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Women Vote, Women Live

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 17, 2024

This is not a drill

Some smarmy former Trump aide over the weekend asked if anyone had evidence of pregnant women actually bleeding out in a parking lot, as alleged since abortion bans took hold across red states. He got inundated with replies, including the TikTok by Carmen Broesder (above) from Idaho. Michelle Goldberg cites a report from ProPublica on a Georgia women who died (Gift article):

It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”

On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.

Thurman died in what medical authorities in Georgia deemed a “preventable” death. ProPublica promises to tell another woman’s story in coming days.

[Thurman] waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.

Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.

Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”

“I suspect that the anti-abortion movement will claim that she was killed by abortion pills and use her case to further its quest to outlaw them,” Goldberg writes, citing Project 2025’s intention of outlawing them.

The bans written by politicians and enacted in multiple states include vague language that leaves physicians and hospitals scratching their heads over when they are legally protected in saving a woman’s life (ProPublica):

Take the language in Georgia’s supposed lifesaving exceptions.

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.

There is also an exception, included in most bans, to allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors said. How can they be sure a jury with no medical experience would agree that intervening was “necessary”?

For that matter, how could politicians with no medical experience craft a bill that would make “necessary” clear? They might as well write legislation defining when a nuclear launch is necessary.

Goldberg concludes:

The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life. And as long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way. Some probably already have. As Surana notes, state committees tasked with reviewing maternal mortality typically operate with a two-year lag, so experts are only just beginning to delve into the details of pregnancy-related deaths that have happened since Roe was overturned.

But we’ll have to wait to find out longer than the delay that killed Amber Nicole Thurman.

It’s National Voter Registration Day. Make the most of it. Make more of Nov. 5. Women’s lives depend on it.

Radio MAGA Speaks

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 17, 2024

Can you say “sto-chas-tic”?

Sure. I knew you could.

Some may “find it harsh using the terms ‘infestation’ and ‘cockroaches’” to describe members of Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang operating in Texas, Department of Public Safety Commander Steve McCraw said on Monday. McCraw made his remarks in Houston after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated the group a foreign terrorist organization:

“Tren de Aragua gangsters are like cockroaches,” said DPS Director McCraw. “They multiply quickly; small intrusions into communities become infestations if not aggressively pursued. These Venezuelan thugs are highly combative, violent, and certainly adaptable. They’re always involved in situations that first start with human smuggling. Then they are involved in the extortion, kidnappings, rape, assaults, and sex trafficking of migrants. Governor Abbott has made it very clear: We will not allow any of these gangsters to gain a foothold in Texas.”

Over the last week, Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance promoted a debunked internet rumor alleging something-something about Haitian immigrants legally residing and working (and welcomed) in Springfield, Ohio. Bomb threats against the town followed their remarks.

The timing of Abbott’s statement about another group of immigrants, albeit criminals, might at best be described as unfortunate. But not McCraw’s remarks describing any Venezuelans as a “disease.”

“This is genocidal language. He should be immediately suspended. At a minimum, this dept should not receive one dime of federal money while he’s in charge,” said Howard University’s Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. McGraw announced his retirement last month.

When they’ve got nothing to offer Americans to solve their problems, MAGA Republicans have an endless supply of Others to blame for them.

Stochastic terrorism

The Ink reflects on how dehumanizing language feeds stochastic terrorism. That is, “random” terrorism that isn’t entirely random, but an outgrowth of characterizing an entire ethnic group as an internal enemy. One doesn’t have to invoke Germany of the 1930s for how that operates:

Instead, let’s go back a few dozen years, to the 1990s, to Rwanda. And to the (now former) Yugoslavia. According to Human Rights Watch:

From 1990 through the 1994 genocide, propagandists used newspapers and later the radio to disseminate these ideas hostile to the Tutsi. It was particularly the last idea—that Hutu were threatened and had to defend themselves—that proved most successful in mobilizing attacks on Tutsi from 1990 through the 1994 genocide.  This idea may have been influenced by a study of propaganda methods. Among documents found by Human Rights Watch researchers in a government office soon after the genocide was a set of mimeographed notes summarizing methods of propaganda as analyzed by a French professor, Roger Mucchielli, in a book entitled Psychologie de la publicité et de la propagande. One of the methods described is persuading people that the opponent intends to use terror against them; if this is done successfully, “honest people” will take whatever measures they think necessary for legitimate self-defense. 

In Rwanda, some 660,000 people were murdered; following a similar playbook in the collapsing Yugoslavia, more than 100,000 were killed. Rwanda’s media agitators were prosecuted and convicted of genocide. NATO bombed RTS/Serbian Radio and Television’s headquarters.

Given First Amendment guarantees, prosecutions of the influencers(?) behind such a genocide could not be carried out in the U.S., argued the counsel for a Rwandan journalist convicted as a war criminal.

That it is not prosecutable here does not make what Vance and Trump engage less “domestic terrorism by proxy,” writes Daniel Drezner in a Monday Substack post:

The difference between Trump and the innocent residents of Springfield, Ohio, is that Trump has the protection of the United States Secret Service. Trump’s targets of political violence possess far fewer defenses. And make no mistake: Trump and Vance’s willingness to lie, deceive, and stigmatize minorities is behind the threats of violence affecting Springfield, Ohio this week.

They are attempting domestic terrorism by proxy. And if they keep it up, they will eventually have blood on their hands.

After the alleged assassination attempt against Trump over the weekend, Vance said at the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner in Atlanta that “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.” He blamed liberal rhetoric for attempts on Trump’s life.

David Cay Johnson suggested that Vance’s comments “painted a target on Kamala Harris, sending a signal that some rightwing nutcase may a take as a directive,” just as Drezner described.

The genesis of genocide

In April 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro reflected in The Atlantic on how Rwanda became the site of genocide:

Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.

And many dehumanizing euphemisms for the Tutsi minority.

By the mid-1990s, the Hutu leadership was in jeopardy. Multiple political factions had emerged, and the insurgent Rwanda Patriotic Front, an organization composed mostly of young Tutsi exiles, had entered the country. For Hutu leaders, it was time to play the Tutsi card. Extremist publications had sprung up, especially a newspaper called Kangura. (Its public face, the editor Hassan Ngeze, was later convicted by the post-genocide International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, along with other high-level figures associated with the publication.)

But it was the private radio station RTLM—which stands for Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines—that illustrates the power of hate media. Rwanda had an official radio station, but Hutu hard-liners came up with the idea of creating a private radio station to carry incendiary anti-Tutsi propaganda.

It was Joseph Goebbels who said, “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.” RTLM was very successful. It managed to plant a seed of discord among the moderate Hutus who were slowly drawn into the extremist fold.

Out of context

Foreign Policy in 2016 reported on one Rwandan receiving a life sentence for genocide, not for what he did but for what he said:

In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.

Spectators claim that at one point in the rally, which was not recorded in its entirety, Mugesera said, “Anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck.” Two years later, some 800,000 Rwandans — mainly Tutsis — were brutally slaughtered and hacked to death in a genocide that lasted 100 days.

Mugesera, who told rallygoers to dump their victims’ bodies in the river, “later maintained his innocence, saying the speech had been taken out of context,” the BBC reported.

Expect to hear the “taken out of context” excuse if we see mass casualty attacks against immigrants in this country.

The Future Saboteurs

Published by digby on September 16, 2024

Bolts.com has done some deep research into the elections official positions in states where they themselves are on the ballot this year. Yikes:

One needs only to skim recent headlines to be reminded of the power of state elections officials to shape access to voting. Nebraska’s secretary of state just unilaterally shut down voter registration for tens of thousands of people with past felony convictions just weeks before the election. The secretary of state in Ohio, who has spent years courting the Big Lie, this month proposed to make it harder to vote by mail by limiting drop boxes. In Arizona, the secretary of state is laying the groundwork to combat election deniers who might seek to reject election results in November.

All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.

Twelve states are deciding in November who will run their elections going forward. 

That role is directly on the ballot in seven states; in five others, voters will elect a governor or lawmakers who’ll then get to appoint their elections chief. 

In most of these states, this elections chief is the secretary of state; but in a few, there is another office that has that authority—for instance, in Utah, it’s the lieutenant governor.

Today Bolts is publishing a new guide that walks you through these elections in all 12 states.

In some of these states, including Missouri, Oregon, and Vermont, a candidate is once again running who has clearly embraced false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They’ve proposed taking drastic actions such as ending mail-in voting.

In other states, such as New Hampshire or Utah, the office is unlikely to fall into the hands of an election denier. But even these races can be critical to the shape of democracy. Secretaries of state or the equivalent official often design voter outreach programs, or set policies that can make voter registration easy or difficult. They can also champion new election legislation or maneuver to stall ballot initiatives. 

In the bad old days, many of these (when America was Great) these jobs were often partisan. But it’s having a big resurgence with the new Republicans election stealing strategy. Keep your eyes on this. Some of those states may not be swing states now but …

Read on for the details.

Was There A Bump?

Published by digby on September 16, 2024

Depends on who’s asking

Ok, ok, I can’t resist. Here’s a little polling chum for a Monday afternoon. Don’t take any of it too seriously because the polls are close and polling is in crisis so we really have no earthly idea who’s ahead and who’s behind. But there are trends…

From Dan Pfeiffer’s post this morning on the post-debate polls:

The national polling averages remain largely unchanged. On the day of the debate, the FiveThirtyEight polling average had Harris leading Trump by 2.5%. Today, that lead is 2.8%. However, a steady stream of positive polls for Harris came out since the debate.

Simon Rosenberg compiled this list in a recent issue of his Hopium Chronicles newsletter:

Harris 50-45 (+5) Morning Consult
Harris 47-42 (+5) Ipsos/Reuters
Harris 51-47 (+4) RMG
Harris 50-46 (+4) Data For Progress
Harris 49-45 (+4) YouGov/Yahoo (LVs)
Harris 49-45 (+4) YouGov/Times (LVs)
Harris 47-43 (+4) TIPP Insights
Harris 50-47 (+3) Leger/NYPost
Harris 48-45 (+3) SoCal
Harris 44-42 (+2) Redfield & Wilton

And then, on Sunday morning, an ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Harris up by six points over Trump. The poll that reinvigorated political junkies was from Iowa — a non-battleground state. The Des Moines Register poll shows Trump up by only four points. This poll was notable for a few reasons. One, it was conducted by Ann Selzer whose Iowa polls are seen as the gold standard. Two, a previous poll from June had Trump beating Biden by 18 points. Finally, states with similar demographics are correlated. If Biden was losing Iowa by 18 points, it was unlikely he was winning Wisconsin. If Harris is only down four in Iowa — a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, then she should be well-positioned to win in the Blue Wall states.

It’s All Good, But Early

These are positive signs, but it’s still very early. Measuring a big event like a debate usually takes about ten days. High-rated pollsters like the New York Times/Siena have yet to release their post-debate surveys. We need to see some battleground state polls.

I was skeptical that the polls would shift dramatically. America is very polarized. Most persuadable voters won’t watch the debate, and Trump’s coalition won’t abandon him over one bad debate. Thus far, that’s what the polls communicate. Small shifts in Harris’s favor, but nothing significant yet. Some polls, like the ABC News/Ipsos poll, showed no movement at all.

Pfeiffer points out that this is typical for a first debate. Apparently, even June’s Biden-Trump debacle only moved the polls about 1.7 in Trump’s direction. (The difference being that Democrats were horrified and didn’t sugar coat it while the Republicans have doubled down on the fatuous BS that Trump actually won it.)

And the polls did show substantial movement in one very important area that can be critical in a close election:

[T]he most positive news in the polling is not in the head-to-head numbers. The debate improved perceptions of Harris. In theCNN post-debate poll, Harris’s favorability rating went up six points. In the ABC News/Ipsos poll, 37% said the debate made them think more favorably about Kamala Harris. Only 17% said that about Trump.

That 17% must have been drunk.

Harris is still introducing herself to the public. Gaining in approval is key right now. In fact, in most polls she’s the only one of Trump, Vance, and Biden with a positive approval rating now with room to grow. That’s good news.

Polling will make you crazy right now. These close elections are ulcer inducing. But as the pundits always say, “I’d rather be us than them” right now. Let’s hope it holds up and she can get over the line in those all-important swing states.

Trump Conspiracy Theories

Published by digby on September 16, 2024

Sam Stein has a useful reminder for you. Loomer isn’t the (only) problem:

 [I]f the presence of Laura Loomer by Trump’s side is what makes you worry that Trump will get dragged into the dark depths of conspiracy land, well, you’re way too late.

The former president has been a prolific conspiracy theorist for decades. Let’s take a tour through what Trump was thinking even before Loomer joined his entourage:

Trump was the de facto leader of the Obama birther movement, even casually suggesting that the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who died in a plane crash, was murdered as part of a coverup.

He openly mused that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir and that Obama never actually went to Columbia University.

He floated the idea that Ted Cruz’s father had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. He raised doubts about Vince Foster’s suicide.

He wondered aloud if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was suffocated to death.

He pushed the story that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering after 9/11.

He raised the idea that Marco Rubio was ineligible to be president because his parents weren’t yet U.S. citizens at the time of his birth. He did the same about Ted Cruz. And Nikki Haley. And Kamala Harris, too.

He questioned the authenticity of the Access Hollywood tape (this was after he apologized for it).

He claimed Obama had him wiretapped at Trump Tower.

He claimed the death toll from Hurricane Maria was inflated to make him look bad.

He said the noise from windmills causes cancer.

He pushed a video saying that the Clintons killed Jeffrey Epstein.

He said Ukraine could be hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

He said that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

He said that fears about asbestos were a conspiracy designed to line the pockets of asbestos-cleanup companies run by the mob.

He retweeted several conspiracy theories around the death of Osama bin Laden (that it could have been a body double).

He has said jobs numbers are manipulated, the unemployment figure was made up, the COVID death numbers were inflated, the Obamacare enrollment numbers were exaggerated, and the border crossing numbers “manipulated” to make the Obama administration look better. 

And, of course, he’s spread a steady stream of lies about election numbers. The 2012 one: dead people voted for Obama. The 2016 one: cheating in blue states like California and New York deprived him of a popular vote win. The 2020 one . . . where do we even start? Sharpies did not invalidate Trump votes; Dominion did not either. People weren’t throwing away bags filled with Trump ballots or randomly finding suitcases filled with Biden ones. Thousands of dead people didn’t vote multiple times. And, no, Italians did not use military technology to tamper with U.S. voting machines.

And there’s the whole raft of other loons he surrounds himself with starting with Michael Flynn who he actually names his national security adviser.

He takes as gospel anything anyone who supports him says. It’s really that simple.

The Chaos Is The Thing

Published by digby on September 16, 2024

If you feel as if American politics have taken yet another deep dive into the Trump show maelstrom, you aren’t alone. This past week has been a chaotic whirlwind of lies, false accusations, lurid scandals and even a foiled assassination plot. Even the sleaziest reality show wouldn’t have had the nerve to script something like this.

The assassination plot that capped off the week took place on Sunday at Trump’s Palm Beach golf club where the Secret Service reportedly spotted a man with a rifle in the bushes at one of the holes and shot at him, setting off a chase which concluded in his arrest. It’s still early, but a cursory look at his background appears to show the man’s politics were all over the place from voting for Trump to giving donations to Democrats then begging Nikki Haley to team up with Vivek Ramaswamy to compete for the presidential nomination. He was, at one time at least, attempting to be involved with trying to recruit foreign volunteers to fight in Ukraine but nobody took him seriously.

And he was, naturally, a serious gun nut who’d been charged with crimes going back 20 years, many of them involving firearms so it figures that the Secret Service reportedly found an AK-47 and a scope at the scene. As far as we can tell, this is yet another case of an armed-to-the-teeth, mentally ill man bent on violence.

Democrats across the board, including President Biden and Harris, condemned the attempt and called for calm but it makes no difference. The Republicans are on a tear right now, hurtling off in different directions in the wake of Trump’s disastrous debate performance and it’s unlikely they’re going to dial it back.

Trump’s bizarre contention in the debate that Haitian immigrants are “eating the dogs and eating the cats” in Springfield Ohio has morphed into a full-blown panic resulting in bomb threats, school and hospital closings and terror among the Haitian community in that town. Despite the Governor of Ohio and local leaders and business owners making it clear that none of these grisly accusations are true and that, in fact, the immigrants are hard-working, taxpaying contributors to the economic resurgence of the town after years of decay, they are not backing down.

When asked about the bomb threats, Trump said he didn’t know about them and them and continued to demean and degrade the immigrants going so far as to say they would be among the first he deports if he wins the presidency. They are legally in the country but apparently that will no longer be an impediment. They’re even beginning to use the word “remigration” which is defined as:

a far-right and Identitarian political concept referring to the forced or promoted return of non-ethnically European immigrants, often including their descendants who were born in Europe, back to their place of racial origin, typically with no regard for their citizenship

We know how he feels about those “sh*thole” countries. He was railing against them during his presidency. Now we are seeing him gin up threats against legal immigrants who hail from them.

Sen. JD Vance, the VP nominee, made the rounds of the Sunday shows and doubled down on the calumny. When confronted by CNN’s Dana bash with the fact that the accusations about eating cats and dogs were lies, Vance admitted it, explaining that they have to lie about these things to get the media to focus on their narrative:

I agree that Trump probably doesn’t know that what he’s saying is a lie. He said he heard it on television, presumably Fox News, so in his mind it may be a fact. And he doubles down on everything anyway because MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. But Vance knows better. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut and he often gives away the game as he did there.

It came to my attention that there is an actual political strategy known as “the dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting,” if you can believe that. It was coined by none other than former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was the mayor of London:

There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!” In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

According to The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, the Trump campaign is very happy with this Haitian immigration story. He says they believe that if the media is talking about immigration (even if it’s a lie) they are winning because it’s their strongest issue in polling. I would imagine that’s true to some degree. But that’s not the only reason. They don’t want the media rehashing that dismal debate performance and they really don’t want it talking about Trump’s rumored paramour Laura Loomer, which has caused a rift in the GOP coalition.

Using an actual “dead cat” is more than a little bit on the nose but I have no doubt that at least some of them are aware of the concept. JD Vance surely is. Even after the bomb threats started he tweeted out to his MAGA followers: “In short, don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”

They are clearly trying to distract from their campaign’s shortcomings, with Trump even posting one of the silliest, most juvenile posts he’s ever written to try to get a new controversy going. On Sunday he blurted out: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” (Maybe he let his 6 year old grandson play with his phone but I doubt it.) Vance’s admission that they “create stories” along with his obstreperous appearances on the Sunday shows overshadowed it, lucky for him, and then another lunatic, gun nut gave him the ultimate gift of thwarted martyrdom and overwhelmed everything else.

I wish we could say that this would also mean that the Haitian immigrants who live in Springfield, Ohio will be able to go back to their lives and put these horrible lies and accusations behind them. But earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign said that he plans to visit there “very soon.” They aren’t going to let this go, at least until they find a new outrage with which entertain their supporters and distract from the fact that Trump is deteriorating more every day and JD Vance isn’t ready for prime time. We just have to fervently hope that nobody gets hurt before they move on to the next shiny object.

Salon

The Gospel Of Uncaused Effects

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 16, 2024

Alexandra Petri take note

Also known as the Gravity Tree. In the grounds of Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham. It is the descendant of the tree under which Isaac Newton sat in 1666, when he saw an apple fall near him, inspiring him to fully realize his theory of gravity. Photo by It’s No Game from Leicestershire, UK. (CC BY 2.0)

The Ink this morning one-ups Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri in reflecting on the “Unity Statement.” You know the ones, the pro forma statements Democratic politicians make in response to mass shootings or, in today’s news, an attempted assassination. Certain stylistic conventions must be followed:

First, the statement maker’s spouse’s name should be included prominently somewhere: “Becky and I were sad to hear…” “Corey and I were deeply shaken by the news…” “Charlie and I join together…” The inclusion of the spouse is important here because it signals that this is a special kind of statement. More Christmas card vibes than political statement vibes. The normal rules are suspended. There will be no jabs here, no stridency, maybe not even any truth.

Second, the Unity Statement must deplore effects without naming or shaming their causes. Now is not the time for blaming someone for their role in contributing to what has finally now come around to imperil them, too. The Unity Statement thereby defies physics with its conception of uncaused effects; it defies botany in its vision of reaping with no connection whatever to sowing.

Third, a Democratic Unity Statement must mention temperature. Specifically, it should suggest that the temperature has risen too high. Though it may be Republicans who are overwhelmingly responsible for raising the temperature, planetarily and politically, in a respectable Unity Statement, this cannot be said. Instead, it should be argued that the temperature be lowered. Who knows how it got raised, and who really cares? And the Democratic statement maker must immediately volunteer to participate in the lowering of what they may have had no part in raising.

Fourth, the Unity Statement must, duh!, call for unity. Oh, and it must be unilateral unity. “Unity,” unmodified, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality or state of not being multiple,” even “a condition of harmony.” The issuer of the Unity Statement knows that this ain’t gonna happen nationally. What the well-meaning Democratic leader means when they call for unity is that they want you, their followers, the people who would actually listen to a Democrat’s words, to engage in some unity making all by yourself. Reach out to an uncle you cut out of your life just because he made the honest mistake of degrading your very being at Thanksgiving; bake brownies for a neighbor whose only sin is flying a Trump flag — plus the Aryan Nations tattoos. Go do some unity — and don’t wait for anyone else to join you. Dance like no one’s watching, they say. Do unity like the other side isn’t ever going to do it also.

Is it any wonder the public perceives Democrats as measly-mouthed while the bomb-throwers are seen as strong leaders? And how does the unity statement reinforce that?

For one, because these events, as a Kamala Harris meme reflects, have context, context which Unity Statements elide. They offer a salve without relieving ongoing injury. They soothe symptoms without addressing root causes.

It is possible to believe that shooting leaders we don’t like is absolutely, incontrovertibly out of bounds and — and — that this event has a history and a context. It didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It is possible to wish a man a speedy recovery and to insist on the urgency of doing every peaceful thing humanly possible to prevent him from driving the country even further down this road to where what happened to him — even though it never should have — becomes unexceptional.

Newton realized that apples don’t fall to Earth by themselves. Actions have causes.

Strap In. It’s Going To Get Bumpy.

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 16, 2024

As I Was Saying….

“This business will get out of control. It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” — Pre-Sen. Fred Thompson (Admiral Painter) in The Hunt For Red October (1990)

Another apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump occurred Sunday. A keen-eyed Secret Service agent spotted a rifle barrel poking through the perimeter fence of Trump’s West Palm Beach, Fla. golf club and opened fire. The gunman, 58, fled in his car and was captured alive miles away. The suspect has a criminal history and a “quixotic past.” Scrambled eggs where his brain should be, by multiple accounts.

Trump is safe. Prominent political figures expressed their relief and condemned political violence. Again. We’ll know more about the guy in due course. He’s “all over the map.”

Ironically, I wrote hours earlier that “Between now and Jan. 20 anything might happen.” A wrong turn in Sarajevo touched off WWI. Events like this assassination attempt, J.D. Vance and Trump stoking hate against immigrants, and more devious political shenanigans from MAGA Republicans before and after the election are what I had in mind. Political tensions were already running high.

People like Elon Musk mean to dial them up to 11. Tucker Carlson thinks demonizing nonwhite immigrants is “so great!”

Trump is melting down like that cake left out in the rain. He blasted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social yesterday because she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and urged Swifties to register and vote. What sane candidate does that? Trump has surely seen the polls indicating his chances of winning the presidency and staying out of jail are slipping away. He’s panicked and lashing out. He’s not even trying to win. Trump will burn the place down if he does not, and take as many of his enemies with him as possible.

God knows what comes next. Strap in. It’s going to get bumpy.