Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

DeSantis should be held liable for this malfeasance

Will Bunch takes on the latest far-right GOP plot to kill Americans. That’s not really hyperbole. The way they behave about public health is a crime. It’s one thing to tell people to be practical and do what they can to protect themselves and others without requiring lockdowns or mandates. That seems to be the consensus as we go into this new surge. But to say the vaccines are dangerous is just plain evil.

They just don’t give a damn about the vulnerable people in our country. I guess that’s nothing new. But it’s never been more obvious.

The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list.

His own citizens.

In what should be seen as an alarming moment in America’s descent into misinformation and political demagoguery, DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, is telling Florida residents under age 65 to avoid a new anti-COVID booster vaccine. That’s the exact opposite of what the nation’s public-health agencies and most experts are recommending to prevent a fall 2023 resurgence of the pandemic. Our would-be POTUS DeSantis is totally on board with his anti-vax medical adviser, claiming he won’t allow healthy Floridians to be “guinea pigs.”

But history and science suggest that some folks who refuse to become “guinea pigs” could become corpses, or will suffer the debilitating impact of long COVID. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had two words for the Washington Post about Florida’s anti-vaccine guidance: “It’s dangerous.”

Offit told the newspaper there’s legitimate debate over who should be prioritized for receiving the new booster — reformulated to attack recent, dominant strains of the coronavirus — but that what Lapado and DeSantis are doing is casting deeper and unwarranted doubt on the effacy of COVID-19 vaccines more generally. “They have been given a platform and abused it,” he said.

Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing.

[…]

On one level, the current anti-vax follies in the Sunshine State are a grim warning of how the United States might respond — or not respond — to the next pandemic that arrives on our shores. But the dangerous doctoring of Lapado also points to something even more insidious: the GOP promise, through a formal agenda known as Project 2025, to “demolish the administrative state” by undoing civil service protection, so that career servants and experts could be replaced with true believers in the religion of Trumpism.

That would mean that key federal decisions about your health and welfare would be made by zealots like Lapado, who was hired in 2022 by DeSantis as the state’s top health official even after his colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles said the surgeon exaggerated his own experiences in treating COVID-19 and that they wouldn’t recommend him for the Florida post because he had “created stress and acrimony” with his anti-vaccine views.

It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that a special task force at the University of Florida, where Lapado was given a tenured faculty post, found that the state’s top doc used flawed science and may have violated the school’s integrity rules when he recommended that men under 40 should not take the then-current iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine. The panel found that his recommendation — claiming an increased risk of heart problems — was based on a small sample studied with shaky methodology.

And yet Lapado was not disciplined. Instead, he has become point man for DeSantis’s 90-degree right-turn on vaccine science, which has coincided with his run for the presidency. The Florida governor’s early support for COVID-19 vaccines was reflected in the state’s early 70% vaccination rate, on par with the rest of the United States. That was before DeSantis stuck his finger in the wind and grasped that public-health measures and the public face of those interventions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, were increasingly seen by core GOP voters as threats to liberty from “a deep state.” Now, only 12% of Floridians received the most recent booster shot, compared to 17% nationwide.

An in-depth analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that Florida’s drop-off in vaccinations left the state ill-prepared when the Delta variant of COVID-19 hit in late 2021. During those months, the newspaper found, Florida actually had a higher death rate than almost any other state. The 23,000 who died in Florida included 9,000 people under age 65, the group that Lapado now urges not to get a booster; most of those who succumbed, according to the Times, were unvaccinated or had not received the second dose.

How many thousands more of Floridians will die needlessly this fall because of the politically poisonous Big Lie about vaccines from DeSantis and Lapado? In fact, the current anti-vaccine and anti-federal government is so extreme that public health experts are deeply concerned they’ll be a drop in other vaccines like the flu shot or protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) headed into the winter virus season. That could be disastrous in a state with so many elderly residents.

These are the stakes, looking ahead to next year’s election. We don’t have to speculate about what Republican government in 2025 and beyond would look like. Just look south to Florida, an authoritarian regime where knowledge and expertise are increasingly despised, cruelty is the point of government, and needless death and despair is on the rise. Meanwhile, pray for the souls of those swayed by the cynical anti-science of DeSantis and Lapado. They are the only real “guinea pigs” here.

If Trump wins, you don’t need to have any doubt that he will never allow himself to be on the wrong side of the anti-health wingnuts again. You don’t even want to think about what might happen.

I keep hearing the right wingers bellow that “they’re coming for your children” and “keep your hands off my kids!”

Uh huh:

While right-wing groups are mobilizing angry mobs to yell at school board members that parents have the right to control what their children are taught, evangelical pollster George Barna told religious-right activists at the Family Research Council’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit Thursday that it is their duty to try to indoctrinate other people’s children into a “biblical worldview.”

Barna, one of the first senior fellows at FRC’s recently established Center for Biblical Worldview, specializes in studying what he calls “SAGE Cons”—Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians. What is most striking about FRC and Barna’s “worldview” project is how few people—and how few conservative evangelicals—measure up to their right-wing “biblical worldview” standard.

When the Center for Biblical Worldview launched in May, FRC President Tony Perkins said that a biblical worldview “is only achieved when a person believes that the Bible is true, authoritative, and then taught how it is applicable to every area of life, which enables them to live out those beliefs.”

Barna told “Pray Vote Stand” attendees that only 6 percent of American adults measure up to that standard of a biblical worldview—and only one out of five people who attend an evangelical church.

“Biblically, it’s parents’ responsibility to shape their children’s worldview—both directly and indirectly,” Barna declared. But, he said, only 7 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 have a biblical worldview. That’s a problem that people with a biblical worldview must fix, he said:

That doesn’t portend well for the future because you can’t give what you don’t have. And so, the rest of us who do get it have to come alongside these children in some way. We’ve got to look for opportunities—sports teams, other kinds of activities that are taking place to help them shape things. You can’t wait for your church to get the job done.

…

This is a battle for the mind, the heart, and the soul of America, and so it’s up to you. It’s up to me—those of us who know God, love God, love Christ, read his word, study his word, embrace, embody his word—and to take that into the world in every way, shape, and form that we can.

Ultimately, we will win or lose this battle long term by what we do with children today. And so when you leave this conference, I’m asking you to think about making a list identifying the children whose lives you can impact. It is our biblical responsibility to raise up children to know, love, and serve God the all their heart, mind, strength, and soul, and I pray that you will do that with all the energy and wisdom that you can muster.

Barna’s PowerPoint slide hammered home his message that parents without a biblical worldview have “neither the vision nor the equipping” to “raise spiritual champions.” That means, it said, “True Christians must seize the moment … Go, make disciples!”

Sure, no problem. But a pride flag is an abomination.

Timothy Snyder on the dangers of the fantasy that the oligarchs will save us:

The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon.

Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it happened, in a biography of Elon Musk and its press campaign. Although neither Musk nor his biographer can get the story straight, it is true that the multibillionaire CEO of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) refused to extend the coverage of his Starlink satellite communications for the Ukrainian armed forces last autumn.

Musk did so because Russians (sometimes he says Putin) told him that a Ukrainian attack on part of Ukraine’s own territory (the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia) would lead to a Russian nuclear response. This was a lie. Ukraine has carried out dozens of operations in Crimea, some of them quite spectacular. It seems absurd to have to write this sentence, but none of them led to nuclear war. The net effect of such operations was de-escalatory, as such attacks reduce Russia’s capability to attack Ukrainian territory.

Since we all know this from abundant experience, no one should have gone to press with the claim that Musk prevented nuclear war by stopping a Ukrainian attack on a Russian ship docked in Ukrainian territory. As if to punctuate the point, Ukraine has attacked several Russian ships in the past few days. Russia has retaliated by promising to repair them. The Russians know that they are in a war and that the other side is allowed to fight back.

After 19 months of war, most observers have understood that Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation, an attempt to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender. The claim that Musk prevented escalation repackages Russian propaganda, and helps it to find a new audience. It provides a platform to Russian lies meant to demoralise.

In fact, Musk’s actions have increased the chances of nuclear war. There is always some risk, which Russia increased by initiating a major conflict. Ukraine then decreased the probability by ignoring Russian nuclear blackmail. If Ukraine had surrendered, then the lesson for the rest of the world would have been clear: you must have nuclear weapons, either to blackmail or to avoid being blackmailed. The Ukrainians took this decision under stress, since if a weapon were detonated it would be on their territory. Musk, who was in no danger of any kind, chose instead to give in to the nuclear blackmail, thereby encouraging more of it.

If anything, Musk’s actions also extended the conventional war. After three major battlefield victories last year, the Ukrainians had a chance to put an end to the Russian occupation by striking south. One problem, to be fair to Musk, was that their western allies had not supplied them with the necessary weapons in time. But without comms, a meaningful advance was impossible. This gave the Russian side time to build the fortifications and lay the mines that make this year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive so much harder. Last week I visited a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv, and spoke to soldiers who had lost limbs.In almost every case, they had been wounded by mines. All of them had comrades killed by mines.

Everything Musk thought he was making better, he made worse. Since then, Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe, and moving closer to a common fascist position with Putin. In a race to the bottom, both men in recent days have been blaming antisemitism on the Jews. It is not going well for Russia on the battlefield, but Musk’s handlers can certainly say that they have done their part.

Perhaps the saddest part of this affair is the celebration of a coward at the expense of people showing physical courage. Ukrainians have absorbed and reversed a full-scale invasion by the world’s largest country at tremendous cost; Musk is a guy who makes a show of not fighting Mark Zuckerberg. In presenting Musk’s psychological vulnerability as wartime glory, the biography invites us into a world where our baseless fears are the truth, and the real courage of others the distraction. The Russians played Musk the same way that social media plays the rest of us, seeking out a personal anxiety, getting us to act on it, then profiting from the cognitive dissonance.

The oligarchs will be cowards, oriented to fantasies of escape to New Zealand or Mars or immortality or whatever, disinvested from the hard choices the rest of us have to make amid the crises they are making worse. Among other awful things, Putin’s war in Ukraine was oligarchical whimsy, based on the fantasy that Ukraine does not exist and its people wish to be Russian. There are things so stupid that you must be a multibillionaire to believe them; but when it all goes wrong, another multibillionaire will offer even more stupid succour, as Musk has done for Putin.

It is hard to think of a more dangerous idea than the one that people like Musk and Putin are heroes saving the rest of us from our own limitations. The plotline about the oligarchical supermen is indeed fictional, but it does real harm in the real world.

It is frightening that any government is relying on Musk for anything to do with national security. Terrifying, actually.

The press decided to pivot to Old Brandon

Dan Pfeiffer in his newsletter today takes it to the media for their coverage of Biden’s age. After watching Meet the Press today, I’m fed up:

Here’s how the self-proclaimed paper of record decided to report on President Biden’s grueling 5-day trip to Asia. Nearly every line of the story is rage-inducing, but this might be the most annoying part:

In three days of diplomacy in Asia, President Biden rallied world leaders to help finance poor nations, fortified the coalition backing Ukraine and struck a deal with Vietnam to counter Chinese aggression.

But even before he left Vietnam on Sunday night, the president was hammered with a very different narrative. By Monday morning, as the 80-year-old president was flying home on Air Force One, conservative media outlets had seized on his end-of-trip news conference as the latest evidence that he is too old to perform on the world stage.

I promise you that the apparatchiks at the Trump campaign are high-fiving over the fact that they got the New York Times to push their chosen narrative about Biden even though the entire trip undermined that narrative.

It’s not just the New York Times, the Associated Press recently headlined a story on their new poll with this atrocity:

“Trump has problems of his own.” Hmm, I wonder what those could possibly be. Do people not like his policy platform? Are they concerned about his position on Social Security? Or maybe Trump’s problems have something to do with the fact that HE HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH 91 FELONIES IN FOUR CASES IN FOUR JURISDICTIONS!

And then a few days later, NBC’s First Read newsletter landed in my inbox with the following subject line: “Biden’s age v. Trump’s alleged crimes: Poll finds liabilities for both frontrunners.”

WTF are we doing here?

Not to pick on the New York Times, Associated Press, and NBC, but these headlines (and the stories themselves) are emblematic of a very concerning trend in how the bulk of the political press is covering the 2024 election. In a desperate attempt at balance, the media is equating Biden’s age with Donald Trump’s criminal behavior emanating from stealing classified documents and trying to overturn an election. In any scenario, this would be ridiculous, but it’s particularly absurd because Donald Trump is a grand total of three years younger than Joe Biden.

But.. I fear the political press is headed towards a repeat of its grievous errors in the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton’s email usage was given equal or greater weight than the sum total of Trump’s crimes, corruption, racism, and rank incompetence. Poll-driven coverage, focused on the horserace, is once again creating a dangerous false equivalency.

The President’s age is a significant political challenge. There is no disputing that fact. The press is not solely responsible for that challenge, but they are inflaming the issue.

Legit Questions v. Irresponsible Speculation

Joe Biden is the oldest President in U.S. history. He will be 82 on Election Day 2024. By seeking reelection, he is asking the American people to do something unprecedented. The media — and the voters — should not simply take Biden at his word when he says he is up to the job. Of course, they should closely cover the White House and ensure that he is capable of performing the awesome responsibilities his position entails. I am not objecting to that coverage.

What I am objecting to is the constant coverage of Biden’s age, the regurgitation of a Republican narrative fabricated by Trump about Biden’s mental competence, and looping through moments of a man who overcame a stutter misspeaking.

For all of the scrutiny, there has never been a suggestion that President Biden’s age is materially affecting his performance as President. His first term saw him ably manage a cascading array of crises, from a pandemic to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to a once-in-a-generation spike in inflation. Biden has passed a historic amount of legislation — much of it with a Republican Party that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of his presidency. Perhaps the best and most telling piece of evidence that Biden can perform is that he meets and speaks with Republican members of Congress and governors all of the time. These partisan actors have every incentive to tell a tale of Biden falling asleep in a meeting or getting confused, and you never hear anything like that. Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on rumors, and if Biden was showing his age, everyone would be talking about it. And I promise you the reporters would be writing about it, but they’re not, and that should tell you everything you need to know.

This is not to say that voters are wrong to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is asking for four more years and will be 86 years old at the end of his presidency. It will be incumbent on the President and his campaign to answer those questions on the trail, but the current coverage of Biden’s age makes that task much more difficult.

2016 Redux

The way the political press is covering Biden’s age mirrors the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The political press was obsessed with the politics of Clinton’s emails as opposed to the substance of her potential wrongdoings.

In this hyperkinetic, highly confusing media environment, this sort of reporting creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Media reports on concerns about X among the electorate → the electorate reads about those concerns → the electorate becomes more concerned → rinse and repeat.

What makes all of this more pernicious is that the media is carrying Donald Trump’s water. The fallacious idea that Joe Biden is too old or senile to do the job was created by Trump and relentlessly pushed by the Right Wing media into mainstream political conversation.

The New York Times’s Charles Blow perfectly summarized this dynamic in a column from earlier this year:

Campaigns elevate an issue, pollsters and journalists ask whether the issue is having an effect on a race, stories are written about that effect, and as a result of the coverage, the effect is often intensified. That is the chain of custody for a political attack, but far too often, that connection and context aren’t made clear. It’s often presented as if these types of concerns just spring forth in voters’ minds and aren’t influenced by campaigns and news coverage

Useful journalism doesn’t report that other people are “concerned.” It helps people decide whether they should be “concerned” by reporting facts and providing context. Reminiscent of 2016, there has been too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Both Sides-ism Rears its Ugly Head (Again)

Just looking at the coverage, one would assume that Donald Trump was much younger and healthier than Joe Biden. Donald Trump is 77 years old. If he wins in 2024, Trump will be the oldest person elected President in the history of the United States. Yet, Trump’s age is bizarrely absent from the media coverage despite Trump regularly demonstrating behavior that raises questions about his mental competence, let alone have access to the nuclear codes.

Joe Biden trips on a sandbag, and the entire world freaks out. Donald Trump spells the word “rumor” in a way that flunks a third-grader, and no one blinks an eye.

The same could be said of this truly bizarre statement from Trump during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

Let’s be honest: if your uncle said some of the things that Donald Trump says, your mom would call a family meeting about whether to send him to a neurologist. Yet, the press never once connects Trump’s delusional ramblings to his age. Every Biden misstatement is treated as a red flag, even though anyone who has observed Biden for years knows that he periodically misspeaks due to his stutter. This is not a new behavior. It was present during Biden’s 2008 — and 1988 — presidential campaigns.

Media Matters did a study around Biden’s presidential announcement earlier this year to look at how often Biden’s age was mentioned in the coverage vs. Trump’s age. The results are quite telling — 588 mentions of Biden’s compared to 72 mentions of Trump’s age.

There is simply no justification for this discrepancy. Just like Biden, Trump is asking the public to do something unprecedented by electing a person of his age to the Oval Office. Yet, the political press refuses to explore the concept.

The reason is depressingly simple. For the bulk of the traditional media, balance is more important than accuracy. For largely honorable reasons, the press wants to ensure their readers see them as objective as opposed to pushing an agenda. Therefore, journalists will swerve out of their lane to appear to cover both sides equally. It is impossible to provide “balanced” coverage of a campaign between a twice-impeached former President who led a violent insurrection, is charged with 91 felonies, spreads dangerous conspiracy theories, and is guilty of sexual assault, and a decent, ethical, empathetic incumbent with a record of success. The obsession around Biden’s age is a way to balance the scales with Trump’s criminality.

Man, that sounds dumb when you say it out loud — but it’s reality.

The Pushback Comes From Us

Biden’s age is still a big obstacle to his reelection. And I am not arguing that all the concern showing up in polls is a product of biased press coverage. I wish I could tell you that the dynamic will change as the campaign goes on. It won’t. Nothing in my two decades in politics suggests that political reporters will pivot from optics and polls to nuance and policy. In that sense, this whole piece may feel like this meme:

There is, however, some value (other than catharsis) in understanding that this campaign will be played with a stacked deck. Ultimately, the traditional political media will be an ineffective and counterproductive vehicle to distribute our message. It will be up to all of us to defuse the age question and make the case for Biden to the skeptics in our networks. It’s not the press’s job to assuage voters about Biden’s age, but it shouldn’t enflame those legitimate concerns for clicks either.

There are literally thousands of examples of Trump’s extremely disordered mind, not to mention his insanely bizarre actions.

Donald Trump is warning America that “Cognitively impaired” Biden will lead us into “World War Two” if re-elected.

You can’t make this shit up. 😂pic.twitter.com/zbRKNj5u6h

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 16, 2023

The media just accepts this as Trump being Trump and while they often will call out his lies, which are pathological to be sure, they don’t call out the fact that he simply doesn’t make any sense a good part of the time. To use a clinical term, he’s fucked up in the head. And it’s outrageous to project that on to Biden when the evidence is that he looks old and his voice sounds old but he’s mentally sharp. The proof is in the pudding.

“We don’t have the evidence now, but we may find it later” — McCaul is what passes for a “serious Republican” these days pic.twitter.com/bPMX1YPOec

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2023

 

Nancy Mace on ABC insists that there’s evidence Biden was bribed — but notably, she can’t seem to cite any! pic.twitter.com/steI1pOWML

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2023

 

the call where Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the government there helped him dig up dirt on Joe Biden? is DeSantis’s position that extorting a foreign government is fine if it happens on the phone? https://t.co/uIqghdNLAi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2023

 

the call where Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the government there helped him dig up dirt on Joe Biden? is DeSantis’s position that extorting a foreign government is fine if it happens on the phone? https://t.co/uIqghdNLAi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2023

From the “I Can’t Even” files

If not for Tucker Carlson and ball tanning, I’d think this was a joke (Washington Post):

It’s been almost 2,000 years since the Roman Empire reached the historic peak of its power. But many men still contemplate it — quite a lot.

A new social media trend prompting women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome reveals that it crosses the minds of many men on a weekly basis. Even daily. Or more — to the surprise and confusion of their loved ones.

“Three times a day,” answered one woman’s fiancé in a TikTok video. “There’s so much to think about,” he explained, eliciting a stunned look into the camera from his soon-to-be wife.

“They built an entire world-dominating society,” another man exclaimed when asked by a bewildered-looking woman to justify why he contemplates ancient Rome.

Domination. Got it.

@listenwithbritt #stitch with @HapaGirl learning new things after 13 years. #romanempire #husband #trend ♬ original sound – Listenwithbritt🎧📚

@kirakosarin “theres so much to think about!” 🫠 #romanempire ♬ original sound – Kira Kosarin

Captain Oveur: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

According to historians, one explanation could be that Western societies have historically overemphasized the aspects of Roman history that are associated with masculinity in the popular imagination.

The first thing that comes to the mind is “an image of the Roman legion, the imperial eagle and that sort of military aspect — along with gladiators, which has a long association with masculinity and power,” Hannah Cornwell, a historian of the ancient world at Britain’s Birmingham University, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

[…]

“Ancient Rome was of course patriarchal and violent,” Lewis Webb, a historian of ancient Rome at Oxford University, wrote in an email. “But it was also a diverse place: there were numerous forms of masculinity, women could have agency and power, and there were multiple gender expressions and identities, as well as various sexualities.”

Somehow, I don’t think diversity and gender-bending is atop these men’s minds when they think about ancient Rome multiple times a day.

Stories about the viral trend have cropped up in Time, Rolling Stone, Yahoo, and Cosmopolitan:

At the end of August, a Roman reenactor based in Sweden, Gaius Flavius, took to his Instagram to post a reel asking his followers to ask their partners how often they think about the Roman Empire, saying: “Ladies, many of you do not realize how often men think about the Roman Empire. Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother – you will be surprised by their answers.”

His post was in reference to the post made by Swedish influencer Saskia Cort, who originally began asking her Instagram followers in September 2022 to ask their partners how often they think about the Roman Empire. It went viral in Sweden, but now a year later has gone global.

A countertrend, Insider reports, is to ask women what they think about most often: Kidnapping and violent crime are top of mind, some women say.

“I think it’s being murdered, or assaulted,” Melissa Urban said in a TikTok. She captioned the clip: “With a splash of did I leave the curling iron on.”

“Definitely being kidnapped, or just in general somebody’s gonna get me,” says TikToker Danyelle Leyden.

@melissa_u #stitch with @emmy ♬ original sound – Melissa Urban

“It speaks volumes for society that women are so cautious and have to feel on guard most of their lives,” Leyden said. “I think unfortunately most women have had past experiences that led them to be this cautious.”

“For me it also put into further perspective that as women we feel like prey subconsciously,” she added. 

And the men? How many daydream of being predators? With nicely tanned balls.

We are so messed up.

Don’t listen to the Sirens. Don’t look at Medusa.

It’s the GOP’s trusty “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” tactic. They’re gonna “But her emails” Joe Biden from here to next November. With help from a compliant, both-sides press again.

The GOP’s goal of course is to repeat unsubstantiated allegations often enough that they are the first impression that comes to mind when people think about the opposing candidate. Take for instance this word cloud Gallup assembled this time seven years ago:

It’s a variant of poisoning the well. Newt Ginrich taught them well. In the Trump era, the GOP has abandoned “Optimistic Positive Governing Words.” (Governing is no longer their aspiration.) But Republicans are still hell at “Contrasting Words.”

Republicans desperate to distract attention from their front-runner’s two impeachments, four indictments and an insurrection will flood the zone with “old,” “senile,” “corrupt,” “Hunter,” and “impeachment.” A little baseless impeachment here, a ton of innuendo there, and voila! Biden is damaged goods. Meanwhile, Donald Trump throws rallies the press will cover. They’ll humor him with uncritical interviews to get the exclusive.

As with Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the GOP will get as much face time in the (water-carrying) press as it needs. Their leaders will look into the cameras and make claims of evidence, massive amounts of it, against Biden and his “crime family.” Evidence we’ll never see because, as with “Stop the Steal,” there isn’t any. Just plenty of wars and rumors of wars. Massive amount of unseen evidence was enough to provoke a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The point is that repetition works. On the left and on the right. So many on the left who hold degrees in political science should have spent more time studying political psychology.

Here’s the New York Times hyping Democratic handwringing over Biden. Democrats do it by reflex, of course, but the GOP knows too well how to trigger the reflex, and the press, having learned nothing, is willing to play along. “Democratic politicians and party officials … have been unable to dispel Democratic concerns about [Biden] that center largely on his age and vitality,” the Times reports:

Mr. Biden’s campaign and his allies argue that much of the intraparty dissent will fade away next year, once the election becomes a clear choice between the president and former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the Republican primary field.

But their assurances have not tamped down worries about Mr. Biden from some top Democratic strategists and many of the party’s voters, who approve of his performance but worry that Mr. Biden, who will be 82 on Inauguration Day, may simply not be up for another four years — or even the exhausting slog of another election.

“The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, a longtime party strategist, who worries that a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden could lead to lower Democratic turnout in 2024. “You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here.”

See? They’re still calling Carville for quotes, for God’s sake.

In recent days, a barrage of grim news for Mr. Biden, including an autoworkers strike in the Midwest that poses a challenge to his economic agenda and the beginning of impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, has made this intraparty tension increasingly difficult to ignore. Those developments come amid a darkening polling picture, as recent surveys found that majorities of Democrats do not want him to run again, are open to an alternative in the primary and dread the idea of a Biden-Trump rematch.

The press was writing Biden’s obituary before South Carolina in 2020.

Update: As I said about Stop the Steal. “There is evidence. You can’t say there is no evidence,” Mace says. Really? Assume I’m from Missouri. Show me.

Nancy Mace on ABC insists that there’s evidence Biden was bribed — but notably, she can’t seem to cite any! pic.twitter.com/steI1pOWML

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2023

The massively corrupt Texas GOP AG Ken Paxton was acquitted in his impeachment trial today. They just can’t quit him. But the Texas GOP is at each others’ throats and it’s going to be a bloodbath.

But that’s not unusual. The inmates are running the asylum everywhere and even the power brokers and the money men seem to be impotent in the face of it.

Even among those Party leaders who cast their lot with Trump in the lead-up to the 2020 election, very few are still with him: NBC News surveyed forty-four of Trump’s former Cabinet members and found that just four supported his reëlection. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has been making the rounds this summer calling his former boss’s arguments about January 6th “nauseating” and “despicable,” and insisting that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump chief of staff, has said, “I’m working hard to make sure someone else is the nominee.”

This dissent belongs to the same pattern as the Koch and Club for Growth efforts, and to the motivated reasoning that powered the early support for DeSantis. For a decade, the central drama of Trumpism has concerned the Republican élites who continued to support him—the story has been about their malignity, or opportunism, or willful moral blindness. Now it may be about their ineffectiveness. The elected officials who long stuck with Trump—Mike Pence, Chris Christie—have found that their loyalty earned them no sway with his base when they finally turned on him. They might as well have been John Kasich.

It has been striking, this summer, to notice how important January 6th has been to the Stop Trump faction—especially to figures like Barr and Mulvaney. And yet that insurrection never features in the ads designed to persuade voters to break with Trump. On policy, too, it is hard to detect an establishment imprint: much of the conversation among Trump’s opponents on the trail has concerned various crazy-sounding plans to use the military to attack Mexico, theoretically to target drug cartels, a plan cooked up by a new maga think tank. Every party, at every time, has some tension between its élites and its base. But it’s hard to think of a more spectacular divide than the one defining the G.O.P. right now.

Why do I believe that they’ll come around when it comes right down to it? Could it be because that’s what they always do?

I’m shocked.

It was only a matter of time before this clash manifested somewhere:

This city of 28,000 was once so Polish it was dubbed “Little Warsaw.” But in recent decades, an influx of immigrants gave Hamtramck new character. Bengali and Arabic joined English on signs at City Hall. Yemeni and Bangladeshi mosques, restaurants and shops proliferated.

And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.

Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.

Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBQT community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.

“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stockpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

The council’s unanimous vote in the middle of Pride Month seemed intentional to Stockpoole and others, though the resolution banned not only the rainbow flag but all flags except for the U.S., state, city and POW/MIA banners. Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, defends the action as one of neutrality, saying no group should be able to promote a political agenda on city property.

“We’re not targeting anybody,” he said recently. “We are trying to close the door for other groups that could be extremist or racist.”

Not everyone buys that.

Of course they don’t. It’s ridiculous. Are they saying that LGBTQ people are extremist and racist? Come on. We know what this is about.

“The sole purpose was absolutely to go after the gay pride flag,” maintains Josh Hansknecht, a local middle school teacher and president of the Hamtramck Queer Alliance. The issue has laid bare tension between the LGBTQ community and socially conservative Muslims like the mayor.

“The ban did not create the conflict, but it emboldened people,” said Hansknecht, 28. “It expanded on that tension.”

It alsotriggered a spike in thefts and vandalism of Pride flags on private property. One YouTube video shows teenagers egging homes that were flying the flag. Some people, like 23-year-old Selena Briggs, are talking about moving out of the city, saying they no longer feel welcome.

“I don’t feel comfortable to even hold hands with my girlfriend,” said Briggs, a lesbian who works at a cellphone shop on Joseph Campau Street, a main commercial thoroughfare lined with mostly aging store fronts where furniture, clothing, jewelry and cannabis can be bought.

Because of Hamtramck’s historic diversity — a reflection of immigrants from Poland, Albania, Ukraine, Yemen and Bangladesh, among other countries — the city likes to describe itself as “the world in two square miles.” Its neighborhoods are filled with small, tightly packed single-family homes and duplexes. Many were built well before World War II.

Flags have long held an important symbolism here.

A 2013 council resolution directed the Human Relations Commission to manage the display of those representing various groups and nationalities on the city’s 18 poles on Joseph Campau. The Pride flag went up across from City Hall in 2021, but only after then-mayor Karen Majewski broke a 3-3 council tie. The next year, despite some officials’ opposition, it flew along with flags representing various countries, the African Union, Cherokee Nation and others. Today, the stars and stripes top every pole.

[…]

Many Muslims and other residents support the council’s decision, the mayor insists.

“I don’t like the fact that [the LGBQT community is] publicly having these flags everywhere, and it’s being forced on me,” said Amin Haque, 26, an Uber driver who is of Bangladeshi descent. “There’s no problem being gay or lesbian, but keep it to yourself. Just don’t push it on us.”

Stockpoole, who served on the council from 2008 to 2012, thinks the real rift is between the LGBTQ community and the city’s male leadership, backed by Hamtramck’s conservative mosques.

Neighbors are not pitted against neighbors, she said. “Everybody I know gets along with their neighbors on a one-to-one basis. We mow each other’s grass, we look out for each other’s kids. Our children play together.”

Anthropologist Rumana Rahman, who chairs the local beautification committee, echoes those sentiments. In a city where low-income immigrants are a significant part of the population, she sees most getting along with the LGBQT community. And their real concerns are not a Pride flag but worries about the challenges of daily life.

“There’s lead in the water, there’s lead in the soil, there’s trash overflowing in the alleys, potholes in the road,” said Rahman, 41, who is from Bangladesh. “A lot of the factory workers don’t have cars. These are their problems.

Right. The trash is overflowing so they don’t want pride flags flying. I get awfully sick of academics and other political experts constantly offering excuses for people’s bigotry. It is what it is and it isn’t going to be solved with a chicken in every pot. Not everything is about money.

The liberals in that town stuck to their principles when they defended people who don’t share their belief in tolerance and diversity. That’s the essence of liberalism. But no one should be surprised when the recipients of that generosity of spirit fail to return it. They don’t believe they have to tolerate people who believe differently.

Or maybe she just sees a new career move:

Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.

“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.

Ellis was one of 18 Trump associates charged with him in Georgia over attempts to overturn Biden’s victory there. Charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer, she was granted $100,000 bail and pleaded not guilty.

Trump pleaded not guilty to 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges.

Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, he also faces four federal counts related to election subversion; 40 federal counts related to retention of classified information; 34 state counts in New York over hush-money payments; and civil cases including a $250m lawsuit lodged by the New York attorney general over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”.

Nonetheless, Trump leads polling regarding the 2024 Republican presidential primary by vast margins, in national and key state surveys.

Ellis is a former counsel for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic group, whose claims to be a constitutional lawyer have been widely doubted.

Described by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary”, in 2020 Ellis rose from relative obscurity to become part of what she called an “elite strike force team” working to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.

That effort failed. American Family Radio signed up Ellis in December last year. On her show on Thursday, she spoke to Steve Deace, another rightwing host.

Deace said: “Before that man [Trump] needs to be president again … [to] escape the quote-unquote, ‘witch-hunts’, that man needs Jesus again because … his ambitions would be fueled by showing some self-awareness. And he won’t do it because he can’t admit, ‘I’m not God.’”

Ellis said Deace had “perfectly articulated exactly how I as a voter feel”. She knew Trump well “as a friend, as a former boss”, she said, adding: “I have great love and respect for him personally.

“But everything that you just said resonates with me as exactly why I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.

“And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling.

“And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.”

She loves and respects him personally but she can’t vote for him because he’s a malignant narcissist. Lol….

I suspect her real issue is that the Trumpers turned on her when she decided to back DeSantis (another career move) and now Trump won’t help her with her legal bills which are going to be massive. Perhaps she now thinks she’ll be compensated by the Christian right? Good luck with that.

But she’s not wrong. Trump is a malignant narcissist who refuses to admit he did anything wrong — or that he lost. And she signed on to help him steal the election from the American people. Let’s just say that her current opinions don’t mean very much.