.” Not once before the attack had America’s president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, nor had Bush convened a single full-fledged, prime-time press conference. His approval rating was already down 17 points since his inauguration and some aides, including speechwriter David Frum, had already decided to jump ship. Now, the dialectic of history had put its proverbial hand on his shoulder, and his first reaction was to crumble before it. As I wrote in The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America (co-authored with Mark Green and published originally in 2004, where one can find footnoted sources for the information below), there were, and remain, massive inconsistencies between what the public was told about Bush’s reactions and what could possibly have happened.

Bush had been visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of September 11. On December 4, he was asked: “How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?” He replied, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there’s one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn’t have much time to think about it.” Bush repeated the same story the following January 5, stating, “First of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake.”

But Bush was lying. No one watching television saw the first plane crash into the tower until the following day when a videotape turned up. Other versions abound of these same events circulated by both Bush himself and by top members of his staff, whose accounts also contradicted Bush’s. Bush told an interviewer that Chief of Staff Andrew Card had been the first person to let him know of the crash, explaining: “‘Here’s what you’re going to be doing; you’re going to meet so-and-so, such-and-such.’ Then Andy Card said, ‘By the way, an aircraft flew into the World Trade Center.’” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer repeated this same story, claiming that Card had told Bush about the crash “as the President finished shaking hands in a hallway of school officials.” But other sources, including Bob Woodward’s allegedly authoritative account, have Karl Rove telling Bush the news. All we can say for certain is that whatever he knew, Bush continued to read to the children and pose for the cameras long after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Military Command Center (NMCC), the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, and Canada’s Strategic Command were all aware that three commercial jetliners had been hijacked. Today, Bush tells the Andrew Card version of the story, with Rove telling him of the initial crash before he entered the school, which he assumed was a pilot error, and Card informing him of the second one while reading to the children. (Here is a photo.) White House staff members would claim that Bush remained with the children as long as he did so as not to “upset” or “alarm” them. This is a bewildering rationale, for if the country was under attack, its president, of all people, might be forgiven for upsetting a few schoolkids. If Bush was in danger, then so, obviously, were those children. Fighter jets had already been dispatched to defend New York City, for goodness’ sake.

A panic motif runs through the president’s actions for the remainder of the day. When Bush’s motorcade did finally head for the airport, the White House claimed that he spoke to Dick Cheney and ordered all flights nationwide to be grounded. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has also tried to take credit for the order. In fact, according to USA Today, it was FAA administrator Ben Sliney who issued this order. As he boarded Air Force One, nearly 90 minutes into the crisis, Bush had done nothing at all to take charge of the situation. Four planes had been hijacked. The Twin Towers and the Pentagon were on fire. And George W. Bush was, in his own words, “trying to get out of harm’s way.” Amazingly, Air Force One took off without any military protection and remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida had many nearby Air Force bases with planes that are supposed to be on 24-hour alert. If the president and his entourage were primarily concerned about Bush’s own safety and ability to conduct operations, they could hardly have devised a less effective way of ensuring it.https://www.hub.fdncms.com/gyrobase/Responsive/Components/Content/TopStoriesVideo?key=7b903a8f96efd2900a55bc32013b39c9&req=iframe

A minor controversy quickly arose as to why the president felt it necessary to fly around the country instead of returning to Washington to reassure a frightened nation. Bush’s initial response to the attack, an extremely brief, almost contentless explanation of what had happened delivered from the school itself, did little to calm the nation’s nerves. The president then spent the rest of the day on Air Force One, which initially landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for fuel, before flying to the Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and, finally, back to Washington, where Bush pulled himself together sufficiently to give a coherent (for him) speech from the Oval Office that evening.

White House officials tried to explain Bush’s AWOL performance by insisting they were reacting to “hard evidence” that he was a target of the terrorists who carried out the attacks. Karl Rove told reporters, “We are talking about specific and credible intelligence, not vague suspicions.” Ari Fleischer added at a September 13 briefing that a threat “using code words” had been phoned in against Air Force One. He quoted the alleged caller, who was even said to know the proper code words, warning, “Air Force One is a target.” But here again, the official account was nonsensical. If the White House had received a “credible” threat to Air Force One, why would the president and his men return to the target and take off unprotected? Asked about his claim of “credible evidence” four days after the event, Fleischer replied, “We exhausted that topic about two days ago,” and continued to stick to this silly story. Eventually, the White House admitted that Rove and Fleischer were lying. All that had really taken place was that White House telephone operators had “apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail.” There were, in fact, no code words, no “credible intelligence,” and no threat to Air Force One.

All of the above is just a minor example of all of the lies and dissimulations that characterized the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11; lies that began, literally, the very moment of the attack and which, we now see, resulted in two disastrously failed wars, the loss of civil liberties, hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, and trillions of dollars wasted, among too many other catastrophes to enumerate here. It would have been nice if reporters had bothered to get to the truth when it mattered politically. It would be nice to know it even 20 years later.

I have always wondered about this. The fact that they wouldn’t let him testify before the 9/11 Commission without Cheney suggests there is more to it.