QOTD -- A Polite Version Of An Extremist

 

"... The mainstream press thinks Kirk was a kind, empathetic believer in free debate because for years mainstream journalists have avoided learning what right-wingers say to one another when they think we're not listening. Mainstream journalists have never made it a habit to watch Fox News, listen to talk radio, read right-wing websites, examine right-wing books, or turn on right-wing podcasts. When Rush Limbaugh was alive, they never read the full broadcast transcripts he posted on his site. Apart from a few commentators, they've never made a habit of going to Media Matters or Right Wing Watch to learn what conservatives are saying. They don't pay attention to the email forwards, the online memes, the bumper stickers. Instead, they go to diners and conduct focus groups, where right-wingers give them the polite version of their thoughts on politics and culture.

"And now right-wing spin doctors are giving the mainstream journalists a polite version of who Charlie Kirk was -- and the journalists have no prior knowledge to compare it with, and apparently no idea where to find contradictory information..." -- Steve M. at "No More Mister Nice Blog," on the "nearly unchallenged deification of Charlie Kirk."  As Steve illustrates in the post, decades of working the refs by the right- wingers led us to this place rather than to an honest analysis of Kirk as a white nationalist extremist. Now, thanks to the unchallenged hagiography emerging around Kirk, there's been a move on to create a "National Day of Remembrance" honoring him.  We live in stupid, awful times. 

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

James Downie discusses the Build Back Better/ Manchin debacle;  here's a long excerpt:

Let’s be clear: Manchin’s excuses for opposing this bill — which would expand child-care and Medicare benefits, fight climate change and provide other supports for low-income Americans — are nonsense. “If I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” But polls have shown that West Virginians on balance support the BBB, and it would likely help West Virginia more than most states. The idea that Manchin, who’s won statewide election six times, can’t “explain” a popular, useful bill to his constituents is laughable.

The rest of Manchin’s rationalizations aren’t any better. “The inflation that I was concerned about — it’s not transitory, it’s real. It’s harming every West Virginian,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier. But numerous economists have said the BBB won’t affect inflation. As White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted in an acid statement, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which Manchin is fond of citing, “issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures.” Notably, Manchin did not cite any expert to rebut that view in either his Fox appearance or the statement announcing his stance.  [snip]

Manchin certainly bears much of the responsibility for this debacle, but not all. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) spent much of the year confusing everyone about what she would and wouldn’t support. (Sinema and her staff insisted the White House knew her priorities; somehow they were leak-happy Washington’s best-kept secrets.) House holdouts such as Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) delayed the bill to reinstate the state and local tax deductions for wealthy constituents. And other objectors such as Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) watered down the bill’s attempt to lower prescription drug prices, originally one of its most popular provisions.

Finally, a hefty chunk of the blame must be placed at the feet of the president and congressional leadership. They chose to split the infrastructure and social spending measures into separate bills. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) chose to let other Democrats waste weeks on a spending package in the $3 trillion range, when he and Manchin had signed a letter over the summer saying Manchin wouldn’t go over $1.5 trillion. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the White House chose to ditch the two-track strategy and fatally weaken the BBB’s chances.

No political party operates at perfect efficiency. But there’s a frustratingly common theme to Democratic failures and even some of the party’s muted successes: a refusal to play hardball.

Granted, it's difficult to play hardball when you have a 50/50 Senate and a closely divided House, where the threat to bolt the party is always an option. But the default position during this whole debacle was always to backpedal and cave to the demands of Sinemanchin at the expense of, but with the grudging acquiescence of, Congressional progressives.  It's hard to believe that Maserati Manchin was ever going to vote for the social spending bill, and was rather dragging "negotiations" along until the moment felt right to go on Fox "News" and announce his back- stabbing intentions.

Steve M. has thoughts about the trajectory of the "negotiations" and how his bad faith will play in his dirt poor state and the ramifications for swing-district Dems:

I thought there might still be hope for Build Back Better, in some greatly reduced form, but Joe Manchin just stabbed the president and every swing-district Democrat in the back, as well as every person who would have benefited from the bill, because the people who own him want to keep ordinary people's grubby hands off what they consider their money and want Democrats to lose every election, and Manchin wants whatever they want. [snip]

Presumably he's been planning to do this for months if he couldn't get the White House and the rest of the Democratic Party to give up. I assume he thought he could kill the bill merely by forcing endless negotiations right up until the Democrats' self-imposed deadline, but when they made it clear that they were willing to keep negotiating into 2022, he decided it was time to shiv them. I'm sure his poll numbers will go up in his extremely red home state, particularly among people who would have benefited from this bill the most, because that's the way this country works.

The apparent demise of Build Back Better in its current form had an immediate, negative impact on economic projections:

Senator Joe Manchin's opposition to the Build Back Better Act prompted Goldman Sachs to swiftly dim its US economic outlook.

The Wall Street firm told clients Sunday it no longer assumes President Joe Biden's signature legislation will get through the narrowly divided Congress, citing the West Virginia Democrat's announcement that he's a "no" on the $1.75 trillion bill.

 

"A failure to pass BBB has negative growth implications," Goldman Sachs economists, led by Jan Hatzius, said in the research report.

 

Citing the "apparent demise" of Build Back Better, Goldman Sachs now expects GDP to grow at an annualized pace of 2% in the first quarter, down from 3% previously.

That's enough on the back- stabber for now.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis issued its staff report (which was largely ignored by the corporate media).  It documents what was obvious to all sentient people about the Malignant Loser's deadly botching of the pandemic response, with some new revelations.  Here's part of The Hill's summary:

The Trump administration deliberately undermined the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes, including by weakening testing guidance and championing widespread "herd immunity," according to a new report from the House panel investigating the pandemic response.

The Democratic staff report released Friday was a summation of the year's work investigating political interference in the pandemic response from Trump officials and the former president himself. 

In interviews with officials and from uncovered emails and other documents, the committee found that the former administration failed to heed warnings about supply shortages, blocked public health officials from speaking publicly and neglected the pandemic response in order to focus on the 2020 presidential election and on promoting the lie that the election was "stolen" from Trump through widespread fraud.

New evidence released by the panel Friday highlighted the frustration and anger among senior public health officials with Trump's embrace of the herd immunity strategy.

You can read the subcommittee staff's report here (pdf).

Retiring NIH Director and Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Collins also had something to say in line with the subcommittee's findings:

The outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday that he faced political pressure from then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans to endorse unproven Covid-19 remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Francis Collins, whose last day as NIH director is Sunday, told CBS News that he got a "talking to" by Trump, but that he held his ground and would have resigned if Trump made him endorse remedies for Covid-19 that were not based in science.

 

"I have done everything I can to stay out of any kind of political, partisan debates because it is really not a place where medical research belongs," he said. "I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job."  [snip]

 

Collins also said he fought back calls from Republicans for him to fire Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who now serves as President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser.

 

"Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the NIH, somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?" he said. 

 

Well, we can imagine it coming from a narcissistic, sociopathic moron leading an administration of 10th- rate sycophants. 

Lastly, a visit to Infidel 753's link round- up is recommended for his usual, comprehensive array of links to varied posts from around the Internet.

QOTD -- Danger For Democrats!!

 

"We're all supposed to believe that Democrats must practice "popularism" -- they should talk about popular Democratic ideas and only popular Democratic ideas; none of this woke "defund the police" or "Latinx" nonsense. Most Democratic politicians actually do just that, but word gets around that every Democrat is excessively woke because the right-wing media says so. But Republicans practice "unpopularism" -- they oppose even modest gun control measures even after horrific massacres, they oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest, they block increased taxation of the rich, they prevent increases in the federal minimum wage, they reject state Medicaid expansion under Obamacare -- and none of this is ever described as carrying "real political risk," presumably because they do it so defiantly that voters just shrug and accept it as inevitable.

"In addition, of course, they benefit tremendously from the work of reporters and pundits like Talev who assume that there's political peril in everything Democrats do and nothing Republicans do. And these journalists don't even notice that they're doing it." -- Steve M., at No More Mister Nice Blog, on a piece in Axios by Margaret Talev on the "real political risk" of vaccine mandates to Democrats.  The polls Talev cites are, at best, contradictory;  but, hey, why be bothered with contradictions when you've got a narrative to flog, amirite?!

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ ip eds.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog writes about what Democrats' focus should be on in the coming months and year:

We need to remind Americans that we can't raise the minimum wage, fight climate change, pass sensible gun laws, increase taxes on the super-rich, or protect reproductive freedom because a solid bloc of Republicans won't allow us to. We need to hammer home the fact that Republicans back or at least tolerate COVID denialism and vaccine skepticism, that they want to restrict voting rights and probably overturn the results of future elections, that they want to scapegoat trans youth everywhere in America, that they believe it's okay to run over peaceful protesters in your car, that they want to return to the days of the Wall and family separations at the border.

Trump could go to prison tomorrow and all this would still be true. It's all true even though January 6 rioters are in prison and up on charges now.

Accountability is fine, but it won't save us. Talking about the ongoing threat posed by ordinary Republicanism might.

Pummeling a radical, anti- democracy party to run against, as well as touting your popular achievements, would be a powerful 1-2 punch.

Virginia Heffernan writes about the demise of the LowIQAnon cult:

QAnon’s demise, in fact, is well underway. Its leader, Q, a figure from the internet’s dark side, is now widely suspected to be the creation of Jim and Ron Watkins. The Watkins men are a seedy father-son duo in Asia who serve up pornography and hate speech online.

If the Watkins hypothesis is true, it means that Q is not exactly the patriotic, principled avenger crusading against sex trafficking that his followers have put their faith in.

Q has also been silent for seven months. The cryptic things Q used to post, tone poems that served as Rorschach tests for his followers’ projections, have stopped appearing. They no longer headline the rave at 8kun, the horrifying online image board, administered by Ron Watkins, where they first appeared.

We have full confidence it will be replaced by other equally demented ones.

Dr. Peter J. Hotez, of Baylor University, writes about "America's deadly flirtation with anti- science and the medical freedom movement" throughout its history, concluding that today COVID anti- vax, anti- science must be countered more forcefully:

Medical and health freedom and its antiscience tenets represent grave threats to American public health in this new century. We must urgently seek broad and innovative solutions that tap guidance and expertise in multiple areas. For example, we might consider a federal interagency task force across several branches of the US government in order to identify new levers for countering antiscience groups (1). These might extend beyond the standard approaches focused on amplifying provaccination advocacy, instead driving harder to remove nefarious antiscience internet content and other forms of harmful communication. We cannot afford a status quo now thwarting desperate efforts to save lives or reduce COVID-19 long-haul injuries.

The US was the deadliest location worldwide for the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, and in 2021, we will hold our breath as the new variants emerge and potentially sweep through the country. The high death toll from SARS-2 coronavirus transmission was exacerbated by a medical freedom ideology linked to political extremism. It is vital to US public health and homeland security that we find ways to defuse antiscience organizations, messaging, and health consequences.

The highly contagious Delta (India) variant is already here.  Our vaccines are effective against it. Get vaccinated, dammit. 

On a related, but more amusing note, Dana Milbank tells us how the "magnetized" COVID vaccine turned him into a Republican:

It took some getting used to, but I’ve begun to enjoy my newly magnetic personality. In fact, I’ve tried to maximize my magnetism by getting a third vaccine dose, and a fourth — Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. Now I no longer have to pay Metro fares; I simply run toward a moving train and peel myself off its side when I get to my stop. Whenever I go to the beach, the tide comes in as soon as I arrive.

[Anti- vax conspiracy nut Sherri] Tenpenny and her ilk also say the vaccine alters our DNA. Those fun-sponges at the CDC say “the vaccines cannot affect or interact with our DNA in any way.” But I’m not so sure. Since taking the vaccine, I’ve stopped believing in anything resembling science in favor of stuff I read on social media. I’ve become totally immune to what “experts” call “facts.” And I have a feeling that my magnetic powers have become so great that the whole universe revolves around me.

See? The vaccine did change my DNA: It turned me into a Trump Republican.

Finally, please head over to Infidel 753's link round- up for a comprehensive array of links to interesting and varied topics from around the Internet.  You'll find something to pique your curiosity, guaranteed (by us, not Infidel!).

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The Washington Post has an exposé on the genesis of the election- fraud myth, now an article of faith among Republicans and their cult leader.  It's a deep dive and, as they say, a first draft of history:

Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.  [snip]

Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation.

“We had to find the right candidate,” said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. “We had to find one who knew they won.”  [snip]

No candidate agreed to bring a challenge, and the idea of widespread vote manipulation remained on the political fringe — until 2020, when Ramsland’s assertions were seized upon by influential allies of Trump. The president himself accelerated the spread of those claims into the GOP mainstream as he latched onto an array of baseless ideas to explain his loss in November.

The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies...

Of course, the unbalanced, narcissistic former guy was the perfect candidate for this bunch of conspiratorial putschists, and his party of aggrieved, low- information, authoritarian- friendly voters the perfect seed bed.

James Downie discusses the fact that there's no intra- party "battle for the soul of the Republican Party":

... The Republican Party playbook is the same as it ever was: Disguise worshipfully pro-big business, pro-wealthy policies with appeals to the resentments of President Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority” or Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” or whatever label the party prefers for a specific type of White American. Every liberal project — from Social Security in the 1930s to Medicare and integration in the 1960s to the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage in the 2010s — is cast as a mortal threat to freedom pushed by the eggheads, the ivory tower or the coastal elites. The threat of “outside agitators” becomes the peril of “political correctness” becomes the menace of “ridiculous wokeness” — the term Cheney used in her Post op-ed last week. They’re all the same look.

Yes, Trump has turned some of these traits up to 11. The dog whistles became bullhorns; the “executive time” administration plumbed new depths of incompetence. But for Republicans, as televangelist and later right-wing presidential candidate Pat Robertson said 40 years ago, “it’s better to have a stable government under a crook than turmoil under an honest man.” The threat of liberalism outweighs the risk of an inept, amoral or fascistic president. The Trump era — including its culmination in January’s attempted insurrection — was not out of step with that. There’s no “battle” for the party’s soul; there are only the party leaders who will keep swimming in this foul stream leaving behind those that don’t. For the rest of the country, including the media, reckoning with that fact means being honest about it — the sooner, the better.

That's a challenge to the Republican- wired media, most of whom feel safe to revert to their natural anti- government, both sides posture now that Democrats have temporarily fought off the violent insurrectionists on their behalf.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog sees a way vaccine- hesitant people might be reached:

So how do we reach them? I'm hoping the numbers change once the vaccines reach full approval -- not just because full approval might persuade a few holdouts that the shots are safe, but because, for once, capitalism might act on behalf of the public good, even if that's not the primary intention. Here's a detail from last week's vaccine news:

Pfizer and BioNTech have begun the process of applying for full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of its coronavirus vaccine, the companies announced Friday morning....

If the vaccine is fully approved, it sets the stage for Pfizer and BioNTech to begin advertising the shots directly to consumers....

America is one of only two countries on Earth that allow direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising. (New Zealand is the other.) This combined with the drug industry's relentless marketing of pricey new products to doctors is one reason our healthcare costs are so high.

However, Big Pharma is good at selling us drugs we didn't know we wanted. The drug industry knows how to make us want to walk into our doctors' offices and ask for a new drug we've seen on TV or in Web ads.

So maybe consumer advertising will succeed where earnest entreaties haven't. And if not, there's always free beer. 

It would also be helpful, and humane, for Big Pharma to waive vaccine patents to allow world- wide production, research and development largely paid for by the American taxpayer.  But no one's holding their breath.

In the meantime, the catastrophic death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic was doubtless under- counted:

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said he has “no doubt” that the number of Americans killed by COVID-19 is much higher than what has been officially reported, after a recent study counted nearly double the amount recorded by federal health officials.

“We’ve been saying — and the CDC has been saying all along — that it is very likely that we’re undercounting,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the number of deaths in the U.S. at around 577,800. In comparison, a study from the University of Washington released Thursday tallied around 905,000 deaths.

“That’s a bit more than I would have thought the undercounting was,” Fauci said of that difference. “I think there’s no doubt ... that we are and have been undercounting. What that tells us is something that we’ve known. You know, we’re living through a historic pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a hundred years.”

... not to mention a "Presidency" the likes of which we haven't seen in 232 years. 

Infidel 753 has his usual, excellent collection of links to posts from around the Internet, including how France just got shrunk a little and a commencement address for our time.  Check it out (and bookmark his blog!).