Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: :
What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson
Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.
Most important from Putin’s point of view, Carlson seemed to share two of his basic assumptions: that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war with the United States and that any negotiations will take place between the Kremlin and the White House, presumably without involving Kyiv. Carlson even nudged Putin to call President Biden and say “Let’s work this out.” To which Putin responded that the message Russia wishes to convey to the U.S. is “Stop supplying weapons. It will be over within a few weeks.”
What Russian Television Viewers Saw
Putin has reprised his history lecture many times. It seems likely that most Russians who watched the entire interview did so out of professional obligation—their job, as propagandists or political appointees, is to amplify and affirm the leader’s message. Ordinary Russians probably watched only outtakes and commentary. What they saw was that something momentous had happened: one of the most popular journalists in America came to interview Putin and looked like a deer in headlights. Channel One stressed both Carlson’s popularity and Americans’ evident interest in what Putin had to say. Carlson’s promotional video in advance of the interview itself had been watched more than a hundred million times! Russians see Carlson, not unreasonably, as a representative of a future Trump Administration, a preview of the coming America in which the liberals who support Ukraine are finally displaced.
What Tucker Carlson’s Viewers Saw
It’s hard to imagine an American viewer who would make it past the first ten minutes of Putin’s monotonous history lecture. (In the interview, Putin called it one of his “dialogues,” betraying either his ignorance or his idea of what constitutes a dialogue; the Kremlin translated “dialogues” as “my long speeches.”) The translator or translators generally cleaned up Putin’s prose, smoothing out passages that, in Russian, made no sense. For example, responding to Carlson’s question about a possible invasion of Poland, Putin said, in Russian, “Because we don’t have any interests in Poland nor in Lithuania—nowhere. What do we need it for? We just don’t have any interests. Only threats.” The translator rendered it as, “Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering.”
In another exchange, the translator took liberties to make Carlson appear more dignified. When Carlson asked Putin about his obsession with fighting Nazism eighty years after Hitler’s death, the President said, in Russian, “Your question seems subtle but is very disgusting.” In English, though, Putin appeared to be praising Carlson’s question as “subtle” while Carlson himself, according to the transcript, called the question “quite pesky”—the words were actually spoken by Putin’s translator. However obscure the subject of Putin’s discursive exercise was, the genre probably looked recognizable to Americans. This was a conversation between an older man who has read a history book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college. Except one of these guys reaches millions of viewers and the other has nuclear weapons.
Tucker Carlson said after the interview:
“The professional liars in Washington . . . are trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take the Sudetenland, or something,” Carlson continued. “Not analogous in any way!”
Gessen writes, “in fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever before, channelled Hitler during the interview.”
Putin has reproduced Hitler’s rhetoric before. Ten years ago, announcing the annexation of Crimea, he seemed to borrow from Hitler’s speech on the annexation of Sudetenland. At the time, I assumed that the language had come from a speechwriter who knew what they were doing while Putin may not have. But the way Putin described the beginning of the Second World War in his interview with Carlson suggests that, although he keeps accusing Ukraine of fostering Nazism, in his mind he might see himself as Hitler, but perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United States and create an alliance with its presumed future President.
It’s telling, too, that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler’s aggression. As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared.
I’m scared. Tucker Carlson is a traitor to decent people everywhere. And he’s brainwashing a whole bunch of people in America. Like this POS:
God bless Tommy Tuberville for actually being stupid enough to say out loud that he’s cutting Ukraine aid because Vladimir Putin told him to pic.twitter.com/2xO5eVn2zM
Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies: I said I would not protect our NATO allies. In fact, I would encourage Russia to do whatever the hell they want pic.twitter.com/ak1a3Mtwzq
Ron Brownstein has written an in-depth piece for the Atlantic about Trump’s 2nd term immigration agenda. It is terrifying. But Trump and his henchmen are dead serious about carrying it out this time. And the reasoning isn’t just to get rid of immigrants they don’t like. It’s to demonstrate and consolidate power to rule by force in many other ways as well. Don’t think you won’t be affected.
Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
“What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”
How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.
[…]
Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.
To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.
In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.
Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”
The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.
The article goes into great detail about how they hope to accomplish this and what the consequences might be. Most people he interviewed seem to think that they can theoretically do it but the result will be civic unrest unlike anything we’ve seen since the civil war.
In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.
These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?
For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.
“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”
If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning.
So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice.
Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter.
Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks.
During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home.
The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.
Hur indicates that in order to convict Biden of willfully retaining classified documents, the prosecution would have to prove that 1. These are the same documents and 2. That Biden remembers that single sentence from 2017.
It’s against this backdrop Hur says:
When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ”all the classified stuff downstairs,” his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.
Notably, the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden’s dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage-in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus-suggests the documents might have been forgotten.
In addition. Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.
Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all. They could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation. This would rebut charges that he willfully retained the documents in Virginia.
Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified 5 documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.
In other words, the totality of the case on the Afghanistan documents would come down to whether he remembered a single un-noteworthy sentence he spoke seven years ago that may or may not have referred to the Afghanistan documents.
The Hur says:
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.
That’s the entire context. Do you remember every sentence you spoke in 2017? I sure as hell don’t.
Oh, and regarding the notebooks. There is no controversy over whether Biden knew he had those. He had handwritten notes with classified information on them.
However, Biden claims that they are personal and points to Reagan (who did the same thing) as a historic precedent.
Note it was Biden who made this argument, not his lawyers. (In fact, he made this argument to his lawyers.) Hur declined to prosecute this on the grounds that Biden is probably right.
Not bad for a dude with dementia.
Also, one other thing you won’t see on Fox is that Hur goes through an entire section explaining why Trump’s case is prosecutable but Biden’s isn’t.
Here’s what he said about that:
…Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.
Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.
All the media cared about was Hur’s character assassination because they are lazy, delayed adolescents when it comes to this stuff and they easily succumb to a “Lord of the Flies” mentality, which the right understands very well and knows exactly how to tickle their lizrd brains.
James Fallows has a great newsletter that you should subscribe to if you can. He’s been writing about all this, particularly the political press, for many years and his perspective is extremely valuable.
This week he starts off interrogating the idea that age is a static thing for everyone and he quotes some experts on the subject:
Last month several doctors and other authors assessed evidence that Biden was on the fortunate side of that divide, a “superager” on the Holmes / Stevens / Carter model. This is even though Biden “reads” as older than his near-contemporary Trump, mainly because of the stiffness of his gait. In this piece at MedPage Today and this in The Hill the authors emphasized differential aging rates and said about Biden:
The geriatricians evaluating Biden’s medical history in 2020 found evidence to suggest he could be a “superager” — a subgroup of people aged 80 years and older that operate physically and cognitively at a level that is common among those much younger.1
There is no clinical evidence for cognitive decline in President Biden — despite armchair gerontologists declaring otherwise.
Then he asks a pertinent question. Might age be an advantage? In our youth obsessed culture that’s heresy but he makes a good case:
The job of president finally comes down to judgment calls. Emphasize this bill, and not that one. (For Obama: the health-care act, versus a big environmental act.) Compromise here, but draw the line there. (For Biden, the tradeoffs necessary to get the big economic bills through.) Fight for this appointment, but give up on that one. (For Biden, going with some GOP choices for judges.) Trust this person, not that. Decide where to fight (Ukraine), where to fall back (Afghanistan).
The presidents we respect, looking back, mainly distinguished themselves with these big calls. By my lights, Biden has made these calls correctly at an unusually high rate. There are some missed opportunities he will look back on, but fewer than most of his predecessors. Even if you disagree with his calls, I think you’d have to observe that they were made in a sane and orderly way, through advisors who have shown far less back-biting and squabbling than in previous administrations, and with practically no scandals.
The same Hill piece says on this point, with emphasis in original:
Verbal memory, inductive reasoning and vocabulary increase with age — cognitive skills particularly important for decision-making.
It’s true that “fluid intelligence” (the capacity to learn new ways of solving problems and performing activities quickly and abstractly) does indeed decline with age. But “crystallized intelligence” (accumulated knowledge that allows for intelligent decision-making) and “tacit knowledge” (practical or pragmatic knowledge learned through experience) increase with age.
In practical terms, someone President Biden’s age might take a longer time to learn how to fly a plane, but he would be less likely to crash it relative to a younger person.
(Or a stupid, sociopath but that’s another story.)
I think that’s key. I have often tried to imagine how Biden would have handled COVID differently that Trump and I think it’s obvious that he wouldn’t have been telling people to use snake oil or lying about the threat in order help his reelection campaign. But even more importantly, he would have known how to deploy the federal government in the early days to get the medical supplies to places like NY City where people were dying by the thousands and move the congress much faster to deal with the economic fallout. He would have ensured that the people who were charged with the details were experienced hands who knew what they were doing. Trump did none of that because he’s a narcissistic imbecile and he empowered people like his arrogant, inexperienced son-in-law to handle the emergency.
Fallows on the mix-up of Egyptian president Al-Sisi in his press conference:
-First, everyone does this. A weary Barack Obama once said that had been to “all 57 states” of the country. I once introduced a panelist at a conference with her middle rather than her last name. As a pilot I’ve screwed up read-backs of frequencies and routings to air traffic control. On the same show last night in which he talked about Biden’s “Mexico” gaffe, Jesse Watters, of Fox, started an interview with Kristi Noem by introducing her as “Governor of South Carolina,” rather than South Dakota, where she actually serves.
All of this is the spoken version of “auto-correct” on a computer, which often fills in things in ways we don’t intend. And it’s very highly correlated with fatigue.
-Second, Biden’s illustrations are neither repeated (like Donald Trump’s Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi), nor grossly fictitious. (As when Trump said in New Hampshire that he had carried the state in general elections, which he had not.) It’s like the difference in how the two men handled classified information they had taken home, according to the new special counsel report. Biden erred largely by inadvertence, and corrected the problem when it was found. Trump stonewalled.
Was “Sisi of Mexico” a gaffe for Joe Biden? Yes. But one worth keeping in perspective, unless there is evidence that Biden has confused the underlying realities, not just the names,
He did not confuse the underlying realities as he amply demonstrated in the entirely cogent comment within which that slip occurred. Ask yourself if Trump could have ever said something like this:
Q A question on Israel, sir. Can you provide an update on the hostage negotiations? The hostage negotiations — can you provide an update of the hostage negotiations in Israel?
THE PRESIDENT: The hostage negotiation, look —
I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip has been over the top. I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico [Egypt], El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.
I talked to Bibi to open the gate on the Israeli side. I’ve been pushing really hard — really hard to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza. There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop, number one.
Number two, I was also in the position that I’m the guy that made the case that we have to do much more to increase the amount of material going in, including fuel, including other items. I’ve been on the phone with the Qataris, I’ve been on the phone with the Egyptians, I’ve been on the phone with the Saudis to get as much aid as we possibly can into Gaza.
There are innocent people — innocent women and children — who are also in bad — badly in need of help. And so, that’s what we’re pushing right now.
And I’m pushing very hard now to deal with this hostage ceasefire. Because, as I — you know, I’ve been working tirelessly in this deal — how can I say this without revealing? — to lead to a sustained pause in the fighting in — the actions taking place in — in the Gaza Strip.
And — because I think if we can get the delay for that — the initial delay, I think that we would be able to extend that so that we can increase the prospect that this fighting in Gaza changes.
There’s also negotiations — you may recall, in the very beginning, right after — right before Hamas attacked, I was in contact with the Saudis and others to work out a deal where they would recognize Israel’s right to exist, let them — make them part of the Middle East, recognize them fully, in return for certain things that the United States would commit to do.
And the commitment to — that we were proposing to do related to two — to two items. I’m not going to go in detail. But one of them was to deal with the protection against their arch enemy to the northwest — northeast, I should say. The second one, by providing ammunition and materiel for them to defend themselves.
Coincidentally, that’s the timeframe when this broke out. I have no proof for what I’m about to say, but it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the — Hamas understood what was about to take place and wanted to break it up before it happened.
Here’s how Trump answers when asked about Gaza:
In an interview with Univision he said this:
“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out. You’re probably going to have to let it play out because a lot of people are dying.
“It should have never started. There was no way it would have started again. Iran didn’t have the money because Iran is leading this. And only fools would say that’s not true. They’re leading this. They’re very tricky, very smart, very cunning. They’re leading it, and it’s got to end.”
“There is no hatred like the Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jewish people. And probably the other way around also; I don’t know. You know, it’s not as obvious, but probably that’s it too. So sometimes you have to let things play out and you have to see where it ends.”
Here he is on the stump promising to deport anyone who protested against the Israeli actions in Gaza:
Fallows on the press:
After Biden finished his remarks last night, White House reporters bayed and yelled at him, more aggressively than I can ever recall. They exceeded the baseline I wrote about nearly 30 years ago in the book Breaking the News, about the macho-style code of the press room that equated being ill-mannered with being intellectually tough:
Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.
After this yelling session, most of the leading press ran stories like this one in the NYT, saying that the one word—Mexico—had:
placed Mr. Biden’s advanced age, the singularly uncomfortable subject looming over his re-election bid, back at the center of America’s political conversation.
Note the agent-free verb “placed.” It’s actually the journalists who are placing it there—as they placed Hillary Clinton’s emails eight years ago, and as they have not placed Donald Trump’s Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley.3 Putting your own spin and frame on events is fine. That’s what I’m doing here. But when you’re going to do it, it’s better just to say so.
Personally, I think he’s being too nice here. The media was utterly disgraceful in that press conference. They were screaming and screeching like jackals. Note this rude exchange:
Q Mr. President, for months when you were asked about your age, you would respond with the words “Watch me.”
THE PRESIDENT: Watch me.
Q Many American people have been watching, and they have expressed concerns about your age. They —
THE PRESIDENT: That is your judgement.
Q They —
THE PRESIDENT: That is your judgement.
Q This is according to public polling.
THE PRESIDENT: That is not the judgement —
Q They express concerns —
THE PRESIDENT: — of the press.
Q They express concerns about your mental acuity. They say that you are too old.
Mr. President, in December, you told me that you believe there are many other Democrats who could defeat Donald Trump. So, why does it have to be you now? Why — what is your answer to that question?
What is a person supposed to say to something like that? Is it designed to elicit some information or is it just a nasty question designed to elicit an emotional reaction? It’s a nasty way of asking, “have you any plans to drop out of the race?” which is also inappropriate because it’s clear he does not. It’s just designed to embarrass him to his face in front of the whole country. It’s not journalism.
His answer to this question, by the way, was spot on:
Because I’m the most qualified person in this country to be President of the United States and finish the job I started.
So STFU.
Another ridiculous person asked this one:
Q Mr. President, why are you confusing the names of world leaders?
As Fallows says, everyone does that including half the Fox New hosts, just this week. I do it all the time.
Who the hell do these people think they are? Ah, I know the answer. They are like piranhas in a feeding frenzy when these kinds of scandals hit and I hate to say but it there are way too many liberals and progressives who get all febrile and excited when there’s blood in the water and forget themselves as well. The media kewl kidz have been doing this for many years now and I guess there’s no end to it.
These are the results:
They haven’t learned a thing.
I agree wholeheartedly with Fallows on this point:
The best test of whether people “can” do a job is how they have actually done it. I would argue that Biden, the oldest president ever, has been one of the best at doing the job in decades. Choosing and managing a staff. Guiding through his legislation. Containing frictions within his own party. Taking advantage of chaos and schisms on the other side. Meanwhile presiding over the most broadly-based economic growth most Americans have ever experienced.
Maybe if the press could find the time between their gleeful enjoyment of ageist snark about Biden and shrugging over the fact that his opponent is a fascist imbecile they could squeeze in a few of those facts as well.
Actually it’s also that he is losing what’s left of his limited faculties and it’s been happening for a long time. The mainstream media never questioned this lunatic’s mental fitness the way they are Biden’s:
Why do we talk about Biden's age, gaffes, & mental competence while ignoring… Trump's?
Courtesy of the @MehdiHasanShow, here's Trump, in his own insane, stumbled, weird words & actions, from Yo-Semites to Thighland to flushes & showers.
Meanwhile, Biden has successfully brought the nation back from economic catastrophe in record time and better than any of our peer countries, managed to get major bipartisan legislation passed under almost impossible circumstances and reassured allies that we haven’t gone completely batshit insane. For that he’s getting the Clinton emails treatment from Republican functionaries foolishly empowered by the Democratic Party and the godforsaken press, the members of which will be the first ones rounded up for the camps once they deport every brown-skinned immigrant in the country, (And that’s if the entire business of mainstream journalism hasn’t completely collapsed before then.)
It’s hard to belive that we’d have to go through this again but here we are.
Republicans living in glass houses, etc. God bless the United Shhates.
Savage — Morning Joe put together a montage of Trump wandering away from public events when wasn't supposed to, set to the Allman Brothers' "Ramblin' Man" pic.twitter.com/5IAOiC76ce
There was lots of talk this week about Nikki Haley losing to “none of the above” in a nevada primary that Trump didn’t participate in and Trump was in Nevada patting himself on the back for his so-called triumph in the rigged caucus that Haley didn’t participate in. It was, all in all, something of a shit show. But get a load of this:
Both Biden and Trump have the nominations locked up. Haley is a protest vote at this point, We don’t know how many Haley voters will hold their nose and vote for him next November but I would guess that most of them will. But the numbers he’s putting up in these primaries shows that he’s going to need every last one of them.
Maybe at some point we’ll see the media talking about that. Until then, tell a friend. That may be the only way they’ll hear about this.
Michael Tomasky’s leadership of the New Republic has been a breath of fresh air. If you haven’t given it a look in years you need to go back to it and check it out. I don’t think it’s ever been this good.And Tomasky himself is writing a lot and it’s all characteristically sharp. Take this insight which I think is right on, made in the wake of the monumentally embarrassing week for congressional Republicans:
Republicans today are consumed by this primal need for immediate gratification. They’re the party of the dopamine rush. Go read an article about the brain, and you’ll learn in five minutes that dopamine helps regulate pleasure, and pleasure is great, but too much dopamine leads to delusions, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis. The entire party has a massive and collective mental disorder, a severe chemical imbalance in what remains of its collective brain, which explains why it kneels so slavishly before a psychotic man with the emotional regulation of a 5-year-old.
Like rutting ungulates, they are incapable of anything remotely resembling thought and respond only to the stimuli right in front of their noses. Deliberation, caution, calm reflection … these are the qualities that most of us have in more or less equal measure to the desire for gratification. These are the qualities that are most in harmony with the habits of democracy. To be small-d democratic is to deliberate; to think things through a little. This country’s Founders believed profoundly in this, which is why they built so many choke points into our democratic processes (too many, as it turns out). They wanted future generations to think stuff through.
But these people are stuck in the land of anti-thought. And because that’s where they live, it means that in many respects it’s where we all have to live, because that’s where a lot of our national debate plays out.
The border debate is a perfect example. There are a lot of problems with U.S. border policy. Undoubtedly some of them are the fault of Democrats. It’s reasonable that people should want more control over the border. But at the same time, it’s a complex problem, and any real solutions are complex too. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, to his credit, tried to acknowledge that reality. And what happened? He was brutally shut down. It was chiefly Donald Trump, but it wasn’t only Trump. One right-wing talk radio host threatened to “destroy” him.
But it’s not just the border. It’s everything. The Mayorkas impeachment. I suppose there are many grounds from a conservative point of view on which to think he’s doing a lousy job. That’s fine. But a high crime or a misdemeanor? Ridiculous. That doesn’t matter, though. The mere word impeachment makes the mules rut, and there ends the discussion.
James Comer and Jim Jordan are another primo example. They just go on Fox and Newsmax and say shit. It’s not about facts or methodically building a case. It’s all about the dopamine rush of being on national television and saying titillating things that rile people up and get the checks rolling in. When they have to walk it back two days later, nobody cares. In fact, they’ve accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, which is to add to the general picture of murkiness surrounding Hunter Biden or whatever. And they walk out of that studio feeling eight miles high.
And that’s where our political debate takes place now. It used to be that dopamine-rush politics was occasional. Both sides did it on issues that clearly worked to their advantage, as Democrats still do. But with the GOP today, that’s all politics is. The immediate gratification of having scored a point, trolled a lib, won a little wedge of Fox airtime—and most of all pleased Donald Trump.
All they care about is that sweet hit of dopamine they get in front of the cameras. This isn’t politics at all. It’s more like a sad little talent show.
Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I’m not holding out much hope at this point. I’m referring, of course, to their inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of Special Prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the results have been predictable.
The idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in comparison to the hacks on the GOP side and it just ends up coming back to bite them. The habit goes back to Watergate after President Richard Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon had Cox replaced with one of his supporters, Texas Judge Leon Jaworski, whom everyone assumed would be sympathetic to the president. As it turned out he was appalled by what he saw and issued subpoenas for the tapes which wound up in the Supreme Court as US v Nixon. However, it was later revealed that Jaworski didn’t agree with the Grand Jury’s recommendation to criminally indict the president and resigned from the job just as the cover-up trials began. As we know, it all became moot when President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.
When the Reagan White House came under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair a Republican judge named Lawrence Walsh was appointed by a three judge panel under the new Independent Counsel statute. He was a pretty zealous prosecutor and uncovered quite a bit of dirt but in the end was thwarted by President George H. W. Bush and his Attorney General William Barr who pardoned all the possible defendants just before Bush left office in 1992. Funny how that worked out for Republicans again.
During the Clinton years, Attorney General Janet Reno named Republican Robert Fiske as special prosecutor to investigate the Whitewater scandal and he was later replaced in the job by ultra conservative Republican judge Kenneth Starr after Clinton himself signed the re-authorization of the Independent Counsel Act giving a three judge panel of right wing partisans the ability to assign one of their cronies.
I’ll never forget when Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans put the Starr Report, sight unseen, on the internet only to find out that it was a downright pornographic romance novel (partly written by the man who became Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) which had as much resemblance to a legal document as a grocery store receipt. It ushered in a new era in right wing hit jobs that ended up backfiring on the Republicans but not before causing massive damage to the lives and reputations of dozens of people.
Fast forward to 2016 and the Russia Investigation, headed by yet another Republican, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. The GOP Department of Justice knew it wouldn’t be right to have a Democrat investigate a Republican president. Why they might be partisan!
Special Counsel is a Republican job, no matter what. Until the appointment of Jack Smith who has been assiduously apolitical during his career, there has never been anything but Republicans in the job since Archibald Cox and it’s a problem.
I bring this up because yesterday the special prosecutor assigned to investigate whether President Joe Biden committed any crimes by retaining some classified documents from his time as a senator and Vice President announced that he was declining to prosecute for lack of evidence that Biden had willfully taken them or obstructed the investigation as Donald Trump had done. Like VP Mike Pence, it appears that he unknowingly took some classified documents when he left office which is apparently not all that uncommon. What is uncommon is for someone to try to hide them from the authorities and refuse to give them back as Trump has been indicted for doing.
But Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican, Trump-appointed Justice Department holdover who, once again, was appointed by a Democratic Attorney General in order to prove just how “non-partisan” the department is. So Hur wrote a voluminous 388 page report which most legal observers believe could have been done in 50, if not less. He could have simply said he declined to prosecute and left it at that but what he did was nothing less than a partisan hit job masquerading as a prosecutorial declination.
Despite laying out in detail that he could find no evidence that Biden committed any crime, making it clear that what he did do was far less egregious than what Trump is accused of doing and declaring that he would not prosecute Biden even if he were out of office, Hur wrote what amounts to a chatty little novel about what he thinks of Biden’s personality and mental capabilities. Perhaps his parents really wanted him to be a psychiatrist or a neurologist instead of a lawyer and this was his big chance to make them proud but it was entirely inappropriate.
He opens the report with what amounts to a character study of Biden that suggests he has delusions of grandeur because he saved papers early in his career because he thought he might be president someday. Then he embeds in the the report a fatuous rationalization that he personally believes that if he were to bring the case to a jury — a case which he has already stated he could not find the evidence to prove — they would feel sorry for Biden because he is a “well-meaning, elderly gentleman with a bad memory.” He dug deep to find a way to get that in there. He pretty much implies that the president is demented because he didn’t perfectly remember dates from the past, something which defense lawyers commonly tell their clients to be careful about trying to do under oath.
It’s a nasty piece of slander that Hur no doubt believed served the purpose of preserving his place in MAGAworld without him having to recommend charges based on nothing. As one of president Obama’s top advisers put it:
Let's be clear–the special counsel isn't a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn't have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.
This reaction from Tennessee GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn is typical:
It’s hard to imagine House Republicans would use this heavily padded tome as the basis for an impeachment article since it would also put Trump’s stolen documents case back on the front burner again but they might just do it. Lord knows the rest of their case is going nowhere. If I were a conspiracy minded person I might even think that Hur took a page out of Ken Starr’s bodice-ripper and wrote it just for that purpose. If so, they might want to check in with Newt Gingrich about how well that worked out for them.
This was a shamefully inappropriate cheap shot against President Biden but in the end, despite the media’s febrile “but her emails” reaction, I doubt that this changes much in the dynamic as long as the Republicans are all genuflecting to the man whose memory is so bad that he mistakenly identified his rape victim as his former wife during a deposition. They have much bigger problems on their hands,
