NY Times posts one letter critical of their pro-Trump editorial

Jun30

After noting that the Times editorial board’s “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” is still on its homepage, you peruse the letters to the editor. You have to read a few letters that agree with the NY Times position that the Democrats must create a process to make Biden step down before you get to this one, followed by several more agreeing Biden must step down (a sampling the Times no doubt considers a “preponderance of the evidence”). The NY Times, at its best:

To the Editor:

So let me get this straight. A presidential candidate who is a convicted felon gives a debate performance that is often incoherent, consists primarily of obvious lies, and includes a refusal to unconditionally commit to accepting the results of the presidential election, and your editorial is filled with histrionic calls to remove the other guy who’s run the country ably and ethically for almost four years because he had an off night on the stage?

You really should have consulted with your theater critics, who can school you in the many ways the run of the show ultimately matters more than the blips in previews. Your failure to focus your outrage on Donald Trump’s truly bizarre and bewildering statements in favor of such an overwrought and shortsighted response to Mr. Biden lets the real danger to our democracy off the hook.

Judith Hamera
Pennington, N.J.

Nicely done, Judith.

And this nice, self-evident bit from one of our nation’s greatest winners, a billionaire:

Profile in trembling cowardice

Jun29

I have many bones to pick with the New York Times. It is often hard to tell, based on their moral suppleness in presenting propaganda and spin right next to plain, old-fashioned fact, how the Times editorial board differs from that of any Rupert Murdoch rag. The Times ran dozens of articles, including, and especially, today, about questions over Biden’s age (81) and now, the predictable “we told you so” editorial.

Here is their latest, about which, in spite of the Grey Lady’s vast influence and my vexation over its complicity in right-wing spin, I am also philosophical. The essential status quo embracing spinelessness of the journal of record just got demonstrated again. Here’s a sample:

As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.

Let’s parse a little bit of this bullshit.

Reckless gamble? More reckless to leave this helpless, doddering, ancient fossil on the ballot after his bad night in a TV debate format his handlers never should have signed on to (no fact checks, no moderator intervention, one minute to respond to Trump’s many lies) than to create a process to oust your candidate, make a last minute change, admitting your incumbent president/candidate is unqualified for reelection, in spite of his many accomplishments in the face of unified MAGA resistance?

Democratic leaders better equipped (to acquit themselves better in a 90 minute televised campaign battle called a debate?) — which ones? Does this ability qualify them to defeat Donald Trump and the reactionary billionaire backed MAGA movement?

No reason for the party to risk not changing their candidate in the weeks before their convention? Just because there is no process for it and the very few times it was tried, this close to an election, the replacement candidate was trounced, just because it would show hysteria and cowardice, and confirm MAGA propaganda– while also guaranteeing Trump’s election, to do so now?

Another morsel:

Ending his candidacy would be against all of Mr. Biden’s personal and political instincts. He has picked himself up from tragedies and setbacks in the past and clearly believes he can do so again. Supporters of the president are already explaining away Thursday’s debate as one data point compared with three years of accomplishments. But the president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night or blamed on a supposed cold, because it affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years. Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled. It cannot be outweighed by other public appearances because he has limited and carefully controlled his public appearances.

The president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night?

It can’t be outweighed (not by his record, the respect of his fellow democratic leaders worldwide, the many good decisions he continues to make, his bearing on the world stage) by other public appearances because he has limited them in the past?

The Grey Lady finally spoke some plain, indisputable truth, buried toward the very end of a piece urging Democrats to create a process to force their candidate to voluntarily step down:

It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate. Mr. Trump’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying. He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that would harm the American economy, undermine civil liberties and fray America’s relationships with other nations. He refused to promise that he would accept defeat, returning instead to the kind of rhetoric that incited the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.

Followed by:

Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader. . .The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

The courage to cower, the clearest path, create a process, indeed… so simple when laid out with the authority of the NY Times editorial board.

Conclusory, opinionated, cowardly, stupid, ill-reasoned, ahistorical, serving not democracy but Trumpism. Aside from that, and making references to propaganda promoted in its own pages as proof (dozens of articles about Biden’s alleged decrepitude and semi-senility) this shameful editorial is a very fine piece. Read it for yourself.

Grey Lady Editorial Board

Trauma produces empathy or sadism

Jun28

When a person survives trauma, particularly early in life, at the hands of family, the people who are supposed to protect the child, there seem to be only two responses. Some people emerge hurt, damaged and empathizing with others who are hurt and damaged. These people can heal to a large extent, with sufficient help, determination and luck. Tragically, many people emerge from childhood trauma hurt and damaged and intent on never being hurt again, convinced that they can never be at fault for anything, recruiting admiring allies and preying on people they perceive as weaker than them. These people are trapped in a lifetime cycle of abuse they will pass on to the next generation and beyond.

You come out of trauma either more fully human or a kind of bullying monster. I have no idea what the deciding factor in this outcome is, beyond some loving adult in position to support the abuse victim and help them through their pain at crucial moments in the young person’s development.

Everybody knows the only thing that stops a bully is the equivalent of a hard punch in the face. It stops them in their tracks, every time. They will not fight somebody once they are afraid of being beaten to a pulp, looking bad, being exposed for their cowardice.

Nothing is more terrifying to a bully than the thought of “losing”. When this happens they whine, threaten, claim to be the victim, lie, make excuses, change their story wildly, completely stop making sense in any way we can understand, beyond being the predictable, desperate shuffle these creatures always do when they feel terrifyingly disoriented and threatened.

Application in Politics

Bullies who unite under a banner of religious faith, patriotism and “exceptionalism”, who have unlimited money to influence political outcomes, and a smart, unappealable way to obtain more and more power (say by arranging to have six of nine members of the country’s highest court members of its doctrinaire, activist conservative-libertarian-Christian judicial fraternity) are very hard to beat. You can’t step up to a political movement and punch it in the face. This is particularly true of a movement steeped in intoxicating mob violence and relishing any chance to unleash the deadly force of the state.

Fascists can only be defeated by the united courage of every citizen who opposes the rule of a few indomitable psychopaths, prone to any excess you can imagine. Very few original Nazi party members signed on gleefully imagining the day when millions of Jews would be killed, along with all political opponents, “degenerates” and other inferior “races”, in enormous, mechanized death centers. It was not their dream, though they all accepted it when it became reality because that’s what this type does. Murder of “enemies” is the predictable outcome when a party in power blindly follows the unquestionable will of a madman leader they have sworn an oath of loyalty to, on pain of death, which is always the case in fascism.

Joe Biden, who began the debate looking 130 years old, got rolled last night. His handlers agreed to a ridiculous format — two minutes to talk fast and one minute to rebut countless lies that were not fact-checked or questioned by CNN moderators, who then moved on to an unrelated topic/talking point. The format allowed for no nuance, virtually no back and forth on complex subjects — and no intervention by “moderators” no matter how outrageous the lie told was. I even heard one of the two corporate shills mention, right before Biden’s 60 second rebuttal, that seven states do seem to allow abortions even on the day of delivery, supporting one of Trump’s steamiest lies about Democrat [sic] infanticide.

It was a format that favored a compulsively lying con man over a thoughtful man who is also a lifelong stutterer. Biden looked so bad, so weak and doddering, rushing to answer a barrage of unchecked lies in 60 seconds and getting confused, that we had to shut the debate off a few minutes in. I understand that he found his footing later, and delivered some excellent points, and that virtually everything his confident, increasingly incoherent opponent said was a lie, but the first few minutes gave right wing media every clip and sound byte they could have dreamed of deep faking.

Before the debate it looked like a mute switch would squelch Trump’s pernicious tactic of talking over people, advantage Biden (wrong, the muted mic made Trump look restrained). The lack of an audience was seen as a major coup, as Trump feeds off his adoring crowds, advantage Biden, in theory. The format… uh… on a cable station that had moved to the right (falsely calling it the “center”) and allowed Trump a national “town hall” to spout his usual lies virtually unchallenged? What could go wrong? It was apparent three minutes in.

I thought Biden should have agreed to a drug test immediately prior to the debate. Biden clearly had not had so much as a cup of espresso before taking the stage. Trump, in contrast, spoke calmly and with unaccustomed focus and clarity (for him, anyway), even as virtually everything he said was a demonstrable lie. Every cognition and focus enhancing drug Trump’s surrogates baselessly accused “jacked up” Biden of taking — Provigil, Adderall, caffeine, cocaine, steroids, diet Mountain Dew, was undoubtedly injected into Trump’s ass (he wasn’t sniffing like a coke fiend this time) before he took the stage. I’d have loved to have seen Biden call Trump’s bluff on the drug test. How might the results of that test have changed today’s headlines calling for Biden to step down?

The sickening farce of the CNN debate will leave a stink for a while, and clips will be played continually during the campaign as Biden is portrayed as an ancient, weak, doddering, foolish, vain idiot incapable of accomplishing any of the many significant things his administration has objectively accomplished. The articles counting Trump’s lies, which probably number in the hundreds, will come out, and be met with yawns about Trump being Trump. We knew he was a snake when we took him in, as he likes reminding people.

This is the politics of our time, corporate mass media framing everything to its exacting profit-driven standards. Lying used to disqualify a candidate, as Biden himself was once booted for delivering lines as his own that were somebody else’s words. Lying is fine now in American politics, as long as it’s not under oath, and if it is ruled perjury, simply attack the law, the courts, the crooked judges, the rigged jury, the deep state, The Department of Injustice, the communists, the fascists, a Jewish billionaire, pedophile cannibals, criminally insane illegal immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, disloyal Jews who’d better shape up, intellectuals, elites, transsexuals, ten year-old rape victims, etc.

The work is still ahead of us and the job remains the same. Get the truth out to everybody who is still, somehow, “undecided”. Biden fell short on a night when he was determined to face down evil, a modern day Hitler if there ever was one. The only book the incurious very stable genius Trump ever cracked was the compendium of Hitler speeches he kept next to his bed.

Imagine the burden on Joe Biden, whose popularity based on his achievements should be very high, instead of at Trump level, standing alone against a dictatorial devil intent on unchecked power to punish his enemies, who was allowed to do his thing, with no interference from the “moderators”, determined to prove he was up to the task of wrestling Hitler to the ground and pinning him. How many of us would not appear a little shaky the first time a torrent of confident lies was spouted at us and we had sixty seconds to respond, without stuttering, without hesitating?

As always, Heather Cox Richardson has a brilliant analysis, today it is of the historic CNN debate.

All hands on deck moment

Jun26

If you think this is a moment to stand on the side, cover your ears and eyes and let heroes save you, I’m here to tell you that nobody is coming to save you. The only heroes who can save us are us. We are in an all hands on deck moment here in the free world. Whatever you personally can do in this fight, you need to do. The fight is against a determined, well-funded, tightly organized movement that believes destruction of all enemies is the will of God Almighty.

This moment is not the same as any other historical moment, except perhaps the eve of a cataclysm like World War Two. The overpopulation of the planet, the rising heat, rising oceans, mass extinction, disappearing water, historically savage inequality, restless armies of enraged grievants serving the will of our most psychopathic citizens, authoritarians ruling most of the planet — a recipe for mass murder if there ever was one.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that a group like the Nazis started in a room, arguing among themselves, until the proper organizational and promotional geniuses arrived. Within a decade you had a potent, violent political force, organized under a rousing banner, indomitably roiling the most civilized nation in Europe. Before the next decade was over you had an unrivaled military power, with a Nazi as the commander in chief, declaring its right to unlimited living space. The rest, as they say, is history.

Once there is sufficient momentum for this kind of movement of true believers, and the voices of reason are silenced, this impulse to dominate the “weak” turns into an avalanche. People at one time merely supremely opportunistic, ambitious, competitive, greedy, superior become the defenders of death camps as necessary to the maintenance of the status quo, the protection of decency and godliness itself.

The Nazis didn’t open a series of death camps in their first year, or their fifth, or even their tenth. Opening mass killing centers is a process that marches step by step, inexorably, carried out by rabidly loyal partisans who ask no questions along the way and echo whatever the leader says, no matter how otherwise insane it might be.

This is what we are looking at right now, boys and girls. You can choose to ignore it, of course, the same way you can ignore history or any other cause and effect in your life. It may not be a wise choice, in the long run, or even in the short run, but it is certainly a popular one.

Nonpartisan far-right doctor aspires to far-right opinion polling-backed nonpartisanship

Jun24

Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative-libertarian Heritage Foundation, calls the aspirations of the far right “think tank” nonpartisan. Let’s take him at his word. He was interviewed on MSNBC the other day, about the Heritage Foundation’s autocratic Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

MSNBC: Is your organization going to accept the results of the 2024 presidential election?

Dr. Roberts: Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.

MSNBC: There was not massive fraud in 2020.

Dr. Roberts: Yes, there was massive fraud… we have an election fraud database that has documented that over years. By the way the Heritage Foundation has been concerned about election integrity for decades, not just about 2020. We’ve been documenting this problem for a very long time, and if, one of the…

MSNBC: I believe, according to the Heritage Foundation, sir, by your count, Heritage Foundation has done an investigation and according to your count there have been 1,513 proven instances of voter fraud across the United States since 1982. 1,513.

Dr. Roberts: They’re very hard to document, and the Democrat [sic] party is very good at fraud. The key thing here, which I think we would both agree on, is that we aspire at Heritage Foundation to seeing a poll after this election where every American believes their vote was counted. I care as deeply about someone on the political left, with whom I disagree, saying that they have confidence in the outcome of the election, it seems rather than turning this into a partisan conversation, which you do a good a job of at MSNBC, we might say we aspire to something more noble, which is that every American believes their vote counts.

Something more noble, specifically, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft! (“the leader’s word is LAW”)

You can listen to Dr. Roberts giving it to the partisans at MSNBC here.

For more details on the Heritage Foundations “election integrity” efforts over the years, here’s a good digest, from September 2020.

Nonpartisan — a new alternative definition

Jun23

If everything you say is based on passionately held feelings, and your goal is to persuade people of the absolute rightness of your provably wrongheaded positions, and you don’t mind being untruthful and resorting to tired tricks to avoid answering basic questions, you can give exactly the interview this “nonpartisan” MAGA spokesman for the Koch Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 did on MSNBC. A masterclass in all that really.

Robert Reich explains what Project 2025 is, asking for support for Inequality Media so they can spread the word on this brazen blueprint for a “conservative-libertarian” dictatorship:

https://www.inequalitymedia.org/

Heather’s concise history of the roots of MAGA

Jun22

Heather Cox Richardson, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Klan murders of three voting rights activists in Klan controlled Mississippi:

Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.

On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.

While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men

Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.

Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats.

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.

“I believe in states’ rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

source

43% of Americans voted by mail in 2020

Jun21

43%

Why worry about a US Postmaster General/megadonor for one of the presidential candidates who has crippled mail delivery across the country?

In desperation, and madder than the overheated freaks in Trump’s war room, I wrote my congressmember today, sending a copy of my letter to the Postal board of governors:

My attached letter to the chair of the Election Mail Committee poses this question: what is the Election Mail Committee doing in relation to the nationwide slowdown in mail delivery in the months before a national election that appears likely to be decided by mere thousands of votes in a few states?

It is staggering to me, and depressing, that nobody in the government seems to be addressing this serious issue ahead of an election where unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud are embraced by a partisan official, Postmaster Louis Dejoy, in position to make sure millions of mail-in ballots (26.6 million mail in votes were cast nationwide in the 2020 primaries, 43% of all votes cast in the 2020 election were by mail — per US Census) are not received in time to be “fraudulently” counted.

Your help in bringing this issue forward – and fixing it in time for the upcoming election – will be greatly appreciated. It is impossible for me to understand why I seem to be the only Democrat with hair on fire about this obvious form of voter suppression. It can be applied surgically, pinpointed by zipcode, making it all the more pernicious.

Subtract the Atlanta-area totals from the Georgia state vote and you guarantee the man who lost the state by 11,779 votes in 2020 all of Georgia’s Electoral College votes. The math is horrific in a democracy where the Electoral College has the final say, no?

The GOP’s aggressive lie about massive voter fraud

Jun21

Go to the Heritage Foundation’s website. Alongside Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, blueprint for an America based on the credo of the Thousand Year Reich (Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft — “the Führer’s word has the force of law”), you can see the database a far right crank named Hans von Spakovsky has been maintaining since the 1980s. Here are my own calculations, based on the Koch’s own Hans von Spakovsky’s important work.

If the relentless 0.00025% fraud rate seen since 1982 increases tenfold (to 25 ten thousandths of one percent), the tally in the 2024 election nationwide might feature literally dozens of fraudulent votes, possibly even triple digits! This is why the GOP is hammering the fraudulent theme of MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD in MAIL-IN VOTING, as Bill Barr publicly did for weeks before the 2020 election (before telling Trump, after he lost, that the fraud argument was bullshit).

Repeat a lie enough times and, in politics as in any family, it becomes the truth.

Nazi Logic

Jun19

Main technique: remove the context needed for an informed discussion and you can win any argument among emotionally stirred up people.

Take a video clip of Joe Biden smiling and giving a thumbs up to a paratrooper who has just landed. Edit out the paratrooper. Now Biden is seemingly smiling, a little dementedly, and giving a thumbs up to the air, before his aide puts a hand on his back and leads him back to the group of G7 leaders. Sure makes the old man look dotty as hell, doesn’t it? Rupert Murdoch’s FOX thought so, so did the tens of millions who saw the edited footage.

Nazi logic, like the “logic” of anyone who can never be wrong no matter what (and will kill you to prove it), is absolute. Make an assertion, stick to it, come hell, high water or the best arguments of entire associations of learned experts (Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.). Repeat it over and over, bash the face of any enemy who tries to refute it using dirty tricks like evidence and common sense (especially if these villains are Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.).

Take my man Steven Gow Calabresi, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the venerated “conservative-libertarian” judicial fraternity The Federalist Society. Check out his position on Alito’s and Thomas’s clear violation of the federal statute requiring Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from any case in which the justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

The petulant fifth-grader tone of this esteemed legal scholar’s writing puts me in mind of our favorite seething private schooler, Boof Kavanaugh: