Month: November 2021

President Joe Biden is getting an awful lot of advice these days. This happens whenever a president’s approval ratings drop and members of his party start to panic. It seems to be a congenital condition for Democrats in particular, as Republicans are more adept at keeping their heads down and barreling over rough political terrain.

Biden’s approval ratings are averaging in the low to mid-40s, where Donald Trump was mired throughout his entire presidency. I don’t recall the Republicans publicly wringing their hands over that fact, but then the Trump presidency was so overwhelmed with scandal and corruption that there literally was no time to worry about such ordinary political concerns. Every day seemed like a survival test. But Biden is a standard-issue president and his low numbers have become a focus of the media so, therefore, it’s a crisis.

I’m sure the administration is frustrated by this since, by all objective standards, they’ve accomplished a great deal in the 10 months they’ve been in office. Considering the fact that they took office with a floundering economy, a once-in-a-century pandemic at its peak and on the heels of an attempted coup, it’s even more impressive. They were handed a giant mess.

And they’ve done a lot. They initiated the biggest vaccination campaign in history and, all in all, it’s been massively successful despite a large faction of anti-science holdouts who have kept the virus going by refusing to get vaccinated. It’s not over yet, and people are still dying in large numbers, but a whole lot of Americans feel a lot safer today than they did a year ago.

They passed two gigantic pieces of legislation, the first of which, The American Rescue Plan, has revived the economy at an astonishing pace, rapidly helping to bring down unemployment and raise wages. They are still dealing with the fallout from the global pandemic with disrupted supply chains and pent-up demand, which has sparked inflation, putting a damper on people’s perception of the recovery. But there is an expectation that these are temporary hiccups — as the markets evidently believe since they have been soaring. (The supply chain problems are already easing.)

With the narrowest possible majorities, they also managed to pass a big infrastructure bill with bipartisan support, which is something of a unicorn in these polarized times, and have successfully passed their big Build Back Better legislation through the House with the hope of getting the two hold-out Democratic centrists, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to sign on before the end of the year. If that passes it will end up being the most consequential first year of an administration since Franklin Roosevelt.

So why are Biden’s approval ratings so low?

Yes, there is inflation and people really don’t like seeing those gas prices go up. It feels like a slap in the face after all the fear and panic over the last year. And the Delta variant dashed everyone’s hopes that we were putting COVID behind us. But the mood is sour everywhere.

Many foreign leaders are experiencing a similar hit to their approval ratings. French President Emmanuel Macron is at 40 percent, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is just above him at 41 percent and even the leader who was once exalted as the COVID star, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, is down in the low 40s. Joe Biden is wildly popular compared to Britain’s Boris Johnson of Britain, a conservative, who is all the way down to 32 percent. Germany’s Angela Merkel is at 70 percent, but she’s leaving office and her party lost the recent election so … (In case you were wondering, Trump’s approval rating is also at 41 percent.) 

But here in the U.S., it’s also the case that this is simply something that tends to happen whenever a new president comes into office and tries to do big things — whether it’s trying to right the ship, make major progress or effect some massive rollback. 

Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times recently called up the ghost of the GOP’s (former) favorite president, Ronald Reagan, to illustrate this phenomenon. He quotes an article from this point in Reagan’s term which could have easily been written today about Joe Biden. The man whom everyone thinks of as being a hugely popular president actually had a major decline in popularity in his first year. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon because, as Bouie explains, “public opinion functions like a thermostat, in which voters try to adjust the temperature of policy when it moves too far in either direction.”

The more ambitious a president is or appears to be, the stronger the thermostatic reaction against him. Biden has spent most of this year broadcasting the size and scope of his proposed agenda and has signed, thus far, two bills totaling nearly $3 trillion in spending. That is ambitious, to say the least, and we should expect the public to react in response. Combine a thermostatic response against Biden with the usual first-year decline (as we saw with Reagan), and you have the first part of a structural explanation for the president’s political woes.

In other words, these things happen.

When you combine all the events outlined above, inflation, the pandemic, the normal thermostatic public reaction, it’s not too hard to see why Biden’s approval is slumping. Yet all across Democratic punditland there are people calling for Biden to make more speeches, change his message, get out there and sell, hold press conferences, conscript party members to do the same, fight back! The press is covering it as a major crisis, largely driven by “wokism,” culture war issues and yes, an agenda that they are pushing the public to see as far too ambitious. (I heard one anchor on MSNBC ask a while back, “is the Biden administration just too liberal for America?” when reporting on the latest poll numbers.) It’s a wonder that Biden’s numbers are as high as they are.

But as Bouie says in his column:

It is hard to act as an ambitious president without incurring a penalty, even if your policies are popular, as Biden’s are. It is also hard, as president, to be popular, period. Every person who has held the office has hit a rough spot and struggled to regain his footing.

Perhaps Joe Biden, having been around for a very long time, has a sense of this and is just carrying on without responding to the carping and hand-wringing with the knowledge that much of this is out of his hands and that which isn’t will not be solved by “messaging” or speeches. A lot of being a successful president is just how skillfully you ride the wave. 

Salon

The erosion of our democracy and slide toward authoritarianism was never funny. Now it is less funny (Washington Post):

The United States for the first time was added to a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report released Monday by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy 2021 report said.

The study, which analyzed trends from 2020 to 2021, found that more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in democratically backsliding countries, which International IDEA defines as nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy.

“The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of covid-19 restrictions,” the report found. “The number [of countries] moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving toward democracy.”

It’s an honor just to still be considered a democracy. pic.twitter.com/HcZFaf492u

— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) November 23, 2021

What to do? First, Joe Biden needs an enemy, writes Molly Jong-Fast at The Atlantic, citing political consultants and history:

“As of now the White House does not have good story tellers. Good stories need villains,” he texted me. The Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock made a similar point, telling me, “Every good campaign needs a villain.” Pollock believes that “the president and his team understand the enemy piece,” noting that “the president has zeroed in on the corporate greed of the oil and gas companies who are trying to raise their prices for nothing more than profit.” Perhaps Biden’s wising up. If he wants to win reelection, however, he needs to shed his nice-guy persona.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the most popular presidents, dealt with numerous crises during his presidency, but he always had a foil. At first, it was the wealthy. In 1936, Roosevelt told the Democratic National Convention, “For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt went on to win 523 electoral votes, the third-biggest victory since the election of 1820, and that was several years into the Great Depression. Americans weren’t exactly living it up, but they didn’t blame the president for their troubles.

Ronald Reagan pitted his supporters against the government itself, announcing in the first line of his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This was ingenious because it allowed Reagan to avoid taking responsibility for just about everything; if his administration messed up, he could just nod along, as if to say I told you so. He went on to cut numerous social programs, including welfare for working mothers and federal mental-health funding.

Counter-majoritarian aspects of our system are “like a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of popular democracy,” Michelle Goldberg told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “If you fight for this democracy, it can be saved” needs to be the Democrats’ message if they expect to energize their base.

With the U.S. among the backslider democracies, business as usual, playing nice won’t cut it.

Republicans tell stories. Democrats cite facts and figures. In that contest, better stories always win. Those stories have heroes. To be a hero, the protagonist must defeat villains:

How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.

For Rocky to be the good guy, Clubber Lang has to be the villain. For Biden to be a hero, someone else has to be the villain or the story won’t connect with people.

The caution against negation has been misapplied to mean don’t engage the topic at all. You confront lies by telling truths and revealing the motivations of the villains peddling them.

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) April 30, 2021

Jonathan Alter told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night that Democrats “want their president to be a fighter.” Biden is too busy trying to be a healer to be a fighter. “Democrats have forgotten politics is a contact sport.”

“What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children,” Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, declared in written testimony in October. He has Donald Trump to thank for it. Schmidt is vice chairman of the city’s election board.

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy look at Donald Trump’s obsession with not being branded a loser. Seven million more votes for Joe Biden in 2020 says otherwise. But the study in personality disorders now residing at his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida will not let it go. Cannot let it go, if one asks his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist. The Journal did not ask.

It is not enough that Trump’s COVID-19 denialism, promotion of quack cures, and general mishandling of the pandemic resulted in the deaths of countless Americans, and continues to. His damaged, fragile ego is slowly killing off democracy as well. His failure to concede the election and unending allegations that the election was stolen from him oblige his elected sycophants to repeat the Big Lie. Among Trump’s base, the lies have led to threats against elections officials and resignations:

The message appears to be contributing to eroding confidence in the nation’s election systems—similar to the long-running decline of faith in civic institutions such as the government, the criminal justice system and the media. In October, a Grinnell College poll found that 58% of Americans were very or somewhat confident that the 2022 vote will be counted fairly. Confidence among Republicans was at just 38%, down from 85% in March 2020.

In the wake of last year’s election, Mr. Trump’s campaign and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits around the country that challenged the 2020 results. The Justice Department said there were no signs of widespread fraud. A bipartisan consortium of local, state and federal election officials declared the 2020 race the most secure U.S. election in history.

The facts don’t matter to MAGA-nation. Facts that do not support Dear Leader are dismissed. Thanks to Trump’s merry band of lunatic lawyers, people across the country believe “Trump’s claims of fraud or anecdotal reports of irregularities published in conservative media.”

Emphasis on anecdote. Trump’s claims are not evidence. Widely circulated anecdotes are not evidence, even Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s binder full of sworn affidavits alleging fraud. “Affidavits that contain vague or second-hand accounts may be hard to prove as false,” writes Ken Haddad of WDIV Detroit. “There are also many scenarios where a witness just misunderstands the situation or is mistaken in what they believe they heard or saw.”

Detroit attorney David Ayyash explained affidavits this way:

“In a lawsuit, if a witness offers sworn testimony, that is considered evidence. But the finder of fact, usually a jury — but sometimes a judge — determines the credibility of that evidence,” Ayyash said. “So technically – yes – an affidavit is a form of evidence, but that doesn’t mean it’s credible.”

Not one. Not a thousand. As stated above, Trump’s allegations were not found substantive in court after court.

As I wrote recently:

When Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?” was a best-seller (speaking of pyramids), Johnny Carson asked a NASA astronaut what he thought of von Daniken’s theories about aliens influencing human history. After a pause, the astronaut replied that when von Daniken looks around the world and sees something he doesn’t understand, he attributes it to aliens. And since there’s a lot in this world von Daniken doesn’t understand, he finds them everywhere.

Watching Brother Giuliani’s traveling Republican salvation show last year, it was clear most of his Trump-fawning witnesses to “massive fraud” applied von Däniken’s approach to the 2020 election. Whenever they saw an election process they did not understand, they attributed it to voter fraud. And since there was a lot about election processes they didn’t understand, they saw fraud everywhere.

The Journal is careful to “both sides” fraud allegations where it can, but the preponderance of efforts to erode confidence in U.S. elections is on Republicans’ hands. Even when they don’t really believe their own claims.

In Washington, some top Republicans privately say they don’t believe voter fraud tilted the 2020 election away from Mr. Trump—but rarely acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in public. Still, there is broad consensus that the former president has tapped into voter frustration by using election security issues to motivate their votes.

Three out of four Republicans said Mr. Trump was right to question whether the election was rigged because there were “real cases of fraud that changed the results,” in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month.

As with the Giuliani affidavits, belief that there exist “real cases of fraud that changed the results” is

Just like the chain emails filled with lies, distortions, and smears you once received from your propagandist conservative uncle, unsubstantiated allegations, or ones that cannot be disproven, work better than facts for indoctrinating the conservative faithful.

Get too specific and facts can turn on you:

In Texas, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered up $1 million in bounties for information that led to voter fraud convictions anywhere in the country. After a year, Mr. Patrick has paid one tipster: a progressive Pennsylvania poll worker who helped uncover illegal voting by a registered Republican.

In Nevada, Republican officials last year pointed to a ballot cast by Rosemarie Hartle—who had died in 2017—as evidence of fraud after the 2020 election. A state investigation concluded in October that her husband, Donald “Kirk” Hartle, cast both his ballot and that of his deceased wife.

Mr. Hartle is a registered Republican, public records show. He’s also an executive at Ahern Rentals, Inc., whose owners were fined for Covid violations after hosting an indoor Trump rally at another business in September 2020.

Last week, Mr. Hartle pleaded guilty to voting more than once in the same election. He will pay a $2,000 fine.

Trump and his allies have yet to pay for systematically (in Trump’s case, pathologically) undermining American democracy. Or for inciting the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, or for his, his family’s, and his associates’ roles in planning a coup. Using burner phones.

If Rolling Stone‘s reporting is accurate, rally planners purchased burner phones “for their most ‘high level’ communications with former President Trump’s team:

One of the sources, a member of the “March for Trump” team, says Kremer insisted the phones be purchased using cash and described this as being “of the utmost importance.”

To be continued, I hope.

The Pew political typology offers some additional insights into our divided society:

In the United States, even the meaning of life can have a partisan tinge. Both Republicans and Democrats say they derive meaning from their families, friends, careers and material well-being. But they differ substantially over several other factors, including faith, freedom, health and hobbies.

If those word clouds are indicative of the divide, we have a problem. Democrats derive meaning from their personal lives. Republicans derive meaning from civic and religious life.

I find it very unnerving. They explicitly find meaning from institutions like government and the church and abstract notions like freedom. Dems find meaning in their families, pets and hobbies. I think the Dems might be healthier as individuals but they are ill-equipped to deal with a group that is driven by politics and religion.

Our political typology provides a roadmap to today’s fractured political landscape. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the 2021 survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Below is a short description of each of the nine groups, ranging from the most conservative to the most liberal.

The 2021 political typology groups

Faith and Flag Conservatives

Highly religious, overwhelmingly White and older than other typology groups. Intensely conservative in all realms, including social and economic issues. Very politically engaged and deeply loyal to Donald Trump.

Committed Conservatives

Staunchly conservative and overwhelmingly Republican, they hold pro-business views and have favorable attitudes about international trade. They favor limited government and are more moderate on immigration than other GOP-oriented groups. Financially secure and highly educated.

Populist Right

Critical of many institutions – especially big business and the government. Overwhelmingly White and less educated than other conservative typology groups. Hold highly negative views of immigration and favor restrictive immigration policies.

Ambivalent Right

They generally hold conservative views on government, business and gender issues. Yet they also hold more moderate stances on other social issues, taking a more internationalist view of foreign policy and a less restrictive position on immigration.

Stressed Sideliners

Generally disconnected from politics and the two major parties, they vote at lower rates than most other typology groups. They lean liberal on economic issues but somewhat conservative on social issues.

Outsider Left

The youngest typology group. They hold liberal views on most issues and overwhelmingly vote Democratic but aren’t particularly enamored with the Democratic Party – and they have deeply negative views of the GOP.

Democratic Mainstays

Committed to the Democratic Party, they are the oldest Democratic-oriented group and among the most racially and ethnically diverse overall. They favor an expanded role for government but are somewhat less liberal on immigration and foreign policy.

Establishment Liberals

Highly educated and racially diverse, they are among the strongest supporters of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Liberal on nearly all issues but less likely to favor sweeping changes than Progressive Left. More supportive of political compromise than other Democratic groups.

Progressive Left

Among the most politically engaged groups, they hold overwhelmingly liberal views across a wide range of issues. Highly educated and majority White. Support far-reaching changes to address racial injustice and expand the social safety net.

Curious which group you belong to? Take the quiz. Answer 16 questions to find out where you fit.

I’m a little bit surprised that I came out a “Democratic Mainstay” rather than Progressive Left, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. I’m getting old.

Sure, this is fine:

Coronavirus cases in children in the United States have risen by 32 percent from about two weeks ago, a spike that comes as the country rushes to inoculate children ahead of the winter holiday season, pediatricians said.

More than 140,000 children tested positive for the coronavirus between Nov. 11 and Nov. 18, up from 107,000 in the week ending Nov. 4, according to a statement on Monday from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

The good news is that kids can’t spread the virus to vulnerable adults or people who haven’t yet been able to get their boosters. No need for schools to have kids wear masks or use social distancing policies as much as possible. Just let ‘er rip. Oh wait. I forgot. A bunch of Trump voting anti-vaxxers have a political point to make and if people have to die, well that’s the price we all must pay for their freedom. (And if they refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks, contract the virus and wind up in the hospital, we all have to pay for their medical care too.)

As Atrios wrote:

Schools being plague zones and then the kids going back and spreading it to adults is really what has been driving the latest round in many places.

I don’t have strong beliefs about what policies/mandates should be, but my basic view is “every little bit helps,” and while allowing life to get back to normal might be fine, shaming people who didn’t rip off their masks and cough in each other’s mouths probably wasn’t the best idea.

It is sick.

Get boosted as quickly as possible.

Get ready to hear more about Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that you ever wanted to know (even if you live there…)

As Donald Trump builds out a presidential-campaign-in-waiting, his team is focusing on an electoral strategy that relies on recapturing the five states that flipped to Joe Biden in 2020.

The five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — delivered a total of 73 electoral votes in 2020, enough to produce a decisive Electoral College victory for Biden. Since then, Trump has held four rallies, endorsed dozens of candidates and played a key role in shaping contests that could put his allies in top offices in those states in 2024.

Trump’s shadow campaign also recently polled Trump-Biden matchups in the five states, all of which were decided in 2020 by fewer than 3 percentage points. According to the poll, a memo of which was obtained by POLITICO, the former president led Biden in Arizona by 8 percentage points, Georgia by 3 points, Michigan by 12 points, Pennsylvania by 6 points and Wisconsin by 10 points.

“Poll after poll clearly demonstrates that former President Donald Trump is still the 800-pound gorilla in the GOP and would be its 2024 nominee should he run,” said Fabrizio, who confirmed the numbers for POLITICO but did not provide them. “This new data clearly shows that today the voters in these five key states would be happy to return Trump to the White House and send Biden packing.”

In another sign that Trump is gearing up for a White House bid, his super PAC is holding its biggest planned fundraiser to date on Dec. 2, when the nation’s top Republican donors are expected to gather at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

The super PAC is also expanding its board of directors to include Trump’s former acting national intelligence director Ric Grenell and his former acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. They will serve alongside former Florida state Attorney General Pam Bondi, who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial.

The former president’s other political action committee, Save America, recently hired longtime Trump aide Lynne Patton to help him build political coalitions. Patton has doubled as a spokesperson for Trump in recent appearances on Fox News and Newsmax.

For months, Trump has been building a turnkey operation in case he decides to announce a presidential bid. Advisers expect him to do so after the midterms if Republicans capture at least one chamber of Congress. The poll from Fabrizio will only be more encouragement for Trump, according to those who know the former president’s thinking.

They say he’s concentrating on the midterms right now, with a focus on those states. No doubt they are road testing their electoral coup tactics. I highly doubt he’s only going to run if the Republicans take back one house of congress in the midterms. Trump can rationalize anything and if they do badly in ’22 he will no doubt surmise that it’s because he wasn’t on the ballot. If they do well it will be because he helped. The only way he isn’t running is if he can’t.

Senator John Neeley Kennedy of Louisiana is the biggest phony in the Senate and that’s saying something. The fact that he has adopted this grotesque, demagogic throwback persona to please the Fox news audience actually says more about the audience than about him. He’s just a standard issue opportunist.

This op-ed was written by a Louisiana professor who knows him well. Commenting on his despicable behavior at the hearings last week in which he said he didn’t know whether to call the nominee for Comptroller of the Currency “comrade or professor” since she was born in then Soviet Kazakhstan, he writes:

Kennedy’s antics at the hearing should have surprised no one in the room. Since entering the Senate in 2017, he has specialized in outrageous comments on Fox News, on the Senate floor and in committee hearings.

An acerbic Biden critic, Kennedy is a fount of sharp-but-folksy one-liners. He punctuated his 2016 Senate campaign spots with, “I will not let you down. I’d rather drink weedkiller.” With his exaggerated Southern accent, he affects a mixture of Mr. Haney, the con artist of the 1960s CBS sitcom “Green Acres,” and the bombastic Looney Tunes rooster, Foghorn J. Leghorn.

The 70-year-old Kennedy is so committed to this persona that a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune challenged readers in 2019 to guess the author of a series of eccentric statements: Foghorn Leghorn or Kennedy? It was a difficult quiz.

Whenever Kennedy appears on Fox News or launches an attention-getting stunt, those of us in Louisiana who know him well roll our eyes and reflect on the Kennedy we knew before his Senate election.

We recall the brainy graduate of Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia Law School and Oxford University’s Magdalen College; the relatively progressive Democrat who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004; the man who, despite his 2007 party switch, served capably as state treasurer from 2000 to 2017; the official who, although in the same Republican Party as then-Gov. Bobby Jindal, was a fierce critic of Jindal’s reckless fiscal policies.

Mostly, we wonder what happened to the reasonable, non-incendiary Kennedy we once knew.

In preparing this piece, I found a lengthy interview Kennedy did in October 2004 with the Shreveport Times. In pitching his Democratic Senate candidacy, he was articulate, restrained and progressive. He scorned the tax cuts for wealthy Americans that then-President George W. Bush had signed. He favored increasing the federal minimum wage.

He was no Bernie Sanders liberal, but he was the progressive Democrat in the race — so much so that some prominent Black leaders, including our congressional delegation’s most liberal member, Rep. William J. Jefferson of New Orleans, backed him.

But what stood out in that 2004 interview was the absence of the homey sayings, abusive zingers and character assassinations that have become Kennedy trademarks. He was nothing like the man you see these days insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “It must suck to be that dumb” — or vilifying then-Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”

When people outside Louisiana ask me about Kennedy, I tell them he’s not the folksy bumpkin you see on TV, but a wealthy, well-educated attorney with an Oxford degree. Just like Pat Buttram, who portrayed Mr. Haney in “Green Acres,” Kennedy is acting. He’s a shape-shifting, attention-hungry politician who found a role — wily country boy — that brings him some fame.

Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has celebrated its brash, entertaining and clever politicians. But Kennedy’s latest media splash was not clever. It was entertaining only to those who enjoy cruelty and xenophobia. It was conduct that, until recently, might have earned Kennedy criticism from some members of his party. The pre-2017 Kennedy would have abhorred it.

What troubles me about Kennedy’s latest stunt is not just what it revealed about a politician doing what some unprincipled, opportunistic politicians have always done. What bothers me more is what it says about Louisiana politics, and today’s Republican Party, that Kennedy could expose himself as a xenophobic demagogue and pay no price for it.

He not only will pay no price, he will be amply rewarded. And nobody can say that this highly educated, formerly normal politician (whom people also say never had that deep drawl until recent years) doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

These right wingers, whether politicians or media, who try to have it both ways are the worst of all. I know many of you hate the Never Trumpers for what they did in the past, and that’s legit. But at least they aren’t like these weasels who want to maintain their credibility with the fascists even as they wink and nod at normal people indicating that they don’t really believe it.

If you work for Fox News with Tucker Carlson you are with Tucker Carlson, period:

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier squirmed on Monday when colleague Brian Kilmeade pressed him over reports that he was bothered by Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy-laden Jan. 6 “documentary,” eventually conceding that there were indeed “concerns” within the network over the unhinged special.

During an appearance on Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio program, first flagged by Mediaite, Baier was asked to weigh in on the recent resignations of longtime Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. The pair, who are also co-founders of anti-Trump conservative outlet The Dispatch, had both been with Fox since 2009 and regularly appeared on Baier’s midday political analysis show.

Following the release of Carlson’s multi-part Patriot Purge series that baselessly suggested the Capitol riots were a “false flag” orchestrated by the federal government, however, Hayes and Goldberg claimed they’d had enough and publicly quit, citing the program’s “truly dangerous” and factually inaccurate content. Furthermore, NPR reported that Baier and fellow veteran anchor Chris Wallace complained to upper management about the decision to air Carlson’s feature.

“What’s going on with Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg? Why do they not want to come on?” Kilmeade questioned Baier on Monday.

“I think it was a tough choice but one that they’ve made on principle,” the Special Report anchor replied. “And I’m going to let them speak for themselves.”

Baier would then boast that his program prides itself for listening to “all kinds of voices” before lamenting that it was “sad” that Hayes and Goldberg had departed, adding again that they’d “made their choice on principle.”

Kilmeade followed up by heaping praise on Patriot Purge, saying it brought an “interesting perspective” on the Jan. 6 violence. At the same time, he wondered aloud about Baier’s feelings about the Fox Nation series.

“I didn’t get hurt by it. I didn’t get damaged by it. Were you bothered by it? Because that’s the reporting,” the longtime Fox & Friends host asked, prompting an awkward silence.

“There’s—Brian, I don’t want to go down this road,” a clearly uncomfortable Baier replied. “I mean, there were concerns about it definitely. I think that the news division did what we do when we covered the story.”

“I want to do all of that internally,” Baier concluded, attempting to move on. “Steve and Jonah made the decision, and it’s their decision.”

And no, this is not enough:

Before the release of Patriot Purge but after Carlson aired an over-the-top promo for the series, Baier featured a segment on Special Report about the insurrection by Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin. Griffin’s report notably included interviews that dismissed “false flag” claims about the riots.

Wallace, meanwhile, interviewed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Fox News Sunday. A prominent Republican critic of former President Trump’s election lies, Cheney called it “un-American” and “dangerous” to peddle insurrection conspiracies. Prior to her Fox News Sunday appearance, she had repeatedly called out Fox and Carlson over the documentary.

This is not a “he said/she said” issue. And handling such a thing “internally” is meaningless. Tucker Carlson is being backed to the hilt by management. These reporters are complicit in his lies by thinking it’s enough to show “the other side.” They are white-washing his lies by pretending it is.

I think the NY Times’ Michelle Goldberg has identified the “vibe” (as everyone’s suddenly calling it) of the moment. And it’s dangerous:

On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.

It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.

One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.

Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.

My friend Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, uses the phrase “the bad feeling” to describe certain kinds of stories about America’s democratic unraveling. “The bad feeling is that pit of the stomach feeling that we’re not OK, and it’s not clear we’re going to be OK,” he told me.Credit…Bill Armstrong, courtesy of ClampArt, New York

The problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes. That’s upsetting, but it’s also fairly normal given the tendency of American voters to react against the party in power, and in a democratic system Republicans should prevail when they have public sentiment behind them.

What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House. North Carolina, a state Joe Biden lost by 1.3 percentage points, just passed a redistricting map that would create 10 Republican seats, three Democratic ones and one competitive one. “Democrats would have to win North Carolina by 11.4 points just to win half its congressional seats,” FiveThirtyEight reported.

There are already lawsuits against the map, but the Supreme Court — which is controlled by conservatives even though Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections — gutted constitutional limitations on gerrymandering in 2019.

Things are, if anything, even worse in the Senate, where growing geographic polarization threatens to give Republicans a near lock on the chamber. As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote last month, the Democratic data guru David Shor predicts that if Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote in 2024, they will lose seven seats compared to where we are now.

Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again. As Hayes said, there’s an inexorability about what’s coming that is “very hard to watch.”

Already, the Republican Party winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies. During the presidential campaign, a right-wing caravan tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, and Senator Marco Rubio cheered them on. School board members and public health offices have sought help from the Justice Department to deal with a barrage of threats and harassment. Three congressional Republicans have said they want to give an internship to the teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. One of those Republicans, Representative Paul Gosar, earlier tweeted an animated video of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the overwhelming majority of his caucus stood by him.

I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us. How much comfort you take from this depends on your disposition.

Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay. In order to get people to throw themselves into the fight to save this broken country, we need leaders who can convince them that they haven’t already lost.

It is hard not to feel somewhat … terrified. And talk of “kitchen table issues” isn’t going to cut it.

“Mr. Douglas, wanna buy my pig?” plays in my head every time Sen. John Kennedy (R) of Louisiana appears.

We all know Kennedy is a phony. In our guts we know it. But those who’ve watched his evolution from “brainy graduate of Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia Law School and Oxford University’s Magdalen College,” and formerly somewhat progressive Democrat in 2004, know it by experience (Mediaite 2019):

Conservative columnist Quin Hillyer went to school with Sen. Kennedy. The pair were fellows in the same class at the Loyola University New Orleans Institute of Politics in 1990. In a new column for the Washington Examiner, Hillyer explains to those unfamiliar with Kennedy’s career that he is simply “a habitual shape-shifter.”

What’s more, that whimsical accent Kennedy uses to deploy metaphors that simply can’t exist? Hillyer says it’s made up:

Kennedy had a mild Southern accent but still sounded rather patrician, befitting his record both at Oxford and as former executive editor of the University of Virginia’s Law Review. His folksy, exaggerated Southern-cornpone accent now is an affectation, mere political theater to stand out among the Senate’s bevy of stuffed shirts. It’s about as authentic as a cow in a camel costume.

Robert Mann, a mass communication professor at Louisiana State University and former Hill staffer, tells all in the Washington Post. The occasion was Kennedy’s red-baiting smear of Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor, in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. The Kazakh-American is President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

But what Kennedy saw before him was a non-white, Asian female who, as they say with a drawl down South, ain’t from around here.

“I don’t know whether to call you ‘professor’ or ‘comrade,’” Kennedy told Omarova:

When Kennedy asked if she had a resignation letter from the Communist youth group the Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan government forced her to join as a child, Omarova responded, “Senator, I’m not a Communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova told Kennedy the Communist regime persecuted her family, adding, “That’s who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I’m proud to be an American.”

Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. What he did instead was drain his party. Of ethics and ideas, and of respect for the law, democracy, and common decency. Now, following Trump’s lead, his vapid followers have fallen back on Joe McCarthy-style red-baiting, freely accusing any political opponents of being communists, hoping to evoke a Pavlovian response from the Republican base.

Remember Republicans? The people who claimed Ronald Reagan defeated communism when the Soviet Union collapsed? Red-baiting, xenophobia, and a will to power is all they’ve got left.

NEW!

President Donald J. Trump:

"The Communist Democrats are engaging in yet another Witch Hunt, this time going after my Administration’s unprecedented and incredible coronavirus response, despite the fact that, sadly, more Americans have died this year from Covid than in all pic.twitter.com/BqfC15eNY7

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) November 20, 2021

Saule Omarova supports abolishing private bank accounts, using govt to bankrupt energy companies & creating a Soviet style “National Investment Authority”

She supports communist policies & a communist should not be our Comptroller of the Currency

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 19, 2021

Kennedy is a particular oddity, says Mann:

An acerbic Biden critic, Kennedy is a fount of sharp-but-folksy one-liners. He punctuated his 2016 Senate campaign spots with, “I will not let you down. I’d rather drink weedkiller.” With his exaggerated Southern accent, he affects a mixture of Mr. Haney, the con artist of the 1960s CBS sitcom “Green Acres,” and the bombastic Looney Tunes rooster, Foghorn J. Leghorn.

Kennedy is a shape-shifter, accentuating his drawl and countrifying his persona:

In preparing this piece, I found a lengthy interview Kennedy did in October 2004 with the Shreveport Times. In pitching his Democratic Senate candidacy, he was articulate, restrained and progressive. He scorned the tax cuts for wealthy Americans that then-President George W. Bush had signed. He favored increasing the federal minimum wage.

He was no Bernie Sanders liberal, but he was the progressive Democrat in the race — so much so that some prominent Black leaders, including our congressional delegation’s most liberal member, Rep. William J. Jefferson of New Orleans, backed him.

But what stood out in that 2004 interview was the absence of the homey sayings, abusive zingers and character assassinations that have become Kennedy trademarks. He was nothing like the man you see these days insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “It must suck to be that dumb” — or vilifying then-Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”

When people outside Louisiana ask me about Kennedy, I tell them he’s not the folksy bumpkin you see on TV, but a wealthy, well-educated attorney with an Oxford degree. Just like Pat Buttram, who portrayed Mr. Haney in “Green Acres,” Kennedy is acting. He’s a shape-shifting, attention-hungry politician who found a role — wily country boy — that brings him some fame.

Maybe after the Senate , Kennedy can get a job bussing at a Cracker Barrel.