Quotes Of The Day -- Stop Normalizing, Start Fighting

 

"To Biden and like-minded Democrats, working with the GOP whenever possible is good policy and good politics, a way for the president to fulfill what pollsters agree was one of his most popular campaign promises. But Biden’s repeated emphasis on his ability to cooperate with Republicans has stirred concerns among some Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and nonpartisan democracy advocates, that he is obscuring the threat mounting against democratic institutions as Trump strengthens his hold over the GOP, and extremists such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar solidify their beachhead in it. The overriding fear is that more Republicans appear to be radicalizing by the week and Biden is making the GOP seem normal." -- Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic, on "When Bipartisanship Risks Undermining Democracy."   

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"The irony of all the throbbing metastatic insanity among Republicans is that it looks quite likely that they will win the 2022 midterms fair and square. If they nominated someone other than Trump or one of his many clones climbing the Republican ranks, they would likely be odds-on favorites to win in 2024 as well.

"One major reason for this, I submit, is that Democrats have failed to convince their own voters — a substantial majority in the last election — about what Republicans are really up to. The leadership doesn't act like the republic is on the line, or can't bring themselves to believe it. That leaves their base either thinking things are basically fine, or despairing at the thought of fighting back without even their own president on their side." -- Ryan Cooper in The Week, on "Democrats Are in Denial About What They're Up Against."

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"... [H]however much the people may have voted for Biden in the hope for a return to normalcy, there is no normalcy on the horizon and efforts to provide it aren’t going to be politically rewarded. The only hope is to start fighting as hard as the Republicans are fighting. That means using the law (since it still exists for a little while longer) very aggressively. It means the effort to right the ship through reestablishing norms will fail spectacularly.

"I’d say that we should do away with the legislative filibuster and pass voter reforms, and that we should develop an intelligent and politically savvy legislative plan for 2022, and that we should do more and better messaging. But most of that won’t happen and the rest won’t be sufficient. The coup-plotters are in the driver’s seat and if we don’t have a radical and preemptive response, they’ll do next November what they failed to do on January 6.

"And we won’t come back from that." -- Martin Longman in Progress Pond, on "I Must Issue the Direst of Warnings."

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"The Rittenhouse verdict matters because it is a symbolic representation of what the American right wing and its avatar the Republican party have become: A movement of heavily armed religious and quasi-religious fanatics, who wish to purify and thereby restore the traditional greatness of the Real America through the cleansing power of violence.

"There’s a word for that kind of thing, but no prominent Democratic politician can use it accurately, because to use it accurately would imply the need for radical resistance to the Republican party and what it has become. And almost no one in any position of power or influence is ready to advocate for that, because people in positions of power and influence aren’t the kind of people who can look this particular species of reality in the face, because doing so would call into question the very system that has made them so powerful and important and respected.

"But that doesn’t change that reality: it only exacerbates it, through continual and systemic denial." -- Paul Campos at LGM, on "Why the Rittenhouse Verdict Matters."

 

Particularly with the ramping up of violent speech by Republican officeholders and their frothing base and the on- going coup against American democracy, the response should be to a "radical and preemptive response" to the existential threat these nihilists pose, not downplaying the danger in a fog of "bipartisanship" or denial.  It would also help Democrats' sagging poll numbers within their own party if they stayed on offense and showed some self- confidence and passion for defending our democracy!

"We Need You To Call It A 'Crisis'! Please Call It A Crisis!!"

 

It didn't take much sleuthing to figure out why the media is determined to focus the nation's attention on "Crisis at the Border!" even as more existential, but difficult- to- soundbite crises threaten to overwhelm us:

Barely two months into the post-Trump era, news outlets are indeed losing much of the audience and readership they gained during his chaotic presidency. In other words, journalism’s Trump bump may be giving way to a slump.

After a record-setting January, traffic to the nation’s most popular mainstream news sites, including The Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm ComScore. The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year, when the pandemic became a major international news story. [snip]

The story is largely the same for cable and broadcast news. Audiences grew during the pandemic last spring and summer, remained high in the fall as Trump tried to fight his electoral defeat with false claims of voter fraud, and swelled in the first few weeks of 2021 when a mob attacked the Capitol and Trump became the first president in history to be impeached and acquitted twice. [snip]

The most deeply affected network is CNN. After surpassing rivals Fox News and MSNBC in January, the network has lost 45 percent of its prime-time audience in the past five weeks, according to Nielsen Media Research. MSNBC’s audience has dropped 26 percent in the same period. Fox News — the most Trump-friendly of the three networks in its prime-time opinion shows — has essentially regained its leading position by standing still; its ratings have fallen just 6 percent since the first weeks of the year. The cable networks declined to discuss their ratings outlook for this article.

But, of course, it always comes down to the Les Moonves dictum that, while the former guy's toxicity may be bad for the country, "it's damn good for CBS."  (Let's not forget the role CNN, under "ratings whore" Jeff Zucker, played in Trump's rise, either.) 

Last night, saying the quiet part loud, ABC News' anchor David Muir pressed a reporter on why won't the Biden Administration call it a 'crisis'!? begging for a reason why the ratings- starved networks can't get the Administration to help it boost their click-bait, ratings- boosting narrative (skip to 3:33).

If we have a "crisis" in this country -- and we do -- it's the fact that one of our two political parties is committed to an anti- democracy agenda, prefaced by the foiled insurrection on January 6.  But that, and the renewal of America that's just begun under President Biden, doesn't stir the dark soul like "caravans of brown immigrants" does.  Here's Ryan Cooper on the media's "crisis" crisis:

This is nonsense. There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a "crisis." It's an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic. [snip]

The border situation "is a political crisis for the new president, with no easy way out," said NBC's Chuck Todd on Meet the Press over the weekend, exercising his considerable political influence to create that crisis. He contrasted the conservative demand of a "big wall and some stricter enforcement of the border" with progressive demands for "humane treatment for migrants fleeing violence … and a path to citizenship for those that are already here" — falsely implying that both are equally extreme and impossible.

It's true that it would be much cheaper and simpler to deflate the frenzy of media hysteria by doing what Trump did — basically closing the border, throwing penniless refugees back over it, and forcing Mexico to deal with the problem. Dealing with migrants in a fair and humane fashion will require money, patience, and good administration. But how better to solve a fake crisis created by Republicans and bored occupants of green rooms in Washington, D.C. than with a fake solution?

Cooper details what the media is determined to ignore in its reporting about the border situation.  It's worth a read to help inoculate yourself against the bad faith "border crisis" stories you'll be seeing until the next shiny object appears from the media's assignment desk at Fox "News."

 

Quote Of The Day -- "President Superspreader"

 "... [T]his White House infection cluster is a perfect microcosm of Trump's world-historical faceplant on the coronavirus response. The president did not even try to protect the country, talked himself and his party into believing that the virus was not a threat, and ultimately failed to protect himself, his wife, and half his top staff.  [snip]

"Again we see part of the reason why Trump has bungled the pandemic so horrendously: He can't even begin to consider the welfare of other people. Not even the gun-toting people who are paid to protect him merit a single thought — Trump will casually risk their lives for a completely pointless five-minute excursion to see his fans waving at him. (As any Roman emperor could have told you, always make sure the Praetorian Guards are happy and satisfied.) A necessary precondition to doing something about a pandemic is thinking it is bad when others get sick or die, but Trump does not care about anyone but himself.

"All these political pathologies mean that a rational, effective response to the pandemic was never in the cards. It requires a willingness to listen to scientific experts, honesty, and a concern for the lives of others. Trump has none of these, and neither does his party. So long as he remains in office, Americans will have to work around our national leader to fight this problem." -- Ryan Cooper on "President Superspreader" in The Week.  Judging from the recent polls, COVID Donnie's "world-historical faceplant on the coronavirus response" is what's finally convincing voters who are going to the polls right now that he  needs to go.

QOTD - "The Worthless Washington Media" (UPDATED)

Let's be frank here: The basic job of Sanders and Conway is to lie and dissemble on behalf of a corrupt president who has taken vicious media-baiting far beyond the Spiro Agnew level. They do it nearly every time they open their mouths. That it is possible to react to these mild insults outside of this overtly and personally threatening context is final confirmation that the above journalists are not capable of perceiving the reality of the American state, much less how they are enabling it. As Alex Pareene once noted, "These people practice a form of corruption in which the corrupt individual literally cannot understand why anyone wouldn't consider him or her a stalwart and productive member of society." -- The Week's Ryan Cooper, in a blistering takedown of the Beltway corporate media and their essential worthlessness as guardians of our democracy, as evidenced once again by the reaction to Michelle Wolf's White House Correspondence Dinner remarks.  Worth a read this morning.

UPDATE:  Ashley Feinberg is maintaining a running list of the "cowards, courtiers, strivers and suck-ups" in the corporate media.