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Has the press learned nothing?

Published by digby on September 18, 2023

Over the last few days as most of the media was blathering on about Joe Biden’s “bad week” , Donald Trump was stepping up his campaign and appearing at various venues saying things and behaving in ways that should have made journalists’ ears perk up, wondering if he’s lost more than a step. He was wildly dishonest and incredibly self-destructive even for him.

It started with an interview with Megyn Kelly for her Sirius XM show last Thursday, the first since Trump crudely insulted her back in 2015 in the first presidential primary debate. Trump seemed to expect a friendly, Fox-like, interview and she gave him plenty of softballs and expressed her agreement with much of his nonsense. But she did ask some probing questions about his legal troubles and once again he more or less confessed to his crimes. He must have said the words “Presidential Records Act” a dozen times, reiterating over and over that he had every right to take any document he chooses. And he slipped up continuously, providing the prosecution plenty of fodder:

When the Special Prosecutor presents this case to the jury they will be told exactly what is supposed to happen with classified documents and they will understand how utterly ridiculous it would be for a president to secretly declassify documents and not tell anyone that they’ve been declassified.

Over the Weekend he spoke at the Christian Right “Pray, Vote, Stand” Summit in Washington and mocked President Biden mercilessly over his alleged mental unfitness and then said this:

Any normal person would have just corrected himself for misspeaking but he can never admit he did anything wrong so instead he twisted himself into a verbal pretzel that had it been delivered by Joe Biden would have resulted in national call to check him into a nursing home immediately.

He later appeared at the Concerned Women for America conference and was a little bit sharper but repeated nonsense such as his silly claim that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread, another sign that he simply cannot retain information. He has certainly heard by now that this is silly and could easily substitute something like “you have to have ID to travel on an airplane” to make his point but he can’t do that. Once he gets something like “low flow showers” or “windmills cause cancer” in his head there’s no getting it out. That’s not normal.

The final segment of his week-end odyssey was the highly anticipated interview on Meet the Press which was filmed earlier in the week. To say it was infuriating would be an understatement. As he always does, he ran circles around the host, Kristen Welker, and basically made a mockery of American democracy by demonstrating that an incoherent con artist is going to be the Republican nominee for president. Again.

He once again showed he is completely oblivious to the legal damage he is doing to himself every time he agrees to answer questions about his cases. Here he confesses that he only listened to lawyers who told him what his own “instincts” told him was true. When pressed he says that the decision about whether the election was rigged was his alone, although he dances away from Welker’s question about whether he was “calling the shots.”

Watching these events is intensely frustrating and I think it’s even more difficult to watch now than before. He is no longer a first time candidate taking the political press by surprise. Neither is he the president whose office confers such immense power that even a dolt like Trump is automatically given more deference than he deserves. Today he is just another candidate for president and he doesn’t deserve to be treated with any more respect than any of the others. In fact, he deserves less since he is a criminal defendant in four different cases and was recently found liable for sexual assault to the tune of $5 million.

The man sat in all the interviews and appearances and made it crystal clear that he believes he is above the law. In fact, with his endless blathering about how he can do whatever he wants with classified documents he makes it clear that he believes he is the law. And yet, the befuddled yet eager media is treating Donald Trump with the same consideration they always did, before they knew how disordered and his mind was and what a danger he is to American democracy and the rule of law.

I had thought after the widely criticized CNN Trump town hall everyone understood that you simply cannot allow Trump to ramble incoherently to cover for his unwillingness to answer the questions. They have to find another way to cover him. And yet there he was this weekend on Meet The Press doing exactly that and inspite of the interview being on tape they aired it as if it was live only putting a lame fact check on their website after the fact.

For every viewer who saw that he’s completely unfit to be president there is another who got lost in the overwhelming rush of words, or what’s known to rhetoricians as “the Gish Gallop” which is a tactic designed to “defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments.” That’s what he does, however unconsciously, and the media aides and abets him by treating him as if he’s just another politician.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan wrote about this problem last week pointing out

Trump is covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes.

She says the solution for journalists is simpler than we think:

Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.Headlines will include context, not just deliver political messaging. Overall politics coverage will reflect “not the odds, but the stakes”, as NYU’s Jay Rosen elegantly put it. Lies and liars won’t get a platform and a megaphone.

I wish I had more confidence that this would happen. At this point I think we just have to fervently hope that there are enough people in this country who can see through that cacophony of bs and vote as if their future depends upon him never holding office again — because it does.

Salon

Joe and Kamala

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 18, 2023

Are there not enough real problems to fret over?

Democrats should have learned from the 2016 presidential race not to underestimate the commitment of the Republican tribe to its presidential frontrunner. Savvier GOP play-ahs may be nervous about having Donald Trump and his indictments running atop their 2024 ticket, but from what Mitt Romney revealed last week, many, many of them are too afraid of their violence-prone MAGA base to openly oppose him/them. An emergent “existential brand of cowardice,” as McKay Coppins put it, permeates the party leadership.

That is to say that Democrats should know better this time than to count on some deus ex machina to recast the race that seems already cast … for both parties. What was it Andy Dufresne said in Shawshank?

But Democrats being Democrats, they will. One thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt. Slate’s David Faris suggests (obliquely) that they get busy instead. He finger-wags at murmurings about a second-term VP for Biden:

“Maybe the president should dump the veep” is a Beltway parlor game as old as time. Or at least as old as the writers doing the speculating. There were calls for George H.W. Bush to replace Dan Quayle with Colin Powell in 1992, and gossip that George W. Bush would toss the gruff Dick Cheney overboard in 2004. Before the 2012 election, some thought that Barack Obama, reeling from his historic “sh ellacking” in the 2010 midterms, should eighty-six then–Vice President Biden and replace him with his 2008 rival, Hillary Clinton. In 2019, D.C. was rife with rumors that Mike Pence would be sacked as Trump’s running mate for former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Not to give away the ending to Titanic here, but none of these incumbents cashiered their vice presidents. No elected incumbent in the binding primary era that began in 1972 has switched running mates before standing for reelection, and the last time it happened at all was in 1944, when Harry Truman replaced Henry Wallace on the ballot to be FDR’s vice president—and then that was only because he had made too many ideological enemies inside the Democratic Party to stay, a problem Harris does not have. And while Gerald Ford, whose journey to the presidency was highly unusual, picked Bob Dole in 1976, and not incumbent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, that was because Rockefeller made it clear he had no interest in the job.

If Democrats could wave a magic wand and replace Harris with someone like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz suggests, without the ensuing backlash and “Democrats in disarray” news cycles, would that be a good idea? Possibly. (Not so much for Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ bananas idea to swap in Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who was for a time the least popular governor in America.) But there are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.

Harris has some weaknesses, sure, writes Faris. She “has failed to stake out a clear policy space for herself inside the party,” and Biden putting her in charge of the southern border did her no favors. Her polling, like Biden’s, leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, “Vice President Harris isn’t going anywhere.” Deal with it.

Faris suggests, “If Democrats are worried about her favorability ratings, they should remember that the best thing they could do for them is to somehow boost Biden’s.” Harris has something special going for her: Republicans fear a second Black president should Biden win in 2024 and leave the Oval Office … unexpectedly. Might that prospect further energize the MAGA base? Okay then, more than what?

And for those taking the “he’s too old” bait, Joe’s not going anywhere either. Democrats need to get busy winning or get busy losing.

The Republican Party’s empty husk

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 18, 2023

Values drag

Honestly, the headline summarizes well a column that tells us little we don’t already know, but let’s run with that: The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket. But you knew that.

Professors Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman make their case that “the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless.” But you knew that too.

Trump, his Big Lie co-defendants, and Mitt Romney’s assessment of his Senate Republican colleagues marks a party “aimless … beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.”

The pair include a walk down memory lane from the 1970s until the party was consumed with conspiracism and its “long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.”

The development of political parties was a mixed blessing, the pair admit. They help channel “individual ambition into collective public purposes.” Their structures provided another set of guardrails that on the right have broken down:

Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.

Solving problems, improving people’s lives is no longer relevant on the right. Upholding democratic institutions and norms is gone. There are individual Republicans who retain a commitment to those and to public service, yes, but they exist alongside “a conspicuously missing party project.” What remains of the hollowed out GOP is simply a will to power and posturing about patriotism and family values that is simply marketing. Principles are marketing too.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado is not a role model for anyone. But along with reality show luminaries such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, she has made herself a conspicious spokesperson for what her party claims to and doesn’t stand for.

A friend this morning sent over a Daily Kos post that cites a Daily Mail report on Boebert’s male companion in the photo above:

Now, DailyMail.com can reveal, that Boebert, 36, and divorced father of a 16-year-old son, [Aspen bar owner Quinn] Gallagher, 46, have been secretly dating for several months.

He is reputedly one of those Democrats politicians like Boebert publicly loathe.

DKos:

The Advocate was happy to point out that the bar owned by Boebert’s boy toy has hosted several LGBTQ+ events, such as a party for Aspen Gay Ski Week and a drag performance called “A Winter Wonderland Burlesque & Drag Show.” There were no age limits posted.

But then you knew that the right’s “values drag” is marketing too, as empty as their oaths to the Constitution. As if their embrace of Donald Trump and defense of his insurrection and attempted coup did not make that a slam-dunk case.

(h/t BF)

This is criminal

Published by digby on September 17, 2023

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.

Go make disciples!

Published by digby on September 17, 2023

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.

Elon bringing us to the brink

Published by digby on September 17, 2023

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.

    What happened to Dark Brandon?

    Published by digby on September 17, 2023

    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.

    Image

    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.

    Chart showing number of mentions of Biden and Trump's age on cable news

    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:

    Old Man Yells at Cloud | Know Your 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.

    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.

    Very serious Republicans

    Published by digby on September 17, 2023

     

     

     

    “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”

    Published by Tom Sullivan on 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.

    But his emails

    Published by Tom Sullivan on September 17, 2023

    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.