Month: December 2021

This piece by Benjy Sarlin on January 7, 2021 illustrates just how shallow Republican principles really are.

Rick Perry tried to warn voters of the dangers of Donald Trump.

In a speech ahead of the 2016 Republican presidential contest in which both men would compete, the former Texas governor framed Trump as an unchecked demagogue and chose a striking historical image to illustrate his point: A mob attack on Washington.

Perry described an 1854 assault on the nation’s capital in which members of the nativist Know-Nothing movement accosted a guard and destroyed slabs of marble that were meant to complete the Washington Monument. Their goal was to thwart an imagined conspiracy about the Pope taking over the government.

“These people built nothing, created nothing. They existed to cast blame and tear down certain institutions. To give outlet to anger,” Perry said. “Donald Trump is the modern-day incarnation of the Know-Nothing movement.”

Trump, of course, was elected president that year and Perry would serve as energy secretary in his administration.

But like many of Trump’s former rivals, Perry seemed to know something like Wednesday’s deadly insurrection at the Capitol was a risk if Trump became president. We know they knew, because they told us so.

He did tell us so, in no uncertain terms. And then he joined the administration. You really don’t need to know anything more about Rick Perry. But it gets worse!

Fast forward to November 2020:

Members of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol believe that former Texas Governor and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry was the author of a text message sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows the day after the 2020 election pushing an “AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY” for three state legislatures to ignore the will of their voters and deliver their states’ electors to Donald Trump, three sources familiar with the House Committee investigation tell CNN.A spokesman for Perry told CNN that the former Energy Secretary denies being the author of the text. Multiple people who know Rick Perry confirmed to CNN that the phone number the committee has associated with that text message is Perry’s number.

The cell phone number the text was sent from, obtained from a source knowledgeable about the investigation, appears in databases as being registered to a James Richard Perry of Texas, the former governor’s full name.

The number is also associated in a second database as registered to a Department of Energy email address associated with Perry when he was secretary. When told of these facts, the spokesman had no explanation.

The House Select Committee declined to comment on the author of the text.The Nov. 4, 2020, text message from Perry’s phone garnered a great deal of attention this week; it was included in a tranche of roughly 6,000 documents Meadows turned over to the House Select Committee.

Here’s the text message:

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that we have voluminous records of Perry’s doings over the past decade and a half. He’s always been a piece of work.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

I just can’t:

Social media users circulated a fake, doctored video that purported to show a child discreetly handing a vial of blood off to President Joe Biden.

“Boy passes Joe Biden a vial of fresh blood to drink on his way back to the White House,” said a Dec. 16 tweet from a Twitter account that has since been suspended.

The Biden-drinks-blood claim was repeated — and the video reposted — on Instagram. There, it collected thousands of views, and it was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

But the claim is false, and the video it’s based on is edited to include the vial of blood.

A Dec. 16, 2021, Instagram post shared a doctored video of President Joe Biden.

The original video, unedited and without the ominous soundtrack featured in the social media version, was captured live on July 21 by a local Fox-affiliate TV station serving the Cincinnati area, Snopes reported. The video shows Biden meeting with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and his family after landing at an airport near the Kentucky-Ohio border. 

Around the 12:30 mark, the Fox19 video shows Biden slipping an unknown object to the young boy standing beside him, Beshear’s son Will, who then placed the object in his pocket. It doesn’t show a vial of blood, nor does it show Biden receiving anything from Beshear’s son in return. 

Crystal Staley, Beshear’s communications director, said the social media claim about Beshear’s son slipping Biden a vial of blood is “completely false.”

The claim about Biden harvesting blood to drink plays into a segment of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including many high-profile Democrats. Some QAnon adherents believe members of this ring molest, kill and eat children to ingest a life-extending chemical in human blood, PolitiFact reported.

I know this is crazy. It seems like we should just roll our eyes and look away. But millions of people are QAnon, including a whole bunch of people who were involved in this:

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

I read this piece on Insider this morning about the Democrats loss of rural support and how they need to “show up”, which is no doubt true — margins matter. But it also says that Democrats have to concentrate on “kitchen table issues” that will materially help these rural voters in their real lives instead of all the supposedly abstract stuff they don’t care about.

I won’t go into all the studies which show that this is not the reason those voters have rejected the Democratic Party. They reject the Democrats is because they are hostile to the people who make up the Democratic coalition: people of color, feminists, LGBT folks, immigrants, city people in general. That is a very difficult problem since these rural voters require that politicians crudely insult the Democratic base in order to win their favor and that is a zero sum game.

And about those kitchen table issues? Yeah … every Republican in the congress and one Democrat from one of the most rural states in America reject the Build Back Better plan which will bring more material benefit to rural voters than any legislation since the New Deal. They believe their voters will punish them for voting for it. (Not to say they won’t take credit for the projects it brings. They are already touting the infrastructure projects they didn’t vote for.)

If you’ve been reading Hullabaloo for a while, you know that we’ve spilled oceans of digital ink on that subject and have featured the ideas and critiques of dozens, if not hundreds, of scholars, experts, analysts and gadflies (like me…) It’s been one of the most important and confounding topics of our political era and I don’t think anyone’s figured out the answer. But we’ll keep asking the questions.

Anyway, everyone is expecting a blow out in 2022. That would follow historical midterm trends and the polling a year out says that nothing is different this time. The pandemic is making everyone sour and that often leads to a “throw the bums out” mentality. The media isn’t helping.

However, I’m not so sure it’s going to go that way. Our era is defined by negative partisanship much, much more than “kitchen table issues” and Republicans know that. Mitch McConnell even announced the other day that they would offer no agenda for the 2022 election. They believe they don’t need one. But he has a problem and it may end up costing him the big landslide he thinks is on its way.

Here’s conservative writer Matthew Continetti in the New York Times:

Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.

Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.

Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: An enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve…

Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme.

Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.

A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.

Republicans have an orange chaos agent in their midst and he is likely going to define the election far more than rural broadband or child tax credits as sad as that might be. Democrats should be prepared to exploit that situation and I hope they are.

We’ll be following all this very closely here at Hullabaloo. My great morning man Tom Sullivan has his eye on the states and I’ll be watching the right wing. We’ll all keep our eye on the media. So stay tuned!

If you’d like to kick in a couple of bucks to keep the lights on around here I’d be very grateful. And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Some advice from experts follow. The first is Bob Wachter from the University of San Francisco:

This is one of the most confusing times of the pandemic, w/ a firehose of new Omicron data (lots of fab work on #medtwitter putting it into context). In this (long) 🧵, I’ll offer my take on how the new information is changing my thinking & behavior.

I’ll start with a few general principles & observations (to save space & time I’m largely going to omit primary data – it’s out there; follow @EricTopol to keep up):

1) Things are uber-dynamic. We have far more clarity now than we had 3 wks ago, but many unknowns remain. More infectious: yes, not sure by how much. Immune evasion: definitely. Severity: conflicting data from UK & So. Africa, even today. Could mean it’s same as Delta, could mean it’s moderately less. Doubt it’s more severe or massively less severe. We’ll learn more soon.

2) If you’re looking for “this is safe” or “this is unsafe” advice, you won’t get it here – the situation is too nuanced for that. There’s safER & LESS safe. And context matters: what might be safe for a healthy 30-year-old could be way too unsafe for a frail octogenarian.

3) It’s not about you alone. That healthy 30-year-old can spread Covid unwittingly to someone at high risk, including a loved one. So decisions about risk need to account for risk to others.

4) We’re all exhausted and sick of living this bizarre and diminished life. Quite naturally, this will influence many people’s decision-making and risk tolerance. But it doesn’t change the risks of those choices one iota. The virus is chipper and ready to go. It continues to deserve our respect, and appropriate caution based on the science.

5) Speaking of calibrating behavior, a few mnths ago, I shifted my attitude – Covid will be with us for the long haul, & thus I was personally more comfortable taking calculated risks (ie, visiting family over holidays), in part because “if not now, when?” In other words in my risk/benefit calculation, I removed my “Remain Extra Careful; Covid Will Go Away” temporal factor. But now, w/ Omicron cases skyrocketing, I’ve added back that “hunker down” variable – I see the next few months as a time to fortify one’s safety behaviors. Why?

1st, Omicron looks to have peaked in So Africa; we’ll likely see a familiar surge-then-plunge pattern, just with a much steeper upslope. Second, I’m quite worried about an overwhelmed healthcare system – we’ll rapidly hit capacity limits in meds, beds, ICUs, testing and most importantly people (many MDs/RNs out sick too). Trust me, you want to avoid getting sick when the system is stressed. Third, I see the Pfizer oral anti-viral as a very big deal, and it won’t be available for 4-6 weeks (even then it’ll be in short supply).

6) Hunkering down means trying to limit risky activities. We now appreciate the negative impact of shutting schools. We need to do everything humanly possible (vaxxing, ventilation, testing, incl. test-to-stay) to keep schools open even in the face of a large surge.

7) Even if Omicron proves to be less severe, don’t get lulled: it’s unlikely to be massively less severe. If (let’s say) Omcrn is 30% less severe but cases go up 5-10x (both plausible), that’s still awful, w/ far more hospitalizations & deaths than comparable Delta surge.

8) In your own decision making, on top of weighing personal risk (age, comorbidities) & risk of exposure (activities, masking, case rates in your community, incl. fraction of Omicron), we now need to be more nuanced about level of immunity. It’s no longer Immune: Y/N?

Immunity is now (best>worst):
a) 3 mRNAs + infection (super-immune)
b) 3 mRNAs (very immune)
c) 2 mRNAs OR J&J + mRNA (modestly immune)
d) 1 mRNA or J&J alone, or infection alone (minimally immune)
e) No shots AND no infection (totally vulnerable)(14/25)

9) We all should have paid more attention in 4th grade when we were taught to multiple fractions. Why? Because thoughtful decision making now requires you to multiple (brace yourself):

Personal risk (age, comorbidity) x activity (indoor, crowded?) x # of Covid cases in the region (cases/d/100K) x risk-reduction by you & others (masking, ventilation, etc) x fraction of Omicron in region x your level of immunity (zero to super) x how important activity is to you (visiting kids/grandparents vs. seeing a movie.

Exhausting, right?

10) While some will say “I’m over this,” taking no precautions seems too risky. Yes, most Om cases will be mild, some severe (especially if hi risk), small # fatal, unknown % will get Long Covid. My vote: try to stay safe until threat passes or we’re more sure of severity.

So what am I doing now? (Context: I’m fairly healthy, mildly overweight 64 yo, 3 Pfizers, no small kids or elders at home, moderately risk-averse. I can work from home most days except when on clinical duty, as I am next week).

Would I travel for X-mas? In US, yes. Om still minority of cases in most places, planes safe, no guarantee next X-mas will be safer. Wear N95 for whole flight, minimize eat/drink time. To Europe: no, risk of Om is too high, and bureaucratic nightmare to return if positive.

Would I dine indoors? Not anymore, even tho SF has v. low case rate and 80% 2-shot vax rate. But cases will start climbing soon (& fast) & indoor dining not worth risk to me. Outdoor dining: fine for now. Crowded event (sports/concert): not for me at this point.

Would I do indoor shopping or work? Yes, but my rule is to wear N95 (or equivalent) in all indoor spaces unless it’s a small group that I’m certain is fully (3 shot) vaxxed, & I know all would stay home if feeling sick. Otherwise, mask stays on in indoor spaces.

Testing? I test myself & family with any compatible symptom (URI, headache, fever, GI). Note Omicron less likely to cause loss of taste/smell. At $12/rapid test (ouch), tests aren’t as accessible as they need to be. Testing before an encounter makes it far safer so it’s reasonable to test before visiting elderly or other high-risk folks, though I don’t test if I’m sure everybody is 3x vaxxed. If I was visiting immunosuppressed or unvaxxed person (incl. a young child), I’d test everybody before gathering.

I hope this is helpful. We’re all overwhelmed, exhausted and frustrated by yet another Covid Curveball. I hope you stay safe and sane, and let’s hope for a quick surge, a milder illness, and that lots of folks choose now to get vaxxed and boosted.

Originally tweeted by Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) on December 17, 2021.

This from Andy Slavitt as well:

COVID Update: A setback is a setback. And we’ve had 3 setbacks with vaccine testing this week.

But all of those setbacks remind me of how blessed we have been so far by science and the people who monitor safety.

One setback, announced yesterday, is the change of position from the CDC on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.

J&J’s vaccine was flagged and pulled from the market temporarily in the Spring when reports of several blood clotting issues arose.

Many criticized the decision for causing doubt & disruption of vaccines at a critical moment after it was ultimately put back on the market.

Having been in the WH at the time, there were 2 incontrovertible reasons the vaccine was temporarily pulled.

One was the standard treatment for w blood clot turned out to be the wrong clinical response. Flagging the vaccine was the only way to be sure docs treated it right.

There were 2 deaths at the time & the FDA wanted to see if more reporting would come in if people hunted for the problem. Not much was there.

But today the death toll = 9, enough for the recommendation to say people are better off w Pfizer or Moderna.

A setback? Yes. We need more safe & effective vaccines, not fewer.

But this should be massively comforting as well. Vaccines have been used over 8.5 BILLION times. Thee safety profile is extraordinary. And the safety regulators are monitoring closely.

And only 9 deaths, considering the millions of times it has been given, means that in places where mRNA vaccines are not available, makes J&J still a very safe vaccine.

But this call is exactly right. It’s not as safe as the others given a choice.

The bigger concern- and a real one— is how J&J holds up in effectiveness against Omicron. And it appears not very well.

Which is why people w J&J are being encouraged to revaccinate & boost.

The second setback that was announced today was the lack of a response in Pfizer’s testing of the dose given to 2 to 5 year olds (it had a good response on 6 Mo to 2 year olds).

For many parents this is incredibly frustrating & disappointing. Small kids are at risk to Omicron.

The latest thinking is that it will be 6 months before a dosing can be approved now for kids under 5. And then it may be 3 doses— also disappointing for parents.

This creates barriers & inequities for the many parents who will find that very difficult.

We’re not used to reading disappointing news about vaccine trials. We’ve had a streak of successful first trials from the original vaccines to teens to kids that it’s easy enough to forget that the vast majority of trials fail.

Getting the dosing right in children is obviously something to test & roll out carefully. Too much vaccine in a 25 pound healthy child is something people who make vaccines are expert at preventing.

So it is smarter to test smaller doses than bigger.

But this means of you err, this is what happens. A safe bit ineffective dose is far better than an unsafe effective one.

Just imagine if we were reading today that a vaccine trial hospitalized toddlers. It would be a long time before parents trusted the vaccine.

Thanks to the safety regulators & people who conduct these trials, we are not in that situation.

There’s no denying how worrying it is to go into 2022 without a vaccine for pre-school age kids in the face of Omicron. As a baseline parents & parents need to boost.

On that note Pfizer filed to extend boosters down to age 12.

More in the “the news isn’t always good” front is early signs from the UK that the booster may wane over the first few months with Omicron.

This would be another setback. But like the others not one we can’t deal with.

Vaccine makers can adjust the vaccine to target the variant better. Two & three doses seem to do a great job protecting against severe disease.

The reality is the virus is highly adaptable & fit. But I still think science is better.

It’s not always as fast as we want. Doesn’t always get us what we need in time. And every day feels costly. But our ability to prevail isn’t in doubt.

There are many at risk while science adjusts. People who can’t be vaccinated & boosted. Older people & those with chronic conditions or immuno-compromised. Our policies & our resources should protect them.

Our policies, including disability policies & health coverage policies, should also be cognizant of long-term COVID effects.

Where science has temporary shortcomings, our policies should fill the gap.

And so should our behavior. A very opinionated news anchor read me what he considered to be his tough common sense wisdom.

“Nobody’s going to alter their plans over Christmas so Biden better do something else.”

Aside from being classic gaslighting, believe me the president doesn’t expect people to be safe on his account.

But if you’re going to be around kids under 5, older people or sick people, if science won’t protect them, that means we have to.

Our will ought to harden in the face of setbacks. Their presence makes me appreciate or progress I’ve taken for granted.

But no matter how good science gets, we won’t be able to science away indifference.

Originally tweeted by Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) on December 18, 2021.

I assume most of you are boosted. Rational people are or are planning to as soon as they are eligible.

I hadn’t thought of looking at it this way but it does make you think:

We’ve known that for a very long time. Recall the Obamacare wars. Or gun violence. But this time they are personally playing Russian Roulette with half the chambers loaded and it’s simply astonishing.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here. And thank you!

We are one week out from Christmas and Omicron is here. Slate’s Tim Requarth cautions, “Wildfire isn’t quite an apt analogy. It’s more like the shockwave of an explosion. The rate of spread is unlike anything scientists have seen before—in the U.K., cases are doubling every 1.5 days.”

Already I’m wondering about the risks involved in a family gathering in which it is not clear if everyone is fully vaccinated. There may be one or two unknowns. A nephew’s girlfriend here, a niece’s new spouse there, a sister who thinks Dr. Fauci is the Prince of Darkness. (Hope there is no Ivermectin in the cookies.) Not sure who will be there. But there’s a Walgreens down the street that does rapid testing and sells testing kits besides. Sunday the 26th. Putting it on the calendar. And before that: I have an in-person party meeting this morning. Maybe tomorrow as well.

Tim Requarth advises:

Use Rapid Tests Just Before Gathering if You Can Find (and Afford) Them

It’s a crime that at-home rapid test kits cost $24 a pop and are difficult to find (and it’s also a crime that the government’s plan to make insurers reimburse for them doesn’t start until mid-January). But they are useful for determining if someone is currently infectious—which is what you want to know before sitting down at the dinner table. If you can, take more than one test in the lead-up to a gathering; they’re sold in two-packs for a reason, and they have a surprisingly high, if imperfect, chance of catching someone who’s infectious. It’s important to do the second swab just before the gathering, as results can change surprisingly fast. You could have a negative result in the morning and be infectious by afternoon. If you’re new to rapid testing, here’s an excellent video explainer on how they work.

Come Up With an Isolation Plan

You might catch the virus no matter what precautions you take, and that’s not a moral failing. The good news is that for the vaccinated (and especially boosted), the case will likely be mild. But it’s best to prevent spread by coming up with a plan to hole up for a bit. Because it can be difficult to separate COVID symptoms from those of other circulating viruses, if you feel anything—fever, cough, sore throat—get tested. Over Thanksgiving, a friend of mine thought he was having allergies, but a rapid test revealed he had COVID. He isolated quickly, and no one else in his family—including his medically vulnerable father—caught the virus. Thankfully, expert thinking on isolation protocols for the vaccinated is slowly changing: So long as you’ve had your shots, test negative, and aren’t showing symptoms, it’s probably safe to emerge in about five days.

******************

That’s about my mean time between seeing anyone indoors anyway.

“What is the matter with the Democrats?” asks Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker.

Two-in-five 2020 voters were college-educated. Even if you suck at math, that’s clearly not enough to win an election with the college-educated alone. What are Democrats planning to do about it in 2022? Have the college-educated urban sophisticates lobby the rural less-educated? Yeah, that ought to go over like a lead Zeppelin.

Harvard political philospoher Michael Sandel offers more than a critique of Democrats’ political positioning:

On the eve of Joe Biden’s election, Sandel argued, in a book titled “The Tyranny of Merit,” that the rise of authoritarian populism in countries from the United States to Germany to China had been made possible by a confusion of success with merit. Élites, Sandel argued, had come to believe that if they came out ahead it was because of talent and hard work; this left working-class people with the impression that if they had not come out ahead they lacked those things. All the hopeful talk about opportunity and talent rising in a system that did not really provide opportunities was a recipe for working-class alienation. Sandel writes that he is often asked how his students have changed during his forty-one years at Harvard, and that he can detect no consistent pattern save one: “Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present, more and more of my students seem drawn to the conviction that their success is their own doing, a product of their own effort, something they have earned.” This development, Sandel points out, took root even as studies were showing that there are more students at Harvard from the economic top one per cent than from the bottom fifty per cent.

The tyranny of merit, Sandel argues in his book, operates in two directions at once. “Among those who land on top, it induces anxiety, a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem. Among those it leaves behind, it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.” That isn’t a bad psychological sketch of the two political tribes right now. Though Democrats now view Barack Obama as a uniquely exceptional politician, and Hillary Clinton as a profoundly flawed one, Sandel writes that they shared an essential messaging strategy—to contrast their own “smart” policies with their opponents’ “dumb” ones. In “The Tyranny of Merit,” he assembles a tally: during his Presidency, Obama called his own policies “smart” more than nine hundred times.

Among the interested readers of “The Tyranny of Merit” was a German politician named Olaf Scholz, a onetime labor lawyer who, in the fall of 2020, had just been selected as the Social Democratic Party’s candidate to replace Angela Merkel. Last December, Scholz and Sandel held a public dialogue, during which Sandel was simultaneously translated into German. “He was deeply familiar with the themes of the book and in sympathy with the themes of the book,” Sandel told me when we met last week. “Olaf Scholz seemed to have absorbed and agreed with the diagnosis, as well as the prescription that flows from it, which is to shift the terms of public discourse from the rhetoric of rising—‘You can make it if you try’—to the dignity of work.” The rhetorical idea that Sandel urged on Scholz was simple: respect.

There is something to this. We have devalued manual work and overvalued white-collar careers. We define excellence by financial remuneration, by things easily measured, not by intrinsic worth. It was not always like this:

In discussing arête, Plato leads the examination of humankind’s quest for excellence. Henry Marrou describes arête as “the ideal value to which even life itself must be sacrificed.” Although Marrou considers ludicrous the translation of the word from ancient Greek to mean virtue (he prefers valor), virtue is the term used by translator W.K.C. Guthrie in two of Plato’s dialogues to describe this quality that is made and not born in us, the quality of excellence toward which we strive in our daily conduct in society.

I wrote sometime back:

My best friend’s dad when I was in high school repaired military aircraft in WWII. He spent the rest of his life reparing cars. His proudest moment from the war was the time he worked on Gen. Eisenhower’s plane. He was a simple man. That did not mean he was not damned good at his job.

But he gets no respect in this society for being the best auto mechanic he can be, for excellence in that. Perhaps what Sandel is reaching for has Greek origins.

Sandel turned out to be more optimistic about the Democratic plight than nearly any other liberal I’d heard recently, perhaps because he saw Biden as a fellow-traveller. “He’s in a way the first post-meritocrat, post-neoliberal Democrat since before Reagan,” Sandel said. In part, he said, this was a matter of personal background—Biden, he pointed out, was the first President in thirty-two years without an Ivy League degree—but it was also one of political orientation: “The standard Democratic slogan about ‘If you are able to go to college, you can rise as far as your efforts and talents can take you’—Biden didn’t talk that way. Neither, by the way, did Bernie Sanders.” If the parties of the center left had lost touch with the twentieth-century tradition that celebrated “the dignity of work,” then Scholz and Biden, according to Sandel, shared a helpful characteristic: “Each of them, it turns out, had an ear for this missing dimension of politics.”

A September article in The Guardian takes note of the shift:

… Covid seems to have led to a greater concern and emphasis on “common welfare”. A new vocabulary of respect and dignity, and a focus on “ordinary” occupations and lives, points to a post-pandemic politics of the left focused on redistributing status as well as income. 

Rural America where Democrats are losing ground was hungry enough for it that Joe Biden became Everyman in the age of the gilded Trump. It was hungry enough for it that Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in the rural district now represented by Madison Cawthorn.

Wallace-Wells adds:

When I asked Sandel what he thought Biden ought to learn from Scholz, he listed three lessons: to reconnect with the working class, to adopt policies that reinforce the dignity of work, and “to give up on the neoliberal economic orthodoxies and technocratic meritocracy that prevailed in his party and set its tone for four decades.” But that didn’t sound to me very much like the real-world Biden, who had helped lead that same Party during that exact period. (It sounds more like Bernie Sanders.) The bracing part of Sandel’s argument lies in his conviction that Democrats must break with the meritocratic liberalism—the preference for the smart over the dumb, the slogans about believing in science, the cool technocratic ease—that defined Barack Obama. But the figure in whom Sandel places his hopes is Obama’s Vice-President, who publicly venerates the former President and employs much of his staff.

Sandel seemed to sense my skepticism. He grinned. “What I’m reading into Biden as post-neoliberal, post-meritocratic—it’s a work in progress,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that this is deliberate. He’s feeling his way as a politician—reading the possibilities.”

As are we all. Some more perceptively than others.

Here are some zoo animals opening Christmas presents:

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

I posted about this before but you have to listen to it to believe it. Stunning bigotry.

“evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews”

in the US “it used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress”

“the Jewish people…in the US either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel”

“they’re Jewish people that run the NYT.”

At least he didn’t mention the Rothschilds and George Soros financing space lasers that cause the California wildfires. But I’m sure he believes it.

Of course there are “good ones” like Ivanka and her beloved Jared, the son he never had. But for the most part he just can’t stand “the jews.” Not even good old Bibi.

Here’s a post from Paul Mirengoff from the iconic right wing blog, Powerline. I get the sense that he hasn’t been one of Trump’s more sycophantic acolytes but I would never categorize him as a Never Trumper.

It’s not a scoop to say that Donald Trump’s opinions about individuals, including whether to support or denigrate them, are based almost entirely on how the individuals in question have treated Donald Trump. Nor is it a scoop to say that Trump’s view of how individuals have treated him is based these days almost entirely on whether they embrace his unsupported claim that he won the 2020 election.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the latest victim of this manifestation of Trump’s narcissism. In an interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, the former U.S. president lashed out at the former Israeli prime minister, who is also his former pal. According to Ravid, Trump told him:

Nobody did more for Bibi. And I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty. The first person to congratulate Biden was Bibi. And not only did he congratulate him, he did it on tape. And it was on tape.

Trump added:

I’ll tell you what – had I not come along I think Israel was going to be destroyed. Okay. You want to know the truth? I think Israel would have been destroyed maybe by now. And the first person that congratulated Joe Biden, because this was an election in dispute, it’s still in dispute. The first person that congratulated was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with…Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.

Early, okay? Let’s use this. He was very early. Like earlier than most. I haven’t spoken to him since. F*** him.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the fact that Netanyahu was not the first foreign leader to congratulate Joe Biden. Among the foreign leaders who congratulated Biden before Netanyahu did are Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, India’s Narendra Modi, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga,

F*** all of them too, I guess.

Second, the notion that Israel would have been destroyed but for Donald Trump is delusional. Pre-Trump, Israel survived the best efforts of its enemies to destroy it for almost 70 years. It would have survived for four more without Trump. It will even survive Joe Biden.

Who was going to destroy Israel, absent Trump? No one. No enemy had the capacity to, and by the time Trump came along Israel had fewer enemies than ever before because important powers previously hostile to the Jewish state now regarded Iran as a serious threat and Israel as a counter-balance.

Trump deserves credit for leveraging that sentiment into deals between Israel and some of its former enemies. But let’s pretend that Trump saved Israel from destruction. That claim makes his assertion that he won the 2020 presidential claim seem reasonable.

Third, Netanyahu had good reason to congratulate Biden. The former VP was about to become the president of Israel’s most important ally. Netanyahu knew he would have to deal with Biden. Only Trump among politicians of any note thought that Biden might not take office in January 2021.

As Netanyahu said when told of Trump’s ridiculous statements to Ravid:

I highly appreciate President Trump’s big contribution to Israel and its security. I also appreciate the importance of the strong alliance between Israel and the U.S. and therefore it was important for me to congratulate the incoming President.

Exactly.

Trump didn’t stop with his condemnation of Netanyahu. He also praised Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority — an entity that would gladly destroy Israel if it could.

According to Trump, Abbas wanted to make a peace deal and Netanyahu did not. This may be true at some level. Certainly, there is a “peace” deal of some sort that Abbas would like to make and Netanyahu would not.

But what sort of a deal? To a competent, rational world leader, that question matters. I’m not sure it did to Trump. Maybe he just wanted a deal, any deal, so he could boast of being the man who finally brokered a Middle East “peace” deal.

In any case, Trump’s discussion of Abbas is over-the-top. He says:

I will be honest, I had a great meeting with him, Abbas, right. I had a great meeting with him. And we spent a lot of time together, talking about many things.

And it was almost like a father. I mean, he was so nice, couldn’t have been nicer.

Is it possible that Trump really views Abbas with this much naivety? Is Trump really this big a sucker? I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute the father-son pabulum to his desire to make Netanyahu look like the bad guy as retaliation for congratulating Joe Biden.

Trump also said:

I thought the Palestinians were impossible and that the Israelis would do anything to make peace and a deal. I found that not to be true.

Did Trump really believe that the Israelis under Netanyahu (or any other prime minister) would do anything to make a deal? If so, this betrays a frightening ignorance.

And if Trump misread Israel and Netanyahu this badly, what/who else did he misread?

North Korea? Did Trump think Kim Jong-un was desperate to make a deal with him? It didn’t turn out that way.

Iran? Did Trump believe the mullahs were desperate to make a deal? Quite possibly. This would explain why Trump blew up the Iran nuclear deal with no apparent alternative strategy for slowing Iran’s march to becoming a nuclear power other than the non-existent desire to make a deal with Trump.

We already knew that Trump was incorrigibly narcissistic. His interview with Ravid suggests that he’s also something of a fool.

What was his first clue? Of course he thought he could make “deals” happen simply on the basis of his desire to make them. He knows he doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing but his life experience has taught him that if he just vamps and poses and dances as fast as he can, it will all work out for him in the end. That is what he means when he calls himself a genius.

And, as we know, if it doesn’t work out he will just say the other side betrayed him or cheated and that he won anyway. Trump’s position is that it’s impossible for him to legitimately lose. And now tens of millions of followers believe that too.

Oy.

It’s Happy Hollandaise fundraiser time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to contribute, you can hit one of the buttons below. And thank you for coming by and reading our scribbles here throughout the year. It means the world to me — digby

That old hippie Rupert Murdoch is ruining everything:

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield suggested that Tucker Carlson’s “liberal bosses” at Fox News are pressuring him to defend Vladimir Putin’s behavior on his show.

Carlson has said on air that Ukraine does not possess enough strategic importance to the United States to justify raising tensions with Russia, which has amassed soldiers near its border with Ukraine.

On Thursday night, Stinchfield claimed that Fox News has taken a leftward turn, and that this alleged development may be having an effect on the network’s highest rated host.

“Fox News’ lurched to the left is maddening for nearly every conservative, including myself,” Stinchfield told his viewers. “And I wonder now, if the leftist leaders of this Trojan horse of a so called conservative network has compromised Tucker Carlson. Now, Tucker is a man that I have absolute great respect for. The fact is Tucker and I agree on most issues, which is why I’m baffled by his defense of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Unless of course, is Tucker operating under duress? Why else would he proclaim something like this about NATO and Vladimir Putin?”

The Newsmax host played a clip of Carlson saying that “at this point, NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin, who, whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading western Europe. Vladimir Putin does not want Belgium. He just wants to keep his western border secure. That’s why he doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO, and that makes sense.”

“Well, Tucker’s right – that from Vladimir Putin’s perspective, it does make sense,” he said. “But who cares what Vladimir Putin thinks? This is a rogue dictator that hates America. He is dangerous and he wants nothing more than to expand his global reach.”

Stinchfield then predicted that “Ukraine is next” because “Putin knows Biden is weak.”

He concluded his monologue by saying that a weakened Russia “makes for a safer world, which then means a safer America. I know Tucker knows this. At least I would hope so, which is why I think maybe his liberal bosses may have gotten to him.”

This is not the first sign of right wing dissonance around Russia, but it’s the first time I’ve seen the pro-Putin line attributed to the allegedly liberal owners of Fox News. Lol.

I don’t know if this guy is stupid or cynical but I’m leaning toward stupid. I’ll be interested to see what Dear Leader has to say about all this. He loves to be the tough guy but he also loves him some Vlad. He’ll certainly say that Putin never made a move when he was president because he was so feared and respected. But where does he go from here?

One thing we can be sure of is that Newsmax and the right wing media infrastructure will follow him blindly whatever it is … except, maybe Tucker. He has his own agenda.

It’s Happy Hollandaise fundraiser time here at Hullabaloo. If you have a mind to throw some change in the Christmas stocking, you can do so by clicking on one of these buttons or using the address on the sidebar.

Thank you!