Tag: Politics

I’m reliably told the ego suffered from similar condition

“The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

Nicole Sganga and Jennifer Jacobs writing for CBS News

Translation: he had a bruise. CBS is out there doing the real work for the administration. And, I’m sure, the ‘Murican people too at some point somewhere out there on an infinite timeline. Heckuva job, Bari.

Listen to Atrios

“That reporters are not willing to deal appropriately with regular lies and liars is not a new thing, but I do think what is new with the Trump administration is that they lie about everything. There is no interest in in attempting to lie plausibly, or even to stick to the truth when that would serve them just as well. […]

You can’t report on this administration by fronting the lies and having the rebuttal 3 paragraphs – or 3 days – later. That they lie constantly has to frame all coverage of them. Nothing is the truth.”

Duncan Black, writing for Eschaton

70 point “Yep” in the print edition of Lemkin. Media doing their job won’t fix our Current Situation, but they can help by being, oh, 97% less credulous of the daily spew. Especially when they know it’s a bald faced lie. Push back. Early and often.

Then they get bitter, they cling…

Basically, every time a Fox News viewer sees a commercial with an interracial couple, he’s reminded that America’s status as a white Christian nation is under assault, by people (progressives) who don’t want America to be either particularly white or particularly Christian. That viewer’s definition of “patriotism” is precisely the embrace of America as the white Christian nation of the viewer’s highly idealized youth, and he interprets the rejection of that vision as a kind of treason.

Paul Campos, writing for Lawyers, Guns & Money.

An Early Retirement

This is a sentence that succinctly captures one of the fundamental and pervasive problems with modern Democratic politics:

“Nadler, 75, is all but guaranteed at least one more term in Washington in the solidly Democratic district while Maloney, 76, will be forced into an early retirement.”

Ross Barkan writing for New York Magazine

Maybe one day, in the far far future, Dear Leader Trump XXVI will allow a Democrat under 70 to run for and hold office in one of the indentured provinces. A person can dream.

The Current Crisis, Writ Small

The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:

Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:

We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.

Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:

Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia

Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member

Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.

But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.

This is why they fail.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

This whole thing needs to be the one and only speech any and all Democratic candidates for President give over the next, oh, five months; but I’d even settle for just a paragraph:

The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

G.K. Chesterton, in his 1929 book, The Thing

Ed Kilgore has some thoughts on Democratic leadership and the need for term-limits (and specifically for Nancy Pelosi):

Ever since Democrats fell short of their 2016 goal of taking back control of the U.S. House, there’s been talk about […] leadership change in the House Democratic Caucus. And after Democrats failed to win any of the four GOP House seats where special elections were held this year, there was renewed talk about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House Democratic Leader. The negative buzz became particularly loud after the party’s biggest special-election hope, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, suffered a disappointing loss, in the wake of Republicans running many millions of dollars of ads linking the candidate to Pelosi.

[…]

[Pelosi] is a much bigger target for Republicans than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell appears to be for Democrats. Part of the problem may simply be that she happens to represent a jurisdiction with rich negative symbolism (dating back at least to the attacks on “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 after the Donkey Party held its convention in the City by the Bay) for the conservatives who are mostly the target for anti-Pelosi ads. You cannot quite imagine Democrats running ads mocking Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky in this manner.

Emphasis added by me because Kilgore completely discounts the most important information in his several paragraphs. The demonization of Pelosi has nothing to do with her having been in the arena for too long, being a woman, coming from San Francisco, or anything else. Those are all useful pegs for the GOP to build their messaging on and around, but they aren’t themselves decisive or even all that interesting. Anyone serving as minority leader will immediately come under sustained and focused attack from the right wing and their stenographers in much of the media. It’s Cokie’s Law: if information, factual or otherwise, is “out there” then it must be discussed uncritically. Thus the media happily carries the GOP messaging machine’s water on Pelosi and anybody else in the cross-hairs that day. There’s just no getting around it, and The Democrat not only doesn’t have anything like this, they aren’t even on the same planet with the scale and coordination of this operation. Unless and until they create a sustained messaging attack on McConnell and Ryan, those two can continue right on doing what they’re doing. Just to focus on McConnell, he’s likely the most destructive force in government today, but most people would be hard pressed to name him, much less know what he’s been up to and why it is dismantling the way our government has, until recently, functioned.
That’s simply not the case for Pelosi, and that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s from San Francisco and everything to do with a sustained, targeted, and years long messaging attack that salts the Earth and leaves useful framing tools for any GOP hopeful to pick up and use, readymade. Democrats try to build the machine from scratch with every individual election, every cycle. How’s that working out for them?

Lastly, if you like the ACA, thank Nancy Pelosi. Period. That doesn’t mean she gets a pass to serve in party leadership forever, but she did that lift more or less with her own political momentum and within the context of the sustained, entirely negative noise machine and well after perceptions about her in the media were set in stone. Think on that as you try to show her the door.

The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers–perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

David Atkins nails it over at the Washington Monthly. I’d only add: yep. Though it’s also worth noting the Democrats are also fighting a messaging machine they can’t hope to match at this point. This is worth noting that in light of the South Carolina over-performance in an essentially forgotten race in a deep red district…

Storm und Frum

A tweetstorm’s tweetstorm from David Frum:

Slicing away one’s memory lobes an excellent basis for decision-making, so sure (he said with heavy sarcasm). [A Fresh Start for Trump!]

Let’s have a fresh start and forget that the president-elect owes his victory in large part to aid by a hostile foreign intelligence agency

Let’s have a fresh start and pretend that the president-elect didn’t alert allies and enemies that America may ignore its NATO pledges

Let’s have a fresh start and forget that the president-elect remains committed to a religious test for the rights of citizenship

Let’s have a fresh start and never mind that the president elect is a confessed serial sexual assailant

Let’s have a fresh start and who cares that the new administration is already developing fraternal ties to fascist parties in Europe

Let’s have a fresh start and believe that it doesn’t matter that the president-elect owes hundreds of millions to the Bank of China

Let’s have a fresh start, because who is bothered that black, brown, & Muslim fellow citizens have been demeaned and feel terrified?

Let’s have a fresh start, and hope that pro-Trump trolls will cease bullying women into silencing themselves on social media

Let’s have a fresh start, because it will take time to learn how the president-elect has prostituted his office for personal gain

Let’s have a fresh start, because 70 year old men afflicted by narcissistic personality disorder often suddenly become better people

Lets have a fresh start, because it’s only fair play to give would-be kleptocrats a 6-month head start before we act to stop them

Let’s have a fresh start, because Trump’s contemptuous assumption of media gullibility is fully justified.