Author: tristero

Look at that humongous pile of eggs. There must be…let me count them…yes! There’s gotta be at least 270 eggs there. Next week, when they hatch, I’m gonna be rolling in adorable little chickens! Close to 300! I’m sure of it!!!

Huh? Hold on, wait a minute… what just happened? The eggs, they’ve all disappeared! And with them, all those chickens I was so sure I had. Maybe some Fox ate ’em. Nooooooooooo!

There’s a moral to this story somewhere…

Meanwhile, if you haven’t done so already, get the fuck off your ass and vote. Got it?

This time will be remembered as a time when there was a genuine debate as to whether a million people should die so that others could go to a bar and par-TAY:

…the [so-called “Great Barrington Declaration” calling for the US to adopt herd immunity] omits mention of how many people the policy would kill. It’s a lot.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, whose modeling of the pandemic the White House has used, predicts up to about 415,000 deaths by Feb. 1, even with current restrictions continuing. If these restrictions are simply eased — as opposed to eliminating them entirely, which would occur if herd immunity were pursued — deaths could rise to as many as 571,527. That’s just by Feb. 1. The model predicts daily deaths will still be increasing then.

Will we have achieved herd immunity then? No.

Herd immunity occurs when enough people have immunity either through natural infection or a vaccine so the outbreak eventually dies out. By Feb. 1, even with eased mandates, only 25 percent of the population will have been infected, by my calculations. The most optimistic model suggests herd immunity might occur when 43 percent of the population has been infected, but many estimate 60 percent to 70 percent before transmission trends definitively down.

Those are models. Actual data from prison populations and from Latin America suggest transmission does not slow down until 60 percent of the population is infected. (At present, only about 10 percent of the population has been infected, according to the C.D.C.)

And what will be the cost? Even if herd immunity can be achieved with only 40 percent of the population infected or vaccinated, the I.H.M.E. estimates that a total of 800,000 Americans would die. The real death toll needed to reach herd immunity could far exceed one million.

As horrific a price as that is, it could prove much worse if damage to the heart, lungs or other organs of those who recover from the immediate effects of the virus does not heal and instead leads to early deaths or incapacitation. But we won’t know that for years.

This vomitous policy is our present moral reality. A moral reality so calloused and cruel that it has no problem accommodating a strategy to deter immigration that depends upon separating children from their parents, locking them in cages, and “losing” the paperwork needed to reunite them. A moral reality designed and celebrated by modern conservatives.

There is something deeply, profoundly sick about America these days. No society that considers itself remotely healthy should be debating the “worth” of such insane notions as herd immunity or family separations.

(picture and caption from WHYY)

Amanda Marcotte makes a great point today.

Just to remind everyone, Donald Trump was impeached last year. It did not go that well.

First, the Senate failed to remove this monstrously corrupt and incompetent man from office. Then in rapid succession, Trump nearly started a shooting war in the Middle East, he presided over the most spectacular public health debacle in 100 years (210,000 Americans dead and counting), and then Trump deliberately took a match to the powder keg of American racism by doubling down on his open embrace of white supremacists and paranoid lunatics like himself. In response, instead of impeaching him again (more than called for), Congress failed to act.

Impeachment was sheer hell. The Republicans behaved shamefully, sliming anyone and everyone who brought Trump’s crimes to light. A lot of people, including close friends of mine who are professional journalists at the top of their profession, thought impeachment wasn’t worth it and would backfire or, at the very least, do nothing.

But Marcotte is right. It didn’t do as much as it should have — there is still a walking, tweeting existential threat in the White House, his tiny hands clutching the nuclear trigger — but it did do something important:

Trump got outed for his involvement in [the Russian disinformation campaign to slime Joe Biden] by a whistleblower who was, rightfully, concerned when he heard Trump blackmailing the Ukranian president into getting involved in the plot, and the impeachment trial followed. Impeachment derailed the scheme by refocusing press attention away from the smears against Biden and towards the real story, which is Trump’s corruption. It was a clarifying moment, one that showed the extent of Trump’s malicious intentions and exposed the workings of the machinery that exists to inject specious right wing narratives into the mainstream press.

Now every journalist knows that trying to make hay out of this latest stunt only makes you look like a stooge of Trump and Russian intelligence, and so they’re staying away. The only outlet that would touch it was the New York Post. Even social media corporations, which have a terrible track record of letting Russian disinformation ops run rampant on their platforms, have gone to great lengths to push back against its spread.

There’s a moral here for Democrats: It’s worth it to fight back hard, even if there’s no immediate payoff.

A lot of folks wonder if impeachment was worth the time and energy because, in the end, the corrupt Republicans who controlled the Senate refused to remove Trump, despite his obvious guilt. But the long-term effects of impeachment have been largely positive for Democrats. Impeachment made it toxic for even the most shameless mainstream journalists to pretend there is any legitimacy to Trump’s lies. It made it so that, in these final weeks before the election, the focus is where it belongs: On Trump’s corruption and failures, not on some made-up nonsense about his opponent. 

There are a lot of difficult fights ahead for Democrats, starting with the fight to keep Amy Coney Barrett off the Supreme Court, but also future ones like the fight to save the economy if Biden is elected and the fight to rebalance the courts after years of Republican court-packing. Some of those fights will be hard, if not impossible, to win. But, as impeachment shows, it’s worth having the fight anyway, because it often pays off in the long run. Just look at the current headlines at the New York Times. 

Once the Supreme Court gets its first (but certainly not its last) Handmaid, I give us ten years until we turn into Poland.

Then again, ten years may be optimistic:

In little over a year, hundreds of regions across Poland — covering about a third of the country, and more than 10 million citizens — have transformed themselves, overnight, into so-called “LGBT-free zones.”

Duzniak, left, and Głowacka hope to marry in Poland, but the country currently prohibits any kind of formal same-sex unions.

These areas, where opposition to LGBT “ideology” is symbolically written into law at state and local levels, have put Poland on a collision course with the European Union and forced sister cities, allies and watchdogs across the continent to recoil in condemnation. Local laws have been contested, and some communities that introduced such legislation have seen their EU funding blocked.

But the impact is felt most painfully — and daily — by the gay, lesbian and transgender Poles who live in towns that would prefer they simply weren’t there.

Poland’s leaders have been reading up furiously on Nazi extermination strategies. This is exactly how it began for the Jews:

“The zones themselves don’t have any legal power, they’re mostly symbolic,” he notes. No signs go up overnight; no businesses become immediately empowered to refuse custom. “(But) it encourages the opposite-minded people to speak out again us, and be more active.”

Oh, and just in case you think this is just a few towns run by a handful of rightwing Trumpian-style nut cases, here’s a map that demonstrates how far the open display of hatred and bigotry has spread in Poland:

RIP, RBG. You will be remembered as a moral hero, one of the greatest this nation has produced. I will let others praise you at length but especially now, it is crucial that focus be brought on your peers who are not moral heroes, those who lack your bravery and integrity.

Trump has an uncanny ability to bring out moral cowardice in those around him. And he extracts it not only from weak-willed individuals like, say, Michael Cohen. He has the capacity to turn some of the most powerful people on the planet — America’s politicians and media elite, for example — into chickenshit.

It’s incredible: If any president but Trump had said that ingesting bleach might be a way to treat Covid-19, the calls for an immediate resignation would have have been broad, angry, and swift. And yet, as far as I can recall, not a single powerful national figure did much more than figuratively roll their eyes.

More recently, Trump’s open embrace of an insane pandemic control ”plan” that everyone who can operate a calculator knows will kill between two and six million Americans would, with any other leader, lead to his immediate removal. But once again, not a single influential person in this country openly called, as far as I know, for him to leave for proposing, and possibly implementing, such a perverted idea.

The refusal by those with power to fully stand up to Trump’s combination of bullying, stupidity, incompetence, and insanity is one of the most striking aspect of his reign. It will puzzle historians for centuries (assuming humans survive). Yes, there was impeachment, some court cases, a few indictments, and there have been millions of appalled words written.

But the obvious conclusions — that every minute he is in office, Trump is a danger to the entire world and must leave immediately — is rarely voiced by anyone with influence. Weirdly, the failure to openly call for his stepping down continues despite widespread whispered consensus among the powerful and influential that the situation is very dangerous.

This is the very definition of moral cowardice. What is astounding is that Trump has caused otherwise take-no-quarter politicians to pull their punches, politicians who may be ruthless but who would nevertheless never tolerate such wanton disregard for American lives.

Their rationalizations have changed but the cowardice has been there from the beginning.
Remember this one, from Anonymous? I do: “No need to call for his resignation. There will be grown ups in the room who will restrain him.” How’d that work out?

Just last week, the excuse was: “It’s less than two months until election. We just need to wait.” After yesterday’s news, I can only worry about what’s next.

And then there’s this very common one, the most outrageous and openly cowardly rationalization of all: “There isn’t the political will to remove him.”

On matters of important principle, on matters of life or death, on matters of sheer basic morality, such cynical strategic calculations don’t matter. If you have an opportunity to speak publicly and widely, you have an obligation to call upon Trump to step down (or resign or be removed by the Senate) when he is blithely advocating, if not implementing, a plan that could kill up to 6 million of your fellow citizens. Including, of course, you, your children, and your parents.

Let’s be clear: this is not about strategy. If openly demanding Trump’s resignation or removal from office results in sparking a groundswell, naturally that would be fantastic. But whether it does or not, as Masha Gessen once wrote, the truth needs to be plainly spoken to authoritarians even at personal risk. That is what moral heroism looks like.

We are living with the consequences of this era’s moral cowardice. The latest disaster, of course, is that the extreme right will control the Supreme Court for at least a generation. Would it have made a difference if powerful people had overcome their cowardice and called, early and often, for Trump’s removal? No way to know, but what is certain is that an attitude of “let’s just wait for the election” did nothing to avert catastrophe.

I have no idea how Trump brings out so much deep moral cowardice in so many very powerful people. But even now, it is critical that they (and we) not give into terror and speak the truth we all know. For the good of this country and the world, Trump needs to leave office now. Today. Only a few prominent voices have said so publicly. But they all know it’s true and it’s shameful they’re not saying so

Prodigal Son-sim is the tendency for the media to privilege the opinions of Republicans who have come to their senses over the opinions of those who never lost their mind in the first place. I dislike prodigal son-ism because, among other things, every moment spent getting a lapsed Republican up to speed on reality-based thinking is a moment not spent actually addressing real problems. Another problem is that so many prodigal son-ists are merely cynical opportunists, a character flaw blatantly obvious, for example, in the mien of the Never Trumpers. They don’t have a deep understanding of how misbegotten their thinking is; they’re just trying to hold onto their status and salaries.

And that is what makes Michael Cohen’s bombshell of a foreword to his new book so interesting. This man is a Republican, a thug, a bully. He is as amoral as all those epithets imply. Cohen is also a damn fool who should have known better than to trust a godfather wannabe like Trump with his career. And yet, this mea culpa feels oddly honest and heartfelt. Why?

It is certainly the case that, if this sample is typical, Cohen is a compelling writer (or he’s got the world’s best ghostwriter). But lurking behind the rhetorical skill appears to be something close to genuine contrition. I’m hedging because it is quite possible that, like Ted Bundy (another Republican), Cohen is merely exceptionally skilled at faking normal human emotions. But this feels real:

…please permit me to reintroduce myself in these pages. The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever you may have heard or thought about me, you don’t know me or my story or the Donald Trump that I know. For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump.

Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them. I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.

To underscore that last crucial point, let me say now that I had agency in my relationship with Trump. I made choices along the way—terrible, heartless, stupid, cruel, dishonest, destructive choices, but they were mine and constituted my reality and life. During my years with Trump, to give one example, I fell out of touch with my sisters and younger brother, as I imagined myself becoming a big shot. I’d made my fortune out of taxi medallions, a business viewed as sketchy if not lower class. On Park Avenue, where I lived, I was definitely nouveau riche, but I had big plans that didn’t include being excluded from the elite. I had a narrative: I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Then there was my own considerable ego, short temper, and willingness to deceive to get ahead, regardless of the consequences.

As you read my story, you will no doubt ask yourself if you like me, or if you would act as I did, and the answer will frequently be no to both of those questions. But permit me to make a point: If you only read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul. More than that, it’s only by actually understanding my decisions and actions that you can get inside Trump’s mind and understand his worldview. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organized crime. If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I was one of Trump’s bad guys.

Another reason Cohen may be, on some level, sincere, is that it doesn’t read like an attempt to self-aggrandize in order to launch a Mooch-like punditry career. Cohen appears actually to understand he’s blown his reputation, his life, and his family’s life, to smithereens. Perhaps one day he’ll have a status similar to a downscale John Dean. But there appear to be only two motives here: first and foremost, make some money in the only way left to him to pay his immense legal bills (not unreasonable). Second, to come clean possibly for no other reason than to square things with his family.

A foreword this powerfully written almost makes me want to read Cohen’s book. Hmmm…. on second thought, nah.

Thank you, Wade Davis, for an unforgettable, pitch perfect description of our time and the end of the American Century. Comparable to Masha Gessen at their best, Davis’s essay should be must reading for anyone interested in understanding this fraught moment and where we might be headed:

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand…

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions.

If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

Digby’s absolutely right about Leonhardt’s article in the NY Times today that attempts to analyze the failure of the United States re: Covid-19. Most of it does have to to do with Trump’s incompetence. And a considerable amount also has to do with a cult mentality around Trump, not the radical individualism that Leonhardt posits. And Leonhardt also missed another reason for the failure of the US which is only tangentially related to Trump’s incompetence.

Trump’s comprehensive corruption directly led to the failure of the American pandemic response. The full story of how supplies were diverted to try to boost his re-election chances hasn’t yet been told. Nor the complete story of how Kushner’s pals and others from the Trump family’s inner circle profited mightily from this awful tragedy. But when it comes out, even the most cynical of us Trump watchers will be utterly appalled.

My god:

…experts inside and outside the government … say they fear the White House will push the Food and Drug Administration to overlook insufficient data and give at least limited emergency approval to a vaccine, perhaps for use by specific groups like front-line health care workers, before the vote on Nov. 3.

“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out,’” said Dr. Paul A. Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee.

“They are really worried about that,” he added. “And they should be.”

Every time I’ve seen The Third Man, a movie I love (especially for that great soundtrack), I find the villain to be implausibly evil. No one is that twisted.

Actually, someone is, and he’s in charge of our government. By not testing properly for side effects — an all but inevitable result of rushing development of a vaccine — people will suffer and die…All for no other reason than to save Donald Trump’s political career.

If this isn’t psychopathology, nothing is.

Prodigal Son-ism — the tendency of the media to treat conservatives who have changed their minds about Trump or conservative causes as far more important than those of us who were right all along — is one of the most obnoxious of Trump-era tropes.

Case in point: Michael Gerson’s opening to a mea culpa on race(Gerson was a W. Bush speechwriter and a prominent neoconservative):

I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame former vice president Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.

But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency.

Gerson actually had to turn to a book before he understood that he should never ignore racist speech from the president of the United States?

This is just one of so many reasons why this passage is so appalling.* It would take volumes, probably, to list them all (who exactly are “conveniently complacent?” Not the millions of Black Americans who are the direct target of racist presidential rhetoric).

Let’s be kind and say that Gerson has a lot of learning to catch up on. And that is the problem with Prodigal Son-ism. By paying so much attention to the Gersons of America, we don’t have time or space in the public discourse for the voices of people who don’t have to be taught the basics and really do understand the problems America faces, including race.

Even more serious: Every moment spent on the Gersons of the world is a moment not spent actually pursuing racial justice. We’re too busy getting people like Gerson up to speed on the basics.

Yes, now Gerson gets the basics of racial history. How long will it take before he finally understands why trans rights are so important? Or why, even at the time, opposing the invasion of Iraq was sensible and invading the country insane? Or why the economic system of the United States generates appalling inequality that only federal policies can mitigate and change?

Don’t get me wrong. Just as we should praise an infant who finally learns how to tie his shoes, Gerson deserves a very nice pat on the head here. But while Mike is slowly learning how to count, let’s put the grownups in charge and let them do the work that badly needs to be done.

*Yes, I’m aware that Gerson is using a literary device here — or at least I hope he is — no American should actually be this clueless. The point is that he actually thinks this particular literary device is somehow appropriate for this subject. And that is problematic. Only the Gersons of the world — white, highly privileged, deeply entitled — would start an op-ed about race in such a tasteless and smug fashion.