Sen. Susan Collins of Maine (center) joined fellow Republicans Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in voting this week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, anyone who has watched several of the last Supreme Court confirmation hearings would reach the conclusion that the process is broken,” said Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, commenting on the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Collins voted to approve Jackson.
“Now it’s become an endurance contest. And I don’t think that serves the purposes that we want to serve,” added Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.
During the hearings themselves, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) fumed that should Republicans retake control of the Senate, there would be no process at all, and no Senate floor vote, for any nominees of a Democratic president if Republicans dissaprove in advance. Only so long as Graham gets his pick does any Democratic president get one (Business Insider):
Graham, whose membership on the committee gives him influence over Supreme Court and other judicial nominees, came out early in support of Judge J. Michelle Childs, a South Carolina federal-district jurist, after President Joe Biden announced he would honor his campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to replace Justice Stephen Breyer, a retiring liberal judge. Graham said he supported Biden’s efforts to diversify the high court and publicly praised Childs as his favored rumored contender.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “If we were in charge, [Judge Jackson] would not have been before this committee.” pic.twitter.com/3C4gvvJaOT
Graham is asserting a preemptive veto by denial of process. If the Collins statement about a broken process was not clear enough, Graham was willing to confirm at least that.
He is not alone.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then Senate majority leader, famously denied hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama’s last pick in 2016 after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. It was not appropriate in an election year, McConnell argued then as majority leader. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, Republicans hustled through confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s Federalist Society-approved pick.
In an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios on Friday, Swan pressed McConnell on whether, if again majority leader, he would allow another Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president to reach the Senate floor for a vote.
“Can you make a commitment to the American public here today that you would at least hold hearings on President Biden’s nominee?” Swan asked.
McConnell said, “I’m not gonna signal how we’re gonna approach it.”
Swan pressed again, calling it a “big deal” that McConnell was dodging the question after his behavior in the Garland affair.
“I choose not to answer the question,” McConnell responded.
Read between the lines. No vote for any nominee other than a Federalist Society-approved nominee. Not if McConnell has say in the matter.
Republicans mean to keep their 6-3 SCOTUS majority no matter what. Stare decisis no longer holds on a conservative Supreme Court. Roe is on the chopping block. The constitutional design of the Senate gives Republicans a structural advantage where they represent a minority of Americans and they mean to keep that as well.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. It is not often that I agree with Susan Collins. Mark this day.
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And they’re gleefully promoting it as a real hatchet job.
There’s a new book coming out about Nancy Pelosi by a couple of the biggest smartass reporters at the NY Times. (Oh how I wish I could read Boehlert’s take on this one…)
Count us as very excited for Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns’ new book “This Will Not Pass.” It comes out May 3, and you should order it. In fact, tell your friends to order it from their local bookstores.
Thanks to Burns and Martin – we worked with both of them at Politico – we got some juicy nuggets for you on Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Burns and Martin sat down with Pelosi twice for this book, which covers the end of the Trump era and the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency.
→ Pelosi resented that she had to “beg” her Democratic colleagues to give her the job as speaker again. “The experience of begging for support was wearing on her. .. Pelosi was the only Democrat in the chamber — the only Democrat alive — who had already served as Speaker, who had shown she could do the legislative arithmetic and twist the necessary arms to get things done. And yet [her fellow Democrats] were making her grovel. ‘At this point in my life, I don’t need this,’ she vented.
“Her victory in holding onto the speakership, ‘seemed like a joyless one.’ Pelosi expressed “her frustration with unusual vehemence that day, discussing her political future in a way she rarely did around colleagues. ‘You couldn’t pay me a billion dollars to run for Speaker again,’ Pelosi said.”
→ Pelosi privately blames progressives for nearly costing Democrats the House and said AOC and Jayapal were fighting to be “queen bee” of the left. “In a few strictly confidential conversations she pointed a finger leftward. Pelosi told one senior lawmaker that Democrats had alienated Asian and Hispanic immigrants with loose talk of socialism. In some of the same communities, the Italian Catholic speaker said, Democrats had not been careful enough about the way they spoke about abortion among new Americans who were devout people of faith.”
“During the infrastructure vote, Pelosi was angry “and in private she vented about the progressive blockade that had forced her to cancel the infrastructure vote. … She told another House Democrat that Pramila Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez were vying to be the ‘queen bee’ of the left, but that their reward might be serving in the House minority after the next election.”
→Pelosi was ticked at Biden for nominating ‘untrustworthy” Xavier Becerra for the Cabinet. “To some Democrats, Becerra was a baffling choice. He was not a public- health expert, and he was certain to face a tough confirmation fight if Republicans held the Senate. Among the flummoxed Democrats was perhaps the most significant political partner for the incoming administration: Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker had worked closely with Becerra in the House and saw him as untrustworthy.
“‘You should know who you’re hiring,’ she chided Ricchetti, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Noting that she was a former colleague of Becerra, and a fellow Californian, she added archly: ‘I may have some valuable information.’”
→Pelosi on Ron Klain. “Not all Democrats shared Biden’s admiration for Klain; some party leaders grumbled about his hard-charging manner and expansive intellectual confidence. The Speaker of the House was one of those Democrats. Late in the 2020 campaign, Pelosi grew openly annoyed when an adviser urged her to consult with Klain about health care legislation. What, she asked, does Ron Klain know about anything?”
Again, order this book.
Yeah, no. I won’t be ordering this one. Even if the book isn’t 100 hit job, which it probably is, these excerpts are designed to get the wingnuts excited and divide the Democrats at a critical time. It’s the most destructive form of beltway journalism and they just can’t quit doing it, even in the face of a political leader who calls them the enemy of the people.
We should not shrug this off as “Dr Seuss” silliness
All this pedophilia talk requires some deeper examination than I have the stomach for right now. Consider, for instance that the most notorious child molestation scandal in history took place in one of the most conservative institutions on earth, the Catholic church. Or the fact that there have been multiple scandals in recent years among the Republicans themselves, from the former speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to the possible future Speaker Jim Jordan, along with Mark Foley, Judge Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz and, I’m sure, many more. There’s something going on there that requires some contemplation.
Recall that Donald Trump said on TV that what he and his daughter have in common is sex and Tucker Carlson said this, so you do the math:
But whatever these people’s twisted personal psychology, there is a political purpose to this latest paroxysm of grotesque right wing cant and we have to understand it. It’s very worrying.
The purpose of randomly accusing your political opponents of the most heinous crimes, or at the very least of enabling or sheltering those who commit those crimes, is to pre-justify extreme action against them. This is the somewhat misunderstood impulse at the root of QAnon, and Pizzagate before it. While there is a kernel of conspiratorial truth there—the Epstein flight logs did feature Bill Clinton’s name, just as there is video of Donald Trump partying with Jeff—it’s not about specific allegations or investigating actual crimes. It is a kind of blood libel in service to violent reaction. Pizzagate took as gospel that the cabal was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that did not have a basement. The most basic tenet of QAnon is that Donald Trump, who hired as his Labor Secretary the federal prosecutor who cut a sweetheart deal with Epstein down in Florida, is the superhero who will break the cabal.
But the fantasy does not hold that the villains in question will be investigated, charged, and tried before a jury of their peers in a civil proceeding according to our Constitution. The QAnon dream, echoed by the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice, is to see American citizens rounded up by the American military, shipped to Guantanamo Bay, and subjected to military tribunals. In some versions, they are summarily executed. Those are the theories. In practice, these cults of information have led people to violent action. Pizzagate inspired a man to go to the aforementioned pizza parlor with a gun, because he received the core message: our enemies are not merely advocates of more government intervention in the economy or marriage rights for same-sex couples. They are an organized cabal of pedophiles and their enablers, and anything is justified to stop them, including violent force.
Now the scattergun accusations of pedophilia—and sympathy for its heinous perpetrators—have hit the mainstream with some of the Republican lines of questioning at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, and with some defenses of a vague new Florida law that, through its vagueness, could easily become a weapon to marginalize LGBTQ people. We know from experience that the higher up in the power pyramid these insinuations go, the more dangerous the situation becomes. You can disagree about what age kids should start learning about sexual orientation and gender identity without calling people who disagree with you pedophiles.
We’ve seen this before on issues like immigration, where people arriving at the southern border are increasingly characterized on the right as an “invasion” of faceless hordes bringing disease, or even an entirely dehumanized force “poisoning” our pure all-American towns. The man who shot up an El Paso Walmart in 2019 left a manifesto obsessed with the idea of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and the so-called “Great Replacement” of white people—the latter a notion that has fueled mass shootings in New Zealand as well as the United States. At the bottom of these theories is the notion that one’s political enemies have committed crimes against the nation and its true citizens so grave that anything is justified in response—except due process according to our constitutional standards. That would involve supplying some evidence that might stand up outside the nation’s digital message boards.
It’s hard to look beyond the old adage (mistakenly attributed to Voltaire) now getting such a workout in our troubled times: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” A mob of people sacked their own national Capitol building on the belief that an election had been stolen across seven or more states—some of which were run by Republican governors and election officials who openly supported the candidate they said it was stolen from—by still more shadowy cabals. In some cases, these theories of the case involved chicanery by Hugo Chavez a decade or more before the 2020 election. It had to be that long because he died in 2013. But there is no burden, or even expectation, of making sense. These folks didn’t want Hillary Clinton locked up over her email protocol, or the Wall Street speeches, or even Benghazi. They wanted her locked up because she was Them—a standard-bearer for The Enemies. Even Republicans, as some senators found out this week, are not immune to becoming Them—and getting smeared as the worst kind of criminal sympathizers—if they fail to march in lockstep with Real America.
We have entered a space where huge numbers of people have been drenched in propaganda for years about how their country is being stolen away from them by their fellow citizens who hate them—and who, in every way that matters, are not Real citizens of this country at all. Maybe it was inevitable that some subsection of that group would turn to more specific visions of invasions orchestrated by cabals, and another subset still would turn to a proper blood libel. After all, one fairy tale tied up in all this maintained that Hillary Clinton literally drinks the blood of children. There is almost an internal logic to the notion that, in response, anything would be justified to get such people out of power. It’s just that, consciously or not, this is rooted in a reactionary motivation to replace them with members of the right tribe at all costs.
I don’t want to be hyperbolic but honestly, I think it’s kind of foolish not to be very alarmed by this stuff. Look what’s happening in Ukraine.
Update: you can’t make this stuff up
Whoever was writing the script for yesterday was working overtime: As KBJ was getting confirmed, a judge on her old court was sentencing a former RNC and Senate GOP aide for, yes, trading child porn.
The details are absolutely vile, so will not repeat them here but you can read @USAO_DC ‘s summary of the case here.
We need a lot more straight thinking and honorable senators like @brianschatz to take the truth and the fight right to sedition friendly degenerates like @HawleyMO. Seriously, all the senators who aren’t planting this flag are wasting voters time. Take a moment and watch this. https://t.co/zQkGxZRVo6
If you want to see the differences and the similarities between the old school GOP leaders and the new breed, you have to look no further than the two most powerful Republicans in the land, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Former President Donald Trump, both of whom gave sit-down interviews this week.
McConnell spoke with Jonathan Swan at Axios while Trump was questioned by Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post. The two septuagenarian leaders don’t speak the same language and they don’t like each other at all but they both want the same thing: power. Their public approach to getting it couldn’t be more different but I have a suspicion that if they both end up back on top they’ll find a way to get what each of them wants.
Dawsey has been covering Trump down in Mar-a-Lago and reported on a party earlier this week in which Trump henchman David Bossie premiered his new film, “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” produced by his group Citizens United. (Recall that the famous court case which unleashed unlimited money into U.S. elections revolved around another Citizens United film called, “Hillary the Movie.”) Dawsey describes a festive get-together in which servers offered up bottomless glasses of Trump wine as paying guests strolled throughout the grounds hoping to catch a glimpse of Dear Leader who was “ebullient” at the prospect of the film. The party was basically a reunion of prominent Big Lie promoters from around the country, all of whom were there to feed Trump’s delusional insistence that he actually won the 2020 election. Bossie repeatedly introduced Trump as “45th and 47th president of the United States” and told the group, “Some of the people here say we shouldn’t be talking about 2020. I think it’s vital that we do. If we don’t prove what happened in 2020, how can we stop it from happening again.” Joe Biden won the election fair and square but among these people, proof is in the eye of the beholder.
All the grifters, hangers-on and grasping operatives will carry on regardless, bilking the true believers out of their money and pretending they can alter reality simply with repetition and lies. It is becoming the Trump operation’s overarching modus operandi and while it may not work on a majority of Americans, it’s fully accepted among the followers. Here’s an example of it from former congressional accomplice and current CEO of Trump Media Devin Nunes:
Trump’s social media platform Truth Social is a ghost town and Twitter is doing just fine. But in Trumpworld all you have to do is say what you want reality to be and it is.
Dawsey got Trump to sit down for an interview the day after the party and he clearly had an agenda. If I had to guess, he is a bit concerned about the January 6th Committee and feels the need to set his own narrative of his behavior that day before the public hearings begin next month. He said he has no regrets about calling for the rally on January 6th, going on and on about the “yuge” size of it as usual, claiming that the fake news refuses to acknowledge just how enormous it was, and insists that he really wanted to lead the march to the Capitol with the crowd but that the Secret Service wouldn’t let him.
“I would have done it in a minute,” Trump told Dawsey.
First of all, Trump hasn’t walked that far in decades. He drives his golf cart on to the green so he doesn’t have to walk six feet. Second of all, he defied the Secret Service dozens of times during the pandemic, holding super spreading events all over the country and sickening dozens of agents in the process. I don’t think we’ll ever know if he said it to get the crowd to go down there and storm the place or if it just sounded good to him in the moment to say he would “lead” them, but had he really wanted to do it, he could have.
He also claimed the insurrection was solely the fault of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who failed to provide adequate protection from Trump’s rabid mob when they trashed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
“I hated seeing it,” Trump said of that day. “I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
He, of course, did not hate seeing it and we know this because of reports from many people on that day who tried and failed to get him to step up and call off the dogs. For some reason everyone, including his daughter, thought the president of the United States had some influence over that crowd and when he finally relented and put out a lame video telling everyone that he loved them because they were so special but it was time to go home, they did.
As Twitter wag, @nycsouthpaw put it, “Trump in every interview is like Col. Jessup but 5x stupider, and no prosecutor in America has the stones to subpoena him.”
Why is that?
Underneath it all Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are the same: ruthless, self-serving, power-hungry brutes.
Trump’s lie about that day is as big as his lie about the election but he believes that by just saying out loud that up is down and black is white, he will make it so. And apparently, tens of millions of people are susceptible to this monumental cascade of bullshit.
Mitch McConnell, on the other hand is an old school snake, who doesn’t outright lie, he slithers around the questions, carefully telling the press only what he wants them to know. In his interview with Swan he made it clear, without ever saying it, that he would do whatever it takes to win and would do it by any means necessary:
I think this answer may be why people like Trump so much more than McConnell, the traditional politician. Trump’s primitive thirst for revenge against anyone who crosses him is actually much easier to understand than that evasive, non-response from McConnell. It’s not that Trump has any “moral red lines” either. In fact, the two of them are perfectly in sync on that question. But McConnell still has the sense that people might think there is something wrong with being an amoral monster so he obfuscates. Trump just comes right out and admits it.
But really it’s a distinction without a difference. Underneath it all Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are the same: ruthless, self-serving, power hungry brutes. They despise each other but it’s a hatred of those who see their own moral bankruptcy reflected in each other’s eyes.
I had something else written and ready to go for today’s newsletter, but in a strange twist of fate, it drew significantly from what would turn out to be Eric Boehlert’s last piece. So it feels appropriate to instead write a few words about why I think his voice will be sorely missed, especially at this time.
If you haven’t heard, Boehlert passed suddenly late Monday at age 57. The terrible news was announced Wednesday afternoon on Twitter by Soledad O’Brien, who said he died in a bike accident. While details remain scant, reports later emerged that Boehlert was fatally struck by a train in Montclair, New Jersey.
I didn’t know Boehlert personally beyond occasionally exchanging DMs with him in recent years, but he was among a leading group of progressive writers I’ve been reading online for what feels like forever. After starting out as a music journalist, he wrote for outlets including Media Matters, Salon, and Daily Kos (he also wrote two books), and since January 2020 he published his work in his Press Run newsletter on Substack. He sent me a nice note wishing me well when I started with Vox in 2018. Coming from someone I had been reading for years, it meant a lot to me. And as I was considering leaving Vox to go solo last fall, the work Boehlert was doing for Press Run served an example of what I hoped Public Notice could become.
He had an impressive ability to metabolize political coverage across a range of mediums, including print and TV, then synthesize it in columns featuring lots of specific examples to flesh out his often provocative arguments. Boehlert described Press Run as “fearless media commentary,” and it wasn’t false advertising. I appreciated his refusal to pull punches, his willingness to call out anyone and everyone, including the MSNBCs and CNNs of the world — something left of center media watchers sometimes shy away from because they don’t want to damage professional relationships.
Boehlert’s last post — Monday’s “Why is the press rooting against Biden?” — is a fitting testament to his skills. It’s rich with examples of how outlets like CNN and the Washington Post trampled on last Friday’s strong jobs report by framing stories about it around inflation (“Why A Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” read a CNN headline) or unspecified anxieties people have (“Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” read one in the Post). He went on to connect the negative tone of that coverage with recent polling showing a plurality of Americans believe Biden has actually presided over job losses, when in fact he’s overseen historic gains.
An excerpt:
Sunday’s “Meet the Press” round table featured two segments with assembled pundits. One focused on how immigration might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms, the other on how Trump might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms. As usual, Biden’s historic economic record was ignored.
That’s why, according to a recent poll, 37 percent of Americans think the economy lost jobs over the last year, when its gained 7 million. (Just 28 percent of people know jobs were up.)
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
It’s hard to argue with any of that — and still hard to process that piece is Boehlert’s last. His voice and insight, which has been a constant presence in my corner of the internet for well over a decade, will be sorely missed.
Perhaps most importantly, Boehlert’s sudden passing is a reminder that none of us should take tomorrow for granted. By all appearances his Monday was a normal day of tweeting, writing, and radio hits, and then he was gone. It’s tragic and my heart goes out to his wife, children, family, friends, and fans.
Chris Hayes likewise did a heartfelt tribute:
.@chrislhayes: "In addition to his insightful work, Eric Boehlert was also unfailingly kind, gentle, sweet person beloved by those who worked with him, those who admired his work, and of course, most of all by his wife and two children he leaves behind. I learned a lot from him." pic.twitter.com/EPyF7hTm55
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) April 8, 2022
I was one of the bloggers he profiled for his book on the 2008 election. I was very privileged to be among them. Eric will be missed.
Update — Here’s Joan Walsh, his longtime editor at Salon:
I am brokenhearted over the news of Eric Boehlert’s death in a bicycle accident this week, at 56. I need to say that first. My thoughts are with his wife, Tracy Breslin, and his children, Jane and Ben, whom he absolutely treasured.
Many fine journalists have written tributes to Eric’s insight and bravery in covering the media, and also his generosity and warmth as a colleague and friend. What more can I add? Well, we worked together at Salon for five years in the early 2000s, and I was frequently his editor. I went looking for some of his early pieces for us, and I found treasure. Whether even his admirers know it or not—and many do, but not all—Eric has been on the same story for the last 23 years: the callow, irresponsible way that our Beltway media has covered Democrats in these decades.
And he has fucking crushed it.
His first case study (to my knowledge) was on the lameness of most national political reporters as they covered Vice President Al Gore’s run for president. First, they puffed up his lackluster Democratic primary opponent, former senator Bill Bradley, and then fell in love with George W. Bush. That double-barreled campaign presaged the way the Beltway media would cover imperfect establishment Democratic leaders, from Gore (won the popular vote but lost the presidency) to Hillary Clinton (oh, same thing) to Joe Biden today (whew, won that popular vote—though unlike them, he faced a coup attempt). All with heinous consequences for our country and our democracy. Eric covered Gore and Clinton and Biden, too; it became his beat until his untimely death.
If we want to honor his memory, more of us should commit to his unflinching attention to the role of the media in creating the mess we’re in today.
Eric saw it all coming. First in the media’s bromance with Bill Bradley, a New York Knicks star (they were my team back then!), an admirable senator, but in no way the political titan Gore’s media detractors tried to create. On that story, he was tenacious in a way that caught our attention at Salon—though we had no favorite in the race—just because of the clear way he detailed media bias against Gore and for Bradley. We hired him, and when I edited him, I would marvel at—and to be honest, sometimes be overwhelmed by—the unrelenting way he marshaled so many quotes, so much polling data, and so many other details on behalf of his argument.
While I was of course on the left, I was actually new to mainstream, national Democratic politics when I got to Salon the year before. I was especially new to the way the titans of the media, some of whom I admired (a very few I still do), were so shallow, vain, mean, and given to following the pack.
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Eric helped me see, belatedly, that the media always needs a horse race. The existing vice president coasting to the nomination was bad for everyone’s business. But more important, if you’re a campaign reporter trying to move up, Gore as juggernaut (and Gore as a person) was pegged as a “boring” story. It was the same mentality that gave Donald Trump universal, free, and malpractice-level media coverage in 2015 and ’16. (Let me say quickly: Bill Bradley was nowhere near as interesting as Trump, but also not at all monstrous, unlike TFG.)
Of course, Eric covered the whole Trump shit show too, going back to the carnival barker’s racist birther stunts, as did I.
Salon’s archives from those early years—our first few years of being a true news organization—have crumbled, like so many others’. But I was able to find a few pieces of Eric’s that I remember for their clear-eyed ferocity. Take “Gore’s premature obituary,” in which he showed how “the media hyped the vice president’s dip in the polls over the summer, but ignored his resurgence in the past month.” And brought receipts.
While the media panned Gore’s October 1999 performances, most prominent reporters ignored that it was his best month on the campaign trail—he’d opened up a 25-point lead over Bradley nationally, gaining 13 points on him in less than 30 days. Why were our trained political media professionals missing the story? Because they were sticking to their own storyline, that Gore was a bad candidate, running a worse campaign. Eric quotes the coverage of the Dartmouth town hall that month:
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Gore was “clumsy,” “awkward,” “artificial,” “glib and occasionally smug” (USA Today’s Walter Shapiro); “the Eddie Haskell-Energizer Bunny” (Time’s Margaret Carlson) who “hit the Dartmouth stage yakking” (syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington). He appeared as “some sort of feral animal who had been locked in a small cage [and] came across as a kind of manic political vaudevillian” (Slate’s Jacob Weisberg). He was dressed “like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station” (Washington Post’s Mary McGrory). And, “If you think that Al Gore won that debate, I think you’re tripping” (Washington Post’s Juan Williams).
He goes on to quote the take of Time’s Eric Pooley: “The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”
Pooley Heathered it up himself in his Gore coverage, but he managed to nail our proud Beltway media’s biases there nonetheless.
By the time Gore crushed Bradley in the January 2000 Iowa caucuses, the solons of the press had a new line on him. No longer “clumsy” or a “political vaudevillian,” Gore was a “thug.”The legendary (not in a good way) Maureen Dowd compared him to Mafia don Tony Soprano in The New York Times. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said there was only one reason Gore won Iowa: “He is aggressive and tough, and he is also mean.” Again, Eric showed that the two women weren’t alone, quoting writers we met in his earlier piece—and others—with their relentless attacks on Gore.
Gore has done little over the last three months but dish out an “onslaught” of “cheap shots” (Time’s Eric Pooley), and hatch a “diabolical” strategy in which he “passed up no opportunity to whack Bradley” (Slate’s Jacob Weisberg), and he’s been busy “demagoguing” (Washington Post’s Juan Williams). Gore is “a savage campaigner” (Fox News’ Brit Hume) who’s been “mangling the truth for political gain” (National Journal’s Stuart Taylor Jr.) and “relentless in attacking Bradley, hammering, needling, hectoring” (Washington Post’s Mary McGrory). Worse, the VP has been “trafficking in fear-mongering” (USA Today’s Walter Shapiro) and seems content to fight a “scorched-earth war” (San Francisco Examiner’s Chris Matthews).
From New Hampshire, the next month, heterodox (I don’t know what else to call him) then-journalist Mickey Kaus, also not a Gore fan, echoed Pooley earlier: “They hate Gore. They really do think he’s a liar. And a phony.”
It got worse when Gore secured the nomination and faced off against George W. Bush. Eric wrapped his just-before-election coverage with the somber, acidic piece titled “Gore’s too-willing executioners,” showing how “the political press has been armed with plenty of attitude in taking on the vice president—but not a lot of facts.”
Reporters, he argued, “have crudely inserted themselves into the presidential campaign with careless and misleading reports about Gore’s so-called exaggerations (journalists literally created Gore’s ‘Love Story,’ Love Canal and ‘inventing the Internet’ episodes out of whole cloth). In the process, they have become Gov. George Bush’s most potent allies.” In this piece, there’s no snappy paragraph of reporters’ bad takes I can share; instead, he takes apart faux-scandals with facts, over many paragraphs. You have to read it, if you care.
Meanwhile, I found plenty of fault with the Gore campaign that year. I’m not saying it was perfect. Or even good. I’m just saying Gore’s media executioners were indeed awful, self-serving, often deluded. And some are still with us.
You know who you are. And I’m sure you don’t give a shit right now.
I’m sharing these early Salon pieces at length, because it would become what Eric was known and loved for, from his years at Salon through a long tenure at Media Matters and lately, at his own PressRun site. He covered the despicable “but her e-mails” coverage of Hillary Clinton, painstakingly, over months (I wasn’t surprised that Clinton shared her condolences on Twitter). And lately he’d been on fire, at PressRun and on Twitter, where we regularly retweeted one another and commiserated about how much worse so many reporters and media organizations have gotten even since their non-glory days covering Al Gore, in direct messages and e-mail. As I often say: The sad mainstream media is trashing Biden as though his opponent were (semi-OK though he did race-bait in 2012) Mitt Romney. That is not what we’re dealing with.
I haven’t seen Eric since before the pandemic. We used to be regulars with MSNBC’s Joy Reid and sometimes All In with Chris Hayes. We often talked about getting drinks, and we did once, but usually he was anxious to get back to Montclair, N.J., and his family.
I want to quote a lot of his final PressRun column here—“Why is the press rooting against Biden?”and “burying great news,” as he put it—because it shares so much with his early Gore media criticism. I read his post on Monday as I thought about my own writing for the week, and I decided I couldn’t make his point any better. If I could have written it first, I would have. So here a lot of it is, below. May his memory be a blessing, for his family and for all of us who knew and loved his integrity and his fervor.
This is how it’s done, people.
Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.
Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.
The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover?…
Axios contorted itself by claiming Biden’s promise to add “millions” of new jobs (which he’s already accomplished), was being threatened because there aren’t enough workers, because so few people are out of work—or something.
Totally normal journalism, right? The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news….
That’s why, according to a recent poll, 37 percent of Americans think the economy lost jobs over the last year, when it’s gained 7 million. (Just 28 percent of people know jobs were up.)
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
Biden is facing not just one organized opposition in the form of the GOP but another in the form of the Beltway press corps. The Beltway press needs to take its thumb off the Biden scale.
Eric began all of his posts:
Be healthy.
Be kind.
And I can’t end mine any better. We’ve all got to improve our work to make up for this loss, at a time when we need clear-eyed media critics more than ever. Be healthy, be kind, be vigilant—and have fun. I know he would add that.
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Steve Bannon, former Donald Trump adviser, he of “flood the zone with shit,” wanted to tear down the postwar international order and international organizations in favor of an all-embracing nationalism, to deconstruct the administrative state. What post-Bannon conservatives want is to flood the zone with distrust.
Christopher Rufo, he of critical race theory hysteria, has now set his eyes on dismantling public education. He spoke this week at Hillsdale College in Michigan, a small conservative school with an outsized presence in conservative cricles.
Rufo hopes, in his words, to “bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] ‘transparency,” Kathryn Joyce writes at Salon, “in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide.” The key is to create distrust:
“For example,” he said, “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
“To get universal school choice,” Rufo told listeners, “you need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
That admission is remarkably similar to the diagnosis that progressive public education advocates have made. Last month, former Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Salon that she saw “all the controversy about critical race theory” as a deliberate strategy to alienate communities from their local schools. The education privatization movement, she said, “is a billionaire’s movement,” and the only way it can “gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system. That’s what all of this is about.”
Like Bannon, Rufo and his allies want to deconstruct, to destroy, not to build. Public uninversities are on the menu as well.
“We need to have the courage and the intelligence and the tenacity to say, ‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away,” said Rufo. “So we go in there and we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”
In terms of the latter, he suggested that conservative legislators use public funding to establish new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities, which could serve as “magnets” for right-wing professors, create a new track of conservative-minded classes and generally establish “a separate patronage system” for conservative thinkers and activists.
That is, expand the right-wing billionaire-funded wingnut welfare system to publicly funded institutions.
In a conversation with other New York Times writers on how the fringe has overtaken the Republican Party, Lulu Garcia-Navarro sees the spread of “Don’t Say Gay” laws beyond Florida as an attempt to apply “the attention economy” to legislation.
I largely agree that this is an attempt to do something like what Trump did: capture attention, generate energy amongst one’s most fervent supporters. Sort of draw the opposition into an argument and hope that you’re able to frame the argument in your direction, and capture the attention of people who may just be marginally paying attention to the whole thing.
Republicans’ decades-long attempt to sow distrust about elections employed “integrity” as a dog whistle for brown people voting. In due course, the program sparked a violent insurrection. Republicans claim their voter suppression laws mean to restore trust in a system they’ve spent decades undermining.
Can these people build anything?
The problem Democrats face in saving democracy and public institutions from schools to elections to having an educated electorate is to overcome the distrust economy directly opposed to the foundations of American governance.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
People have pooh-poohed my comments about the Republicans killing off their own voters, but they actually did:
Despite the availability of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, so many people died in the second year of the pandemic in the U.S. that the nation’s life expectancy dropped for a second year in a row last year, according to a new analysis.
The analysis of provisional government statistics found U.S. life expectancy fell by just under a half a year in 2021, adding to a dramatic plummet in life expectancy that occurred in 2020. Public health experts had hoped the vaccines would prevent another drop the following year.
“The finding that instead we had a horrible loss of life in 2021 that actually drove the life expectancy even lower than it was in 2020 is very disturbing,” says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, who help conduct the analysis. “It speaks to an extensive loss of life during 2021.”
Many of the deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives, Woolf says, and drove the overall U.S. life expectancy to fall to 76.6 years — the lowest in at least 25 years.
“Shame on the U.S.,” says Noreen Goldman, a demographer at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “It just continues to boggle my mind how poorly we’ve come through this pandemic. And I find that disgraceful.”
The 2021 drop came after U.S life expectancy plummeted in 2020, tumbling by almost two years — the biggest one-year fall in U.S. life expectancy since at least World War II.
“The motivation for this study was to determine whether the horrible drop in life expectancy that we documented in 2020 resolved or rebounded in 2021 or whether there was a continued decline. Unfortunately, we did not find good news,” Woolf told NPR in an interview.
Surprisingly, while the 2020 drop in life expectancy hit Blacks and Hispanics hardest, that wasn’t the case in 2021, the analysis found. Life expectancy among Hispanics didn’t significantly change between 2020 and 2021, and life expectancy of Blacks actually inched up slightly — by a little less than half a year.
In contrast, the life expectancy of whites fell by about a third of a year, mostly among white men.
“So what this tells us is that this continued decline in life expectancy that we see in the second year has been carried mainly by deaths in the white population,” Woolf says.
It’s unclear why this happened, but Woolf and others think it may be due in part to whites being more likely to live in states with fewer restrictions, so they let down their guard more, while often refusing to get vaccinated.
“The deaths that occurred in 2021 were a product not only of a lack of vaccination, which was a huge factor, but also being in places that didn’t observe policies like masking and social distancing that prevented transmission of the virus,” Woolf says.
Because of the huge loss of life among Blacks and Hispanic in 2020, their life expectancy went down more than whites over the last two years. But the reason whites continued to die in larger numbers in 2021 can be attributed to the fact that unlike Blacks and Hispanics they refused to get vaccinated. And we know why, don’t we?
I don’t know if it will make any difference in the GOP vote next fall but you have to wonder. In a close race every vote is important. And the people they led to their deaths are their hard-core older, white, male voters. Ooops.
