How Much Of Trumpism Is Just Toxic Masculinity?

 I read this story, about some troglodyte running for county executive in Pennsylvania, and I fold it in with the Madison Cawthorn story from yesterday and the innumerable cases of dipshit White guys playing soldier or freaking out over masks and...WTF, White guys?

America's endless fetish with massive pickup trucks, guns and "tactical" gear bespeaks a fragility in the male ego that is kind of nuts. True, for decades White guys had close to carte blanche for the sort of low-key aggression of "it was just a joke" or being secure as the primary breadwinner. The rise of women in the workplace culminated in the 2008 economic crisis that hit blue collar White guys especially hard. Add in the temerity of non-White people asking to be treated with respect and something broke in a certain segment of White guy. Oh, and his girlfriend/wife.

My son just saw his barber driving down the street in a huge black pickup truck, smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone. His barbershop is like a petri dish for a sort of throwback, swaggering idea of manhood that will ultimately curdle into something pathological in some men.

There is a certain fragile masculinity at hold in Black people as well, it's not solely a White thing. The rap culture of conspicuous excess and casual misogyny is a good example of this dynamic. 

When did men become so delicate and fragile that they need to threaten school board members over public health measures like wearing masks in school? It's so fundamentally stupid that it befuddles people. Of course, it's not about the mask per se. Some of it is a recklessness confused with bravery, but most of it is the casual Oppositional Defiance Disorder that characterizes modern boys and boys over the age of 18 who never grew out of it.

If we don't start creating more empathetic and compassionate men, we are so fucking doomed. 

Lost In The Crazy

 With all the attention given to Marjorie Traitor Greene and JV Sarah Palin aka Lauren Boebert, we really have overlooked how batshit crazy Dollar General Tom Brady is.

The fact is Traitor Greene is going to win re-election, unless she get a really strong third party challenge and even then...she won with 74% of the vote. Boebert? She could lose, as she eked in with 51.4%. Target her with your donations. Don't give a dime to Greene's opponent unless you've maxxed out elsewhere.

Cawthorn did win 54.5% of the vote, but that could be vulnerable, as he really wasn't vetted. He seemed like an inspirational story, but much of his "story" was a lie. Now, he's come out as a full-on Q Anon freakshow. Some of it may depend on how his district is drawn. North Carolina is gaining a seat, but it could reduce his share of rural whites and increase the importance of winning Asheville, where he's unlikely to be popular.

So don't sleep on Cawthorn, but write your checks to Boebert's opponent.

Woof

 I'm just going to quote Paul Campos:

Approximately 800,000 more Americans have died since February of 2020 than would have died over that time frame if age adjusted mortality rates had remained the same (age adjusted mortality almost always drops from year to year). That’s an average of 1,416 excess deaths per day, or basically three 9/11 terrorist attacks every week for 19 months. It’s also equivalent to the total number of murders committed in America over the course of the last half century.

This Is A Good Idea

 Greg Sargent lays out some basic reforms to prevent a repeat of aspects of 1/6.

It's The Pandemic, Stupid

 While there is no question that the relentlessly negative coverage of our retreat from Afghanistan has impacted Biden's approval numbers - coverage that it fundamentally unmoored from reality - the idea that Afghanistan will be the issue that decides the midterm elections next year seems far fetched.

The issue will be the next six to nine months of the pandemic. Sure, Biden's legislative agenda is looking a bit shaky with nine morons "moderates" holding it hostage because apparently for some people, it's still 1994. Still, I expect Nancy Pelosi to roll them flat as a pancake. No, the issue will be Covid.

Biden's pressers and interviews have all stressed that the buck stops with him over Afghanistan. This is his policy and he's counting on doing the right thing and being Trumanesque will ultimately accrue to his benefit or at least won't hurt him.

Covid is different. For whatever reason, we have people like Ron DeathSantis refusing to follow public  health advice while promoting horse dewormers. DeSantis is still getting remarkably soft media scrutiny despite the horror show unfolding on his watch. 

This is yet another test of the American polity's ability to navigate policy consequences. As Biden has said about Afghanistan, the buck does stop with him. With Covid, because of our balkanized public health institutions, it's largely up to state and local governments to arrest the spread of the virus. Yet, when we look at the Covid ActNow map, we see a wide swath of red and dark red states. 

Now, I have my problems with that map. I think it rather alarmist. Take Illinois for example, the state has a 65.6% vaccination rate, a reasonably low positive test rate of 5.2% and an RO of 1.11. That's not great, but they are coded red because they have 28.6 new cases per 100,000. Both their infection rate and positive test rate are declining. Their ICU beds are currently manageable. Let's compare to Texas. Texas has a lower vaccination rate at 56.8%, a positive test rate three times as high at 15.9%, but a curiously low RO of 1.04. Their daily new cases is twice as high at 52.8/100,000. How are these the same? Texas' ICU situation is critical and their deaths are skyrocketing. That both states are coded the same color is a serious flaw. There's good date at Covid ActNow, but their color coding is problematic, especially if they are basing things on vaccinated people who have tested positive but had mild or no symptoms.

Now let's look at Florida. They have 106.5 new cases per 100,000 people. They have a positive test rate of 18.9, which suggests not enough testing is being done to catch all infections. While 63.4% of Floridians are vaccinated, this number is skewed by the large number of people over 65 who live in Florida and have been vaccinated. The current iteration of the pandemic is people under 65 who have the Delta variant. ICU beds are full and more and more people are going to require those beds, not to mention that "normal" ICU patients will get squeezed out. My son is headed to Savannah for college and while I'm not worried about him getting Covid (again), the fact that there is basically no room in the local hospitals does scare me.

Currently the Northeast is largely coded Orange, mostly because of the daily new cases. Again no differential between positive asymptomatic cases in the vaccinated and people on their way to the ICU (although Connecticut ICUs are only at 56% capacity). However, cold weather is coming and schools are returning to in-person learning. Will Delta cause an explosion in the Northeast?  I very highly doubt a Florida-style debacle will happen here, but it could very, very easily get worse.

Which brings me back to Biden and the Democrats. 

If various mandates, fear of Delta and complete FDA approval can get vaccination rates over 70% combined with infection-acquired immunity could finally dampen the spread and turn the pandemic in a background illness like the flu. If that happens, Democrats should do fine next November, all things considered. They might still lose the House, but they also might not. If the pandemic is still raging, even if it is the fault of Republican governors, then Biden - and by extension Democrats - will be hurt, because the President's party will get blamed for the weather, much less a pandemic.

Of course, the fact that prominent anti-vaxxers and rightist media figures keep dying of Covid, maybe there won't be anyone around to rally the Spreadnecks.

The Crux Of The Media's Problem With Afghanistan

 I've read countless bad takes by commentators on Afghanistan, but this one seems to crystalize the problem, in particular this part:

One would think that after a half-century in Washington, Biden would have internalized this truth and done a bit more to minimize the ugliness of Afghanistan. He would have seen the hot potato hurtling toward him and put on oven mitts. George W. Bush passed his failed nation-building project off to Barack Obama. Obama cranked it up, then dialed it back and dished it off to Trump. Trump surrendered to the Taliban at Doha, but managed to delay the rough end of the bargain beyond the range of his own responsibility.

Biden simply reached up and grabbed the potato with both bare hands, seemingly heedless of how it would burn.

Do you see it? People like Von Drehle admit that Afghanistan was lost. It was a failed mission. But Biden...something something something.

Biden willing to "take the hit" on Afghanistan is one of the best examples of presidential leadership that I've seen, up there with Obama insisting on a ground force to kill Bin Laden. 

We should be rewarding a president who has done the right thing but also the hard thing. Instead, he's being pilloried.

What Have We Learned?

 The middle of a pandemic - in many ways an entirely new pandemic than the one we faced a year ago - is not necessarily the time to reimagine the public health institutions of the United States. But we need to do it at some point. There is very good evidence that legacy institutions and practices were unequal to the task of fighting a global pandemic. The extraordinary caution of the FDA in giving full approval to mRNA vaccines has meant that institutions like the military or school districts can't require them. Sure, there are a few people who were waiting for full approval, too, but the real import of full approval is mandates.

The initial confusion of the CDC guidelines in 2020 ought to be somewhat forgiven. It's a novel coronavirus. Still, that was not the agency's finest moment. A bit of that was Trump, but overall the medical establishment moves slowly. Because of the risk associated with tending to sick people - think of the ridiculous list of side effects accompanying every advertised treatment for plaque psoriasis - doctors and public health officials like to make 150% sure that a new treatment abides by the Hippocratic standard of "first, do no harm."

Doing no harm, however, can do harm when we are talking about a pandemic. When I was in the hospital, I got the usual treatment of Remdesivir and steroids, but I also got an emergency use dose of an rheumatoid arthritis drug that - correlation is not causation notwithstanding - coincided with my recovery. The doctor said that they aren't even sure why it works, but it apparently does. That's flexible, adaptive medicine. 

This interview with Leana Wen, MD, touches on this issue.

Following the science means you don’t manipulate scientific data, and your decisions are based on science. But public health is not just about science and knowing the right data. It’s about values. It’s understanding how to communicate those data to stakeholders. It’s getting the buy-in of others around you, and effective communication that earns people’s trust is essential to achieving your outcomes. And so the CDC is great at the science. They have been impeccable about the getting the data. But the interpretation of the data into policy cannot just involve the CDC. And, in fact, it needs to involve many stakeholders, both within the federal government and with local and state health departments, businesses, unions and so forth. If those entities were consulted around the guidance for fully vaccinated people, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in now. Because any of them would have pointed out that the honor system would not have worked.

We can't allow the "honor system" to get us out of this pandemic. Wen continues:

I worry about this a lot. You’ve seen what happened in Tennessee with the vaccine director being fired for trying to promote covid vaccines to adolescents. And even more disturbing, I think is that now, Tennessee health officials are being prohibited from promoting vaccines to children. Not just covid vaccines, but all other childhood immunizations. I mean, public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been before.

I don't know what we do about the significant but small minority of anti-vaxxers in our country (or anywhere, really). But I have an idea.

Being anti-vax is like being a drunk driver. There is a pretty good chance that you won't die driving drunk. However, driving drunk significantly increases the odds that you kill, maim or injure yourself or others. No one thinks that driving shitfaced is an expression of Murican Freedumb. It's just...wrong. People still do it, but we dramatically increased the penalties for endangering the public by driving drunk. Since 1982, and the advent of anti-drunk driving campaigns, drunk driving deaths have fallen by 52% and fallen by 82% among people under the legal drinking age. Do people still drive drunk and kill themselves and others? Sadly, yes. 

But using the combined force of the law and public stigma, we've made a difference. Sure, mandating vaccines won't get us to 100% vaccination, anymore than strong anti-drunk driving laws ended all drunk driving. However, it will absolutely make a difference.

I'm convinced - 100% convinced - that I'm alive because I was vaccinated. I was an outlier within an outlier (although Delta is a new beast and a new pandemic) but I'm mostly fine and getting better each day. If I wasn't vaccinated, I shudder to think where I would be right now. The people who are poisoning themselves with horse dewormer...well...Instant Darwin gonna getcha, I guess. 

The way out of this pandemic is vaccination. Delta has shown us that traditional herd immunity thresholds will not be enough. We need shots in arms (and shots in arms around the world; maybe we could spend some of that money we lit on fire in Afghanistan to get shots in arms throughout Latin America and Africa). 

As we exit the pandemic - into the reality of endemic Covid - we need to assess what we did well and what we pooched. That examination must include looking at other countries responses. Americans hate to borrow practices from overseas, but other countries did much better than us. We need to be more adaptable and quick witted.

Covid will not be the last pandemic of our lifetime. We can't afford to fuck up as bad as we have, at times, again.

A Brief History Of Afghanistan

 Josh Marshall has it here. I'm not saying that Marshall having a PhD in history makes him a more sagacious commentator, but...OK, I'm saying it.

Attacks In Kabul

 Unsurprisingly, if you thought leaving was a bad idea, this proves you right, because apparently we want to be attacked with suicide bombers. There are whispers that sources in the Taliban tipped off American intelligence that ISIS-K would try this. The reality of suicide bombings is that they are undeterrable. If America stays in Afghanistan, there will be more of these attacks. 

I heard some fucking journalist say that this was an embarrassment to the United States. How is someone who is willing to blow themselves up an embarrassment to the United States? Does that make the entire occupation of Iraq an embarrassment to the United States? Does that makes the previous 19 years in Afghanistan an embarrassment to the United States?

The suicide bombing is why we are leaving. I'm very, very sorry for the Afghan people and the shitshow they are going to inherit. But it's their country, and if they don't like it, the Northern Alliance is waiting.

Master Race "Democracy" And The Closing Of The Mind

 I'm laboring through Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. It's an amazing book, but rather a dense read.

Anyway, I've reached the 1850s and the lead-up to the Civil War. There is an interesting segment where Wilentz talks about Master Race democracy in the South. While Edmund Morgan first postulated that the rise of American equality - at least the Chesapeake region - was predicated on African slavery and Native American subjugation, it was pretty clear by the 1850s that many White Southerners had taken this idea and run with it.

By the 1850s, elite opinion in the South had changed from the opinion of the Revolutionary generation. People like Washington, Jefferson and Madison saw slavery as a necessary evil and something that could not be ended easily, but something that would likely die out over time. For decades, this position had informed moderate thinking on slavery and combined with the idea that freed slaves should be forcibly removed from the country back to Africa or to the Caribbean. This was the so-called Re-Colonization movement. People like Lincoln endorsed it because A) they couldn't imagine freed Blacks getting a fair shake from the White majority and B) they never bothered to talk to actual Black people. Lincoln would change, because he was Lincoln.

Anyway, an interesting moment in Master Race Democracy was the publication of Hinton Helper's book, The Impending Crisis of the South.  Helper was a poor to middling mountain White. He hated Black people, but he hated the White aristocracy of the South even more (a natural precursor to Andrew Johnson). He saw the White South as essentially an oligarchy run by the scions of plantation wealth and one that kept the White South poor, illiterate and backwards. 

Those plantation elites responded by passing laws to ban Helper's book in every slave state except Kentucky.

These sort of bans were not new. For years, there was a Gag Rule in the House of Representatives that forbade even discussing petitions against slavery. US mails could not carry abolitionist literature south of the Mason-Dixon line. Banning books, from Helper's to Uncle Tom's Cabin, was a natural next step.

When Hitler came to power, he looked to the ideas of the American South to craft his version of Master Race democracy called Herrenvolk Democracy. The basic thread was that certain people are true citizens and other people are not. The White Anglo-Saxon South or the Aryan Germans were given authority to rule because of the racial inferiority of other groups. Burning books is a trademark of this movement; ideas can be defeated with ideas, but only if those ideas are given free rein.

I bring this up, because it is increasingly clear that the GOP is relying on a form of Herrenvolk democracy. The GOP is basically the party of White Patriarchy (women can absolutely serve patriarchy). In order to sustain that, they have to stop critical thinking... or Critical Race Theory.

The whole argument over CRT is bullshit, of course. CRT is a law school theory about assuming that all legal institutions are either explicitly or perhaps implicitly based on White Supremacy. Put another way, don't assume that things that LOOK race neutral are in fact race neutral. It's not a universally held position, either.

What the GOP is really railing against is the idea that America has White Supremacist origins. Sorry, but it does. There is no objective reading of American history that does not center the idea that White Protestant Americans had a right to conquer land from Native Americans and enslave African because they belonged to a superior race. Hell, they even excluded Catholics when they could from this form of Herrenvolk "Democracy." But if we understand America's White Supremacist past accurately, it pierces the aura of White Victimhood that is essential to Herrenvolk democracy.

The White South fanned secessionist flames because of the "Crime of the North" which was basically the North saying, "Yeah, we don't want any more slave states." Not "get rid of your slaves" just "no more slave states." The South was the victim. (Of course, the nascent anti-slavery Republican party also used the victim ploy in talking about how Slave Power was destroying the will of the majority. Tough to argue they were wrong though.) Hitler of course used German victimhood to launch his ascent to power. Trump's appeal to the his base was that he would fight back against the oppressors of Sarah Palin's Real Americans.

That the current GOP is basically banning books or avenues of academic inquiry should surprise no one. Ron DeSantis went to Harvard, but he understands the power that "liberal" ideas have in destroying the thrall of Herrenvolk democracy. So he will try and ban the teaching of anything to do with America's tortured racist past.

My hope is that this is the last gasp of a dying movement. (And not just because they are literally gasping for breath on ventilators in ICUs.) The appeal of Herrenvolk democracy is limited and largely un-American - even if it has deep roots in the South. The panic and desperation of the Trumpists is because subconsciously, they know they are losing.

This moment does feel like the 1850s, but America's division is not geographic and unlikely to end in Civil War. Domestic terrorism is much more likely, though to be fair many of the Trumpists are such fucking morons that they will likely be planning to blow up a Pride Parade in a chat room where half the members are FBI agents. 

This...isn't good. I don't think America as an idea dies on the rocks of Trumpism and his appeal to Herrenvolk democracy, but it's not going to be a fun decade.

The Goalposts, They Are A Moving

 Pfizer now has full FDA approval.

Let's watch the objections to the fact that it doesn't have FDA approval change into charges of corruption at the FDA.

Still, there are those that are hesitant that it might nudge towards the shot. If so, it could save their lives.

Frankentrump's Monster

 Lots of people were talking about this last night. At one of his Volksturm rallies, Trump touted taking the vaccine and his cultists booed. The fascinating closure of the reactionary mind is perfectly on display here. For all of our focus on Trump's unique awfulness as a president and simply as a human being, he was always more of a conduit than a generator of this shit. His salesman's instinct for telling the customer what they want to hear was his singular political talent. 

What they want to hear is simply laughably absurd bullshit.

This is seen in the RINO phenomenon. Anyone who varies even slightly from orthodox is an apostate, a heretic to be burned at the stake. Could that include Trump himself? I think it could, providing Cult 45 has a new figure to venerate. Digby Parton's famous maxim during the late Bush years - "Conservative can never fail, it can only be failed." - shows the inability of reactionary politics to admit being wrong, needing to change or adapting. Ideologically, it's as much a dead end as Marxism. 

There have been a number of stories about Rightist radio hosts dying of Covid. There are also the stories of dupes who have begged for the vaccine when they are on ventilators, which is of course too late. Roughly 1,000 people a day are dying of Covid in the US. Sadly, not all of them are going to be reactionary conspiracy theorists. Sadly, the reactionary conspiracy theorists are going to kill other people. 

I do honestly believe that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis as creating massive backlashes with what are objectively pro-Covid policies, but then again it's Florida and Texas. In the rational model of the world that liberal democracy relies upon, the manifest failures - measured in human death - of Republican governance would banish them from the corridors of power for a generation. I have to hope that this can be true.

If it's not, if America is perpetually balancing between competent, empathetic governance of people like Obama and Biden on the one hand and Trumpist lunacy on the others, it may well be time to break this country up. I am not willing to live with these fuckers anymore.

August And Everything After

 If there has been one thing true about the Beltway's media's coverage of the situation in Afghanistan, it has been that it is badly disconnected from the broader public's opinion on the matter.

Americans have largely reached their conclusions about Afghanistan, and those opinions are not in synch with the sort of commentariat that Josh Marshall accurately describes here. When I look at the five "main stories" being read and shared at WaPo there are four stories on Covid and one on Hurricane Henri. At the Times, the top two stories are Covid, one is about Silicon Valley and two on Afghanistan.

When I think about this dynamic, I think about the month I was married, 23 years ago. It was the Summer of Impeachment in 1998, and Clinton's deposition with "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."  The reality is that people had made up their mind about the situation. As breathless as DC media was about Clinton, it never landed. A similar dynamic seems to be at play with Afghanistan. We knew who Clinton was by 1998, and we know what Afghanistan is like in 2021. 

I don't know what it is about August that creates this dynamic, but polling is also remarkably inaccurate during this month. That makes sense as people are on vacation or gearing up for Back to School. They aren't answering pollsters.

The most important story in America right now is Covid/Delta. I'm not saying that because of my personal experience, I'm saying that because it's true. The Fox Universe can flog Afghanistan and Biden's impeachment over it (seriously...) but the majority of people are most concerned with the fact that Delta is out of control in large parts of the country and history suggests it will move north with cooler weather and the return to school. 

It is remarkable that journalists can't see that.

America May Have All The Watches, But The Taliban Have All The Time

 A veteran weighs in.

A Personal Note

 I have been in Massachusetts General Hospital since last Thursday with acute Covid pneumonia. I was released today and am on my way back to Nantucket (and apparently a hurricane). After checking into Nantucket Hospital on August 5th, I was treated for Covid - they thought successfully - and released two days later. By August 11th I was struggling to breathe. 

Basically, while they had most likely stopped my viral infection with Remdesivir, my lungs were terribly inflamed to the point where they couldn't recover on their own. Friday morning in Mass General, I kind of crashed, or at least my oxygen saturation rate did. I felt fine, actually. But they threw the whole toolbox at me. Again, I responded well to treatment and am headed home.

I was vaxxed. I was treated. I still got worse.

Delta is no fucking joke.

Getting vaxxed saved my life. I'm convinced of it. 

If You Read One Person On Afghanistan

 Make it Josh Marshall.

Captain Obvious

 Someone (Anne Laurie?) called Matt Yglesias "Captain Obvious" and I can't get that out of my head. His latest piece on American foreign and military policy falls neatly into "Captain Obvious" territory.

I read a book over 15 years ago by Dana Priest called The Mission: Waging War And Keeping Peace With America's Military. Central to Priest's thesis was the idea that the State Department was being hollowed out and foreign policy was increasingly centered and defined by the Defense Department. This obviously exploded under Bush 43 and after 9/11, as it was part of Cheney's reimagining of America's role in the world.

As Captain Obvious notes, using the military to do all of our heavy lifting is incredibly expensive and not always terribly effective. The old adage of "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is perhaps unfair to the military, but not out of bounds. What we saw over two decades in Afghanistan was the problems of the military can-do, problem solving mindset in circumstances that simply denied solution. Diplomats are perhaps more comfortable with the ambiguity that the world often throws at us.

It's not a question of intelligence or capability, so much as it a philosophical way of engaging with the complexities of a world that spins beyond the ability of any organization to control it.

I had a mildly interesting Twitter interaction over the Trolley Problem as it relates to global humanitarian crises. The Trolley Problem (if you haven't watched The Good Place, and why haven't you) is basically this dilemma. You are standing next to a switch; a runaway trolley is coming down the track; if you do nothing it will crush five people; if you flip the switch, it will kill one person, but you will have actively killed them. What is the moral culpability of someone witnessing something tragic? 

The argument the Twitter poster was making was that America is standing by the switch while death and suffering occurred and that was not OK. I wondered why it was America who was standing next to the switch. Are we morally culpable in Chinese oppression of the Uighurs? I can't see it. 

The "liberal interventionist" perspective is that we - America - are alone next to the switch. Yglesias mentions Libya as a bad example of America sticking our nose into an impossible situation. But America didn't take the lead there. Britain, France and Italy did, because they not only saw a humanitarian crisis, but a subsequent refugee crisis that would swamp the nascent democratic movements in Tunisia and Egypt and eventually wash on to the shores of Italy and Europe. Or in other words, exactly what happened in Syria.

Neither Syria nor Libya are "good" outcomes. They are plausibly categorized as "bad" outcomes, especially if your yardstick is measuring against an abstract positive outcome where Libya becomes, well, Tunisia. But, of course, Libya is NOT Tunisia and the outcomes would never be the same. Did that make intervention wrong? Impossible to say. Did intervention save Tunisian proto-democracy? No way of knowing.

To me, the great missed "liberal intervention" was Rwanda. It came hard on the heels of the Battle of Mogadishu, and Clinton didn't want to see any more Americans dying in poorly defined African conflicts. Fair enough. But the problem in Somalia was that people were starving. We established enough order to feed them, but we could not create a stable state. Just like Afghanistan. If your goal was to stop wholesale death, then Somalia was a success. If your goal was to create a stable, self-sufficient state in Somalia, that was never going to happen. In Rwanda, you could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but you could never have gotten the Hutu and Tutsi to have a loving relationship.

In other words, the military can established Max Weber's "monopoly of violence" long enough to stop on going atrocities. The military cannot establish a legitimate state as an external actor. This is somewhat hazily referred to as "nation building." Perfect. "Nations" are groups of people with a common identity who share a desire for self-rule. Yes, the American military cannot create that. Nations are perhaps not entirely organic, though they often line up with existing ethnicities, but they are explicitly indigenous. They cannot be grafted on from outside.

We have tasked the military to do something that cannot be done. The collapse of the Afghan Army is simply a byproduct of the real absence of an Afghan nation and especially an Afghan state and government. They didn't leave their posts because they were cowards, they left because there was no one to fight for. The famous question John Kerry asked of Vietnam "How do you ask a young man to be the last to die for a mistake?" applies to an Afghan solider, too.

I don't know if reinvigorating the State Department would help here. I do think that relying on the Pentagon to solve political problems with military tools does not seem to work. 

The Dumbs Of August

 What is it about this month and political media? I can remember preparing for my wedding while everyone was hyperventilating over Bill Clinton's definition of "what the word 'is' is." That was 1998.

Today, we have actual people saying that Biden's Afghan policy is his undoing. Not just the GQP Talkers who are trying to manifest this outcome by repeating it, but "normal" journalists.

Some perspective, please.

By all accounts, the evacuation of American and Western allies is going well after the initial chaos. The Taliban have won. They know it. Acting rashly now will undo that. As I've said, it will suck for the people of Afghanistan, but it has sucked to be the people of Afghanistan since 1980. It's a failed state.

You want to know what people care about? Fucking Covid. Of the top-5 stories at WaPo, the top tghree are Covid-related. The revelation that Governor Abbott of Texas has Covid is just <chef's kiss>. Maybe that shitstain DeSantis could get it next. Then there are the facts that Abbott:

- Is not only vaccinated but had a booster.
- Is getting monoclonal antibodies despite being asymptomatic (I never got those and I'm in one of the world's best hospitals with Covid pneumonia.)
- And finally, is making it actively hard for communities in Texas to prevent the spread of Covid.

How does that add up to political success beyond the (literal) fever swamps of Trumpistan? Have DeSantis and Abbott decided that the super majority of Americans who want to keep their children and themselves safe are going to be wowed by their principled stand in favor of letting the virus spread uncontrolled through their communities?

What we are seeing in the "Red Belt" from El Paso to Miami are levels of new cases that dwarf what we saw this winter. On January 8th Florida peaked at 80.3 cases per 100,000 people. Today they are over 100. Deaths - mercifully - have not exploded, because our ability to treat the disease has improved so much. Take it from me, the level of care and improvement I have seen has been amazing. 

But I'm in a private room in Boston. The ICUs of the Red Belt are full. If the hospitals overflow, those death numbers will climb. The efforts of the GOP Death Cult will get kids sick. This is absolutely going to happen. Delta is a brute. Every dead child from this disease needs to be laid at the feet of the GOP.

Please, tell me how bad Afghanistan is going.

Worth A Read

 David Ignatius is one of the clearer eyed national security correspondents. His piece is fair, though the "catastrophe" in media narratives of people clinging to planes seems to be diminishing. The Taliban could outwait us over 20 years, they can outwait a week or two of refugees leaving the country.

It would be sadly funny if the Taliban 2.0 was basically a poor version of Saudi rule - conservative, theocratic Sunnism, pretty repressive but not the horror show of Taliban 1.0. Funny/sad if the great bogeyman of Central Asia turned out to behave like our alleged allies in the Kingdom of Saud.

May You Choke On Your Cake

 I am currently still stuck in hospital with Covid Pneumonia. I'm fine, really, but stuck until my lungs clear up a bit more. Anyway, that means way more TV channel surfing than I am accustomed to, because I usually know exactly where to go to find something distracting to watch.

All of which is to say that I've scrolled through Fox News a few times. 

The reaction to what seems to obviously the right choice in Afghanistan is falling into as predictable a pattern as the collapse of the Afghan proxy forces. "Sensible foreign policy heads" are decrying...something...credibility...<waves hands>. These are the people invested in America's ability to create a nation in Afghanistan where none exists. They were given my eldest son's entire lifetime to solve this, failed and now want to blame Biden. Fuck'em, but I do think they legitimately care that things on the ground in Afghanistan are going to get worse for many, many Afghans,

Fox, on the other hand, is giddy. All their efforts to smear Biden - Hunter's laptop, Tara Reade, dementia, Major's nipping people, his return trips to Delaware - have fallen flat because they are all just transparently stupid. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is "bad." And what's more, it's undeniably real, unlike the idea that requiring vaccinations is the equivalent of Nazism.  

First, of course, they have to erase that this withdrawal was largely Trump's plan. In fact, the GOP had to scrub a web page touting Trump's role in creating the current circumstances. (People have pointed out that we "only" had 2500 troops there. But that was largely because we were negotiating our withdrawal anyway. If we wanted to stay, it would have required more troops.)

So rather than get into the merits of whether it was right to withdraw (it was) and therefore get snared by the fact that withdrawing from Afghanistan is broadly popular, Fox and the GOP are going to try and "have their cake and eat it to" by blaming Biden for the precipitate collapse of the Afghan government AND his efforts to rescue Afghans who helped us over the last two decades. Those of us who are sadly realistic about this situation also realize we can't abandon our friends.

That means immigration of large numbers of Afghans. 

That weird moaning noise you hear is Stephen Miller getting an erection at the thought of all the Islamophobic bile he gets to unleash. 

It is true that vetting the influx of Afghan refugees is important. It is also true that we must stand with them in their hour of need. The GOP and Fox get to attack Biden both for leaving (also Trump's idea, but shhh) and for abandoning our allies and for trying to save as many of our allies as we can.

I think Biden's Afghan plan and speech will go over better than the "Blob" realizes. I think the people at Fox "get" that. But they can always hate on immigrants and Muslims. That's evergreen territory for them.

It Was Always Going To End Badly

 It's been obvious for almost the entire 20 year occupation of Afghanistan that any Afghan government - and that includes the incoming Taliban regime - lacks widespread legitimacy. One propped up by US dollars, but dollars that largely disappeared into corruption, was no more legitimate than any puppet regime might be.

The rapid collapse of the Afghan "government" is a sign that - however painful and embarrassing - Biden's and (yes, Trump's) decision to get out of there was correct. Clausewitz's famous quote - "War is politics by other means" - is often warped to imply that politic should be ruthlessly Machiavellian. In fact, all military action must have an achievable political goal. What was striking about the Bush Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is how very little they understood this. They operated under the pretense of "everyone loves liberty" when that isn't necessarily so. Afghanis are primarily loyal to ethnic, tribal and kinship groups. There is no "Afghanistan" just as there isn't really an "Iraq." They are fictions on maps that war-gamers in Washington thought could be easily manipulated by simply replacing leadership in capitols. 

It is an undeniable catastrophe for Afghans who put too much trust in us, but I wonder how many really did. I hope we get out as many people as we can. I am sorry for what is about to happen to the women and girls of Afghanistan.

But it's been nearly 20 years. We had a generation to change Afghanistan and Afghanistan shrugged off those efforts in a few days. 

We failed because we could never succeed.  

I doubt beyond the Never Trumper Neocons and those already implacably opposed to him, that Biden will suffer too much from this decision. He will need to follow through on re-establishing multilateral coalitions like he promised. No one will care by Labor Day. Afghanistan will remain a backwards, brutal theocracy. A weak state, poorly governed. Like Syria. Like Yemen, Like Chad, Like Somalia. Like Poor Haiti. Like Libya. Like Iraq. Like Myanmar. Like Congo. 

We can't fix them. We tried. We were rejected. Spectacularly.

Can't Say I Disagree

 Yglesias takes on the United States of Fear.

Afghanistan

 It was pretty much always headed this way after 2003 and the pivot to Iraq. Maybe even without the pivot. So pissant whining like this is stupid. America is withdrawing from Afghanistan to be engaged elsewhere.

"We built nothing."

This Is A Weird Piece

 Vox did a very small "study" on people with breakthrough infections. They point out - accurately - that those of this with these infections are understudied and poorly understood. One thing they say is that people with this infections feel guilty. And maybe the dozen or so people they interviewed do feel guilty. Feeling are weird.

I don't feel guilty. I feel hopeless. 

When you mask for a year, then get your vaccine, and everything seems to have turned for the better...and THEN you get sick, you feel hopeless. Right now, I'm still struggling to catch my breath and I just don't know when that will get better. It just happened, even with the Pfizer vaccine to protect me. I don't feel guilty, because I didn't do anything wrong.

Maine And North Carolina

 Damn you guys...because you sent Collins and Tillis back to the Senate we have to deal with preening jackasses Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. I hope Greg Sargent is right that we are entering into a strange kabuki where House Progressives bottle up Manchin and Sinema's infrastructure deal until those two prima donnas sign off on the reconciliation bill, but every time something good happens, it seems to unwind.

Take The Good News Where You Can Get It

 Cuomo will resign.

The Senate actually passed the infrastructure bill.

Sometimes the wheels grind slow, but they do grind on.

Despondent

 Part of having Covid can be mood changes, and maybe that's what I'm going through right now.

On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder how we work our way free from the two greatest problems we face right now: this fucking pandemic and climate change. I do think Biden has made some laudable movements to "green up" our energy, but it feels like everything is spinning out of control.

I'm normally fairly optimistic about various trends and crises. I never thought Trump could hold on to power, for instance. But these are different - massive events that don't correct easily. 

Right now, I can't walk up stairs without getting winded, and I'm supposed to get ready for a school year? Most likely with masks again? 

I just want to slink into a hole.

Sick Of The Doomers

 Josh Marshall takes on Alex Pareene, who argues the apparent bipartisan win on infrastructure is in fact a loss, because it didn't apply the appropriate lessons from 2009-10. What is frustrating about all of this is Pareene is a very good commentator. Yet, as Marshall points out, there simply aren't the votes in the Senate to pass voting rights, immigration reform or labor reform. Critics of "Democrats" simply wave their hands at the very annoying reality that Democrats lost winnable Senate races in North Carolina, Maine and possibly Iowa and Kansas. If they had won those seats, any number of different courses of action would be open.

But they didn't!

Everyone who laments that Biden isn't LBJ or FDR steamrolling his way through Congress neglects that fact that both men had supermajorities to work with. Biden does not.

What he has done is get important emergency spending done quickly, allowed Manchin and Sinema their bullshit moment of attention and passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, AND set the stage for a second, larger bill passed via reconciliation. (That bill is still going to have to pass fucking Sinema's bullshit reflexive "moderation.")

Before I got sick, I began a Twitter argument (FUN!) over whether we were Germany in 1930. I said that was absurd, and I remain convinced of that. The simple reason is that we have many, many moments in American history where terrible wrongs were committed in defense of White rule. It's "funny" how everyone is focused on the "lost history" of the Greenwood/Tulsa massacre, but they are also ignorant of Rosewood, Colfax, Memphis, New Orleans and countless other incidents of White supremacist violence. People who scream "If you aren't teaching Tulsa, you are whitewashing history!" are missing the point. 

It was never just Tulsa.

That the GQP has abandoned multiracial democracy is not a new development in American history. Precisely when did the White South - and its cultural cousins in other parts of the nation - accept multiracial democracy willingly? They tolerated it when they could still win majorities from 1968-1992, but every year makes that harder, so their resistance ramps up.

This is not new, and we have beaten them before, and we will beat them again.

But not if we retreat into an Eeyore shell of despondency and despair.

Reclaiming Patriotism

 The sickening imagery of 1/6 has led many people from the center left to become deeply uncomfortable with patriotic symbols and expressions of patriotism in general. Sickening images like Hair Furor literally humping the flag have soiled the garment in many people's eyes.

Matt Yglesias has been trying to resurrect left of center patriotism, especially as the Far Right has moved to embrace fascist movements abroad like Viktor Orban's Hungary. As American culture moves continually leftward, the Right seems willing to abandon American values like democracy. They simultaneously wrap themselves in the flag and shit all over the founding documents and ideals of the country.

The Rightist attacks on what they have vaguely labelled "Critical Race Theory" (really anything that accurately describes the racist past of this country) are part of this last gasp attempt to preserve the White Ethnonationalist state that prevailed largely until the 1960s. It began with the 1619 Project, which accurately placed both African Americans and White Supremacy in their proper historical context. If you grew up with shitty, inaccurate, white washed history, it was a shock (and likely an unwelcome one) to read that essay.

Except you probably DIDN'T read that essay. You read someone criticizing it. There was one sentence that I thought was bad about the Revolution, but what was striking about the essay was how the author's father remained intensely patriotic, even in the face of Jim Crow. If there is a fascinating truth to the American story, it has been the steadfast patriotism of many groups that have traditionally been excluded at times from American power. Immigrants have been targeted well before Trump came along, and yet they continue to come here and become our most devoted citizens. Black Americans are certainly familiar with America's history of racism, yet they (mostly) refuse to give up on America.

My worry is that the one group that has never really bought into the promise of America are Leftists, and their ideas are increasingly gaining traction beyond their usual grip on Academia. (This is not something I worry about from Joe Biden.)

If the Right wants to embrace anti-American regimes like Orban's, Bolsonaro's and Erdogan's, then they are ceding the field to the Center Left.

What I find weird is that "Doomers" who see 1930s Germany around every corner in America are so blind to our own country's history. I'm reading Fawn Brodie's biography of Thaddeus Stevens and the politics of the 1840s-1870s were more fraught, violent and repressive than anything the GQP dreams of today. 

If you're worried about attacks on democracy in America, there are other examples than freaking Hitler. America's commitment to its ideal has always been a conflict, an argument, not a settled case.

The proper attitude for the center left should be to reclaim American patriotism along the lines that Obama did: focusing on "in order to build a more perfect union." It is the fight to make America what it claims to be that is the truest expression of patriotism. Not coddling Viktor Orban or claiming against all available evidence that America is the only or even most racist country in the world.

Well, That Escalated Quickly

 Despite being vaccinated, I've been briefly hospitalized with Covid pneumonia. I woke up Thursday with bloody flecks in my sputum, so I went to the ER. I was put on Remdesivir and steroids and began to bounce back almost immediately. I went in around noon and could taste again by 5:00pm. I should be released tomorrow.

The fact that I got so sick is a testament to the virulence of the Delta variant.

The fact I've recovered so quickly would seem to speak to the vaccine working even in a bad breakthrough scenario.

But if people want me to wear a mask, I'm going to, and you should, too.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall provides some context.

Good News From Ohio

 Shontel Brown defeated Nina Turner in the primary for OH-11. Turner represents the "politics by division" wing of the Left. She throws more bombs at Democrats than Republicans. She was able to outraise Brown, because she could tap into a national network of Sanders' donors. Brown simply had Democrats on her side.

As we approach yet another critical midterm election, hanging on to every House seat is important. What's more, it's important that Democrats in Washington ultimately are all pulling in the same direction. I think that's something AOC ultimately gets, but I'm not sure Ilhan Omar does.

In an unlikely endorsement of David Brooks, Martin Longman points out that a certain cultural leftism has taken root. On the one hand, Turner seemed to represent the class and economic issues that would resonate with WWC voters. Where I differ with Longman is that I don't think a policy portfolio is going to shift the needle much. There's a pundit's fallacy that the arcane details of policy move voters. The sort of voters who get moved by that are already committed ideologically. Only a few voters are moved at the margins, and that is often for more generalized "feelings" about the state of the country or the candidate. 

Turner was a candidate for the Angry Left, petulantly relitigating the fact that Sanders lost. The reason Sanders and Turner lost is that they tended to attack other Democrats. For the Twitterati, Brown represents the dreaded "establishment Democrats." To the bulk of the party, she's just a team player. 

You need those.

Holy Crap

 Most of Twitter is a deep cesspool of awfulness, but this thread is amazing. Basically large numbers of anti-vax protestors are hired actors.

Twisting Freedumb Into A Hangman's Noose

 Paul Krugman takes on the unfolding disaster in Florida. He points out that while Florida is roughly at the national level of vaccine uptake, senior citizens in Florida are overwhelmingly vaccinated, leaving the bulk of the population unvaccinated. He then moves on to Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis is likely the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024, if Trump doesn't run. His conduct during the pandemic is perfectly Trumpian, with the caveat that Trump is an idiot who suggested injecting bleach and DeSantis is a cynical shithead who simply wants to latch on to whatever Trump started.

Since the beginning, DeSantis has embraced this messed up idea of "freedom." It's something I've encountered with a cousin on Facebook. The idea that masking and mandatory vaccinations are an assault on our precious freedoms. 

Krugman lays it:

My answer is that when people on the right talk about “freedom” what they actually mean is closer to “defense of privilege” — specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want.

If you can explain to me the difference between a toddler's understanding of autonomy and this bullshit "Freedumb" movement, I'm willing to listen. Do masks suck? I mean, a little bit. But as someone who is suffering through a breakthrough infection, I can tell you it definitely does not suck nearly as much as having Covid, even fully vaccinated.

Krugman continues:

Once you understand that the rhetoric of freedom is actually about privilege, things that look on the surface like gross inconsistency and hypocrisy start to make sense.

Why, for example, are conservatives so insistent on the right of businesses to make their own decisions, free from regulation — but quick to stop them from denying service to customers who refuse to wear masks or show proof of vaccination? Why is the autonomy of local school districts a fundamental principle — unless they want to require masks or teach America’s racial history? It’s all about whose privilege is being protected.

This is part and parcel of the freakout by certain segments of White America to a changing country. They see their impending marginalization, but they are erecting these false structures to shield themselves from it. They respond to cognitive dissonance with abject denial and a retreat to fantasy.

Trump won 46 and 47% of the vote in his two elections. Rather than see that the majority of Americans rejected him, they simply create a fact-free narrative that he actually won. 

Masks work, and despite our personal experience, vaccines work. My wife and I feel like shit, but we aren't going to die. But if you've been conditioned to see "gubmint" as "crazy socialists after your freedom to make a joke about your Black co-worker," then you reject common sense calls to return to mitigation and you reject calls for mandatory vaccination. 

One of the clearest examples of this is the term "pro-life." Republicans have been clinging to this term, even as they support the death penalty and invading Iraq. If we properly understand anti-abortion sentiment among many conservatives as about preserving the privilege of men to have children without the necessary consent of women - the "forced birth" position - then there's no longer any hypocrisy. This is why they can scream about "bodily autonomy" when it comes to vaccines and not abortion (or even birth control). It is why the GOP has moved forcefully away from supporting basic ideas of democratic rule.

There are always limits on freedom. In fact, we know the GOP supports efforts to limit the freedom of teachers to teach, people of color to protest and on and on. 

They do not care about freedom.

They want autonomy.  Freedom exists within the confines of a well-run society. Autonomy is simply divorcing yourself from everyone else. 

As the pandemic has shown, that's deadly.

It Broke Through

 My family is not its own little break through infection from Covid, likely the Delta Variant. 

My eldest son had been fighting a sinus infection off an on all summer and then felt really sick. There had been a close contact at work so we had him tested. He came up positive. My younger son felt sick, but tested negative. My wife - who's been fighting Lyme's Disease - also tested positive. Meanwhile, I'm in Georgia. I feel achy one day and run a fever that night, but then feel fine. I make it back to my family and almost as soon as I get home, I hit the wall. Fever, chills. My wife feels like a truck hit her. 

My eldest son is fine and we both felt so much better this morning.

I'm not worried about our health; we are on the road to recovery. Here's what's concerning. Massachusetts has some of the highest vaccination rates in the country. Nantucket has the highest vaccination rates in Massachusetts. 

Delta found a way around that.

When I was in Georgia, after finding out that my family was sick and I was likely sick, too, I wore a mask when I was around people. For the most part, everyone was fine with that. One guy at the hotel I was staying at asked me why I was masking. I didn't want to come out and say "I have Covid" but maybe I should have. Instead, I said I had been in close contact with someone who tested positive. Maybe, I said, I could shed the virus, so I was wearing a mask to protect others.

His response was illuminative of a certain mindset. "Those idiot doctors don't know nothing."

I wanted to tell him that there was much they don't know for certain about what is, after all, a novel virus. The original "Masks don't work" in March of 2020 was...bad. The fact that most Americans don't know what '95% effective" means is...bad. Delta broke through in our family, but we are going to be OK. I'm a little concerned about my wife, because of her Lyme diagnosis, but hopefully we are on our way through this.

However, if Delta is actively working its way around the vaccines, maybe we are headed for another hellish Fall. That scares me, because most people are simply done with giving a shit about each other. A year of Trump's endless messaging problems ("Hey, kids, let's inject bleach!") made everything worse.

If we can reach 75% vaccination rates, we will likely STILL see some breakthrough infections. We need a plan for that.