Tag: serious people

It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.

Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.

James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

[Bloomberg] clearly was not prepared for these rather obvious questions, perhaps because he is a cloistered plutocrat surrounded by yes men and toadies, or perhaps because there is no defense at all. He appeared very much like what he in fact is — a very rich man who is likely facing bitter, unfiltered criticism to his face for the first time in years.

Ryan Cooper writing for The Week.

While I’m sure we’ll get plenty of “why are they so mean to Bloomberg” takes today, I’d say his ~$500M attempt to buy his way into both the Democratic party and the White House are effectively over.

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.

If the Republicans in the Senate were really as concerned about a renegade presidency as they claim to be on Twitter and in anonymous mumblings to various reporters, they’d join with Democrats to block [Mnuchin’s] nomination. It only takes three of them, and they all could cite Mnuchin’s dubious testimony to the committee as a very plausible reason for doing so.

There was absolutely no chance of that ever happening, however. Nobody—except Bernie Sanders, who said it all the time—wants to get up and state flat out that the business model of people like Stephen Mnuchin, the people who immiserated millions out of sheer animal greed, was plain vanilla bunco fraud. This was really the last chance to make that point before these gombeen yahoos do it all over again.

Charlie Pierce, writing about the Mnuchin confirmation for Treasury Secretary. Yep. Great Recession II is coming, and if these yahoos are still in charge when it happens they’ll merily let the global economy burn to the ground Hoover style. The Market will sort all that out, don’t ya know? So get ready for your haircut, Wall Street, because it’s coming sooner than later; the great reckoning that should have been bailout and jailterms back in ought-eight will instead be no bailout, total ruin for you, and a decades long recovery for literally everyone else. And, of course, the end of the GOP. So we’ll have that going for us.

What Atrios Said

Press conferences don’t really matter that much anyway. Just one of those ritualistic things we’re all used to. Just get rid of it, spend your time doing something else. Stop whining about it.

Full Text

Yep. I’d only add that “something else” has to be real, aggressive, confrontational journalism. It is a colossal waste of time and resources to wait around all day for the privelege to sit there and go through the motions of jotting down what the press secretary said and, on a good day, elicit some minor gaffe around imprecise wording that we can all titter about for a few hours before repeating the same pointless nonsense the next day. Seriously, when was the last time news of any kind was broken at a press conference? If you’re thinking of citing Muskie’s suspect tear, then keep looking and leave the Man from Maine alone, my friend.

If Trump eliminates this particular brand of nonsense forever, I say good on him. At least he accomplished something beyond enriching himself and forcing all the august journals to acknowledge that water sports are officially ‘Merica’s Prime Patriotic Pastime.

I’m a PC

A long piece by Ta-Nehesi Coates on Obama (and, basically, race in America) that is predictably excellent, but this little scene really sticks out to me:

The [systematic and complete GOP] obstruction [throughout Obama’s presidency] grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”

Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. “I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ ”

This is a genuinely and deeply important perception by Obama. It is undeniable that racism figures into much of the baseline Obama hatred/denial (“not my President!” “not a citizen!” and so forth), but baseline crazy is baked right into the mix for any Democrat that holds high office. Period. And an over-reliance on just characterizing this stuff over the last eight years as racism in blanket fashion is definitively of a piece with the “PC run wild” attacks that Trump used to great effect.

Even more importantly, though, is the fact that it’s all too easy to forget what the ground rules are for Democrats as candidates or office-holders. Expect this kind of shit. Run against it. Point it out in off years any time you are near a live microphone. You can never just “move forward,” unilaterally disarm, and take what you perceive to be the high road. Use your foreknowledge and expectation of these asinine talking points to preemptively mock and aggressively belittle your opponents based on the predictability of their spew as opposed to the far easier shortcut “oh, that’s just racist.” Because once you throw those qualifiers in, people on the convincible peripheries just stop listening. It is far easier to show them the crystal clear pattern of noise and falsehood, especially if you’re the one bringing it up and preemptively bludgeoning your opponent with it, than it is to get them to stare into the maw of decades and centuries of systematic privilege from which they have likely benefited…and but also magically admit to that, accept your point, change their worldview, and march right down to vote “D” for the rest of their natural lives.

But, alas, Serious Democrats are against this sort of thing; my dears that simply isn’t done. And this is why they fail.

Meet the Press | Washington Spectator

Superb piece by Rick Perstein, a tiny bit of which is this:

It’s almost like they keep score in editorial offices. Only a certain number of horrifying—which is to say, truthful—things can be allowed in a major publication about our president-elect every day, which then must be balanced by something reassuring. Which is to say, something not true.

You really must read the whole thing. It’s excellent.

Meet the Press | Washington Spectator

It’s been clear for years that Michael Bloomberg would like to be president and even clearer that there is a network of political consultants who would like to get paid by Bloomberg’s hypothetical presidential campaign.

Matt Yglesias, finishing his 15 point analysis of Bloombmentum in just one point…