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A Hand Full Of Nothin’

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 13, 2024

Republicans plan “Jan. 6 hearings” on age

Tired: Benghazi-Benghazi-Benghazi. “But her emails.”
Wired: Ageism.

“Joe Biden is better on his worst day than Donald Trump is on his best day,” Lawrence O’Donnell noted Monday night, referencing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s accomplishments in office and physical condition when he ran for a fourth presidential term.

There are serious stakes for these United States in this fall’s elections, particularly regarding who wins the White House. But Republicans are proving themselves no more serious today than they were in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022. They plan to campaign on ageism.

Paul Krugman wrote on Monday, Lincoln’s birthday:

But watching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.

And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election. It reminds me, as it reminds everyone I know, of the 2016 furor over Hillary Clinton’s email server, which was a minor issue that may well have wound up swinging the election to Donald Trump.

Over the weekend, the same Trump who invited Russia to publish hacked Hillary Clinton emails in 2016 invited Russia to invade any NATO country he felt hadn’t paid enough for alliance defense (as though he was being personally cheated). Trump told a MAGA crowd in South Carolina that under a Trump presidency he would not defend that NATO country. He pledged, in essence, to violate U.S. law for which Trump has serially demonstrated his disdain. And for which Trump faces 91 felony counts in multiple jurisdictions.

Trump is “utterly deranged,” tweets Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer.

Republicans’ “cool hand”

Cool Hand Luke once said, “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” And nothing is what Republicans have to offer. So they hope hearings on Joe Biden’s age will do to him what Benghazi and “But her emails” hearings did to Hillary Clinton.

Axios tells us what we already know about the GOP’s fall strategy:

House Republicans are activating a weekslong, perhaps monthslong, plan to keep questions about President Biden’s mental state in the spotlight, Axios has learned.

The big picture: The GOP planning includes hearings and possibly even subpoenas for documents and recordings.

Why it matters: Sources close to House GOP leaders are blunt that they don’t think it even matters what they find. These sources think that any fight will make the White House look bad — and keep a huge Biden vulnerability in the headlines.

They plan to milk the Robert Hur report on Biden’s retention of documents for all the media coverage they’re worth. And to spotlight again and again Hur’s gratuitous smears against Biden’s age.

Next, we’re told, House Republicans plan to seek testimony from Hur — and would ask him both about how Biden’s storage of sensitive documents could have hurt national security, and about the president’s mental acuity in the interview.

If I was as conspiracy-minded as MAGA Republicans, I might believe they were complicit in Hur’s dropping those comments into his report for just this purpose. They knew the press would pounce or at the very least both-sides Trump’s and Biden’s ages. The New York Times and other news outlets are today as willing to help the GOP as they were to promote George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion. It’s no wonder Krugman is worried.

Here are O’Donnell’s comments in full.

Update: O’Donnell was referencing Roosevelt’s accomplishments and physical condition in his third term when he ran for his fourth.

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BREAKING: Senate Passes Ukraine, Israel Aid Package

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 13, 2024

Above banner this a.m. from the Washington Post

Let the follies begin (Washington Post):

The Senate passed a $95 billion national security package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies early Tuesday morning after a monthslong debate that has deeply divided congressional Republicans.

The bill passed 70 to 29, after 22 Republicans joined Democrats in approving the aid.

God immediately told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to reject the Israel aid because the package wasn’t harsh enough on strangers in the land. Johnson dismissed it premptively Monday night.

“In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will o these important matters,” Johnson said in a statement. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”

Johnson’s statement comes after he and other House leaders helped torpedo an earlier version of the legislation that includes sweeping border security measures and other reforms.

The whiny voice of God Johnson is hearing is Donald Trump’s, if not Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speaking through Donald Trump.

“These past few months have been a great test for the US Senate, to see if we could escape the centrifugal pull of partisanship and summon the will to defend Western Democracy when it mattered most,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after the bill passed. “Today, the Senate has resoundingly passed the test.”

That’s a test MAGA Republicans in the House mean to fail. Deliberately.

Ukraine funding has become unpopular among GOP base voters, and Trump said at a recent rally he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO nations that he views are not spending enough money on defense. Trump also explicitly opposed the foreign aid package, saying in a recent social media post that he believes aid should be given as a loan.

That’s because profit and loss, winners and losers, are the only lenses through which Trump the Shallow views the world: What’s in it for me?

House Democrats are exploring using a discharge petition to go around Johnson’s announced blockade, the Post reports. They would need “at least four signatures from Republicans supportive of Ukraine funding” to introduce the petition before the end of the month.

Any Republican who signs would draw a primary challenge this time around or next. Still, Democrats have about 14 Republicans not seeking reelection they might persuade to take a principled stand before leaving. But signing would end whatever future political plans they might have in the Republican Party, not to mention attract death threats against them and their families from an unforgiving MAGA cult.

Democrats’ dishcarge efforts, the Post explains, could also face reservations from their own caucus.

Its path would still be tricky in the House, given that some Democrats have objected to the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza, where most homes have been destroyed or damaged, more than 12,300 children have been killed and a quarter of the population is starving, according to the United Nations. Enough Republicans would need to support the bill to make up for those Democrats who would not vote for the bill over the aid to Israel.

Bringing the legislation to the floor through a discharge petition — which requires 218 members to support it — would avoid Johnson having his fingerprints on the proposal amid calls by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and others to remove him as speaker if he puts a Ukraine funding bill on the House floor for a vote.

Greg Sargent points to a new ABC News-Ipsos survey in which Donald Trump “gets substantially less blame for killing the bipartisan border security deal” Republicans killed last week “than any other major actor in that drama” (The New Republic):

Biden strongly supported the deal, while Trump explicitly and repeatedly called on Republicans to kill it. He expressly asked for the blame for its death to be directed at him. As the measure appeared to be dying, numerous Republicans said openly that Trump was the reason for it, even suggesting that he demanded its demise to give himself an issue against President Biden. Trump himself didn’t bother trying to hide this motive.

Unreconstructed royalists

Yet as president Biden will get the blame, Trump knows. He wants his weapon for the fall campaign. A booming economy and falling inflation no longer work for him. But fear of the Other? It’s as reliable as a knife when your pistol runs out of bullets.

That same Ipsos poll finds Americans trust Trump over Biden to handle immigration by 44 percent to 26 percent: Here Biden gets blame for what’s happening at the border and also for the failure of Congress to improve the situation after Trump commanded Republicans not to.

[…]

No matter how many times Republicans insist the executive can “shut down the border” by himself, the Great and Glorious Donald J. Trump also presided over numerous border crises and even released huge numbers of migrants. Congress largely created this situation. It could make all this better, but as last week showed, it won’t.

Johnson and his caucus of unreconstructed royalists are not serious either about the border or aid to Ukraine and Israel. Fealty to their liege-lord is everything for the power they believe Trump will bring them in a second term. His subjects will need new red hats with ’47’ on them. Trump himself seeks a crown and the immunity from prosecution he believes comes with it.

Update: See Ryan Grim’s account of the Senate vote, of Chris Van Hollen’s speech (he voted yes), and the dire conditions in Gaza created by the far-right extremists in the Netanyahu government. Whatever pressure Washington is applying to Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza is not working. Children are already starving to death.

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This Is Real, Folks

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

This isn’t on some obscure corner of the internet. It’s on Newsmax which is watched by many MAGA Republicans and on which many GOP elected politicians appear:

I just thought you’d want to know what your fellow Americans are watching. Now, go have a drink.

Good Stuff

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

By the way, here’s Trump being “funny.” I’m sure the kids love this stuff.

Tuberville’s Latest

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

People are worried about Biden’s mental acuity but this man is on the Armed Services Committee

Steve Benen points out that this man has access to very important defense information. I think that’s a big mistake:

Over the course of just three years, Sen. Tommy Tuberville has made quite a name for himself. The Alabama Republican is perhaps best known for launching an unprecedented, 10-month blockade, preventing confirmation of U.S. military leaders, but that’s not the right-wing senator’s only notable contribution.

Tuberville has also made headlines for embracing Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” for example, and voting against certification of the 2020 election results. He’s also disputed the racism of white nationalists and presented an unsubtle argument that “inner city” school teachers are lazy and possibly illiterate. He’s also struggled with basic details related to civics and modern American history.

But let’s also not forget that Tuberville has shared a variety of curious thoughts about foreign policy in general and Russia’s attack on Ukraine in specific. Two years ago this month, the Alabaman insisted that Vladimir Putin launched an invasion in order to acquire “more farmland,” because “he can’t feed his people.” The idea that Russia was incapable of feeding its population was plainly wrong, though the GOP senator apparently didn’t know that. (In the same public appearance, Tuberville complained that China’s economy has surpassed the United States’, which also wasn’t even close to being true.)

Two years later, Tuberville is taking a firm stand against U.S. security aid to our Ukrainian allies, and he turned to social media last week to explain why:

“Last night’s [Tucker Carlson’s] interview with Putin shows that Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war. That is why I’m voting to stop 60 BILLION MORE of our tax dollars to this conflict.”

Right off the bat, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the apparent fact that Tuberville considers Russia’s authoritarian leader a credible source. Putin said he’s open to peace, and Tuberville, relying on his vast expertise, is inclined to take the dictator’s rhetoric at face value and give him the benefit of the doubt.

As truly ridiculous as this was, however, let’s not brush past the fact that, according to the senior senator from Alabama, “it is DC warmongers,” and not the Kremlin, “who want to prolong the war.” In other words, Tuberville could hold Putin responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but instead, the Republican is inclined to blame officials in his own country.

All of which leaves me with a lingering question: Why, exactly, is Tommy Tuberville still on the Senate Armed Services Committee?

The man is intellectually challenged and I’m not just being snarky. He’s really dumb and he seems to get dumber every day. I honestly think he’s capable of anything simply because he’s clueless. He’s not the first brain dead Senator but I think he may be the first one who is completely uncontrollable by his staff or any of the other Senators. What can be done about it I don’t know but this is a bad situation.

Why The Biden Coverage Is So Distorted

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

He just doesn’t have enough scandals

JV Last has a very interesting look at the “age problem” in today’s Bulwark that you should read in its entirety if you have the time. He points out all the usual stuff about Biden, who has always been gaffe prone, the stutter etc and points out that Trump is having many similar gaffes and “senior moments” on the trail so the issue in reality is a wash. We have two old candidates and that’s just how it is. But then he explores why this has become such a focus of the campaign, even before the Hur report:

Again, the issue is not the discussion of Biden’s age but the disproportionate focus on it. It’s worth speaking clearly about the reasons for this dynamic among Republicans, among Democrats, and in the press.

For Republicans, Biden’s age is just about the only true thing they can attack him on. In early 2023, it looked like the economy would be a liability for the president. But with solid growth, low unemployment, rising wages, and tamed inflation, it’s looking strong enough now that Trump is preposterously trying to claim credit for the stock market reaching new highs.

Immigration and the border will be a major Republican line of attack this year. But Biden recently agreed to tougher border security and asylum laws, and congressional Republicans rejected it at the behest of Donald Trump. The political attack relies on lying that Biden wants “open borders.”

Meanwhile, attacks on Biden’s son Hunter have fallen flat, because he’s not in government, has no apparent influence, and the accusations against him basically amount to Imagine Hunter did what Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump actually did.

Biden’s age, however, offers Republicans a line of attack with a basis in fact, and it plays into voters’ existing concerns.

Age talk is a double-edged sword: In emphasizing Biden’s age, Republicans also inherently lower expectations for Biden, including for debates. Typically, campaigns try to lower expectations for their own candidate, setting up post-event spin that they outperformed. With Biden, his opponents insist he’s a drooling dementia patient who can’t string a sentence together, then he waltzes over that low bar, as in the 2020 debates.

I think that’s worth looking at. Here’s Biden today, employing something that’s going to be vitally important: humor:

He also discusses the Democrats who are currently calling for the smelling salts like a bunch of Aunt Pittypats:

Some elements of the Democratic coalition have always disliked Biden and they now wish he’d step aside for a more progressive candidate. Some worry about Biden’s re-electability, and wish he’d step aside for a younger candidate. But there’s nothing close to a consensus alternative among Democrats, Vice President Kamala Harris’s net approval is even lower than Biden’s, and he’s running, so it’s moot anyway.

As a result, Democrats’ Biden age discourse is often second- or third-order. There’s concern about his age among voters, yes, but more expressions of concern about that concern. There isn’t enough, there’s too much, you’re not allowed to say it, you won’t shut up about it, etc.

For example, the New York Times quotes Obama strategist David Axelrod lamenting that the special counsel’s comments on Biden’s memory go “to the core of what is plaguing Biden politically.” Interestingly, the Times article introduces Axelrod as “one of the Democratic Party’s leading figures warning about how voters view Mr. Biden’s age.” Note the language: not warning that Biden’s age means he might not be up to the job, but warning that voters see it as a negative.

Last excuses Axelrod and his ilk here for simply saying what democratic strategists need to be concerned about but I disagree. it’s Axelrod and his ilk self-righteously trying to place themselves above the petty concerns of Democratic strategists to preen for the public about what dispassionate observers they are. They are running with the media pack. There are always Democrats who for personal or professional reasons are ready to puff themselves up as being smarter than the alleged hacks who are trying to get the candidate elected.

I don’t know what David Axelrod has against Biden but he’s been hostile to him his whole term. Maybe his old boss Barack could have a chat with him. This is about the future of the world.

This brings up the media and he makes a smart observation. The sheer volume of Trump scandals creates a distortion. Since the media thinks being fair and balanced means they have to offer equal negative coverage to each candidate this is what happens:

To make the levels of negative coverage remotely similar, Biden’s age and mental acuity have to, on their own, balance out many things (including Trump’s age and mental acuity). Think of it this way:

So coverage in the press often inflates Biden’s age as an issue and effectively downplays the importance of Trump’s malfeasance, since there’s so much of it.

That’s absolutely the case. But I also believe that the media is subject to right wing propaganda, particularly if it is snarky and nasty. It just turns them on and you can feel it when it happens. Trump’s schtick long ago stop having that effect but Biden’s “age problem” is fertile ground for this febrile type of pile-on and it creates a group think that many of them seemingly can’t resist. You saw it in living color at the disgraceful press conference last Friday.

The fact is that barring some unpredictable health event, these are the two candidates. And as Last writes:

[I]f you think old and sometimes forgetful is worse than or equal to old, sometimes forgetful, corrupt, bigoted, anti-democracy, criminal, serially lying, and encouraging political violence, or that these things deserve approximately equal attention, that’s nuts.

He’s right. It’s nuts. And it’s going to take some unnecessary heavy lifting to get past the Democratic hand-wringers and the press to make that clear. It should be necessary but it is.

Who Needs Friends?

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

Thank goodness Trump’s going to build a big dome over the whole country so we won’t need any

As we all, know, the biggest story in the world is the breaking news that President Joe Biden is old. Sure 9/11 was something of a big deal and the war in Iraq and the global pandemic required all of our attention for a time, but this is the most important news of our lifetime, maybe anyone’s lifetime and there’s no telling when, or if, the nation will ever recover. Still, it’s probably important to at least pay a tiny bit of attention to other things that are happening in the world just in case they might also be affected by Biden’s age in some way.

In fact, we probably should be just a little bit curious about what the former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson was doing in Moscow last week interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin. Carlson has demonstrated his affinity for Putin for years now and is commonly extolled on the Russian state television channels as a model American with all the right ideas. Back in March of 2022, Mother Jones obtained a copy of a Kremlin memo with talking points for the media:

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”

(People like Carlson used to be called “useful idiots.”) Russian state media has followed those instructions and for the past two years has featured Carlson’s commentary regularly. It’s therefore not all that surprising that he would be granted the coveted interview with Putin.

As it turns out the interview ended up mostly being a twisted history lesson from Putin with Carlson sitting there like a potted plant with a feigned fascinated expression on his face. The point of Putin’s tutorial was to explain why Russia has every right to invade Ukraine and anywhere else he might fancy.

Putin went to great pains to explain why it was the victims in WWII who made Hitler do what he did, specifically the people of Poland whom he blamed for balking at Hitler’s invasion of its country. The entire thrust of the conversation was a very thinly veiled threat to invade Poland. The Polish government certainly heard it that way. The foreign minister posted this on Friday:

He’s right. It isn’t the first time. He’s been saying it for years now and it’s one reason why the NATO alliance has not only been more unified than ever, they’ve welcomed in Finland — another country that shares a border with Russia and is definitely on Putin’s wish list. Sweden has also applied for membership but is still being held up by Russia-friendly Hungary under the leadership of authoritarian dreamboat, Viktor Orban. (There is some hope that this last impediment will be lifted in the near future.) These are countries which had long resisted joining the alliance but moved quickly to do it when Putin expanded his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They see the writing on the wall.

There’s been a ton written about the right’s attraction to Putin for reasons that range from affinity with his macho whiteness and adherence to “traditional values” (homophobia and misogyny) to an appreciation of his willingness to crack down on dissent. He’s their kind of guy. And we know that the man who leads their party, Donald Trump, admires him greatly because he says so all the time. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump was very impressed:

Here’s a guy who’s very savvy … I know him very well. Very, very well. By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

He pays lip service to the idea that Putin is so afraid of Trump that he would never make a move without his permission but the truth is that Trump not only doesn’t care that Putin invaded a sovereign country, he is actively hostile to Ukraine, which he has been persuaded to hate for a variety of reasons many of which were likely put in his head by Putin himself. And as we know, he’s even more hostile to the NATO countries at least partly for the same reason.

He’s been opposed to the alliance for years, mainly because he never understood what it does and why the US should be a part of it. He even admitted it on the trail once back in 2016, saying “I said here’s the problem with NATO: it’s obsolete. Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it, but I learn quickly.”

Whatever he may have learned came up against his unwillingness to ever admit he was wrong so he transformed his critique to the only thing he understands: money. He has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO because the other countries aren’t “making their payments” as if they’re members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club in arrears on their membership dues rather than a mutual defense alliance in which each country has agreed to spend a certain amount on its national defense.

Over the weekend he went further,however, and said something truly dangerous and unhinged:

This kind of loose talk is dangerous and stupid coming from a man who was once president of he United States and is running again. People believe him when he says something like that, not because they can’t take a joke or don’t know that he’s full of hot air, but because it’s entirely believable that he would do exactly that. Everyone knows he doesn’t care about America’s allies and he has made it clear over and over again that he sees no real benefit to them beyond a possible pay out. He posted this on Sunday:

That’s a completely meaningless demand which indicates that even after four years as president, Trump is still as shallow and vacuous as he was the day he was inaugurated.

It’s no doubt a coincidence that he made these comments within days of the Carlson interview with Putin. I find it hard to believe that Trump slogged through that tedious conversation or understood what Putin was talking about. But you can bet that Putin heard Trump and rubbed his hands together with glee. If only the American people heard him just as clearly.

Salon

Blame Rand Paul

Published by digby on February 12, 2024

He and the rest of the MAGA weirdos are making the Senate work around the clock because they’re having a tantrum. From @SenWhitehouse on Sunday night,here’s an explanation for the weekend activities in the Senate:

If you’re sitting around wondering what is happening in the Senate, (a) you need to get a life, and (b) here’s a handy-dandy overview. 

We begin with the rule that spending measures have to originate in the House, so to start a bill like our Ukraine funding measure in the Senate you need to bring a House-passed measure to the Senate Floor. The first step is to proceed to that House-passed measure. 

A group of Republicans objects to all this, so the Majority Leader had to file cloture on that motion to proceed to the House-passed measure, requiring 60 votes.   Getting cloture on that motion was our first vote, 67-32. 

Cloture rules require thirty hours of post-cloture debate, so that debate took place, and then after that came the actual vote to proceed, which only required a simple majority, cloture having been invoked.  That passed on Friday 64-19. 

But the bill we moved to is not the one we want to pass, so we had to substitute in the text that we wanted. 

That too required cloture (filed Friday), which requires an “intervening day” (yesterday) before the vote, as well as the thirty hours after. That second cloture is what we voted on today, 67-27. 

In the meantime, one Senator today tried to send the bill to committee, taking it off the Floor and everybody back to square one, but that measure was tabled by simple majority vote. 

That was the first vote today; then immediately came the 67-27 cloture vote regarding the substitute language. 

Now we have thirty more hours to burn, setting up a vote Monday evening, by a simple majority, to actually effect the substitution of the text of our Ukraine measure for the original text of the House-passed bill. 

Monday’s vote will be the actual vote substituting in our Senate language. Then we have to pass the bill with the new language. 

So a third cloture may be required, with another intervening day, and another vote over 60, and another thirty hours of debate. So this could take a while. 

Much of this procedure is swept aside by agreement, but a group of Senators is so opposed to the bill that they won’t allow unanimous consent to any departure from these procedures.  That agreement is often achieved by agreeing to a schedule of amendment votes. 

Feelings are running so high within the Republican conference, that Republicans have so far been unable to agree on any amendment, let alone a schedule of amendments that can accelerate the schedule.  So here we are.  Now go get a life. 

Rand Paul should get a life.

Work The Media For Fun and Political Profit

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 12, 2024

Go, and do thou likewise.

Biden campaign joins TikTok. By Monday morning this vid had 3.9 million views.

The New York Times, writes Jamison Foser after years of reading “is, politically, a Republican newspaper.”

Okay, so I’m on a rant about the media’s obsession with Biden’s age. Thankfully, Jamison Foser offers suggestions on how to do more than complain or suggest, as lefties regularly do, that the left build its own media platforms. (In the next few months?)

Foser writes at his substack, Finding Gravity:

First, it is important to note that there is a difference between acknowledging that the Times and its ilk won’t change much in response to criticism and thinking they won’t change at all. Forceful, reasoned media critiques can shift behavior around the margins — a little more coverage of something that’s been underplayed, a little less of something over-played, a reconsideration of a unsupported assumption or an underlying bias. It isn’t particularly efficient, it isn’t going to lead to the wholesale changes it should, but in a closely-divided country changes at the margins can be decisive. (It should also be noted that marginal changes work both ways, and if the anti-Trump coalition were to stop working the refs, media coverage might get even worse.)

Second: Changing the news media is not the only goal of media criticism. Another is changing the way people react to the news media. We might not be able to get the media to stop applying a deeply stupid double-standard to Biden and Trump, but if we can get some of their audience to understand that double-standard, we can reduce the harm it causes.

Third: Not only are “Yelling about political coverage” and “telling people how their lives would be different under a Trump presidency vs. a Biden presidency” not mutually exclusive, the former can actually be an effective tool in the latter. And I don’t just mean indirectly, via the marginal improvements discussed above. I mean that media criticism is often a useful vehicle for carrying other messages. When people criticize the New York Times for, for example, downplaying the threat of Donald Trump banning abortion, we aren’t just ineffectually criticizing the Times: We’re telling our audience that Donald Trump will ban abortion.

That might seem like an absurd bank shot; like a really inefficient way of spreading a message. Why not just say Trump will ban abortion? Well, obviously, we should do that, and do it often. The primary way the anti-Trump coalition communicates with voters should not be via media criticism; it should be more direct than that. But we know that a lot of people are mad about the media doing big things badly. We know that, as John Lydon said, anger is an energy. That anger is contagious, and when you’re in the message-spreading business, contagiousness is extremely valuable.

The goal, as Anat Shenker-Osorio says often, is to get your side to sing like a choir, in unison. If your team won’t repeat your message, if they won’t repeat or retweet it, it’s not a good message.

Foser adds, “The news media is not the only audience for media criticism, nor is media criticism qua media criticism completely futile. Don’t stop.”

But don’t be mules for carrying the other team’s message either. Here’s how he suggests professional Democrats likely to be quoted use the media to push back and transmit a counter-message:

If you’re a professional Democrat who supports Joe Biden and a reporter asks you about the politics of Biden’s age, your job is to tell the truth: “Donald Trump is a delusional, addled imbecile who confused a photo of the woman he sexually assaulted for a photo of his own wife, but you biased jackasses in the media are disproportionately obsessed with Biden, just like you helped Trump win in 2016.” Your job is not to sound like some third-tier pundit straining to sound as neutral as possible6 in order to win a PBS contract; it’s to tell the damn truth and help stave off fascism.

It’s a start. A spicy start. Go, and do thou likewise.

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“Come on”? That’s it? “Come on”?

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 12, 2024

That’s no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a train.

Light at the end of the tunnel. Image by JJ via Flickr ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED).

We’ve seen this movie. We watched it in 2016. The press, driven by capitalist imperative to sell newspapers and attract eyeballs, promoted every right-wing smear against Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, most importantly the faux scandal about her private email server.

Clinton was likely the most qualified presidential person Democrats have ever fielded for the presidency. To win the presidency, Clinton first had to be an excellent candidate. She was not that, nor was her campaign up to the job. (Don’t get me started.) Nevertheless, the race to defeat Donald Trump, the TV celebrity and failed casino operator, was close. Her campaign suffered death by a thousand media cuts, flogged by right-wing outlets and in the eleventh-hour by grandstanding of FBI Director Jim Comey.

It’s happening again with the stream of media attention to President Joe Biden’s age. Republican’s all-but nominee Trump is only three years younger and in obvious cognitive decline. (He was mentally unstable in 2016, but that just made him a colorful novelty.) But fear of Trump’s MAGA mob makes Biden look like a softer target.

Ratings, eyeballs, and profits again make Trump better for business. The media’s collective thumb is again on the scale with this year’s “but her emails” narrative hook. News outlets cannot resist “Biden’s too old.”

But this year’s election is not a ratings game or a high school popularity contest. Over a million Americans died under Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s openly declaring his intention to reduce the country to a third-world dicatorship in fact or in effect.

So far, Americans who should know better are watching the same train roll towards them down the same track as 2016 and doing nothing.

Michael Tomasky has something to say about that:

Well, of course both The New York Times and The Washington Post led with stories Saturday morning about Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity. The story of special counsel Robert Hur’s report and its petty rhetoric about the president’s supposed memory lapses broke Thursday afternoon. It was the lead story in both papers Friday, perhaps understandably. But then it was still the lead Saturday. And even on Sunday both papers were still chewing it over, although to its credit, the Post’s Sunday piece didn’t just lazily extend the narrative with another beard-scratching “news analysis” about Democrats’ “deep concern” but reported on what actually happened during Biden’s two interviews with Hur. (Spoiler alert: Nothing occurred in the sessions to make White House aides think that attacks on Biden’s memory would feature in the report at all).

We’re at a fateful crossroads here. On one road, the Avenue of Responsible Sobriety traveled by the Times and the Post and most of the mainstream media, lies legitimate and necessary dialogue about whether any octogenarian, and this one specifically, is fit to be president. But the other road, the Mad Max Hellscape Expressway, has been taken over by the right-wing media, whose interest is not legitimate dialogue but the utter destruction of the octogenarian in question.

We can see where this is headed, writes, Tomasky. “[T]he souped-up Hummers of the Hellscape Expressway will overrun the dainty Priuses of Responsibility Avenue.” Again. Right-wing propaganda outlets pave the national media road that even the “responsible” outlets will drive.

Tomasky summarizes the well-trodden history of the Powell Memo, and the fallout from Trump’s 2020 loss, contested to this day on the right. Surprise, the right quadrupled down on crazy. “Fox, Newsmax, One America, all those Sinclair radio and TV stations, Christian radio, most newspapers out there around the country, the majority of prominent opinion journals, most of largest social media personalities, and more—that now sings from the same hymnal.”

So now what re: Biden’s age? For one, Trump’s speeches are a trove of “but his mental decline” material:

And: What about Donald Trump’s brain? For God’s sakes, he confused E. Jean Carroll with his ex-wife! He makes verbal gaffes all. The. Time. Just last Friday in a speech before an NRA crowd, he made several. He slurred “subsidies” as “subsies.” He groused that it gets covered if he “said one word a little bit mispronunciation.” He confused Biden with Barack Obama (again). He said the Democrats were going to rename Pennsylvania (?!?).

He also said: “Nice Saturday afternoon. I could tell you, if I weren’t doing this, where I would have been, I would have been in a very nice location.”

It was Friday.

Night.

Can you imagine if Biden had done that? The Times covered the NRA speech, as did the Post. Neither piece made any mention of these malapropisms.

The Times emphasized Trump’s comments about Biden’s handling of classified documents, while the Post led with his promises to the crowd on guns. Those were legitimate news judgments by traditional standards. But I can’t help suspecting that if Biden had confused his days, it would have made it into their stories. Maybe even led them.

The problem here is that on the left what we see are complaints about the slanted coverage, as Jason Statler pointed out over the weekend, and as Tomasky does here, observing, “hewing to traditional news standards will do nothing but play handmaiden to democracy’s demise. So sure, Joe Biden’s age is an issue. But I mean, come on.”

“Come on”? That’s it? “Come on”?

As I suggested on Sunday, “Come on” is not going to cut it. What “refs” the right does not own it works. Somehow (Spocko?) those of us who expect this republic to live to fight another day have to actively pound the press as hard as the right does. I’m not sure how, but simply complaining won’t stop the train we all see coming.

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