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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

About That Speech

Published by digby on July 21, 2024

James Fallows is a great writer and a professional speechwriter. His examination of Trump’s dumpster fire of a speech and the media’s reaction to it is well worth your while. Every journalist and opinion writer needs to read it .

The piece begins like this:

This post has one central point. It is that the press should give “fair and balanced” attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances.

Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles:

—For Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. There’s an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. “In another difficult moment for the President….” “Coming after his disastrous debate appearance…”

—For Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, “Sir” story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. “That’s just Trump.” “Are you new here? Never heard a MAGA rally speech before?” “It’s what the crowd is waiting for.” “Oh, here comes the ‘shark’ again!” There’s an ever-thickening layer of habituation, normalization, jadedness, just plain tedium. The first five times Trump tells the Hannibal Lecter story, reporters notice and write about it. The next hundred times, they’re checking their phones.

Last night a member of the Washington Post editorial board actually put it just this bluntly. Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now of Zeteo, asked Shadi Hamid, of the Post, about the many ludicrous and damaging claims in Trump’s convention speech, which Hamid had waved off as “just normal Trump.” Hamid chuckled and answered, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that Trump is Trump, and it’s a low bar, and that’s what we’ve got to work with.” To which Hasan replied, “Some of us are trying to raise the bar.” You can see it here.

I’m sure that on reflection Shadi Hamid would have made the point more carefully. But his instant reaction distilled the “it’s just Trump!” framing that has prevailed through the 2024 campaign.

The obvious and unequal result: The public registers more and more about Biden’s “fitness” based on his appearances, less and less about Trump’s.

Then he goes into the speech and it’s devastating. A short excerpt:

First, it was not a ‘speech.’

Eight years ago, I stood near the front of the crowd at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, listening to Donald Trump give his first acceptance speech. I thought it was dark, dystopian, and narcissistic. But it was a speech. It had a beginning, a middle section, and a conclusion. It had a theme. (That theme, unfortunately, was “everything is broken, and I alone can fix it.”) It appeared to have been “written,” and Trump appeared mainly to be saying what was set out in the text. The crowd roared when Trump gave the big, planned applause lines.

Thursday night’s speech started out that way. It had some “writerly” early segments—which you can always identify in Trump’s speeches by the way his voice and rhythm change. When he’s sounding out words from “planned” text on a teleprompter, the energy goes out of his voice, and his tone is that of a schoolboy struggling through an unfamiliar primer. Sometimes he gives a little aside of meta-commentary appreciation for a nice line he’s just read: “You know, that’s so true.”

The written part of this speech contained a “bring us together” line that died on Trump’s lips even as he said it: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.” And his opening description of the shooting had an unmistakable “he is risen!” framing. For example, with emphasis added:

Many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose [!], surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out.

They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over.

But I could see it and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.”

You don’t have be a Christian to recognize the Easter-weekend iconography.

Ugh. And then he kissed a helmet.

Fallows says that if he had gone on in this vein it would have marked a new direction for Trump. But it did not. After the first 30 minutes of his “prepared speech” he went into his usual litany of grievances, hate and gibberish.

To return to the theme of age and its toll on candidates: this was different from 2016. Then, Trump held the crowd throughout. Now, he came across as the guy in a bar you couldn’t get away from. Has age affected Joe Biden? Yes. And Donald Trump too.

Read the whole thing. He makes many very cogent points that should have been taken by the media on the day after and certainly by now. Unfortunately, they have learned nothing from previous mistakes in coverage. So, we have Biden the ancient loser and Trump the “changed man.”

Yesterday’s Trainwreck

Published by digby on July 21, 2024

If you want to see all the highlights, you can see them at @atrupar on twitter. If you just want to read through a succinct recap, here’s a handy one from @artcandee:

Dr. Ronny On Call

Published by digby on July 21, 2024
Remember him?

Trump is not being cared for by a licensed physician but rather by his former “gentleman of the stool.” (Ronny “Johnson” is no longer a licensed physician.)

Here is a letter that rivals his former Dr. Feelgood who distributed a dictated statement from Trump himself:

He is not a real Dr and It appears he wasn’t one even when he was licensed. He was a pill pusher. It’s a shocking fact that he was ever the White House doctor.

We have not heard from any legitimate doctor about Trump’s “wound.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neuro-surgeon, has said that we need to know if there was any neurological damage which could have happened if that was, in fact, a bullet wound. It appears they have no intention of doing that. And it also appears that the press has no intention of pushing for “transparency” on the issue.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that they have held Joe Biden to a very different standard. The Parkinson’s “debate” is recent. Remember this one?

Same old, same old with the media.meanwhile, here’s how the Trumpers are dealing with this:

After days of hand wringing and peal-clutching over “bringing down the temperature” this is what the right is running with: “the Democrats tried to kill Trump.” And the media is sitting around gossiping about which TV starts we should choose to pick Biden’s replacement. (I’m not kidding.) They’re in a state of febrile excitement and even if Biden drops out it’s not going to change. better get used to it.

Credit Where Due

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 21, 2024

A stopped clock

Not a big Bill Maher fan, but this week’s show had some moments. Digby noted a big one. Here are some others.

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This Crew Is Beatable

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 21, 2024

But not if the beatings continue

One may find polls to support about any position out there. A set of polls that consistently tilt one way are those reporting that conservatives are happier than liberals. These findings date back years.

Contra that, Rachel Bitecofer cites data from the World Happiness Report—a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the United Nations—that suggests people who live in red states are, by and large, less happy than those who live in bluer states. European countries, you have heard, report greater hapoiness than the U.S., however. This too is a consistent result. Indeed, “the U.S. fell eight spots to number 23 in the global rankings between 2023 and 2024,” dropping out of the top 20 for the first time in the survey’s history.

But not so fast. Polling of individiuals still more consistently shows that conservatives report being happier than liberals.

Real Clear Science from August 2022:

Social psychologist Jaime Napier, Program Head of Psychology at NYU-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.

“One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it,” she told PBS. “That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were.”

To paraphrase, conservatives are less concerned with equality of outcomes and more with equality of opportunity. While American liberals are depressed by inequalities in society, conservatives are okay with them provided that everyone has roughly the same opportunities to succeed. The latter is a more rosy and empowering view than the deterministic former.

Two other studies explored a more surprising contributor: neuroticism, typically defined as “a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings.” Surveyed conservatives consistently score lower in neuroticism than surveyed liberals.

There are other studies that show the same thing.

All that is prelude to an observation made last week by David Frum that reduces liberal less-happiness to a single line, one that reflects why efforts at selling a progressive policy agenda fail to persuade voters.

Considering the sideshow put on in Milwaukee last week by the Republican National Committee, Frum assured readers of The Atlantic, “This crew is as beatable as any reactionary minority faction ever was beatable.”

Frum notes, however, that when Bill Clinton gave his SOTU address in 1996, he led with his economic accomplishments “within the very first minute of his speech.” Nearly 30 years later, Joe Biden buried his lede 15 minutes deep into his 2024 SOTU.

Frum believes it reflects the left’s less-happiness (emphasis mine):

This Clinton-Biden disparity reveals something bigger than a difference in presidential style. The Democratic Party has profoundly changed since the 1990s. Today, tremendous power within the party has been amassed by groups and factions that speak for grievances. Good news is contrary to their principles and their purpose. Nobody can be happy if anybody is unhappy. They seem to believe that the way to reelect an administration is to detail all the things still wrong after four years of holding office. Here’s the advice Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was offering Biden on the eve of his disastrous first debate with Donald Trump: “You should spend 80 percent of the time telling the story of how the drug companies screwed people, and 20 percent of the time explaining the solution. We do the opposite.”

Last year, The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman remarked upon the Biden administration’s “fear of being seen as out of touch—or their fear of being scolded by participants in an elite debate that is invisible to most of the electorate.” That latter observation was exactly correct. Above all else, the Biden administration feared scolding by progressive interest groups. Those groups gain clout within the Democratic universe by accusing and disparaging. They imagine that the same techniques might work for an incumbent Democratic president with a record to defend, seeking to persuade swing voters. They don’t, and they won’t.

Not being a buzzkill sells better, Barack Obama observed. I’ve referred to “glass-half-empty progressives” whose first reflex is to complain about what the “establishment,” the neoliberals, the centrists, etc., did not deliver, that nothing is better than half a loaf. (Nobody can be happy if anybody is unhappy.) We all know them. Some of us are them. We tend do be liberal with sticks and conservative with carrots where it comes to our political allies. This is not the time.

Frum offers a big “Biden must go” caveat:

Democrats seem to be convinced by the hope that the way to inflict the beating is to change leadership. But the biggest defect of the present Democratic leadership was imposed by the Democratic followership: the reluctance to accept the fact that four years of non-Trump leadership have accomplished an enormous amount that is worth defending.

With a predator’s cunning, Trump has always understood that the first step to winning the confidence of others is to project confidence in oneself. Trump has used that understanding for his own crooked and criminal purposes. But the same understanding can be put to good use by better people.

Believe! Or lose.

Lead with the good stuff. Please. Declare victory and don’t stop.

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A Man In Decline

Published by digby on July 20, 2024

Very much worth seeing if you missed it.

You really cannot overstate just how bizarre he was, and I’ve seen a lot of Trump speeches. I liked David Frump’s description in The Atlantic:

At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.

Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.

Whatever the explanation, Trump demonstrated in Milwaukee that President Joe Biden is not the only national politician diminished by the years. Trump too is dwindling into himself, even more isolated from such facts about the external world as elapsed time and audience impatience.

Bizarre byways to pointless destinations is right. Also he kissed a helmet in one of the smarmiest displays I’ve ever seen and wore a huge bandage on his ear that we now learn didn’t even require any stitches.

He’s a clown but an especially evil one.I guess half the country just loves evil.

Just Another Mass Shooter

Published by digby on July 20, 2024

While everyone was handwringing about political violence after the shooting last week-end, I wrote that for Salon. Days and days of lugubrious moaning about “changing the tone” and “bringing down the temperature” later:

I wanted to flag to your attention another data point that suggests that reader of ours was on to something when he posited that Tom Crooks, 20 year old who tried to shoot Donald Trump, was more in the line of school shooters and mass shooters than political assassins as we’ve conventionally understood them. CNN now reports that Crooks had been googling information about Ethan Crumbley, a 2021 school shooter, who’s parents were later prosecuted over his murders. Indeed, the FBI seems to be quite literally moving toward this theory of Tom Crooks’ murders.

Quoting CNN: “One emerging theory by investigators, based in part on the timing and subjects of his online searches, is that the shooter was looking to carry out a mass shooting and that the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most ready opportunity.”

This is a pretty extraordinary interpretation of the events of one week ago and it matches very closely with what TPM Reader GS surmised the morning after the events. This theory from investigators suggests not simply that Crooks profile matched the sociology and ideation of school/mass shooters but perhaps that he was quite literally planning a mass shooting and the Trump rally, which was announced ten days in advance, simply provided a ready venue for it. I confess even I have some difficulty quite getting my head around this idea. But there it is. And it suggests that rather than some climate of persecution by which “they” – some fuzzy reference to the vast collective of Trump opposition – tried to kill him, as Republicans are now universally claiming, Trump may have fallen victim to the mass shooting/school shooting culture gun rights activists have done so much to foster.

The minute we found out it was a lone 20 year old gun nut who’d been bullied in school, there was a good chance this was what it was.

The Consensus Gels

Published by digby on July 20, 2024

Contrary to what we’re reading from the Kewl Kidz at Axios and Politico, CNN has a piece today that says the Democrats are actually coming to a consensus that Kamala Harris has to be the nominee if Biden steps aside. (Duh…) The way they describe the dynamic rings true to me:

No one quite knows what the process of picking a new nominee would be if Joe Biden did step aside – but many Democrats say that any process is likelier than ever to quickly end with Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. The informal conversations about how a fight to replace Biden at the top of the ticket would play out have been raging for weeks behind the scenes. But uncertainty about the process has been so unclear it’s given multiple Democrats – even those with serious concerns about Biden – pause about coming out against the president’s candidacy, given that what comes next could be even messier.

“F**k it, I’m coconut pilled. I just want this to stop,” said one well-known Democratic operative, referring to the online meme that has taken off from an old video of the vice president telling a story of her mother saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

It’s not that everyone has suddenly coalesced – but exhaustion is gelling into consensus.Internal polls that show Harris would at least be more helpful to boosting Democratic enthusiasm and aiding down ballot races are getting passed around. Arguments that she would be fastest to put together a campaign are landing harder. Daydreams of her making a more active and vigorous case against Donald Trump are taking root.

Many are deliberately holding off talking about hypotheticals as Biden aides say he plans to get back on the campaign trail next week once he recovers from Covid-19. But if that suddenly changes, two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives told CNN, they can’t realistically see this ending any other way.

Some are pushing for a fast and closed process, where delegates would bless the swap as part of their planned pre-convention virtual nomination plan. Some reject the idea of a coronation, either because they prefer others or don’t like the way that would look. But – though there are musings about quickly creating a series of blitz primaries or town halls – no one can agree how that would work with just over 100 days until the election and much less than that before Democrats are scheduled to gather in Chicago. Still, it’s an idea some Harris backers support, doubting that anyone serious would challenge her, as much chest puffing as there is behind the scenes.

Multiple Democratic members of Congress who have called for Biden to go declined on Friday when asked by CNN if they were ready to say they want Harris to be the nominee.If nothing else, people connected with several of the other possible most serious options and others acknowledge, they would likely feel boxed in by both party loyalty and their own future ambitions. Pressure will be high to unify after the last month of infighting, and anyone who takes her on would be risking torpedoing their reputation with the base in a potential 2028 open primary if she were seen as weakened by that and went on to lose.

Some Democrats believe, even with the threat of early ballot deadlines, it could be settled on the floor of the convention in late August. If this stretches out that long, though, multiple Democrats predicted that the hunger for resolution will only intensify.That’s become ever more likely, those politicians and operatives say, both by how much closer they are to Election Day and by how impressed they’ve been by how the vice president has handled these weeks of Democratic crisis. They argue the vice president has not been caught scheming, even in private conversations, and instead has showcased being fiery and loyal to Biden at a series of campaign stops, which will continue on Saturday at a fundraiser she’s headlining in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

“I do believe it has to be the vice president. She’s campaigning vigorously under the mantle and she’s the natural successor. It’s going to be important in the scenario that the president isn’t the nominee that we rally around her immediately,” said one Democratic House member who asked not to be named so as not to be seen undercutting the president.

You’ve got Never Trumpers like Mike Murphy out there pushing for an open convention probably because, as a Republican, he’s just used to thinking about a Black woman nominee as the kiss of death. But this isn’t 2016 — abortion is on the ballot and women are motivated. Also I would have thought that people who worked for John McCain and Mitt Romney would have gotten over that idea as it pertains to Black candidates.

Anyway, the CNN piece goes on to argue that Biden endorsing is hugely important, which it is, and I expect he would do. It points out that there have been no whispers of her plotting a takeover, not even one and that’s pretty impressive. No one has defended him more vociferously and I think that matters to him.

Read the whole thing, there’s a lot more. I have a suspicion that may be the real state of play. People are exhausted with this and most have to be recognizing that it’s already gone on too long and extending it with some kind of reality show circus would only hurt the ball team. God, I hope so, anyway.

Do You Know What This Means?

Published by digby on July 20, 2024

I have no idea what that is and I lie online. That’s how deep into the right wing weirdo rabbit hole Elon Musk is. He’s basically nuts but he’s massively influential.

Michael Hilzik in the LA Times ponders the problem of this massively wealthy man with a powerful social media platform:

Here’s a handy two-step process for taking a thoughtful and judicious approach to the burning social and political issues of our time:

1. Examine closely the position taken by Elon Musk, and;

2. Go the other way.

Musk’s drift — more precisely, his headlong dive — into right-wing orthodoxies has been well-chronicled. He has openly endorsed antisemitic tropes, called for the prosecution of the respected immunologist Anthony Fauci (evidently buying into the right-wing fantasy that Fauci helped create the COVID-19 pandemic), and associated himself with a grotesquely ugly conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He reversed policies at X, formerly Twitter, designed to block hate speech, including racist and antisemitic tweets. That has turned the platform into a hive of repulsive partisan commentary.

(Musk blames an imaginary advertisers’ “boycott” for the user decline at X, though the repulsive atmosphere of the platform since his acquisition probably has done more to drive users and advertisers away.)

Musk again put his acrid personal worldview vividly on display with his announcement Tuesday that he would move two of his private companies, Hawthorne-based SpaceX and San Francisco-based X, to Texas.

He made clear that his decision was triggered by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of a law that bars school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents of their children’s gender identity changes. Newsom signed the law on Monday.

“This is the final straw,” Musk posted on X. He described the law as one of “many others” in California “attacking both families and companies.”

A few things about this.

If anything, Musk’s corporate activities point to what is often described as a “whim of iron.” He defends his policies and politics as derived from painstaking consideration based on immutable laws of human behavior, but they don’t hold water on those terms. Instead, they point to the social dangers of endowing self-interested personalities with the money to buy unaccountable influence in conflict with the public interest.

Musk appears to have a real problem with transgender rights. According to the Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, this may have originated with the decision of his eldest child, Xavier, to transition at the age of 16. “I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted a relative. “Don’t tell my dad.”

Jenna followed up with a political awakening that Musk ascribed to her attendance at a private school in California. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he told Isaacson. Jenna broke off all contact with him.

Musk moved his company to Texas where he pays no income tax. They are also unremittingly hostile to transgender youth which seems to make him happy.

He also loves to have free rein to treat his employees like dirt:

Musk can scarcely claim that his own corporate policies are family-friendly. They are, however, arguably self-destructive. Consider his treatment of thousands of former Twitter employees who were summarily fired after he took over the platform in October 2022 and are suing to receive severance payments, bonuses and other benefits they were promised before the takeover.

The mass firings have given rise to about 2,000 arbitration cases and a dozen class-action lawsuits, according to Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Massachusetts labor lawyer who represents the workers in arbitration and filed the lawsuits.

Among the workers’ claims is that while Musk was working to close his acquisition of Twitter, as it was then known, the company promised employees that they would be entitled to “benefits and severance at least as favorable” as what Twitter provided before the Musk takeover. The promises were made by company executives in a series of all-hands meetings at Twitter headquarters and were written into the merger agreement Musk and Twitter management negotiated in April 2022.

“The promises were made to keep employees from fleeing the company during those chaotic months before Musk closed on the acquisition,” Liss-Riordan told me. “Then after he closed, he just defaulted on that promise.”

He forced them into arbitration and then refused to pay — just like his new best pal, Donald Trump.

Leaving aside the ethical implications of a company’s forcing employees into arbitration and then refusing to allow the cases to proceed, Musk’s demand that ex-employees submit to arbitration may be exceptionally more costly for the company than trying to reach a general settlement. Arbitration fees can average $100,000 per case, Liss-Riordan told me; hundreds of millions of dollars in claims may be at issue.

“You have to scratch your head over why Elon Musk has to fight this so hard,” she says. “Would it really be that big a deal to pay the employees what was promised to them? Frankly, it doesn’t seem worth his time.”

He has more money than time and he wants to run the world according to his own narcissistic whims. He’s a real mess but has so much money that he can mess the world up right along with him. He is a literally a Bond villain.

BY the way, that illustration seems to be about IQ but I still don’t know what it means and neither do the people commenting on it.