Fox News is not a journalistic enterprise. The fact they are allowed to exist in the same headspace as the Times or Post, CNN or even MSNBC is a joke, but not a very funny one.
I have a vague memory of Rupert Murdoch surviving a plane crash back in the '80s or '90s. Damned shame that that happened. There have always been cranks and lunatics on the Right. Birchers, Klansmen and neo-Nazis have all been at the margins, but now they have nightly shows on Fox.
Jon Chait takes a run at the similarities between McCarthyism and today's hysterical attacks from conservatives on anything to the left of Mitch McConnell as "socialism" and "communism."
His jumping off point is that there were actual communists in America during the McCarthy Era. He points to Klaus Fuchs and Alger Hiss. Fuchs were unquestionably a Soviet spy, but he was spying for them in Britain, so...I'm not sure what the point of this was. Fuchs was perhaps the most damaging spy for Moscow, but it doesn't really say much about McCarthyism. Alger Hiss remains a fascinating Rorschach test about the Cold War. There is no smoking gun either way, but a ton of hearsay and circumstantial evidence. Hiss was likely a "Communist" but might not have passed on anything of value.
Regardless, the argument that the McCarthy Era adds some illumination to Democrats current debate seems fairly forced. History has not been as kind to McCarthy as the contemporaneous press was, but that hardly matters if you're trying to hold on to control of Congress.
Chait's thesis - and it's difficult to differentiate this from his long running obsession with campus speech codes and illiberalism on the Left - is a muddled mess. On the one hand, he's right that Democrats shouldn't engage in unpopular positions like "Defund the Police" or "Open Borders." When "The Squad" does embarrassing shit like vote against seizing Russian oligarchs' assets, because of civil forfeiture laws...that's just a stupid own-goal. On the other, the GOP media machine doesn't really care. The other lesson from McCarthyism is how much was just made up. Reporters helped "punch up" his crazy accusations to get front page bylines.
"Democrats" is also a tricky category. He mentions "dubious DEI training," which certainly exists and is another hobby horse of his. But we also know that teaching students that America was founded as a slave-holding nation dedicated to the white supremacy of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Indian Removal is considered "CRT" by the Right. They are currently fomenting the idea that Social Emotional Learning is secretly CRT to make Becky and Chad hate that they are White.
One thing Democrats absolutely should do is make a positive case for letting people alone. Same sex marriage didn't poll great. It was rebranded as marriage equality and that helped get people to support it. Anti-LGBTQ bigotry is very real and not very popular. Culture war vendettas against Disney are not very popular. Vaccines are popular.
Defending human dignity should absolutely be a priority of Democratic messaging. I agree that Democrats shouldn't step on their own dicks, but neither should they cave in to Republican falsehoods and bigotry.
Whispers are that Biden is going to move on easing or cancelling student debts.
I'm ambivalent.
On the one hand, the nature of student debt is that it is both large and falls on the young disproportionately. So you have people who are making less money than they eventually will - because they have degrees - who are leveraged.
It's also a clear demographic that Democrats need to win elections, but one that has a spotty history of actually turning up to vote. At this point, Biden and Democrats have trapped themselves because they've paused student debt payments. If they resume before the midterms, younger voters might stay home. So from a demographic stand point, you want to reward your voters.
On the other, they hired the money, didn't they? While student debt is a huge number for the population, it averages around $30,000 per person. So the individual benefits are going to be smaller than people think, but there's another problem. Inflation. A primary policy goal must be to corral inflation before it becomes a spiral. Stimulating the economy is the last thing we need to do right now. Inflation hurts everyone at the current rates, including those who will get debt relief.
There's at least some pushback from those who didn't take student loans and those who paid theirs off. Some of this is tied to just being selfish, which is a pre-existing condition for being a Republican anyway. Still, there could be a political cost to a student debt "jubilee."
Personally, I think Biden should cancel the interest on the debt with a promise to consider debt forgiveness once inflation is under control. The lack of interest will help, and get debtors out from compounding the principle. The promise for future debt relief might incentivize younger voters to get out and vote, unless they are being petulant little shits for not getting everything they want NOW.
As I said, I'm ambivalent. I think Biden has trapped himself by pausing debts. He can't un-pause them before the midterms, but forgiving them has a greater cost than people will admit - both politically and macroeconomically.
There are some absurd ideas on the Left and especially Far Left. I concede that.
However, the sheer firehose of insanity coming out of the Right these days is mindblowing.
Let's take freshman representative Madison Cawthorn. Jon Chait has catalogued the many scandals that this whackaloon has already managed to blithely stumble into in his brief time in Congress. In the past, these levels of scandal would sink any politician. Trump managed to inject a stunning disregard for normally career-ending scandals when he bull his way past the many scandals in 2016, like the Access Hollywood tape. You have Democrats who - rightly - asked Al Franken to resign, and the GOP who refuses to condemn people like Cawthorn, Marjorie Traitor Green or Paul Gosar.
Even the so-called intellectuals of the Right are prone to just moronic statements. Here is Dan McLaughlin arguing against public education from a facile and ahistorical viewpoint. As respondents note, New England had tax supported public schools in the early 17th century, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 actually set aside the sale of public lands in what is now the Midwest to fund schools. The Lincoln administration passed the Morrill Land Grant act that also set aside funds for public universities.
There is a plausible argument that the Reagan (and Nixon) Revolution of the 1980s was founded on certain ideas. A lot of those ideas were wrong (the Laffer Curve and Supply Side economics) or odious (racism masquerading as "states rights"). But they were ideas. There was a compelling argument that America in 1979 had too much burdensome regulation and that taxes were too high to allow for investment in new businesses. There is an equally compelling argument against those positions, but that's what politics should be.
The facts of Reagan's tax cuts created unsustainable deficit spending, and so George H. W. Bush raised taxes. He and Bill Clinton re-introduced some fiscal sanity to government and the economy truly exploded. Those are facts. Another fact is that Bush's decision to bend to facts in 1991 when he raised taxes helped lead to his defeat in 1992. Another fact is that you cannot get a single Republican to agree to raise taxes (unless you're Rick Scott), even if it would be economically healthy.
The Republican Party is now deeply enthrall to people who believe China hacked "Venezuelan" voting machines to throw the election to Joe Biden, and these are not at the margins.
Here is my knee-quaking fear: We are about to start the January 6th hearings. We are going to discover that many, many high ranking Republicans were in on the chaos of that day or in the fever dreams that led up to it. This will range from people like Green actively helping the coup attempt to people like McConnell tacitly humoring these falsehoods and giving them oxygen to survive. We will have documented evidence of treasonous activities by Trump, the members of his staff and administration and large numbers of the GOP caucus.
And it won't make a damned bit of difference, because the average American voter can't understand that they are paying $4.00 a gallon for gasoline, because Putin invaded Ukraine. Nor can they admit that one of our two parties has gone insane.
John Judis is an aging left of center pundit-type who finds a way to be wrong about just about everything. His latest is calling for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, that will be a product of US policy. His jumping off point is that US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin has called for a war to weaken Russia. Austin's point, no doubt, was that Russia cannot simply call an armistice, regroup and attack again in 5-10 years. Russia must be weakened to the point where it can no longer threaten the peace of Eurasia.
Judis tends to come at things from a '60s leftist point of view, where America is usually the bad actor. So we have statements like this:
Such a statement portrays the war as being between the United States and Russia, it will make Russian President Vladimir Putin even more intransigent and even more willing to escalate, and it will make it impossible for the United States to play a constructive role in promoting negotiations to end the war.
The catch here is that the US is largely peripheral to any negotiated settlement. We are clearly not a neutral party here. And we shouldn't be. Peace in Ukraine is largely a product of Russia's designs. Ukraine's goals are pretty clear: preserve Ukrainian sovereignty and hopefully force Russia out of as many territories that they occupied in 2014.
Judis continues:
There are Washington foreign policy experts who believe that Ukraine can win this war with Russia. Anders Aslund from the Atlantic Council, who was once a senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin, wrote on twitter, “My guess is that Russia will have to give up all its territories in Ukraine and face total defeat.” I have no inside information on the war’s progress, but I doubt Ukraine can win outright
Translation: I do not know anything about the actual conduct of the war, but I disagree with those who do. His later point is that the war will grind on and kill "several million" which seems unlikely. Hundreds of thousands, yes, but that is why war is awful and Russia must be chastised enough to not pull this shit again. No more Georgias or Chechnyas or Syrias.
But wait, it goes on:
It may be that Putin will prove unwilling to negotiate. There have been reports that he has ruled out negotiations. But what seems unlikely today can become possible tomorrow, and the United States should do whatever it can to encourage, rather than discourage, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
So, Putin is 100% responsible for this awful war. He shows no signs of negotiating. But on the very slim chance that he might want to negotiate, America should, what, downplay our assistance to Ukraine? We cannot simultaneously stand up for the freedom of Ukraine and be a neutral umpire in peace talks. Let India take the lead there. Maybe China.
He concludes with this:
One final point: I think there is also a problem with the administration portraying the war in Ukraine as part of a global conflict between democracies and autocracies....There would have been good reason to defend Ukraine against Russia even if Zelensky were a monarch rather than Ukraine’s elected president.
I'm sorry, what? In many ways it is precisely because Zelenskyy is the elected president that Putin invaded in the first place. When Viktor Yanukovych ran Ukraine as a vassal state of Russia, Putin was fine. Euromaidan forced him from power and Putin immediately invaded Crimea and the Donbass. That's not complicated causation. Putin is invading precisely because Ukraine is consolidating its democracy and moving away from Moscow and towards Brussels.
Judis seems to fall for a frame in which everything is America's responsibility - a kind of international Murc's Law. Putin initiated this war, because he wants to crush democracy in Ukraine; he has threatened democracies in the Baltics and Poland; he has interfered in Brexit and US presidential elections. Putin is an active menace to the idea of liberal democracy in ways that Xi Xinping, for instance, is not.
Judis erases Putin's singular agency in this entire matter and chastises American rhetoric instead.
UPDATE: Chait takes on some more egregious examples of this nonsense.
Mark Penn is a terrible political adviser, precisely because he tends to see in his poll results exactly what he wanted to see before he asked the questions. In his piece for the Times today, he measures some very real things, but his causation is all messed up.
A few examples.
- He says that inflation and fuel prices are upsetting Americans. This is true, but then he says Biden should greenlight the Keystone Pipeline. Keystone will not help fuel prices in any meaningful way by November, probably not even November 2024. Also "continuing to let gas prices surge" is a weird way to put things. Gas prices are largely beyond the ability of a president to control, as it's a global market.
- Balancing the budget is a sound bite, not a legitimate policy prescription. Ideally, yes, Biden could balance the budget. As it is, he's reduced the budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars. If you're a voter who believes in a balanced budget, the last thing you should do is vote for Republicans. The general perception is that Republicans are budget hawks, but the reality is that they are absolutely terrible with budget discipline.
- He must "beat Putin," but I guess while also bringing down fuel prices? And no figure on the international stage aside from Zelenskyy has done more to hurt Russia in Ukraine than Biden.
- Crime. There's a perception that crime is out of control. It's not exactly, but that's the perception. It is rising, but we don't know whether or not that's a byproduct of the pandemic or not.
- Ah, yes. The pandemic. Oddly, this really doesn't appear anywhere in Penn's piece. The pandemic is at the root of inflation, general unease, worries about schools and energy costs. It may be that "ending" the pandemic now will let things get back to a more normal status by November, but the perception might not have cemented itself among voters in time.
- Immigration is a bit of a tricky issue, but only because it's so easy for Republicans to demagogue it.
Finally, there is no way to measure exactly how much the batshit insanity of the current GOP will weigh on the electorate, especially in Senate races. The baked-in partisanship could really mess with the usual dynamics of the midterms. We shall see.
Democrats absolutely need to start campaigning better. But Penn is selling doom and that's not helpful either.
Emmanuel Macron won re-election over Putin loyalist Marine Le Pen. The margin was large, but smaller than it was four years ago. Given the economic dislocations of the past three years, this was about as good as Le Pen could hope to do, although her naked embrace of Putin probably didn't help her.
This is the brilliance and the flaw in French elections. In round one, all candidates are on the ballot. Every voice in France is allowed a chance to be heard. If no candidate gets 50% - which is always - it goes to a second round with the top two vote getters. This guarantees the president gets a majority of the vote.
Imagine if, in 2016, Clinton and Trump had gone instead into a runoff, as neither got 50% of the vote. (First, of course, we would get rid of that stupid anachronism, the Electoral College.) In this scenario, all of those Jill Stein voters or Gary Johnson voters who just couldn't stomach Trump would likely migrate to Clinton - reluctantly, as many voters cast reluctant votes for Macron today.
And that's the down side. If the runner-up is Le Pen, you really don't have much choice but to vote against her. The first round: tremendous choice. The second round: the lesser of two evils.
That Evangelical God Botherer Madison Cawthorn was caught out with pictures of him engaging in behavior that would have dominated Fox News for a fortnight if a Democrat had done it is one of the least surprising stories of the year so far. Mr. Cocaine Orgies was always going to have a weird party side - the story of his ex-wife is fishy as hell - because hypocrisy is only surpassed by cruelty as the creed of the contemporary GOP.
Scott Lemieux is right. Cawthorn is perfectly free to engage in cross-dress play and get drunk (as long as he isn't endangering others). He is free to do so because of an emerging, let's call it, social liberalism that says, "You have the freedom to be you, as long as it doesn't cause safety problems for others." You can navigate ideas of gender fluidity, but you maybe shouldn't have weapons of war in your arsenal is kind of where modern progressivism is.
So much of modern "conservatism" is a combination of Evangelical and Patrimonial Authoritarianism. Obviously, Evangelism is interested in preserving or returning to a patriarchal society, but Patrimonialism is primarily a form of elite corruption that corrupts the state into a means to preference a few oligarchic leaders. That's why evangelical Christians (White ones anyway) lined up behind the comically immoral Donald Trump - a textbook Patrimonial strongman wannabe.
Cawthorn is an exemplar of dipshit "Christians" for whom the faith is really a cudgel to beat down people they don't like, all the while sinning in their own hypocritical ways.
Ron DeSantis' war on schools is really worth paying attention to. There has been some coverage of how Florida is rejecting math textbooks because of CRT. What's really happening is that they are banning them based on the inclusion of Social Emotional Learning. SEL is a framework that has been around for decades to teach elementary school students to be kind, collaborative and how to work through their frustrations with school and other problems. That's it. In my local batshit insane Facebook group, I've already seen the shift from decrying CRT to attacking SEL, which they call CRT in disguise.
I have no idea why they moved on from CRT, unless it was the constant drumbeat of how CRT wasn't actually being taught in schools, but that seems out of character. When have objective facts made a difference? So there seems to be two reasons why they are attacking SEL.
First is that they generally don't want kids to be kind, empathetic and collaborative, because those are hallmarks of "the Left" in America. If much of left-of-center culture wars can be boiled down to "don't be a complete shit to other people, especially the people who have historically been at the margins, then right-of-center can be boiled down to Adam Serwer's famous phrase "The cruelty is the point." People like DeSantis are playing the long game to create a future generation of selfish assholes who will shit on those who are beneath them in social hierarchies. Since Millennials and Gen Z are moving hard away from that sort of selfishness, Republicans want to create a new cohort of selfish assholes in Gen A.
I dunno. That seems like a very doubtful move for a group that has typically never been focused on anything beyond it's immediate next move.
Second is that Republicans are trying to discredit the very idea of public school education. This has long been an article of faith among both the Christianists and the Extreme Anti-government cohort.
For Christianists, ever since Schempp and Vitale removed religion from public schools we have seen the collapse of morality in America. Kids with their blue hair and gender fluidity are a direct result of not having Jesus forced into them at young ages. Homeschooling produces two things. People who grow up bitter that they were homeschooled and morons like Madison Cawthorn. Delegitimizing the entire public school project is their mission.
For the anti-government set, public schools are a stronghold of the teacher's unions and therefore Democratic voters. Additionally, people tend to like their public schools. It's a tangible example of a governmental service that is free at the point of delivery and which people see real benefits to having. If you can convince people that public schools are full of pedophiles and people teaching little Becky and Chad to hate themselves because they are White, then you can get people to want to privatize the public schools, so they can have more control over who teaches what.
This seems more plausible, as a motivation for attacking teachers and schools.
So what now?
One problem is the journalist practice of neutrality in place of objectivity. It will be very hard for the press to accurately depict conservative efforts to destroy public schools, because it seems, on the surface, insane. We saw some of this with Louis DeJoy's efforts to destroy the Postal Service. That was active sabotage - not only to screw with the 2020 election but - to destroy the Post Office so that it could be replaced with UPS and FedEx. The press couldn't quite bring themselves to accurately describe what was going on. There is little effort to do the same now with the GOP's war on public education.
Another problem is that it's not enough to decry this within Democratic circles.
Everyone is agreeing that the midterm landscape is bad for Democrats at the moment. In many ways the Senate races in PA, GA, OH, WI, NC, AZ and NV are going to be incredibly important, as Mitch McConnell has already said he basically won't approve ANY of Biden's judicial appointments if he has a majority. Losing the House but preserving the Senate is critical and a lot of these races are going to come down to the suburbs and motivating urban voters. Democratic gains in the Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix suburbs and the Research Triangle are tenuous. Those voters don't like inflation.
But they like their schools. That's why they moved to the suburbs.
Nationalizing DeSantis' war on schools won't be hard. Even if it's not 100% accurate for every race, who cares? If it gets 3 Pinocchios from a fact checker, who cares.
Glenn Youngkin won for some idiosyncratic reasons, including misleading attacks on CRT. But nationalizing the Far Right's attack on schools should absolutely be a message that should Democrats should start to hammer now. Josh Marshall has noted that we are a storytelling animal. Start telling the stories now.
Josh Marshall makes a good point about how Democrats seem unwilling to engage with, for lack of a better word, storytelling. The GOP is hopelessly corrupt and married to autocrats around the world. That's a story. Republicans have been telling a story for years about how the Democratic Party is in the thrall of coastal elites, so that story is now simply understood to be true by a large swath of America.
Democrats need to hammer the story about the authoritarian, anti-woman, corrupt GOP every minute of every day from now until the midterms. They aren't, and that's political malpractice.
Yglesias does another one of his "dog with a bone" things. He has a few overweening ideas that he crams everything into. One idea is that Democrats have a bunch of terrible, unpopular ideas and that this is why they don't win as many votes as they would if they just did things that he, Matthew Yglesias, thinks they should.
Now, there are certain issues where he's right. Defund the Police and Open Borders are awful political messaging. Of course, Biden has explicitly called for increased funding for police and we are aggressively detaining people at the border. One of the infuriating trends is that the large number of detentions at the border are seized on by Republicans as examples of Biden not...enforcing the border? How does that work?
The idea that Biden isn't enforcing the border because of all the people we are detaining at the border is misinformation. It's not understanding the cause and effect cycle. You could argue that migrants believe that Trump being out of office would allow them to cross the border with ease, but Biden is actively enforcing the border, so it's their error, not one that Biden is making.
Yglesias is conflating misinformation - mistaken assumptions based on faulty reasoning or incomplete information with disinformation - the willful manipulation of truth and falsehoods.
Paul Campos is one of many to look at a new study that suggests that watching Fox News is not misinformation but active disinformation. The piece he's looking at notes the effect of presenting facts to someone but the cognitive dissonance is so great that they retreat further into their delusions, in this case the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.
However, removing Fox News from someone's viewing diet and making them watch CNN can actually change their positions. Actively saying that migrant caravans are full of MS13 gang members is disinformation. It's being aggressively pushed to make the geriatric Fox News addict clutch their pearls and worry about the CRT that's being fed into their grandkids' veins like heroin. In fact, all that CRT shit is active disinformation.
Put another way, when you read a story about a car theft ring in your neighborhood and conclude that crime is at an all time high, you are engaged with misinformation. Crime is up, but not at an all time high. It feels like crime is exploding, but it's really just a marginal increase. Your perspective skews your view of the facts. When someone says that the Biden Administration is the most corrupt in history because of Hunter Biden's laptop, that is active disinformation. It's provably false - Hunter Biden is not a governmental official - and pushed for a partisan advantage: to negate the very real corruption of the Trump years.
Finally, there is the very real axis of disinformation between Fox, Russia and the Patrimonial League. We know that Russia spread disinformation in both the 2016 Brexit votes and American elections. Disinformation is part of their intelligence operations since forever. As George Kennan noted in 1946, "(Russian) propaganda is inherently negative." It exploits divisions in their opponents and seeks to exacerbate them. A divided enemy is a weak enemy.
What is new is that "conservatives" have embraced this disinformation environment. Trump lied about basically everything and paid no political price for it. Why shouldn't they follow that example? In fact the entire anti-vax movement is built upon active disinformation coupled with popular misinformation. Tell me what Ron DeSantis is doing that is based on a reasoned understanding of objective reality.
When Obama talks about disinformation and Yglesias says this is him just "coping" with why Democrats aren't more popular, he's unwittingly giving an example of exactly what the difference is between being misinformed and disinformed.
At last!
Since the early days of the pandemic, I've used Covid Act Now as my primary resource on the state of the pandemic. It used to trace new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It would have immunization levels, ratio of new cases per 100,000 people and so on.
As the pandemic changed, the website remained very conservative in its evaluation of the pandemic. That led to a lot of states being "Orange" or even "Red" because of a single metric being high. If your state had a really good testing regimen in place, it would have more positive tests, but fewer hospitalizations, which made it look worse than it really was.
The new metrics are tied to the fact that this is no longer a "novel" coronavirus. Either via vaccination or infection, a great many Americans have had their immune systems primed to fight off Covid in the future.
The new metrics are all per 100,000 people and look at overall cases, hospital visits, and hospital admissions.
As someone who has been extremely pissed at the cavalier attitude that many have had towards a virus that has killed more than a million Americans and continues to kill thousands every couple of weeks, I also understand that we have simply moved on from Covid restrictions. I no longer mask up, and I don't feel especially vulnerable. (I also don't act like a turd if someone else is wearing a mask.)
As long as no new variants show up, it's time to back off and monitor.
Josh Marshall looks at the extraordinary and out in the open graft of Jared Kushner. As I've said before, the worst legacy of Trumpistan is that we now seem to simply accept a level of corruption by public officials that would have caused Nixon to blush.
The outlines of what Marshall relates are this. Kushner is your archetypical failson - like his father and brothers in law - who made terrible investments of the family's money while his father was in jail. Trump famously put Kushner in charge of all sorts of shit, despite the fact that US intelligence agencies would not issue him a security clearance.
Now that he's out of the White House, Kushner got a $2 billion investment in the hedge fund he's starting from Mohammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Kushner had undermined the US investigation into Jamal Kashoggi's murder and - if reports are to be believed - may have given sensitive US intelligence to Saudi Arabia.
Marshall also says that Kushner may have tipped off MBS to a plot by his relative Mohammad bin Nayef to sideline MBS. bin Nayef was arrested a couple of years ago and hasn't been seen since.
Marshall also notes that - unusually - Saudi Arabia has refused to boost oil production to compensate for the effective reduction in Russian oil. This benefits Saudi Arabia a little bit in higher oil prices, but it really has the effect of screwing up Biden and Democrats' hopes for the midterms.
Kushner has no business getting a $2B investment. It's absurd and corrupt. And what's more, it's a stark example of the new sides in the 21st century cold war. We have corrupt patrimonial kleptocracies on the one hand - Russia, Saudi Arabia, several Gulf States - and their enablers in the West - Trump, Le Pen, Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage - against a general sense of global order.
Three countries that hold the balance of power in this new cold war are China, India and Iran. China wants a stable international order. Russia undermines that, but China is also basically becoming one of those patrimonial states. India seems to be largely retreating into ethnic nationalism under Modhri and could also collapse into patrimonial corruption. Iran is also corrupt as hell, but their system isn't conducive to patrimonialism, at least.
Iran is... terrible in so many ways. But increasingly it's better than Saudi Arabia. Right now, the US and Iran are negotiating America's return to the JCPOA (nuclear deal). The sticking point is our labelling the Revolutionary Guard a state sponsor of terror. We really need to get that deal done so we can get Iranian oil and natural gas to market.
We also need to start planning for a post-Khamenei Iran. He's 83 years old and in poor health. When he dies, Iran could go in a different direction, only if it sees hope of a better relationship with Europe and America.
Fundamentally, we need to do two things: prosecute Jared Kushner for the brazen corruption and end our reflexive alliance with Riyadh. It's not 1979 or 2003 anymore. Saudi Arabia are part of the problem, not the solution.
Paul Campos runs down some reasons here.
I think there's another pretty compelling reason not to charge Trump with criminal charges.
A) How do you find an impartial jury?
B) How do you secure a unanimous verdict from a hypothetical jury?
C) If he's acquitted via a hung jury - most likely outcome - this will be treated as exoneration by Trumpists and therefore a political witch hunt by Hunter Biden's Laptop against our Lord and Savior Donald J. Trump.
As Jeremy Stahl notes in the original piece Campos links to, the threat of prosecution might be enough to keep him from running.
The problem with that is that Trumpism has extended beyond Trump. Greg Abbott spent a few weeks just brazenly breaking the law and nothing will happen to him. Ron DeSantis is violating civil rights and liberties on a daily basis.
Time for the DOJ to do their fucking job.
A question that I don't think we are going to get a truly satisfactory answer to until 2024 is whether or not the Republican Party is killing too many of their own voters. I've argued before that the dismal governance of Red States actually creates more Republican voters, because their lives generally are worse off. They ascribe this to Woke CRT MS-13 Groomers rather than their own fucked up Republican administrations, but the unpleasantness of many of these places is real.
Given how polarizing the vaccine became, one has to think that the overwhelming majority of those currently dying in the US - and it's still hundreds every day - are unvaccinated and therefore Republicans. The only age demographics that Republicans win are 50+, and there highest margins are among those over 75. Now, old people vote at much higher rates than young people. With Gen Z and Millenials supporting Democrats at very high numbers, Gen X leaning Democratic and Boomers leaning Republican, only the Silent Generation shows high support for the GOP.
The preeminent question is whether the normal mortality among those over 75, combined with Covid and Covid-related increased mortality, combined with more younger people being added to the voting rolls will create enough demographic shifting to offset legitimate - if misplaced - concerns about inflation.
If the GOP nominates a pack of lunatics in some of these Senate seats, I could see the House switching hands, narrowly, and the Senate actually adding Democratic seats.
The GOP is a minority party that our weird institutions allows to govern the country even when in the minority. If they are dying off, even that avenue will be closed off to them.
Tom Junod, one of my favorite writers, collaborated on a long, searing expose on a serial rapist and murderer on the Penn State football team back in the 1970s. The focus, aside from the criminal, was on the degree to which Joe Paterno knew and tolerated the behavior. That aspect of the piece is actually the weakest for me. It functions less as an indictment of Paterno and more of an indictment of American football culture and the casualness with which we excuse sexual assault.
Of course, it's not unique to football. We have the Brock Turner travesty at Stanford. The list is very long.
What's appalling - and I know cataloguing the appalling actions of the GOP is exhausting and apparently fruitless - is the degree to which Donald Trump's successful run for the Presidency in 2016 has de-stigmatized rape and abuse within the GOP.
The nature of rape is that it can be hard to convict without a third party witness. The presumption of innocence and the usually private nature of the crime can make it hard to create a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.
However, when multiple accounts of sexual assault or harassment start to pile up, we really should see that as a corroborating evidence. It seems, therefore, that we can call Donald Trump a credibly accused sexual criminal. There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloguing the allegations against him. His behavior seems consistent to what he bragged about on the Access Hollywood tape. He would grab a woman inappropriately and then basically gauge what happened after he shoved his tongue down her throat or grabbed her breasts or buttocks. "When they're famous, they let you do it." Meanwhile the lone and shifting accusation against Joe Biden by a politically motivated opponent seems way less credible.
All of this leads to the current state of the GOP. Candidates across the country are accused of really horrible things, yet there is little chance that this will count against them in the current climate of the GOP. The piece lists candidate like Herschel Walker, Eric Greitens, Max Miller and Charles Herbster who have been accused of sexual assault, domestic violence and harassment. But in a party where Trump remains a Golden Calf and Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, why WOULD a Republican drop out of the race? In what way is being a credibly accused rapist a liability in today's GOP.
What is sick is the number of GOP women who remain enablers of this behavior. In this piece on Florida's attempt to ban abortions, we have a GOP Assemblywoman in Florida saying that women will falsely accuse men of rape to get those sweet, sweet abortions, so there should be no exception for rape victims.
The gender gap from now on is likely going to be huge. I really can't explain away or excuse my fellow men's desire to be OK with this. The shock of the #MeToo moment has gone, and even college educated men are moving towards a party that is perfectly fine with rapists, as long as they aren't Democrats. (Meanwhile stoking fears of pedophilia among Democrats. Every accusation is a confession.) There is something broken in men who never grow out of a petulant adolescent attitude about sex.
How women can be part of a political party that actively treats them like shit is truly a marvel of motivated reasoning.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot basically shut down trade along the US-Mexican border in his state with "secondary inspections." He has now lifted the slowdown saying "Argle bargle caravans scary Messicans argle bargle MS 13 blah blah blah."
Here's the thing. It sure seems to me like Abbott was breaking the law. Certainly what he was doing was unconstitutional.
Under America's first form of government, Congress - such as it was - had no power to regulate trade between states or between states and other countries. New York could carry out its own tariff and trade deals with Britain and Connecticut. This was obviously chaotic and huge - in fact THE - reason that the Constitutional Convention was called. That document gave Congress exclusively the power to regulate trade, either between the states or with other countries, under the Commerce Clause.
Abbott basically decided to create his own trade restrictions with Mexico.
The politics of this are obvious. Abbott wanted to contrast himself with Beto O'Rourke by being "tough on immigration." This is also part of his kidnapping plan to take migrants and refugees and bus them to DC against their will. He's clearly appealing to the Messicans R Skaree demographic in his re-election campaign. (He did manage to infuriate business owners in Texas.) There was also the ancillary benefit of driving inflation higher to hurt Democrats in the midterms.
Here's the thing. Greg Abbott should've been served an injunction and possibly arrested. I realize that this would make him a cause celebre on the Right, but screw it. It's clearly not the time to go around presuming that the average voter is up to date on the Commerce Clause, or that they can understand how or why Republicans are going to want to keep inflation high through the midterms.
This is also not a case of "politicizing the Justice Department." Abbott has broken the law. People who break the law should be arrested and tried in Court. "Not guilt by reason of being a powerful Republican" is simply unacceptable.
Trumpist politics have generated the politics of grievance, but it has also been the politics of lawlessness. That has to stop.
This letter to Josh Marshall is an old complaint from rank-and-file Democrats. The DC establishment does a shitty job of highlighting GOP insanity, intransigence and inability to govern. DC Dems - the narrative goes - are still assuming it's 1964 and they can get Republican votes for the Civil Rights Act.
I think there might be some truth in that and I wonder how much the Very Online Democrat - which probably includes a lot of the Hill Staffers - sees the GOP insanity as self-evident. That their actions are so obviously harmful that reasonable people will make reasoned and informed decisions on what is patently obvious.
The 2022 midterms have begun. Democrats need to start shoving GOP insanity in people's faces. The press won't do it.
Back in the Reagan era, the GOP called itself the Party of Ideas.
OK.
The decision of the GOP to pull out of presidential debates is really nothing more than a stark display of how far even the rhetorical pretense of having "ideas" has been abandoned. The only policy agenda proposed by the GOP for 2022 is Rick Scott's plan, which seems obviously politically toxic. The GOP at the moment consists of two basic "ideas":
1) Donald Trump is our undisputed God-Emperor. No criticism is allowed; no heresies permitted. You shall not deviate from the one, true faith.
2) Fuck the liberals.
Points 1 & 2 are obviously linked, as Trump is really good an "pwing the libtards." His ability to infuriate people with basic empathy and a moral compass - liberals and a few conservative heretics - is his real appeal to the GOP and especially his rabid cultists.
As we enter yet another crucial election, I defy you to come up with a positive policy that the GOP is putting forth. They are going to let the Courts strike down Roe and other popular decisions. They will scream bloody murder about global inflation, immigrant caravans, "CRT", tolerance of transgender youth, that Democrats are pedophiles, Hunter Biden's laptop and I'm guessing there is yet another batshit insane echo chamber attack that has yet to emerge.
Basically, they are riding on the fact that people are broadly unhappy with economic conditions created by the emergence from the pandemic and the energy crisis created by the War in Ukraine to win control of Congress. If they win the Senate, there will be no more confirmations of Democratic judges until...some unlikely future date.
They are vandals in the temple of American democracy, and yet the bulk of poorly informed voters who make up the electorate will buy into the "bothside" bullshit spewed by the media and the basic ignorance that the bulk of Republicans no longer think democracy is worth it.
Nancy LeTourneau has called current GOP fear mongering over schools a "Defund the Schools" movement. If Democratic hopes for retaining Congress run through the suburbs - and I think they do - then this could really resonate. Suburban families tend to love their local schools while decrying a mythical school system elsewhere. If we make the GOP's current platform aligned with "Defund the Schools" then we could crystalize these culture war issues in a way that could really help Democrats this fall.
There's some confusion in the reporting, but it seems as if Ukraine may have sunk the Black Sea flagship that was memorably told to go fuck itself by Ukrainian Marines. This would be a huge victory for Ukraine, because it's going to require the Russian Black Sea fleet to back off from the coast, especially near Odessa. Ukraine is getting British anti-ship missiles, too, so that will even the balance in the Black Sea. I would imagine that Ukraine has had to keep a relatively large defensive force near Odessa to protect against a landing behind their lines. If so, sidelining the Russia fleet allows them to transfer troops to the front near Mykolaiv.
Putin has already started threatening to move nuclear forces near the Baltics. As much as is prudently possible these sort of threats should be ignored. Russia is repeatedly showing its ass in Ukraine and they will replace that with bluster and threats. As long as that's all they are doing, the West shouldn't give them oxygen.
Somehow I missed posting yesterday. There was the shooting in the NY subway, and that got a lot more coverage than other recent, more fatal shootings. Because it happened in NYC, the nation's media landscape managed to push the Ukraine war below the fold.
We live in a country where it's going to be much easier to buy a gun and kill a bunch of people than to safely access reproductive care, including abortion. We've apparently made that decision that a zygote is more important than a group of adults on their way to work.
Yglesias is basically doomposting that Democrats will get slaughtered in November. Nancy Tourneau is closer to where I am: Republicans are going to the ones - for once - who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Republicans are rushing so far to the right on these bizarre culture war issues that they are going to continue to alienate suburban voters. As Tourneau points out, the Virginia governor's race - on which this strategy is based - was really just the mobilization of older white voters.
We are in a race in America as to whether we can save electoral democracy before the Trump generation dies off. A lot of pundits have written off The Emerging Democratic Majority, but it's a simple fact that older, white voters are way, way more conservative as a group than younger generations. They mainline Fox News propaganda until they believe MS13 is in a caravan to groom your grandkids into CRT. Or something.
Democrats need to make sure that voters understand how batshit insane Republicans have become and get their voters to the polls.
Jon Chait makes a compelling comparison between Putin and Trump's susceptibility to believing their own bullshit propaganda. They become trapped in the falsehoods that they have fed their subjects. Trump can't move beyond the Big Lie and Putin can't accept that Ukraine isn't what his propaganda said it was.
While I am cautiously optimistic that Trump himself is becoming a spent force in American politics - he's old, he's stupid, he's morbidly obese, it wouldn't surprise me if he has Long Covid - but the particular type of patrimonial strongman politics that he's infected America with seems alive and well. It's particularly alarming to think that Biden has presided over job growth so robust it's actually causing inflation, led an international coalition to support Ukraine and stymie Russian imperialism, made Covid mitigation efforts widespread and passed a major series of bills on everything from infrastructure to child tax credits...and Democrats could still get creamed in November.
As Chait notes, Democrats don't have partisan news sources. MSNBC and to a lesser degree the Times and WaPost are liberal in the personal politics of their reporters, but they are not partisan in their coverage. There is no equivalent of Fox News for Democrats.
And there shouldn't be.
In the end, propaganda dependent regimes like Putin's fail, precisely because they cannot assimilate negative feedback. There is no room for objective truth in Russia or Mar A Lago.
However...and this is a huge however...Fox News has undoubtedly create the conditions to destroy American democracy. (I had a quote from NZ PM Jacinda Ardern about Fox News, but then I looked it up and it was fabricated. I was able to assimilate that this information that was not accurate but clashed with my argument and was able to discard it. You know. Objectivity.)
Chait notes that there was an experiment that paid Fox News watchers a stipend to watch CNN instead. There understanding of the world became much more tethered to reality. Recently I was at my (very Red( town's Facebook chat page. Some idiot was asking of "Transgenderism was being taught in our schools." The comments were a medley of people saying that CRT was now just being renamed SEL. SEL is Social Emotional Learning and it's a really good curriculum for young kids to learn proper socialization with other kids. I guarantee, Fox will turn SEL into rabid, untethered lies about transgender kids and "grooming" and everything else.
If you shut off Fox News, you shut off the firehose of bullshit fearmongering that has been a staple of Rightist politics since forever, but now has the immediacy of an entire TV network to amplify it. Recently, most cable and satellite providers have removed OANN from their roster of channels because of the rampant falsehoods and overt racism and sexism. I am hesitant to advocate for censorship. That's a horrible slope to start down.
But if Fox News went off the air - or at least their worst offenders like Carlson, Ingraham and Hannity shut up - my guess is we could have a politics that was something approaching normal. Reasoned discussions about the role of government, instead of whether admitting that gay people exist is called "grooming."
I used to think Roger Ailes was the horrible font of our horrible politics. But since his death, it's gotten worse. No, it's Rupert Murdoch who is breaking this country. He can't die soon enough.
Authorities in Texas have arrested a woman for murder when she had a "self-induced abortion."
Amazingly, a search of the Washington Post and NY Times does not turn up a story on this. So either there's some ambiguity or uncertainty surrounding the story or we are seeing a failure of elite media. Again.
Secondly, I've tried to look up the penalties for abortion providers under Texas' new snitch laws. It does not appear to include charges for murder. The idea behind the bill is to have private citizens sue abortion providers for damages, in order to drive abortion providers out of the state. So, I'm not quite sure under what statute this woman was arrested.
It took place in the Rio Grande Valley, which is overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic. Did someone turn her in? Or is she a test case for abortion restrictions?
The internal contradictions to Texas' (and other states') new laws on abortion or myriad. It proceeds from a position that all abortion is murder. But Roe allows for abortion, and rather than take Roe on directly, these laws target the provider with monetary penalties rather than follow through on the logic of "abortion is murder." The arrest of Lizelle Herrera is a logical extension of anti-abortion moral absolutism, but it does not seem to be justified under even Texas' draconian anti-abortion laws.
Is Herrera a test case? And for which side of the debate? Could pro-choice activists have used this to test the limits of the anti-abortion laws? The fact that this is taking place in a very poor part of Texas makes me have doubts. Perhaps anti-abortion zealots somehow found out about Ms Herrera's use of RU 482 and want to see how far they can push the limits.
This is a very strange story and I wouldn't say anything is off the table.
What is clear, at least at this point, is that anti-abortion politics is not terribly popular and yet Republicans continue to push them, like they are with oppressive measures against LGBTQ communities. This is clearly a "motivate the base" strategy. One would think that it would also be very motivating for those suburban voters that turned against the GOP in 2018 and 2020.
For decades, the GOP has been able to use anti-abortion rhetoric and promises to motivate the Talibangelicals that make up the bulk of their voters without actually having to enact draconian anti-abortion measures. With Trump packing the Court with reactionary zealots, they are suddenly acting on these horrific ideas.
The electoral climate isn't great for Democrats this coming November (although it should be). GOP overreach might be...check that...ought to be a huge mobilizing factor for Democratic voters. At least, I hope so.
The recent arrest of two men who have been trying to infiltrate - in some, as yet unclear way - the Secret Service is just bonkers.
This feels like an undercooked attempt by someone - Pakistan? Iran? Saudi Arabia? - to infiltrate the Secret Service details that guard the...First Lady? Hunh? Or maybe it was just the Secret Service in general? Or maybe these are wannabe "hard guys" who like palling around with Secret Service agents and making themselves seem like Big Shots. Why admit to being connected to Pakistani intelligence at your arraignment? That's not something spies usually do. "Ya got me! Guess I'll confess everything! Good job, you guys."
Anyway, the specifics are just nuts, but it also isn't the first time the Secret Service has sat on their own balls. There's something broken over there.
Finally, my favorite part of the story is that you have these guys - whoever they are - buying influence with the Secret Service, who are supposed be elite law enforcement officers.
But they get discovered by a US Postal Service Inspector.
I can't wait for the Coen Brothers to make this into a movie.
A startlingly large element of the "conservative" movement is openly embracing patrimonial authoritarianism. All the focus on Trump has been on the racism, sexism and corruption, and that's fine. But if we understand that Trump's real appeal to millions of Americans is precisely the sort of "Strongman" authoritarianism - which comes wrapped in sexism and ethnonationalist racism - then we can see how it is not limited to one guy...and yet it kind of is.
Trump's ban from Twitter has pretty much worked. Denying him the oxygen he was given in 2016 to spew his "I alone can fix it" rhetoric has seen his following reduced to a small cult. It is certainly possible someone like DeSantis can fill Trump's clown shoes, but Trump had the CEO/Reality TV persona down in a way that DeSantis doesn't. DeSantis can be cruel - he's excelling at that - but cruelty might be the point, but it's not the whole point. Resentment politics only goes so far.
Someone tweeted that all the things social conservative say they care about are worse in red states (and red towns, let me assure you). This was presumed to be a dunk on their hypocrisy. In fact, it's why they embraced Trump's American Carnage spiel. Their communities are riven with opioid abuse, divorce, bankruptcy, child abuse and early death. Patrimonialism is a direct response to the loss of control they feel. Of course, the reason things suck in Alabama is in large part because of how Republicans choose to govern. Whether intentionally or not, their decades long assault on competent governance has created the conditions for someone like Trump to ascend to the head of their party.
The question that will consume us is whether this move towards Orban-style soft dictatorship has an off-ramp. Is there a way to divorce "normal Republicans" (still bad at governance) from those actively working to destroy the fabric of our democracy? If so, we'd better reach for that soon.
No, I'm not talking about Ukraine. There is a current phenomenon on the Right, whereby attention trolls like Matt Gaetz, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley escalate rhetoric against Democrats to a fever pitch and then meek, spineless dickweeds like Lindsay Graham hop aboard.
Some examples:
- Odious child molester and hair gel enthusiast Matt Gaetz goes after the Secretary of Defense for making the military "woke." Basically, attacking the legitimacy of the military within the context of bullshit culture war markers.
- They attack Judge Kentaji Brown Jacksons with QAnon inspired smears.
- When that failed, they went with Nazis.
- When a few Republicans did the normal thing and supported a President's qualified Supreme Court pick, Traitor Greene called them pedophile enablers.
- When Democrats have objected to a mean-spirited Florida bill to prevent any real discussion of sexual orientation, Republicans say that they are "grooming" children for pedophiles.
The pedophile thing is particularly appalling on two fronts.
First, there is the "every allegation is a confession" aspect of everything the GOP does. Matt Gaetz is under actual investigation for sex trafficking a minor. Donald Trump was good friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Then you've got things like this nausea inducing story. Or Tennessee Republicans getting rid of the age of consent for marriage.
Second, "pedophile" is about the lowest thing you can call someone. It's a crime so vile that even prison inmates consider it beyond the Pale.
There's no coming back from "This guy is a pedophile." What's more, you're setting the stage for violence. We saw it already with the Pizzagate/Comet Pizza shooting. We have already seen how appeals to violence wedded with toxic conspiracy theories led to January 6th.
Eliminationism is the idea that one's political opponents are not worthy of inclusion in the polity. I don't agree with how your Bog Standard Republican of 10 years ago wants to run the country, so I vote for Democrats. Trump mainlined this Eliminationist rhetoric into the heart of GOP politics. Trump was never the President of the United States, he was only the President of Trumpistan. And if you don't support Trumpistan, you are supporting pedophiles (projection) and Hunter Biden's corruption (projection) and the weakening of America (projection). Because you don't support a Rump America known in these parts as Trumpistan, you are not a Real Murican and are therefore a traitor.
If you want an example aside from Nazi Germany, look at how Putin and Russian media are talking about Ukrainians. The rhetoric used there is designed to justify the horrors of Bucha. If genocide is the act of destroying an entire group of people, you simply make it so that the group you are attacking aren't worthy of being considered people.
I am tentatively - so tentatively - hopeful that if Democrats hold on the Congress in November this twisted fever might break. Conservative, pro-business Republicans are not great. But this revanchist, patrimonial authoritarian version of the GOP will destroy America if allowed to gain power again.
A very dense, scholarly article about the rise of patrimonialism over the past two decades.
Basically, the breakdown between "authoritarian" and "democratic" is not too helpful at describing this moment in time. Patrimonialism is "strong man" politics. Trump is patrimonial. So is Putin. To defeat a thing, you must first understand it. It's also why it might be hard to transfer whatever grip Trump has on his cultists to a drip like Ron DeSantis.
One if the infuriating aspects of the Covid debates was those people who claimed they "did their own research," which was really just combing social media for stories that fit their preconceptions. Confirmation bias is a real thing, and we can all fall into it.
I was reminded of this as we deal with Russian denials of the war crimes that they committed in Ukraine. The scenes from Bucha are awful, and highly unlikely to the last of their kind. This is what Russia's military does and has done. Naturally, Russia denied doing the things they did. What's amazing is how the Times has conclusively (in my mind) debunked Russian denials. They've used satellite imagery to show that the locations of the bodies in Bucha have not moved in weeks.
So, objectively, we have a story where what we knew already - the Russian military has routinely targeted civilians in Chechnya and Syria - comports with the evidence that Ukrainians have presented and has been largely verified by a third party.
It won't matter.
If you believe Vladimir Putin is the savior of traditional values - and there are a distressing number of people in the US who believe this, even if they are mostly quiet about it - then the evidence either won't be believed or won't matter. We will get patently ludicrous accusations of "false flag" operations, or caterwauling about "fake news."
We have degraded the quality of public discourse in this country to the point where self-government is becoming tenuous. Even a "once a century" pandemic or the overwhelming evidence of climate change or the attempt to overturn the election - things that happened right in front of our very faces - can be waived away.
When the internet came into popularity, there were techno-utopians who talked about the democratization of knowledge. Certainly the ability to find information has never been easier in human existence. Did you know the average rainfall in Cape Town, South Africa is 24.4 inches and predominately falls during the winter months? It took me ten seconds to find that information.
The problem is that access to information isn't enough. There are certain critical thinking skills that must be brought to bear. That means being able to evaluate the source in front of you. For instance, I generally trust the text of The New York Times. I am skeptical of their choice of what to focus on and the predilections of their opinion writers. "But her emails" from 2016 was an editorial choice that was simply indefensible, especially given Trump's rank criminality caught on tape.
The Jeffersonian ideal of an educated populace making rational decisions on their own behalf has come into conflict with the reality that we are subject to a firehose of bullshit thrust in our face every day. The dynamic of confirmation bias is not new, but the ability of bad actors like Rupert Murdoch to find a way to inject this directly into the veins of those inclined to believe it IS new. Then, like junkies in search of a stronger fix, his audience spreads out into the fever swamps of OANN and Newsmax.
Confirmation bias is not unique to the right, but the predilections for hierarchical thinking makes them more vulnerable. Skepticism is useful, but things have gotten so bad that we are sinking into cynicism, which is not.
As long as Republicans embrace a form of theological authoritarianism, every election in America is a do-or-die election. Electoral choices are supposed to be rational choices, but that idea seems quaint now.
I don't expect Exxon or Massey energy to easily embrace a carbon-neutral future. It's the "environmentalists" who seem to refuse to embrace actual measures to reduce carbon emissions who leave me speechless.
Yes, there is no such thing as a perfect form of energy, and there is a subset of these "green" groups that want us to return to some sort of eco-farming communes. Freaking hippies.
The reality is that we could likely get to our carbon goals with a massive but safe expansion of nuclear power. We won't do it because too many people are locked in the environmental battles of the 1970s.
To the surprise of no one who knows the history of the Russian military this century, it appears that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Given the way Russia behaved in Chechnya and Syria, this can hardly be a surprise. Of course, the question - as always - is: what now?
Ukrainian forces are pushing Russian forces away from Kyiv, but they will need more counterattacks in the south of the country to solidify things. Meanwhile, Russia is withdrawing from Kyiv to focus their forces in Eastern Ukraine. Attacking is harder than defending, so the burden will shift to Ukrainian forces.
Still, there is a decent enough chance that Ukraine can continue to pummel Russia enough to outright win the war to at least a status quo antebellum. In the face of these atrocities, can Ukraine stomach the permanent loss of Crimea and the Donbas? And what of the rest of the world? Even if Russia withdrew to their February positions, there is no way we could lift the sanctions. There is also no way we can keep imposing the burdens those sanctions impose on our economies. Most of the Westernized Russians have likely fled the country.
The DC press considered it a huge gaffe when Biden said that "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power." As usual in these moments, the DC press was wrong.
Rick Scott is in charge of Republican efforts to re-take the Senate. He is also pushing a plan that is bonkers. Scott wants to raise income taxes on low earners. In some ways, this is just standard GOP hating on the poor and working poor. But they never come out and directly do shit like this. It's just an astounding "own goal."
Trump at least made a slight head fake towards economic populism. It was almost entirely bullshit, as Trump's real "appeal" to White Working Class voters was cultural grievance, of which he remains an almost pure avatar. Nevertheless, Trump did attack the GOP for various iterations of Romney-style Rich Guy politics. (That this came from some trust fund baby like Trump remains bizarre.)
The Senate map favors Democrats as much as it ever does (which isn't much). If Democrats can win Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, they will have 51 seats. If they can pull out wins in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and/or Ohio/Missouri, they will have the sort of margins that make Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema irrelevant.
The only way this happens if for the GOP to run mini-Trumps on a Romney platform. That seems to be happening. The only explanation I have is that Scott thinks that no one will actually believe that the GOP will raise their taxes. That's not a terrible bet but it's not a sure one.
GOP culture wars are linked to immiserating the poor. But if they alienate suburban voters and piss off WWC voters...who's left?
