PMC Commentary

Worrying about a cold, while a cancer is eating us up

Politico:

"[Arizona] is spreading the 'audit' playbook across the country…. Supporters of former President Donald Trump … are behind a new push to review the results in states including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The new drive is worrying state election administrators, who say the efforts will further inflame conspiracy theories and erode faith in the American democratic system."

Arizona's doofus-laden audit will produce whatever its doofuses want it to, of course, and Trump supporters — the discipled sludge of doofusdom — will believe it. It's what they do.

But if worried state election officials and conscientious politicians really want to counter the erosion of faith in the American democratic system, they might also want to largely dismiss these possibly sprawling audits as the doofus insanity they are, and focus instead on Republican state laws that promise to actually kill American democracy: namely, laws that permit partisan actors to elbow election officials out of the vote-counting picture, and simply declare the winners of elections.

Should these laws be allowed to stand, we'll never see another Democratic senator or Democratic presidential nominee triumph in, say, Arizona or Georgia. The forces of anti-democracy, you'll notice, trouble themselves not with passing these laws in guaranteed red states; they're targeting only the battleground states, where the balance of power lies.

These laws are the imminent danger - the singular danger, the veritable end of American democracy. Doofus-laden audits are, by definition, a sideshow.

Bill Barr is no "MAGA defector"

Another Post column worthy of comment: Max Boot's "Why we should welcome MAGA defectors like Bill Barr." He bases his forgiving critique on personal experience:

"I spent the first 29 years of my adult life as a Republican. But the day after the 2016 election, I re-registered as an independent. A couple of years later I wrote a book that reflected on my career as a conservative and admitted errors ranging from my support for the Iraq War to my willingness to overlook the GOP’s growing nuttiness. I admitted that I too bore some responsibility for President Donald Trump’s rise."

His payoff from "some" liberal and progressive writers, he writes, were "[attacks on] me as a war criminal who should never be allowed to publish another word again…. As you might imagine, this experience gives me additional sympathy for political defectors."

The flaw in Boot's sympathetic outreach to MAGA defectors is that many were MAGA zombies until the brutal end. I can rejoice in Max's rehabilitation, since it began "the day after the 2016 election." But Bill Barr, particularly? This sycophantic, norm-busting and criminally co-conspiring lowlife bailed on Trump only after the 2020 election. And now he's doing the Albert Speer routine, trying to rehabilitate his shattered reputation, post-Hitlerian-Trump. Thank you, no.

He'll get no sympathy from me, and neither should he from Max Boot.

Are 2022 Dems looking at a repeat of 1966?

Charles Lane may be a regular Fox News personality, but his Washington Post commentary is worth noting:

The United States is booming, with the Federal Reserve forecasting 7 percent growth this year and 3.3 percent next year. Unemployment should be almost back to pre-pandemic levels in 18 months.

Buoyed by a $1.9 trillion economic package and a possible bipartisan infrastructure bill, with social and environmental legislation to come, President Biden enjoys a 53 percent approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling average, while 41.9 percent feel the country is heading in the right direction — the most since 2009.

Meanwhile, Republicans remain tainted by former president Donald Trump’s wild campaign to discredit the 2020 election, which inflames their extremist base — but turns off suburban voters by the millions.

The stage is set, in other words, for a Democratic wipeout in the 2022 elections, writes Lane — one larger than a presidential party's nearly habitual losses in midterms.

He compares the potential of 2022 to the Democratic disaster of 1966, when they "lost a net three seats in the Senate and an astonishing 47 in the House." That, despite a booming economy, in addition to 1965's passage of "Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, a landmark voting rights law, and a new immigration law."

Johnson's deeper U.S. involvement in Vietnam was an unlikely factor in Democrats' bruising, since in '66 less than a third of Americans saw it as "a mistake." Continues Lane: "What probably rattled the middle class more were a surge of inflation, which nearly doubled from 1.6 percent in 1965 to 3.0 percent in 1966 — and a sense that previously low levels of crime were creeping upward dangerously…. The 1966 election results also reflected backlash against the racial-justice achievements of the Johnson administration by White voters who often blamed the civil rights movement for urban uprisings in Watts in 1965 and Cleveland in 1966."

Paradoxically, "racial-justice achievements" may have been the most prominent factor in Democrats' massive congressional failures. Indeed, I consulted Jules Whitcover's magnificent The Party of the People: A History of the Democrats, and there lay corroboration. He noted that Johnson's Great Society was "increasingly seen as … for the special constituencies of poor and minority Americans" only. Alongside the president's social programs were race riots and the emergence of "Black Power," suggesting to many white, middle-class voters that "the society that Johnson so strove to perfect was being torn apart from within."

In short, dark cultural perceptions trump hard-fought sociopolitical and even economic successes. President Biden and some congressional Democrats understand this, which is why they're emphasizing their political efforts as beneficial to poor and middle-class whites as well as minorities. Countervailing race-based propaganda from the right, however, is clouding the brains of older white Americans, typically the largest voting contingent in midterm elections.

To offset that negative influence, my advice to Democrats is not to double-down on their brand-based appeals, but to jack 'em up tenfold — to make such appeals the absolute centrality of 2022 campaigns. Well, almost absolute, since corresponding negative campaigning about the democracy-dismantling opposition will also be a necessary strategy.  

Online political engagement is down (as usual)

From Axios:

Changes in monthly traffic in the months before and after Trump left office

Axios' principal takeaway is that "outlets most dependent on controversy to stir up resentments have struggled to find a foothold in the Biden era … and publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit."

A glance at the charts alone — without reading the fine print above, "Selected media publications" — might lead to confusion, as might a cursory reading of Axios' analysis. The words "outlets" and "publishers" are conflated. While the outlets of Fox News and Newsmax are known for their television presence, the charts and analysis refer only to their online publications.

There is also this inconsistency. To repeat, Axios writes that "publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit," adding that "right-wing outlets are seeing some of the biggest plunges." But while Fox News and Newsmax dropped by 22% and 21% respectively, mainstream publications such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal dropped nearly as far: 18%.

In its "Between the lines" segment, Axios explains that "while the Biden administration has seen plenty of debate over policy, economics and a a crisis at the border, personality-based controversy has largely been absent." Thus readership declines, for there's nothing like a personal target to dismember.

I have an alternative, empirical explanation for drops in readership across the ideological board. For 20 years, after each presidential election I've watched significant drops in this site's readership. This evidence is, of course, singular and a bit anecdotal, but it squares with the charts. Midterms don't do much to heighten reader numbers, but mano a mano, gladiatorial contests can do statistical wonders, however fleeting they may be.

Just leave God out of it

News coverage of the Miami-area condo collapse is bone-chilling in its rising body count, guaranteed to rise much further. Deepening the chill are reports of "severe" structural damage left unaddressed for three years. More than a hundred lives might have been saved had repairs been undertaken sooner.

In watching the news coverage, what also chills my bones and sickens my heart is the thought of how victims' families and other loved ones must feel when they hear a lucky survivor of the lethal collapse "thank God" for sparing his or her life.

What a direct, thoughtless, hellishly unfeeling slap in the face of the dead, mangled and rubble-buried residents and all who so deeply cared for them. What the God-thanking survivors are, in effect, telling the grieving is that, well, for their loved ones, God could not have cared less.

Such immense indifference to the gravely wounded feelings of others occurs after every natural disaster, or, as in this case, even man-made disasters. Those who see God as responsible for their survival don't seem to fathom that they're also saying God is responsible for killing dozens or hundreds of innocents — and leaving far more badly heartbroken others to suffer their loved ones' God-forsaken fate.

Just leave God out of it.

Here's a lovely idea

House Republicans will appoint five of their colleagues to Speaker Pelosi's select committee on Jan. 6, to be established tomorrow. And Arizona's Rep. Andy Biggs has stepped up to the crazy plate:

"If you’re going to do it, I can’t think of anybody better than somebody like a Marjorie Taylor Greene. She doesn’t have a committee; she could put a lot of time and effort into it."

Time, yes. Lots and lots of time. Her participation, on the other hand, would be effortless. Crazy comes so naturally to her, as it does to Biggs, as it does to most House Republicans — who will be appointing those five members. Which means crazy is likely to dominate the select committee's proceedings.

For everything House Republicans touch becomes some really crazy shit.

Where Florida's public universities meet the University of Heidelberg, circa 1930s

Such are the extremes to which Republican pols now go, having been pressured by their extremist base, whose extremism has been fed by extremist Republican pols. The circle of madness.

Salon: "Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state's Republican-led legislature."

The draconian requirement is laid out in a law signed last week by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who hopes to be the next Donald Trump, going all the way. The law's stated purpose is to ensure "intellectual diversity" on college campuses, which will vanish, since faculty members may be identified in their surveyed responses. Any insufficiently intellectually "diverse" professor could be indirectly sacked by extremist Republican pols, once his or her employer is threatened with the loss of state funding.

The law's actual purpose was articulated by one of its chief lobbyists two months ago: "In a conversation with the Miami Herald … he said [the forthcoming law was] less about 'intellectual diversity' and more concerned with maintaining the country's conservative Christian identity."

Finally, as with the barrage of "election security" laws being by passed by GOP goons to battle the nonexistent plague of election fraud, "When pressed by reporters, the governor did not offer" — could not offer — "any specific examples of repression and discrimination faced by conservative students."

Never in my life did I suspect that before it was over — or at any time — a U.S. state's publicly funded colleges and universities would be subjected to the American right's version of Nazi Germany's "educational" system. Until now. And the Trumplike ghoul who governs the state is rumored to be in possession of a real shot at reoccupying the Wolf's Lair in Washington, D.C. — made realistically possible by just one or two ghoulish Republican states legally capable of declaring their Electoral Votes for whichever presidential candidate they please, voters be damned.

Progressive pols set out to destroy the infrastructure deal

The "youth-led," "left-leaning" Sunrise Movement, as The Independent labels it, gathered its disciples outside the White House yesterday and did what youth-led, left-leaning movements do: It demanded the impossible, and in a strident, obnoxious way.

Chanting "Shut it down!" and carrying signs exclaiming BIDEN YOU COWARD FIGHT FOR US and NO CLIMATE NO DEAL, the group protested the infrastructure bill, succinctly characterized by the Washington Post as "the product of weeks of painstaking negotiations." And that's OK, since, as noted, stridently demanding the impossible — and at the eleventh hour — is what youthful protest movements are supposed to do.

The farce came when the "adults" joined the infrastructure-deal protesters — Democratic House members also demanding that unattainable improvements be added to the package. That would be the package that if anyone so much as sneezes on it, it'll burst into flames. Weeks of high-pressure negotiations that have cobbled together a delicate, multifactional agreement to get something done — kaboom.

In enthusiastic attendance were progressive House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, the latter of whom seemed most afflicted by mass-rally dementia, which we've painfully witnessed, from the other side, for the past six years. After rightfully decrying the absence of police reform and the social crimes of large-scale incarceration and food insecurity, the New York City congressman wailed that "our buildings and schools [are] falling apart." Which the current infrastructure deal addresses. Mr. Bowman's solution? "Fuck that!"

He added that "We've got to go big, and take it to another level…. If [the bill is] not where it needs to be, we’ll vote it down and see where it goes from there." I can tell him where "it" will go from there. His district's buildings and schools will cease falling apart and simply collapse.

Today, another rally, this one on the National Mall. It's hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders; joining him will be Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, Nanette Barragan and Earl Blumenauer. They too will demand progressive improvements to the infrastructure bill — namely, an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

Capital idea, no argument there. One little problem, however. Not even the reconciliation alternative would work, since the "improved" bill would be rendered useless. Joe Manchin, you know. But what's a bit of immovable reality compared to the progressive thrill of demanding the impossible?

Jonathan Karl's awful reporting on Bill Barr

Making the internet rounds is ABC News' Jonathan Karl's Atlantic piece in which former attorney general Bill Barr says of Trump's election-fraud allegations: ​​​​​"It was all bullshit."

After informally investigating two of the allegations — "ballot dumps" in Detroit and vote-switching machines — "We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit," says Barr.

This, I needn't really remind you, is not news. It was five months and three weeks ago when Barr disclosed to an AP reporter: "We have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."

What I do find to be newsy comes from a journalistic viewpoint, and this Karl entry: "Barr and those close to him have a reason to tell his version of this story. He has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department."

Once again the passive voice — this time politically akin to "Mistakes were made" — molests reality. Everyone with a conscience and the ability to read newspapers saw Barr as "a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department."

Karl then immediately compounds his journalistic sloppiness by writing: "But when the big moment came after the election, [Barr] defied the president who expected him to do his bidding."

Hardly. His informal investigations into Trump's fraud allegations? They came shortly after Election Day, which "overturned long-standing policy that the Justice Department does not investigate voter fraud until after an election is certified."

That's from Karl's own reporting. Not merely another instance of Barr's norm-busting, but another instance of Barr doing the bidding of Trump.

Perhaps ABC News will hire me as a six-figure "reporter" if I write this: Barr is now widely seen as covering his ass and trying to mend a reputation in immensely deserved tatters. Widely seen by whom? That's for the reader to figure out.

Trump in Ohio - or anywhere, at any time

Politico calls it "his first campaign-style rally since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol."

Technically, yes, although there was Trump's June 5 spectacle at North Carolina's GOP convention, a rally in everything but name. I recall it distinctly, since the pre-"rally" coverage featured former U.S. representative Mark Walker telling a cable host he was confident of Trump's support in NC's Senate primary — only to then watch Trump waddle onto stage and promptly endorse Rep. Ted Budd. I could almost hear Walker, offstage, physically deflating.

Trump held his Saturday farce to — again, technically speaking — endorse former aide Max Miller against the evil Anthony Gonzalez, Ohio's 16th C.D. incumbent and all-star Republican traitor for having voted to impeach the vastly impeachable former president, who called it "the unhinged, unconstitutional illegal impeachment witch hunt." Miller, on the other hand, is a real stand-up guy, having been arrested several times for assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Trump's larger purpose in Ohio was, of course, to focus on all his election-related grievances, while other speakers focused "almost entirely on one man: Trump." Just another day in TrumpWorld, and just another day in Republicans' cultish politics.

The one interesting aspect of Gonzalez's situation is that "even his most ardent opponents [are] admitting that the furor around his vote has since dissipated, as voters go about their daily lives and, in part, forget about the outrages of early 2021."

The downside for Gonzalez? Everyday voters don't vote in primaries.

Biden said only what Schumer and Pelosi had already said

"We never had an inkling that there would be any kind of linkage," said Sen. Susan Collins in response to President Biden's "misstatement" on Thursday afternoon that he'd not sign a bipartisan infrastructure bill in the absence of an on-his-desk reconciliation bill on climate and social programs. "We always knew that there’d be another bill," added Collins, "but not that the success of the infrastructure package was going to be in any way dependent on the other bill."

The senator from Maine — and every other shocked Republican senator — was either undergoing yet another episode of political befuddlement, or she hadn't been paying attention. For Biden's misstatement was in reality not a misstatement at all, as evidenced by the Senate majority leader and House speaker's earlier statements in the same vein. Collins' unknown "linkage" was everywhere.

Chuck Schumer, Thursday morning: "These two efforts are tied together. Let me make that clear…. All parties understand that we won’t get enough votes to pass either unless we have enough votes to pass both." Nancy Pelosi, also Thursday: "We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill."

Nevertheless, Biden's comment alone "was enough to upend [his] proud bipartisan moment," reported the Times. Although "the drama does not appear to have sunk the deal," nowhere in the NYT article is there mention of the number of Senate Republicans still willing to pass the filibuster threshold.

We are not surprised. Five'll get you ten this is nothing but that old Republican scam: to substantially whittle down a Democratic package in negotiations while promising support in the end, only to double-cross Democrats at the eleventh hour.

If so, then both bills will fall to Sen. Manchin — as does everything else.

My daughter is visiting and we have things to do before she returns to her West Coast home on Sunday. So I'll be away, here. See you soon. 

***

Funny … For the last few weeks I have felt groggy, exhausted, throughout the days. Only this Sunday morning, the last day of my daughter's visit, did she ask if I had any acetaminophen that wasn't the "PM" variety, which I had on the bathroom counter, though I was unaware they were sleeping aids; just hadn't noticed. Because I always felt creaky in the morning, I had been taking two of the damn things each morning on top of strong doses of a Rx sleeping med I had taken just a few hours earlier. So, beware when you grab those aspirin or whatever at the store. Then again, I'm an idiot — and you aren't. So, never mind.   

I'm sorry, but ...

​​​​​I'm sorry, on two counts. One, for the lengthy quote (Axios). Two, for writing this: I've pretty much had it with Democrats' staggeringly witless strategery, their optional self-castration, their asinine protests of powerful unity — and the exceptionally easy pickings they leave for Republicans to exploit.

[1] Democrats, in private and public, are warning that rising crime — and the old and new progressive calls to defund the police — represent the single biggest threat to their electoral chances in 2022….

[2] The latest: Democrats say it's no coincidence that Eric Adams, the leader in the New York City mayoral race, ran against defunding the police. Adams, who retired as an NYPD captain after a 22-year law-enforcement career, held a lead in yesterday's Democratic mayoral primary.

[3] The N.Y. Times' Tom Friedman, one of Biden's favorite columnists, writes Wednesday under the headline "Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police": "As for policing, this issue could really sink Democrats. For example, big swaths of my old hometown, Minneapolis, have been turned into a dangerous and dystopian ghost city, wracked by gun violence, since the police murder of George Floyd."

[4] WashPost front page on Wednesday, top of column 1, "Cities at a loss as murder rates soar": "The killings rolled over the country like a fast-moving storm. From Savannah to Austin, from Chicago to Cleveland."

And the topper ...

[5] "What's next: Republicans plan to use Dems' defund-the-police rhetoric as a major issue in next year's midterms."

First paragraph: No shit, although the reporting is bullshit and Democrats are full of shit. Rising crime is nowhere close to Dems' "single biggest threat to their electoral chances in 2022." Republicans' overt theft of the electoral process is their — and our — biggest threat. But leave it to Dems, "in public and private," to emphasize the wrong fucking threat. And leave it to the press to underscore it.

Second paragraph: Even a redundantly lobotomized Louie Gohmert could have told Democrats that "defunding the police" was the absolute stupidest slogan that any political party could ever assist in promoting. But damn! it felt so good at the time. Right? Forgive them Father, because these feckless imbeciles knew not what they did? Bullshit. They reveled in it.

Third paragraph: Who gives a fuck what the N.Y. Times' Tom Friedman — "one of Biden's favorite columnists"! — has to say about his goddamn dystopian hometown, "wracked by gun violence, since the police murder of George Floyd." Where was Friedman when his sympathetically crackpotted defund-the-police editorial board was cranking up national hysteria about bloodthirsty cops?

Fourth paragraph: Dear Washington Post — Have you or anyone in the "news" business stopped to consider that "the killings [which] rolled over the country, from Savannah to Austin, from Chicago to Cleveland," were perhaps in large part a celebratory example of Bugsy Siegel's profundity, "We only kill each other"?

Fifth paragraph: The selfsame response to paragraph #1. No shit. It's what they do. And in this instance, they do it to distract from what they're really doing: controlling the steal and murdering American democracy.

Read the news long enough, track congressional Democrats long enough, listen to Democratic "activists" long enough, anticipate every easily anticipated Republican countermove long enough, do all that for 20 years or more and … you'll be sorry, too.  

In fact the sorrow will become so deep, you'll begin asking yourself: Why in hell am I doing this? It brings no satisfaction. Just deeper sorrow.

Indeed, watching one's country get flushed down the toilet by the withering trifecta of political incompetence, public inattention and sprawling indifference can do that. 

Look over there! Not here.

Dana Milbank plunges into one of the rings of the right's multi-ringed circus arena: "Senate Republicans [have] embraced the latest Fox-News-generated conspiracy theory: that a shadowy network of America haters — suspiciously similar to antifa, BLM and the deep state — had taken over the Biden administration with a nefarious ideology known as critical race theory."

Congressional Republicans are receiving plentiful help at the state level, too. Notes Milbank's Post colleague, Max Boot: "[Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis is appealing to White voters who aren’t quite sure what critical race theory is but know they don’t like it. At DeSantis’s urging, the state Board of Education just banned public schools from teaching about critical race theory. There’s only one small problem: According to the Miami Herald, 'The theory is not taught in any Florida school districts, state officials acknowledge.'"

Problem? Small, middling, or large? Not at all. Republicans' CRT obsession is just another example of their pattern of "treat[ing] something unserious as serious." Milbank further notes that CRT has "been around for decades in academic circles without attracting much attention." Actually, no attention — not of the public sort, anyway. Even in my years of political and cultural history grad studies, not once did I hear or read of critical race theory. But there in the ivory towers' upper levels it has lurked, shrieks the GOP — its propagandists insidiously biding time until the nation at large was ripe for intellectual pollution and revolutionary destruction. And that time is now.

Why, CRT pushers are an even greater threat to American honor than were the schemers behind Mr. Potato Head's ruthless demise.

What does it all mean? Nothing, except for this additional "small problem." CRT-bashing is yet another ingenious way in which to distract the public from Republicans' true goal: the murder of American democracy.

Yep

If you believe that the minority should absolutely have the right to stop a bill or measure from being debated and voted on, then there is little more to say, except please don’t call this democracy.

— Tom Harkin, former U.S. senator