But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.
Toobin (and Weissman, based on interviews he’s already given), both lament the overly-cautious, tradition-bound behavior of Robert Mueller as he confronted Trump’s total obstruction of his investigation. A creature from an era when people in high offices showed basic respect for legal “norms”, Mueller (and at least one key deputy) refused to push a direct face-to-face confrontation with Trump or any of his family over the source of their wealth, despite clear indications that its roots were in Russia and therefore they were all highly likely to be compromised by Vladimir Putin.
The spectre of litigating against … the President of the United States … over large scale money laundering for Russian oligarch/gangsters was simply a place Mueller didn’t want to go. Better to deliver a narrowly-investigated, bridled report that suggested as much but left all the ugly charging business to Congress.
Stelter’s book is a dizzying trip into Fox’s alternate universe. The naked careerism and mendacity. The all but total dereliction of journalistic duty in favor of locking down and pandering to an audience with a nearly-religious allegiance to a “norm-busting” celebrity figure. It’s all there, plus some.
Bad as all that is, the problem both Toobin and Stelter suggest is that “normal”, “traditional” politicians, courts and media are still off-balance and indecisive about how to respond to Trump. And this comes barely a month before the next election and with Trump plainly setting up to deny the results of the election should he lose.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the people in control of response to Trump’s (and Bill Barr’s, and Mitch McConnell’s) flagrant norm and tradition-breaking are almost all figures groomed and elevated to their positions from what appears to be a lost era. An era when editors and judges and sensible, civic-minded politicians always gave presidents the benefit of the doubt, always sought to present a “balance” between “both sides” and always avoided the word, “lying.”
But if you watch the Trump spectacle day after day and if you read what you can, the only conclusion is that we don’t live in that era or world anymore, and given social media and every other platform of disinformation, we never will again. The evolution of “normal” has passed our institutions by and is rocketing into a new time zone.
The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?
Or, are they going to accept a harsh reality and adapt to change?
Frankly, if Trump is able to create enough chaos to declare and sustain victory I don’t see how old time tradition will hold sway in the US of A ever again.
Even as someone who was well old enough to remember 1968, I can’t shake the feeling that this … today … is worse. And that drift toward fatalism isn’t helped when Dr. Michael Osterholm predicts “another 12 to 14 months” before we’ll begin to feel true relief from the pandemic.
There’s a psychological fragility in the air that I’ve never felt before. 1968 was a terrible year. But even with 400 or more GIs being killed a week in Vietnam, (i.e. less than half of one day of this pandemic), even with the assassinations, the street protests and riots it was still possible to grasp The Silent Majority’s rationale for supporting the war, for supporting Lyndon Johnson (until they didn’t) and eventually Richard Nixon. The Commies were bad. We couldn’t let them win … no matter how much damage we did to ourselves.
It didn’t make a lot of sense. But it made some sense.
As much as we loathed Johnson, Nixon, Curtis LeMay and all the establishment warriors of that era, in retrospect at least we regarded them as fact-based characters. Rational but seriously misguided.
Today though, and without question, our fate, is in the hands of utter fools. Fools lacking even a waving relationship to scholarship, honesty and the basic efforts of their job decriptions. Fools being given stalwart legal support by deeply cynical (i.e. Nixon-like) characters, but fools none the less.
The combination of an eight-month old pandemic for which the government still has no plan, and against which our president long ago decided not to bother fighting, racial tension as bad as 1967 and a truly apocalyptic wildfire season out west, a scene long predicted by Osterholm-level climatologists and regularly mocked as a “hoax” by fools creates a cocktail of despair unlike anything in my lifetime.
I was a big fan of “Game of Thrones”, but the “Winter is coming” jokes have lost their gallows humor punch.
Write it off as the congenital mental weakness of elitist libtards, but I am struck by how often and unbidden friends and neighbors are saying, “God, I’m dreading this winter.” And how could a rational person not?
We have an election marked by utter stupidity and “viciousness”. An election we know with near total certainty will end in a culture war battle royale no matter who wins.
Plus, we have an unmitigated pandemic that is almost certain to regain deadly strength as we seal ourselves back indoors and cut off what limited physical contact we’ve been able to enjoy with others. And, as I say, all that plays against terrifying, conclusive proof that scientists have been right all along about both virus and climate … and yet the fools are still mocking both. So yes, the ingredients are there for a season of extraordinary psychological pain.
Facing this, every trite homily will encourage us to practice saintly quantities of patience toward each other. Some might even advise that each of us has to take heightened responsibility for our own sanity and stability … in order to be of any value to others. But the larger question is, “What percentage of us are prepared to reflect on our responsibilities to the culture at large?”
And will that percentage be enough?
Even if Donald Trump is dragged out of office, his army of self-pitying fools, catalyzed by their grievances, their sense of humiliation or their anachronistic genetics far more than any policy, will continue to resist and obstruct any science-based plan to restore “normal order.”
So yeah. If you have a new, stronger prescription for rose-colored glasses, you know where to find me.
Even before we got to the “losers” and “suckers” phase of The Donald Trump Experience we already knew this election was set in cement. Nothing is going to stop 39% of the American voting age population from idolizing a narcissistic reality TV performer. That 39% can almost be described as “genetic”, certainly figuratively and quite possibly literally.
A few days before Donald of Bone Spur called Americans who volunteered to defeat facism — instead of making a few million bucks by taking over daddy’s real estate scams, tax frauds and all, and devoting his spare time to avoiding STDs on the Manhattan dating scene — a poll showed the same 39% crediting Trump with doing “a good job” on the COVID-19 pandemic.
If I had a dollar for every time I asked, “Who the [bleep] are these people?” well … I’d owe myself a couple million. Through the lenses of sociology, cultural anthropology and basic psychology the absolutely unmoveable, intractable, granitic allegiance of this percentage of people to Trump — not the Republican party, but Donald Trump — is nothing short of astonishing. A “good job” on the pandemic? Has this crowd been on Neptune since January?
I’ve been fascinated with this undistractable, almost reptilian response to Trump since he rode down the gilded escalator. This isn’t “normal” political appeal. This is way beyond Ronald Reagan. Trump clearly excites something in the 39% that no other personality in American leadership ever has. I said as much when I wrote about how he could “win it all” back in 2016.
Arguably, and well worth discussing, is the likelihood that there’s something even deeper than psychology at work in the tribal, animal-like response to Donald Trump among 39% of our population. Or at least I think it’s worth talking about. So bear with me here.
A little knowledge of evolutionary physiology can be a dangerous thing. But there is common agreement that at any given point in time individuals of any species, from locusts to salamanders to humans possess physical abilities different from other members of the same species. It’s Darwinian. It’s how species at large guarantee their survival. A certain percentage of every herd, or tribe, possess capabilities, genetic structure, talents and instincts that allow them to survive stress, whether by drought, famine or conflict with predators.
I’ve mentioned I’m a fan of Ezra Klein, of his website Vox, his podcast and his individual writing. And I’ve been struck by how many times in conversations with guests from one scientific discipline or another he’s walked up to the line where the logical next phase of the discussion about “Why We’re Polarized”, or tribalism or what gives with the 39% is to talk about a biological/physiological explanation.
To be specific, about the likelihood that the 39% is an evolutionary standard, possibly millions of years old. There have been studies of the psychological manifestations of an overactive, which is say, “differently wired” amygdala, the brain’s physical center for controlling emotions. A bit more active than “normal” and the fight-or flight mechanism is more hair-trigger and less reflective.
I’ve also read sensible explanations for the (very) long-term benefit to genetic survival in having a portion of every tribe wired in such a way. Having a large portion, i.e. 39%, hyper-perceptive to potential dangers — the snap of a twig in the dark forest, drums beating on the other side of the savannah — meant the tribe as a whole had a better chance of preparing for and defeating whatever might come.
This kind of talk is of course a cultural minefield, especially in the aftermath of “The Bell Curve” by Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in 1994. All hell broke loose over their suggestion that genetics explained intellectual weaknesses among races.
But what I’m talking about has nothing to do with racial or even ethnic distinctions. The possibility worth discussing is whether this is what it would more likely be, which is to say a standard percentage across every “tribe”. A very, very basic means of insuring genetic survival.
Eventually the conversation has to then turn to the value of so high a percentage in a modern, highly-interconnected and (despite what the headlines tell you) a far, far less violent world than what we evolved from at say The Dawn of Man.
Barely 200,000 years have passed since humans began some form of tribal living, a collectivizing frought with fear of the tribe on the otherside of the valley and every other … other. That’s far too little time to significantly reduce — i.e. Darwinize-out — the “inflamed amygdalas” among the human species.
So this high percentage of hair-trigger “fight or flight” tribe members today instead responds not to the snap of twigs, or smoke signals on the horizon, but rather to high intensity, high frequency signals from within the culture at large. Moreover, being at the dawn of the age of highly-individualized social media as we are, where everyone can plug into whatever excites their amygdala the most, these people can feel fortified by the presence of a vast tribe of common thinkers, or “like-minded fearer/fighters” if you will.
Donald Trump’s lamentable talent, one that I doubt he’s ever bothered to explain to himself since it works so well, but is copied from every authoritarian in history and all the autocrats of today, is to feed this percentage of the tribal population precisely what excites their brain structure most effectively. “Precisely” in terms of not just message, but of tone and context. (A “really, really rich” silverback known to associate with only attractive females.)
And yes, Trump’s triggering shtick is abetted, if not lifted whole from popular media like Fox News, Breitbart, talk radio and so on. All of which, as ratings and surveys regularly confirm, are consumed by the same percentage and composition of the population.
As scientists have said, ruefully in many cases, it’s an open question whether in evolutionary terms this 39% represents the portion of the species that survives what comes next and therefore passes on its DNA, or whether it fades away, an unadaptive anachronism, like wooly mammoths, dodo birds and our prehensile tails.
The immediate problem of course is what damage this highly instinctive, highly reactive, all but completely unreflective allegiance to the biggest ape’s constant false alarms does to the tribe in general.
Tim Walz got off one of the better lines of the summer when he was told Donald Trump was thinking about making a stop at 38th and Chicago, at the George Floyd memorial, while in Minnesota rousing the rabble a week or so back.
Said Walz, “That is a really bad idea.”
The Governor of Wisconsin and the Mayor of Kenosha are saying the same thing today as Trump prepares to inflict himself into a roiling cauldron of rage tomorrow. After spending Sunday re-tweeting sympathizers of the 17 year-old wanna-be cop/Trumper who killed two people with his (illegal) AR-15, it’s not likely Trump is going to Wisconsin to defuse the race war bomb he’s been packing for the last four years.
He wants more rage. He needs more rage.
At this point it’s realistic, and not at all cynical to believe Team Trump is eager for video of protests and riot-like violence around him in Kenosha, especially if the protestors are black. The starting gun for the final stage of what we’ve all known will be the ugliest, most shameful and embarrassing presidential campaign in American history has been fired. And Trump’s strategy, maybe his last best strategy and his latest assault on common decency, is selling suburban America on the idea that inner city blacks are coming for their property.
And it will work to some extent.
For all the revulsion and disgust of Trump by college-educated suburban women, there are enough of them — 10%-15%, who knows — with a fragile enough sense of security, they will gamble that despite all evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump is the better bet to restore “law and order.” The better bet to keep scary-looking black people off their lovingly manicured lawns. Their husbands, polls tell us, will take even less convincing.
I still believe that given robust voter turn-out and ineffective meddling by Russia and other bad actors, Joe Biden will win. Or, to re-purpose Trump, “The only way I win is if it’s rigged.”
But prone as I am to dystopian fantasies I’ve spent too much time churning over scenarios like this:
Following several weeks of protest and counter-protests, (think this past weekend in Portland, Oregon muliplied a couple hundred times), with muddied results from mail-in ballots challenged at every turn by Trump/Barr lawyers and judges, a consensus finally emerges that Trump has in fact lost. He has to vacate the premises.
But … facing a future of ceaseless and financially ruinous criminal and civil indictments, he pitches Biden … The Deal.
“Either”, he says to the President-elect, “you grant me total immunity from any prosecution now or in the future, or I keep up this fight, this all-out culture war.” Essentially, Trump, who is far more important to Trump voters than the stale old Republican party, would be threatening to set up a separate government. A viral, media-driven insurgency, with himself as the wounded, legitimate leader driven from ofice by the “deep state” but supported and served, passionately and reflexively, by literally hundreds of thousands of wanna-be cops. People with an endless supply of bigotry, anger and bullets.
What does Biden do?
Does he take the deal and direct his Justice Department, the attorney general of New York and the SDNY to drop all investigations and prosecutions of Trump and his cronies? Or does he risk what he knows with absolute certainty Trump is willing to do to destabilize Biden’s new government?
Only an idiot would make any kind of deal with Trump expecting him to honor it. But the dilemma remains.
Biden will have to be making every move imaginable to finally get the pandemic under control, which could mean another tougher, nation-wide, mid-winter lockdown. Simultaneously, he will have to prove that genuine police reform has begun across the country. And … and … with Congressional support, he will have to quickly and successfully stimulate an economy all the way down to the bottom 20% to stave off mid-winter evictions, homelessness, rage, suicides … and on and on.
I know what I’d do. It’d be the American version of The Nuremberg Trials.
You may be thinking, “Damn, how are they going to top that first night of Trump’s convention?” And I can understand that thinking. Monday was …um … pretty … um … out there.
The (white) gun waggling St. Louis couple talking about the ruination of the suburbs! (The suburbs!) Donny Jr. looking more red-eyed and hyped up than a Foghat tribute band drummer exiting a men’s room stall! And Donny Jr.’s girlfriend in a spray-on red dress yelling — on an empty stage — about how radical liberals, “… want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how. You. Live! They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victimology to the point you won’t recognize this country or your self.”
Yowza! It’s got to be tough topping that.
But if you’re thinking that, you’d be wrong. The Trump family has a very deep, dare I say fathomless bench of yellers, I mean speakers. Spray-on gold leaf-tongued orators you might say. And each of them has a vision of radical, anarchist Joe Biden’s America more terrifying than the one before them.
Check out this speech leaked to the fake news media prior to this evening’s gathering of the Grand Old Guignol.
Hostess: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Samuel J. McGuirk, Vice-President of the QAnon National Trust and Treasurer of We Build the Wall (Greater and Bigger Again).”
Sam McGuirk: “American patriots. I wish I could speak to you in better times. But both you and I know I can’t. America is dying. Flopping on a cold rock like a diseased carp, gasping for one last pure breath. One last inhalation of air free of tyranny and socialism. A last glimpse of the pure blue sky before the sickening, poisoned red glow from the smoldering ruins of once great cities like Minneapolis and Kenosha, cities destroyed by Joe Biden-Kamala Harris-led antifa snipers and arsonists, moves over us and blots out the sun.
Radicals and heathens and, I’ve been told, pizza-eating cannibals like Biden and Harris are driving their people, dark, and I do mean dark, criminal, rapist and pedophile people out of the inner city into our suburbs. Suburbs where there are now jungle-like voodoo tent invasions full of drug dealers injecting babies and your pets, your Pomeranians, your Castle Defense dobermans with meth and crack. You’ve seen it on ‘Fox and Friends’.
“And all this while they disarm the police, the proud last line of defense between you and some “African” American openly driving through what was once your neighborhood with a broken tail light. A tail light which as we know from Q is really a code, a signal, to other America-hating antifa looters to follow in behind, kidnapping your women, your wives and daughters. Abducting them in order to subordinate them to the most perverse and sickening desires of their drug-crazed socialist anti-Second Amendment cults. This is happening right now, to pure, righteous women who proudly fall to their knees in the presence of godly men like the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. and pray for a man, a great man with a long red tie, a man promised by the Bible, to come and drive the mongrels from our treated lawns.
Ladies and gentlemen I know of what I speak. As a proud member of the Northwest Alabama Muzzleloaders and Reenactors I have experienced first-hand the disrepect and abuse of basic freedoms that comes with cannibal pedophile socialist invasion. When I confronted an anti-white, anti-christian invader filling up what was clearly a stolen vehicle over at Bobby Dan’s FastGas here in Haleyville, informing him in no uncertain terms with the business end of my Second Amendment-protected AR-15, that he had five seconds to stop abducting and plotting fornication with my women and get out of the county, I was mocked by the fake news media. You all saw it. Me, with only a fifty-bullet clip to protect my freedoms, against a wild-eyed “African” American intent on practicing socialist pedophilia at Bobby Dan’s … in broad daylight!
This is where America is today. So-called “urban” forces, illegally immigrating openly not just into suburbs but in … in … in places beyond the suburbs. Places where our great generals shed patriotic blood to keep us all free of the darkening of our country.
I could go on for quite some time. But you know most of the rest of the story. How China invented the kung flu in a lab and made a deal with Joe Biden to shoot it into our tap water, our Bud Light and even our Mountain Dew to steal the election. Fortunately for us, and this is where the story gets to its happy ending. There is light at the end of this dark tunnel because, praise the lord!, we have had Donald J. Trump here to stop the cannibal socialist gun-hating plot in its tracks.
Donald Trump has worked 24 hours a day to cut off invaders from China. He said this “plandemic” was just oneperson coming in from what we used to be able to call the Yellow Peril, before political correctness ran crazy and wecan’t say what we’re all thinking. And he was right. Like the miracle he said would come, and like the miracle he himself is for us, the Wu-hoo flu has stopped. He has said so.
The fake news media, libtard smart asses who wouldn’t know a Mountain Dew from a pocket Glock, people who don’t have a tenth the mental power of a Sean Hannity, say this flu has killed a couple thousand Americans. But you know that’s a hoax. Those people were going to die anyway. What are we getting so upset about?
I don’t believe in the “plandemic” and either do you. Why? Because Donald Trump, the man who holds the Bible high over the head of radical antifa pedophiles tells us so.
Donald Trump is all we need. Donald Trump knows all that needs to be known. Donald Trump was promised by God. It’s in the Bible. You can look it up. Leviticus, I’m pretty sure. And, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow true Americans, I attest here and now that Donald J. Trump is not and never has been a pedophile cannibal.
Thank you and good night. Keep your women close and your weapons closer.
Whatever problems the Post Office is having, they haven’t slowed the torrent of anti-Ilhan Omar/pro-Antone Melton-Meaux clogging our mail slot here in the beating heart of the Fifth District. In sheer total mass the accumulating pulp is approaching the heft and gloss of that Restoration Hardware catalogue. Post-primary, the printers handling all this stuff will be kicking back in Cabo for a month.
The cash for attacking Omar is believed to be coming from “bundlers” associated with pro-Israel lobbies, committees and such, as well as Republicans eager to paint Omar’s high-profile immigrant, female, Muslim “radicalism” as a political loser and swap her out for something more mainstream. At this moment I’m not certain if either or both is true. But the size and sophistication of the effort to take out a young, first-term Congresswoman is both extraordinary and more than a little repellent.
I’ve rolled my eyes more than a few times over the past two years at the way Omar has said things as well as moves she’s busted in the context of her squirrely personal melodramas.
IMHO there’s a prima donna factor involved there, as well as, ironically, a tone of entitlement. At the risk of stepping out into the minefield of sexism, what I’ve seen with Omar is not unlike what I’ve seen countless times with other young, female celebrities. Being successful and good-looking buys you a lot of space in modern America. It can go to your head.
That said, I had no second-thoughts about checking her name and mailing in my ballot for her. Having yet to meet the perfect politician, my attitude is that Omar deserves another term, at least to tidy up her personal life and refine her message discipline. You never want to set the bar for comparison as low as utter fools and frauds such as Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Ted Yoho, Matt Gaetz and a dozen other trolls in the Republican caucus. But if they, (mostly sewage-spewing white guys), can hang around DC year after year, Ms. Omar — who may be self-involved but isn’t stupid — deserves at least one more term.
Frankly, I like Omar’s style of in-your-face “radicalism”, and I’m not all that bothered that she hasn’t stuck a sock in it and waited ten years to step up and say what’s on her mind. Despite what Breitbart and OANN and FoxNews are forever hyper-ventilating over, Omar and the rest of the all-female, “ethnic” Squad are hardly on the verge of enacting Sharia Law in ‘Murica, grabbing our guns and forcing us to live on a diet of kale and seaweed.
They remain distinctly minority voices … but with unusual potency in the age of social media.
Far from being detrimental, the noise Omar and the others are making, both impudent and imprudent to the ears of sclerotic institutions like the Star Tribune editorial page, is actually healthy for a functioning democracy. And absolutely vital to one like we have today, which is being rotted out from within by an enormous cast of shameless, homogeneous charlatans. (You want eye-rolling? Zoom me any time the Strib natters on about the anodyne values of “reaching across the aisle”, “consensus-building” and “pragmatism.”)
I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi has ever had a kind of Mother Hen chat with Omar. But certainly someone explained to her the hellfire she’d face if she dropped so much as a syllable of negativity about America’s carte blanche commitment to “Israel”, which is synonymous with “Benjamin Netanyahu” as far as too many Americans are concerned. Netanyahu is as flagrantly corrupt as Donald Trump, and as long as his kind holds power in Israel we need someone with a high Congressional profile asking, “Exactly what in hell are we doing here?”
Ms. Omar is hardly a bashful flower. She likes the stage and the lights. No one will confuse her with quiet, plodding Marty Sabo. And that’s good. This is a wildly different time.
The Squad is .92% of the current Congress. The GOP’s Orwellian-named Freedom Caucus is nine times as large, and none of them are enduring a flash flood of attack cash during their primary campaign.
Stylistically and tactically Omar has things to learn. And if she doesn’t, her 2022 race may be a different story. But right now she’s a valuable voice because she’s unique and because she won’t quietly relent to brute tradition.
Having found a real cup of coffee, I was walking back to my lavish room at the Spa Hot Springs Motel and Clinic on Main Street, White Sulphur Springs, Montana when the half-dozen biker guys poured out of their adjoining rooms and began the process of saddling up for the day’s ride. They were a riot of Harley-Davidson-branded gear. Harley vests. Harley belts. Harley t-shirts. Harley bandanas. And of course big, chromy Harley motorcycles.
Watching the elaborate packing process while sipping my latte I finally asked, “So what’s up with Sturgis this year? Have they called it off?” Four of them ignored me. The guy I picked for the alpha of the bunch shot me a look and said, “Fuck no.” The sixth guy, a bit more sociable, looked up from carefully folding his rain gear into his (Harley-branded) saddle bag said, “No way. It’s happening.” All I could say was, “Really. Well, that’ll be wild.” “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a protest.”
I was tempted to say something effete and out-of-touch big city liberal like, “A protest against what, sanity?” But I didn’t. At this point in the worst pandemic in a hundred years and with as many Americans dying every three days as died in 9/11, futility is the only product of a “discussion” with Harley-encrusted “protestors.” So ride on, dudes.
It goes without saying that the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a tribal extravaganza of face-to-face, jowl-to-jowl, belly-bumping machismo and consumer exhibitionism holds the high probability of being the single largest “super spreader” of COVID-19 held anywhere in the world since the outbreak began last November. A quarter of a million people, the vast majority middle-aged to older white men, will both ride into western South Dakota this week for the giant, mechanized bacchanal … and then turn around ride back to their homes, all across the country, spreading everything they picked up in Sturgis all along their routes, like a horde of toxic Johnny Appleseeds.
Bikerworld’s other big rally, in Daytona, Florida went on as scheduled this past March in the early days of the pandemic. But Daytona’s “Biketobefest” seems likely to be cancelled this fall, what with the virus surging worse than ever … in large part due to “protestors”, the roughly 36% of freedom-loving Americans who refuse submit to reality and continue to prolong and enhance the peril to the lives and livelihood of everyone else.
Letting Sturgis happen amid all this is of course not surprising given the culture of South Dakota. The current governor, Kristi Noem, once upon a time the South Dakota Snow Queen, is every Trumpist’s dream girl. She’s abolished the requirement to get a permit before carrying a concealed gun, opposed Obamacare and every form of abortion rigts she can find or be pointed at, is on record — during Obama’s term — as being very concerned about the national debt, so much so that as a Congresswoman she declared the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, high-speed rail projects, cap-and-trade technical assistance, and subsidies for the Washington Metro rapid transit system examples of federal programs she thought needed a damn good whacking.
Then there’s the $400,000 fence she wanted built around the Governor’s Mansion … in Pierre (friggin’) South Dakota, the state government jobs (with salary increases) she gave her daughter and son-in-law, the $80,000 personal TV studio she had built and her order that the words “In God We Trust” — in 12″ high letters — be displayed prominently in every school in the state.
And all that of course was before she shrugged off any kind of science-based compliance with CDC virus guidelines.
Noem of course isn’t unique among South Dakota politicians. A few beauty queen touches here and there and she’s really just a FoxNews regular guest upgrade from the usual white male militarist-rancher anachronism. Put another way, Noem is precisely the kind of creature-from-a-different-era who blithely rationalizes away any responsibility to a world beyond that which sustains her.
I won’t bore you here with the long(est) version of my personal interaction with South Dakota’s authoritarian politics, namely it’s “Stop and Frisk” drug interdiction policy on its Interstate highway system. No more than to say getting pursued, stopped, interrogated and searched by a nervous young trooper (who kept repeating, “This is what I do and I’m good at”) under the pretense of being written a warning ticket for going 82 in an 80 has led to several revelations. Not the least being that South Dakota troopers tasked with stopping “drug smugglers” (i.e. anyone who they suspect might be running home with a gummi left over from their visit to Colorado) make no attempt whatsoever to stop, interrogate and search commercial truckers. Trucking companies have lobbies, y’know.
That and the South Dakota Superintendent of the State Patrol, replying to my complaint about the incident telling me, a 67-year old tourist, I didn’t deserve so much as an apology for the inconvenience of the stop because … wait for it … the twitchy officer, after rummaging through my wife and my underwear, eventually found an unopened jar of foot cream containg CBD oil. A jar my acupuncturist friend had given me. Foot cream you see is “an illegal narcotic” as far as South Dakota is concerned and therefore me smuggling it validated the entire stop, interrogation and search. (The Superintendent didn’t explain why I wasn’t arrested and forced to fork over the usual $2300-plus worth of fines to the state coffers.)
To date, the incident has to date led to dozens of conversations with South Dakota lawyers, journalists and politicians. (“It’s just an amazingly stupid place,” bemoaned one ex-journalist.) The still-developing picture is of a state like so much of Trump-loving conservative America that wears its “love of freedom” on its sleeve while routinely, regularly abusing the spirit of the most basic Constitutional laws. All in service to an ossified 1950s-style notion of “law and order.” (Throughout the incident above, I could only imagine what would be happening if I was a 20 year-old black kid, instead of an old white guy in a bland, late-model rental car.)
Point being. No matter what science or common sense or common courtesy say, no matter what’s good for the rest of the country, South Dakota wants the money the flagrant recklessness and naked stupidity Sturgis brings in.
So yeah, it’s a righteous protest. Ride on dudes. MAGA!
With everything coming at us, an unrelenting pandemic, a long winter lockdown and the most berserk election season any of us have ever experienced, I took eight days away to infuse myself with some Big Sky Montana social distance and peace of mind.
It was a valuable respite … that ended, since returning on Monday … with Donald Trump hyping a witch doctor who believes in “demon sperm”, who says that children should be whipped and claims that some government leaders are “reptilians” and space aliens. That in addition to revealing that in eight recent conversations (eight!) with Vladimir Putin he still hasn’t confronted him about Russian bounties for U.S. troops, and saying that those of us living “The Suburban Lifestyle Drem” no longer have to worry about “low cost housing” moving in next to us, and then this morning twitting that mail-in voting is so fraudulent he may have to “delay” the election.
And that, folks, is just skimming off the top. It leaves out Bill Barr seeing no legal reason why a guy running for reelection can’t accept “foreign assistance” … like from say, oh I don’t know, Vladimir Putin … again.
One easy way to become a master prognosticator is by extrapolating out the most obvious trendlines. For that reason I can’t claim wizardly powers for telling everyone who’ll listen, for months now, that we will enter a period of unprecedented chaos prior to this November’s election. And, for the record, I began saying that before the pandemic and America’s thug-like cop culture set off a new round of racial animosities.
If there’s a primary takeaway from the serene moments sitting on the hood of my rental car in a sprawling, mountain-ringed wheatfield, sipping a beer from the cooler, it’s the conviction that chaos is the only card Trump has left to play, and that it, like everything else about his sordid, fraudulent career, depends on … Vladimir Putin.
As hundreds have pointed out, nothing Trump is doing makes any normal, tactical election sense. Every day he hypes witch doctors, shows indifference to the killing of American soldiers, ignores the death of legendary civil rights leaders, bemoans the loss of confederate statues, sends (a la Putin) anonymous “Little Green Men” into American cities to gin up viral social media videos of “terrorists” and “rioters”, he loses another chunk of rational, functionally intelligent voters.
The thing is, by now he knows that simply hardening and “exciting” the always-Trumper base isn’t going to win … a normal, uncontested election. But what it will do is inflame their fundamentally racist, paranoid passions to the point that they will instinctively respond — passionately and recklessly — to his inevitable claim that the November vote against him was “rigged.”
Since no one ever knows what Trump talks to Putin about, (remember, Dan Coats, former Director of National Intelligence, left office without ever being briefed on what Trump and Putin discussed for two hours alone in Helsinki), it seems fair to suspect a coordination of nefarious strategies for election night chaos has been on the agenda.
And, as we are coming to understand, rather than election night, we are looking at something much more like election month, as mail-in ballots are sluggishly counted, contested and invalidated by legal challenges. My prediction being that Trump will declare victory based on in-person results from a handful of red states and then commence, with Barr’s help, a torrent of legal assaults designed to once again push the decision on a winner to the Supreme Court.
I truly wish I could imagine something more honest and straightforward. Something more respectful of “norms.” But this is the world modern Republicanism — the governing vehicle for rancid, know-nothing tribalism, anti-science voodoo hysteria and hyper-micro legal parsing — has ordained for the majority of the rest of the country.
Like you I am shocked by the claims made in Mary Trump’s book. By stories that her uncle, currently the POTUS, cheated in high school, cheated to get in to college, blew hundreds of millions of his father’s money on failed … casinos … is regarded by his sister as a “clown”, revoked medical coverage for his brother’s son suffering from cerebral palsy and instead of being at that same brother’s bedside when he died … went to the movies.
I mean, how after all these years, could we even begin imagine such behavior?
It’s easy. Way too easy.
Ms. Trump’s book arrives like so much other news of uncle Don’s unprecedented sociopathy and corruption that it’ll have a hard time maintaining a lifespan longer than a week. Amid a near-apocalyptic botch of response to an international pandemic, resulting in the worst economic crash since The Great Depression, throwing gasoline on the fires of racial tensions, ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers and still holding children and families in corporate prisons in the deserts of the Southwest, new proof that Donald Trump is morally degenerate doesn’t come as a surprise or even news. Like COVID-19, it is what we’re living with.
But amid the new book and all the other horrors, I remain fascinated by what is going on with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Why? Because if there’s a coup de gras out there, one capable of delivering a fatal blow not just to Trump, but to Bill Barr and the Trump regime, it resides with — I believe — Epstein’s former girlfriend/teenage rape victim procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, now in a Brooklyn jail cell.
Maxwell was arrested last week in New Hampshire, and I’m not alone in believing the imminence of her capture was what motivated Barr to make his ham-fisted move on Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York a week earlier. At the time, many were asking, “Why now?” Well, Ghislaine Maxwell is prima facie for “why.”
She knows all the players involved, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and on and on. And she knows where the money came from. And — if we’re to believe a story in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, she has — the videotapes.
Some of you may have watched the Netflix documentary series about Epstein, “Filthy Rich”. It’s a truly revolting tale of not just sexual depravity, but blatant, high-level legal corruption. (While I generally advise tempering most documentaries with heavy doses of sea salt, “Filthy Rich” has not yet taken any serious shots for factual inaccuracy. If anything, there’s frustration with it for not going further.)
Little too much ink on the eyebrows, Donny.
The Maxwell scenario that we know — and what we can sense — is straight out of countless pulp mystery crime dramas. Begin with the innocent victims and work you’re way up the ladder to the highest offices of power. And it’d be cheesy, melodramatic speculation if it weren’t for what we know about who Epstein consorted with, his absurdly over-the-top lifestyle and … the presence of Deutsche Bank, (yet again). The only bank in the world who would lend Donald Trump, he of five bankruptcies and 3500+ lawsuits, so much as a wooden nickel.
Simultaneous with Maxwell’s capture, at a luxury country home in New Hampshire of all places, (not exactly Walter White on the lam as “Mr. Lambert), Deutsche Bank was fined, again. This time $150 million for continuing to process Epstein’s enormous, mysterious cash flow despite knowing he was a convicted pedophile.
Even if she doesn’t have videotapes, Maxwell is in possession of enough data, hard evidence and testimony to make some — if not a lot — of prominent, influential people very uncomfortable.
I will speculate here that she can connect both Epstein and Trump to Russian “investors” in Deutsche Bank’s bank-within-the-bank lending desk, which as the feds have already asserted with Epstein was an unfiltered viaduct for criminal money laundering. If she’s also got tapes of Trump cavorting with impoverished teenage girls (my apologies for the imagery), all the better, although I should say “all the worse.”
None of this, not sex with 15 year-olds, a fake empire built on Russian gangster money, ignoring Russian bounties on U.S. GIs or crippling the U.S. economy for years through sheer incompetence, matters a whit to hard-core Trumpists. For them it’s enough he’s “owning the libtards”. Nothing else matters.
But the story Maxwell is able to tell, and prove, holds out the possibility of being the single most devastating link to all of Trump’s pathologies and to deciding who wins, as Bill Barr likes to say, the ability to write history.
Now all she has to do is live long enough in police custody to tell it.
Let me get this straight. U.S. troops find a boatland of cash in a Taliban hideout. They investigate and learn from captured Taliban that Russia has been offering — and paying — a bounty on U.S. soldiers they kill. This gets reported up and up through the intelligence agencies and the whole megillah of the chain of command, with special inter-agency meetings, until it gets to the White House where in Version #1: Trump was never told about it. Or, in Version #2: his people (meaning who? Jared? Ivanka? Mark Meadows?) decided it wasn’t credible enough for him to do or say anything about it.
Is that the story? Am I missing anything?
With everything else going on, and by that I mean everything else that has turned into an All-Time, #1 on the charts [bleep]show of incompetence and corruption by Mr. MAGA, it may be hard to assign proportionate shock and disgust at this one. But someone’s got to try.
Obviously, no one — and I do mean no one — outside the wire of TrumpNation believes Trump wasn’t told. We can believe he didn’t read his Presidential Daily Briefing, (the one later marked “President Has Seen”), because these briefing things are often longer than a paragraph, don’t refer to him specifically in every other sentence and have too few pictures. But this is … big stuff.
This is Vladimir Putin himself putting out contract killings on American GIs.
Stuff like that, if you’re in the intelligence business, you make 100% certain POTUS is told, face to face, that this is what’s going down. It’s why you simultaneously offer him a menu of options of how to respond.
So yes, he and his “people” are lying and praying to hell that the “fake news” doesn’t come up with any more proof of what they … haven’t bothered to do anything about.
As these things always go, attention turns immediately to TrumpWorld’s royal guard, namely congressional Republicans, including notable hawks like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and hell, if they can track him down, ex-South Carolina congressman, Trey Gowdy, former chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.
We all remember Gowdy. Not just for the worst case of flop sweat since Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”, but for the way his committee (the sixth “investigation” Republicans whipped up around Benghazi) spent two and a half years (eight months longer than the Mueller investigation) and $8 million to find that, big surprise here, Hillary Clinton didn’t personally feed ammo clips to rebels attacking the U.S. compound.
Certainly now, congressional Republicans will be seen everywhere, scuttling like crabs to get in front of the nearest camera, puffing themselves up and inveighing against the hated Rooskies for such a low down dirty hit job on our universally beloved troops, right?
Right?
Right?
Just kidding. Maybe a couple here and there, in tepid terms. But because of Donald Trump’s (tiny) fingerprints on this atrocity, the hive mind of the Trump-era Republican borg will have nothing impactful to say … again. They’re the bored cops waving gawkers past the flaming 20-car pile-up. “Nothing to see, folks. Keep it moving. But hey, did hear the one about Antifa?”
Assuming that Mitch, Barr and the usual suspects will keep the lid on any serious investigation of why Trump hasn’t so much as publicly scolded Putin … for paying medieval religious fanatics to kill American soldiers, this scandal, BountyGate, will quickly get tossed on the heap of cadavers from his monumentally fcked up preparation and response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the way he’s incited bigots amid the George Floyd/BLM protests.
Which leads to something I think about a lot. Hell, too much.
“What do you with this guy once he’s out of office?” A few days ago the Strib ran a guest opinion piece from a local attorney arguing that Joe Biden, like Barack Obama in the wake of Dick Cheney, has to just let it go and “move on”, in the name, you know, of helping a divided nation heal.
Sorry, but I ain’t there. From the highly-suspect-to-rancid-smelling Russian “investments” in his real estate “developments”, to the racist appeals in his opening “birth certificate” pitch, to soliciting and getting Russian help to win the White House, to kow-towing to Putin at every imaginable turn and now to this, to tacitly acquiescing to the killing of American soldiers, it’s gone too far to simply “move on.”
Like the scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where the now fully-mad John Nash has diagrammed his Grand Unifing Theory of Everything with lengths of thread maniacally criss-crossing pins in calculations, photos and clippings, I have completed my life’s work. Or at least this past month’s work. I see where Trump is going with his full dive into reckless bigotry and corruption.
Follow this if you can.
While those who tell him such things fear his spittle-flecked wrath, Trump, since giving up on any kind of plan to fight COVID-19, has by now processed if not accepted that he is going to lose in November. He understands that he is so deeply and intensely despised by such a substantial majority of voters there’s no way short of outrageously criminal voter suppression and election manipulation he can reassemble the 77,000-votes-in-six-counties Electoral College freak act he did in 2016. Put bluntly, it’s over.
But in the mind of Donald Trump accepting that it’s over doesn’t mean he has to, you know, lose.
There’s money, big money, to be made in a grand, vain glorious defeat. But there are steps that need to be taken to prepare the final battlefield.
1: He must re-engergize the hardest core of his base. Suburban women? College educated whites? Traditional Republicans? Screw ’em. They’re not the target consumer bloc, not that they ever have been. But now, in preparation for What Comes Next/The Big Cash Out, they’re fully expendable. The people Trump has to re-commit himself to is the rock solid 35%, or roughly 40 million maskless, MAGA-loving, AR-15 brandishing, cop-cuddling, immigrant-hating, QAnon-inhaling base. They must not only be fed the same toxic offal as always, but more of it, and more ferociously with less and less “Presidential” mealy-mouthedness. And this — as we see — he has begun doing with raw abandon. (And wait until he delivers his “acceptance” speech in Jacksonvile.)
2: He must clear away as many money-sucking legal obstacles to his post-presidency while he still has Bill Barr to do it. Many of us have been startled by the brazen nature of the moves Barr has already made, flagrantly lying about SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s “resignation”, as well as his greasy paw prints all over the cases of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. There’s nothing remotely subtle about it. Plainly Barr has been instructed to “move on this now“. The long, long list of pardon-immune SDNY prosecutions in particular. This list represents potentially tremendous legal costs to post-presidency civilian Trump, assuming a Biden administration ignores tradition and allows SDNY to continue prosecuting rather than, um, “moving on for the good of the country.”
The “now” part of Barr’s act this last couple weeks continues to baffle legal experts. What’s so important that he’d do something this naked and clumsy …now? Suspicions are that Berman and SDNY had entered a new and more dangerous phase of investigation into — well, take your pick — cases involving Trump’s Russian-curated relationship with Deutsche Bank, his influence-peddling inauguration scam, his taxes, any or all of Trump Inc.’s real esatate deals, the squirrely $13 billion scandal with that Turkish bank or, maybe, his long, close bromance with Jeffrey Epstein and the case his former Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta signed off on prohibiting indictment of others “known and unknown.”
Point being, whatever can be done to snuff out or mitigate damage coming out of New York needs to be done …now … to protect the revenue stream produced by a righteous martyr’s defeat in November.
3: There is no money be made betting against Trump and Barr shrieking and howling about a “rigged” election. Hell, it’s already begun. Mail-in ballots! Too many polling stations in black neighborhoods! The “rigging” is already happening. But — I predict — nothing today compares with the indignant rage that will explode on election night over “serious discrepancies”, “irregularities”, “alarming misconduct”, “clear examples of voter faud” and on and on and on and on.
Such sore-loser pissiness might strike you as pathetic, futile whining, which it would be — even in the event of a Biden landslide — if it weren’t for the fact Mitch McConnell, Barr and The Federalist Society have now stocked the courts, in particular the Appelate Courts with so many Trump-sympathetic judges, there’s a better than 50-50 chance they can get one or more of them to uphold a challenge to the election results for weeks if not months. Certainly long enough for Trump to close the deal on his next chapter.
4: Money. It’s all that matters. Everyone who has known him or worked for him understands the foundation of his only ethos. A “rigged” election, even what is clearly a blow-out, has the advantage of acting like an accelerant over all the festering greivances and whack-doodle conspiracy theories of Trump’s non-college educated, self-pitying white base. And as Trump fully understands, there’s money be made in them thar rube-covered hills.
Out of the White House, (which he clearly won’t miss … too much work …not enough Donald time), Trump’s move is to tap that raging 35% base, or hell, even 10% of it with some new media platform. An ad-based rival to FoxNews (which will happily replace their affection for louche and stupid Trump in exchange for a more devious and competent version, like Tom Cotton) is a distinct possibility. A buy-out of the nitwit One America Network (OAN) would not be a bad investment. Or there’s always a subscription-driven streaming platform. That might reduce the 35% to 5%, as paying customers, but 8-9 million at $10 a month … you do the math.
Once you factor all this together, drawing 50 or 60 different colored threads back and forth across the wall, you see how Trump could actually embrace defeat, even will it.
How great would be to be a martyred hero to millions of fee-paying acolytes if you not only didn’t have to be burned at the stake but got to live in an even grander style than before?
And with that I’ll breakfast on another couple peyote buttons and await my next vision.
Someone, back in the civil rights fight of the mid-Sixties said, “The American attention span is ten days.” After that, lacking any fresh excitement, we get bored and gravitate to new stimulation. Today, in our digital age, there are studies saying goldfish have a longer attention span than the average human.
The context is of course the remarkable clamor for radical police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. As a wizened creature of the Sixties, who saw months/years of angry anti-war street protests elect Richard Nixon … twice, I am skeptical anything seriously “reformative” is going to come out of any level of government, certainly not the Republican-controlled federal end of things.
The one wild card in this Debbie Downer thinking is the absolute certainty that as this summer goes on and leads into what is certain to be an absurdly chaotic autumn campaign season, American cops will continue to kill black men and women with appalling regularity.
Watching the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, I was flasbbergasted that the two cops involved clearly has no sense of the large cultural moment. They had no presence of mind or impulse cntrol to consider that everyone in that Wendy’s parking lot was aiming a video camera at them and that they were poised to be the next poster-boys for panicked, racist cops. (The guy’s drunk and he’s running away. You’ve got his car. Go pick him up later. FFS.)
This past weekend The New York Times hosted an unusually good roundtable discussion of what “police reform” should include. It ran the gamut of everything currently on the table. Dissolving or neutering police unions. Reallocating/restoring money for armed cops to basic social services like mental health. The tricky transition period between dissolving a police department and replacing it with something better trained in de-escalation. Reassuring white suburbanites that they’re not going to be collateral damage in “defunding” the police. It’s worth the read.
For me, as I’ve ranted before many times, the bottom line begins with a better class of person hired to be an armed cop. Time after time the curriculum vitae of cops involved in these killings plays along the lines of: high school drop out, GED diploma, junior college drop out, odd assortment of “security jobs”, maybe a hitch in the Army then on to four months at police academy where they get eight times as many hours of gun and “defensive” training as de-escalation education. After that they’re handed a badge, a loaded gun and assigned to a “senior officer”, think Derek Chauvin, who shows them how the game is really played.
That is nuts.
Add up the property damage, over-time for ensuing protests, impact on reputation and legal pay-outs (when rarely convicted) and you’re talking the most expensive employees any city puts out on the streets. Drop-outs and semi-deadenders with guns? Jesus.
Is it too much to ask and wonder how many of these characters ever took a humanities course? Ever read a novel, other than “The Turner Diaries” or some Vince Flynn pulp? Shouldn’t an education in human psychology, the roots of rage and depression and a broad depth of understanding of dissimilar cultures be primary criteria for graduation from police academy if not acceptance into cop school to begin with?
Were I allowed to play king, (feel free to bend the knee), I’d coordinate a temporary force of the State Patrol, county sheriff’s department and National Guard as needed, (deal with them later), simultaneous with the dissolution of the Minneapolis police department (and its “union” — not that the AFL-CIO wants anything to do with Bob Kroll et al). The dissolution would come with a promise that all current officers would be allowed to immediately re-apply for the new Minneapolis Peace Force (or whatever). This would be conditioned on them proving they have not been a repeat violent offender, have not participated in one of Betsy DeVos’ brother’s paranoid “Bulletproof Warrior” trainings (or the like) and pass a dramatically upgraded and aggressive psychological examination designed to thoroughly assess their worst authoritarian impulses.
The carrot to all this would haver to be — have to be — a substantial increase in pay and benefits. Day to day policing is miserable work, (made worse by the cast of alpha dog Derek Chauvins you have to kowtow to). If you want better people, you’re going to have to lure them away from jobs that don’t require them to get in between raging spouses, chase around gang-bangers, piss off average citizens with nuisance, revenue-enhancing traffic tickets and write up minor car accident reports.
The savings would come with — picking a number here — 35-40% fewer armed cops. And significantly more mental health counselors, accident investigation personnel and similar non-uniformed, unarmed civilian staff to respond to things like, well for example, suspicion a guy tried to pass a counterfeit $20.
“Over-policing” is a real thing. It’s expensive to sustain, and catastrophically expensive when it goes bad. How much better off would George Floyd and the city of Minneapolis be if two MPD plus a Park Police squad, totalling six officers didn’t show up to “investigate” that bogus $20?
But I’m not holding my breath for anything of the sort. The old Cold War mentality that any “cuts”, any changes, anything other than more firepower would leave us “nekkid before the Rooskies” applies in this case as well.
On the list of people for whom I sympathy, down past George Floyd, his family and those who were close to him are Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey and now Attorney General Keith Ellison. In the midst of an economy-crushing pandemic, with no constructive national leadership and the usual “opposition party” petulance, they have to deal with this. Another thug cop race killing jacked up to an epic national scale.
Walz and Keith Ellison, who is now getting “final say” over Hennepin County Mike Freeman in running the Floyd case, have just left their 7 p.m. news confrence, and I wish I could say I was encouraged that they were getting a grip on the situation.
Some thoughts:
The Governor, as he should, continues to express his anger and indignation over the Floyd killing, as well as a decent human being’s understanding of the pent-up frustration over police brutality exploding here and all over the country. But when he says “we”, meaning Minnesota government and courts, have to get this right, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “Uh huh. But as in this case and right now. Not in maybe the next killing or the one after that and not in a year’s time.”
Ellison than got up and reminded viewers of the difficulties in prosecuting cops.
Uh. Sir, we know that. All too well. Those “difficulties” are seeping wounds of America’s original sin, which is going back a ways now.
The unenviable job you have, taking over for (although in coordination with) Freeman, is getting the prosecution train up to speed in days, not weeks and months, and securing a murder conviction of not just Derek Chauvin, but his three accomplices as well, all of whom should have been charged and taken into custody by now.
Ellison is a pretty savvy political animal. So I hope he’s also aware that the collective antennae of outraged Minnesotans are going to be watching — closely — to see if he is just a black face getting slapped on the usual institutional rope-a-dope. If he is a cynical move to give the bureaucracy time the public wasn’t going to give a establishment white guy like Freeman he’s in for a very rough time, black be damned.
The point again being, this case has to move, dramatically and quickly. Everyone understands the courtroom peril of a jury of 12 law and order-abiding citizens giving the men in blue the benefit of every implausible doubt. And everyone is aware the 1992 Rodney King riots — with destruction far beyond what we’ve seen here to date — came after the trial, when the jury acquitted LA cops in spite of the filmed evidence.
Walz and Ellison have to gather what lessons they can from that failed prosecution, (i.e. venue and jury selection) and somehow apply them to a winning verdict against Chauvin and the others. Moreover, to repeat myself, they are not going to have the luxury of months of secretive, exhaustive investigation. I could be wrong. (I often am.) But this case is so egregious, so outrageous and so fully processed in the entire country’s mind there is not going to be any patience for the normal, glacial pace of evidence gathering. (As though we needed more than what our lying eyes are already telling us.)
Then, adding to my sympathy for them all, is the matter of these “outside agitators”. I’m sorry. But healthy skepticism is in order, and will remain in order until I see unequivocal proof that “professionals” have descended in our midst and have been guiding the attacks on property.
Of course it’s possible. But what little evidence there is in terms of social media chatter to date, is pretty vague and inconclusive. There was talk tonight of planted incendiary devices and an unusual influx of stolen, plateless cars, and a guy in Bloomington pulled over in such a vehicle getting out and setting the thing on fire. All of that stuff is very provocative, and supports a wishful narrative that no Minnesotan would ever do such things, apparently because there couldn’t possibly be a hundred of us so enraged and despairing at the endless cop beat downs and court system bullshit they’d torch a dozen city blocks.
On a pure reptilian level, I’d love to have solid evidence that white supremacists are here in town acting out their long-planned “boogaloo” scenario by juicing up a race war. But if a major publc official is even going to hint at something like that, they better have the goods. Otherwise they sound hysterical, which seriously undermines their hard-earned credibility.
While we wait for County Attorney Mike Freeman and his advisors to assure themselves they have an “airtight” case against Derek Chauvin and the three other ex-cops who killed George Floyd, I’m preparing myself for the appearance of Earl Grey, or someone of his, um, stature.
A slick, high-priced lawyer like Grey (who successfully defended the hapless, panicked cop who killed Philando Castile) is, in my mind, umbilically linked to the tried and true cop defense, “He feared for his life.”
The argument being that the average cop (pick any of them from any of the hundreds of dead black man/woman incidents) faces such constant peril protecting and serving their city they have every reason — and therefore right — to operate with a hair-trigger for “resistance” to their authority.
Grey’s problem — of whoever accepts the high-profile challenge of defending Chauvin and his band of brothers — is all the video documentation of Floyd’s killing. Not being a great legal mind, I can’t imagine how you create a situation of peril … to the cops … with killing an unarmed man already on the ground and in handcuffs. But based on experience we’ve all seen with the American court system, given enough time and money, I’m sure there’s a way.
But until the logic-bending court room theatics begin, you have to feel overwhelmed by the reaction to this particular incident of race-based violence. This one is as stark a case of “depraved indifference” as you could imagine. Newsfeeds are filling with police chiefs, retired law enforcement officials, legal scholars and such making unequivocal condemnations of Chauvin and partners. With them — right now, based on videos alone — there’s no “wait to see all the evidence”. It’s right there. Caught in the act. You’re looking at a capital crime.
With all this, and searching for solutions, I’ve found myself most interested in … police union contracts. The outrageous thuggery of Chauvin and the jaw-dropping complicity of the other three proves that stricter guidelines and all the city/community hours spent improving “dialogue” are a futile waste.
Police culture is diseased. It’s infected. And will continue to undermine its own authority unless and until you A: Hire better quality people to be cops, and B: Make them sign contracts with swift and heavy penalties for what, let’s face it, is regarded within “the brotherhood” as sanctioned brutality.
I’ve said before there’s a solution to this institionalized thuggery in better, tougher psychological screening of cop candidates. Half-facetiously, I’ve also said the red warning lights should start flashing when any candidate tells you they’ve always “dreamed of being a cop.”
Obviously, pay and benefits would have to be a lot better than they are if you want to attract and hold people who don’t get a secret tingle over being “the man”, the dude in uniform, with a badge … and nearly unlimited authority over whoever they cross in the street. Because as we’ve seen, there’s obvious racism in that “tingle”. A racism that becomes more overt and less restrained once out on the job and interacting with a lot of marginal people.
As of this morning Keith Ellison is telling CNN he expects charges soon.
That’s already overdue and will be one small step. The big ones come with thundering criminal penalties on the heads of Chauvin et al and a top to bottom re-write of the current police union contract.
Minnesota U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar is an extremely talented politician. In my lifetime, Klobuchar and former Governor Tim Pawlenty were the most skilled Minnesota politicians I’ve observed. Both come across as smart, savvy, genuine, reasonable, warm, sincere, likeable, trustworthy, eloquent, and sensible. That’s why they won a lot of elections.
Moreover, in the presidential caucuses and primaries Klobuchar proved to be perhaps the strongest debater in the very large and talented field. So that sounds like a pretty great Vice Presidential choice for Biden, right?
Biden certainly could sure do much worse, but he also can do better. Here’s why.
Minnesota Is Likely A Biden Win Without Her. Biden probably doesn’t need Klobuchar to win Minnesota. While off-year elections are dicey for Minnesota Democrats, presidential years like 2020 are pretty solid. There hasn’t been any recent head-to-head polling in Minnesota that I know about, but in October the Star Tribune poll had Biden leading Trump by 12 points.
More recently in May, on what looks to be the uber-dominant issue of the 2020 election, a Survey USA/KSTP-TV survey showed that Minnesotans give Trump only a 34% approval rating for his handling of the pandemic crisis, compared to 82% approval for DFL Governor Tim Walz.
Looking at those numbers, Minnesota simply isn’t looking like much of a 2020 battleground state. Obviously, November is still six months away, and Trump will be targetting Minnesota with a big war chest. So Minnesota is not a lock for Biden. But if the overall environment is so bad that a state currently giving Trump pitiful 34% approval ratings goes to Trump, the Electoral College likely will be long gone anyway.
Selecting a proven vote-getter in a swing state such as Wisconsin, Nevada, Texas, Michigan, or Georgia arguably would do more to shake-up the Electoral College map than nailing down the already relatively solid Minnesota.
Staff Abuse Stories Baggage. Long before Klobuchar ran for president, I’ve heard a steady stream of accounts of Klobuchar being childish and abusive to staff. Some of what I have heard has been publicly reported, some has not. These do not seem to outlier stories, as evidenced by Klobuchar having perennially having the highest staff turnover in the U.S. Senate.
This issue died down in the primaries, and it’s nowhere near as consequential as the myriad of Trump sins. But it would get more attention if Klobuchar became the nominee.
I worry that these stories will detract and/or distract from the issues Democrats need to stress in order to defeat Trump. The rule for a veep candidate should be similar to the Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm.” Through detraction or distraction, new or rehashed staff abuse stories would do some amount of harm to the ticket. Coverage of these cringe-worthy stories would erode perhaps Klobuchar’s biggest political asset, a perception of decency.
Could Lose a Precious Senate Seat. If Klobuchar were Biden’s vice presidential nominee, there would need to be a special election to replace her. If historical trends hold, Democratic turnout in an off-year likely would be much lighter than normal, which could lead to a Republican representing Minnesota in the U.S. Senate. That could prove decisive in the narrowly divided Senate, hurting progressives on important issues, such as Supreme Court justices, a minimum wage increase, health care reform, and taxing the wealthy.
Minnesota has been trending increasingly blue in statewide elections, but it’s still purple, not blue. It’s a state that Hillary Clinton only won by 1.5% in 2016, when Democratic turnout was realtively heavy. In off-year, statewide elections, when Democratic turnout is lighter, Minnesota has proven willing to elect Republicans, such as Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman, and Mary Kiffmeyer. Republicans also currently control the Minnesota Senate, giving Minnesota the only divided Legislature in the nation.
Risking the loss of control of the U.S. Senate by putting purple Minnesota up-for-grabs is not worth the relatively modest amount of political benefits Klobuchar would bring to the Biden ticket.
Won’t Inspire Progressive Turnout. To put it mildly, Senator Klobuchar is not exciting to progressives from the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. That matters a lot. Democrats can’t win without enthusiastic support from progressives driving up voter turnout.
If Senator Klobuchar is selected by Biden, her moderate record will fuel fears of the Sanders supporters that Biden will govern as a milquetoast moderate. It will erode the “more progressive than you think” narrative that the Biden camp has been actively pitching to skeptical Sanders supporters.
Putting a moderate like Klobuchar on the ticket could contribute to many progressives voting third party or failing to vote, which could sink Biden.
Won’t Inspire People of Color Turnout. Democrats also can’t win without enthusiastic support from people of color driving up turnout in key states. People of color will be underwhelmed if Biden chooses a white person to be the 49th consecutive white Vice President. The fact that it’s also a candidate who African American leaders have criticized for a shoddy investigation and prosecution of a potentially innocent African American young person doesn’t help.
Democrats have a lot of dynamic non-white women candidates who might generate enthusiastic turnout of people of color, such as former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, California U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, Nevada U.S. Senator Catharine Cortez Masto, or Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The turnout those candidates generate could be crucial in November.
I don’t want to make this issue bigger than it is. Vice Presidential nominees don’t tend to have much of an impact on election outcomes. But if Democrats find a candidate that is a bit of a net positive in battleground states, it could make the difference in a razor-thin election. I just don’t think Amy Klobuchar fits that bill.
It’s tough sometimes being a cheery, what me worry?, live-in-the-moment, glass half-full kind of guy. If you’re like me, you look around and say, “They couldn’t fck this up any worse than they have.” But if you said that, like me, you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Take for example the other day after reading two pieces, one from Politico and the other from The Atlantic, back-to back. The effect, on me at least, was to check Google Flights for a one-way ticket to New Zealand.
The Politico piece was titled, “Experts Knew a Pandemic was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next. Nine disasters we still aren’t ready for.”
Some of the scenarios experts were consulted about include, of course, “The Big One”, the mega-quake that levels Seattle or the Bay Area or LA. Based not just on the level of federal government preparation for a disaster like this entirely forseeable coronavirus pandemic, but the response to post-Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, experts see no way the current underfunded, chaotically-managed federal system is ready to capably respond to a major, long-term disaster hitting a large metropolitan area.
Among other scenarios are: loose nukes, any serious planning for mass migration up from tropical regions as climate changes spikes humidity to unlivable levels, all the bio-terrorist attacks you, me and Hollywood can imagine and so on.
In the months after the Trump election in 2016, Lewis went around to key government agencies, the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department and others and found a common bewilderment. Unlike every previous transition, from say George W. to Obama, the in-coming Trump administration never bothered to send anyone to be educated on the details of how the agencies actually ran. No one showed up. PowerPoints and thick three-ring binders and top agency officials sat ignored … until they were eventually unceremoniously replaced with cronies and grifters like Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke and on and on. And at that point even worse bungling, corruption and mis-management became the order of the day.
Dan Balz of The Washington Post revisits much the same theme in a story yesterday morning, titled “Coronavirus pandemic exposes how US has hollowed out its government.”
But as bad as all that is, #1 on Politico’s list is the international rise of white supremacy. #1, they say. Specifically, the swelling radicalization of home grown, far-right zealot/terrorists inspired and directed via the internet, exactly the way ISIS recruits and trains its holy “warriors”. To this Politico moves on to and melds in the rage-stoking power of “deep fakes” and waves of nefarious misinformation peddling via social media, a la Russia in 2016.
Is there anyone so naive to think that that kind of chaos-inducing activity will not be expanded and improved upon this coming fall? Why would anyone think that? Our adversaries — Putin, North Korea, whoever — don’t have to attack us with guns and bombs. The chaos we inflict on ourselves — because of misinformation and misplaced zealotry — will create all the destruction they could want.
So … while I was still digesting those dystopian, high-probability scenarios, I waded int The Atlantic story. It’s titled, “Nothing Can Stop What is Coming” and it underline something I’ve worried about a lot over the last four years.
In January 2016 yours truly, NostraLambertus, wrote piece titled, “Why Trump Can Win It All, and I Mean ‘All’ “. My concern then was that Trump was appealing to a serious, previously untapped chunk of the population. A sub-set that rarely if ever voted, a crowd for whom he was the long-awaited candidate of their most fevered dreams. For them Trump had an appeal far different and far stronger than any ordinary Republican or Democrat.
I didn’t quite say it at the time. But it’s an appeal that borders on the religious.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance begins her piece with a long take-out on QAnon, the wildly popular-though-faceless-and-nameless source of bizarre coded conspiracies. Like the one about the pizza joint in D.C. where Hillary Clinton and other Illuminati-style Democrats were running a child sex ring.
LaFrance takes readers on an unsettling history and survey of QAnon and a half dozen other irrational, obscene, frequently racist and violence-oriented sites like 4chan, 8chan and 8kun, as well as the characters, both conniving and sad, associated with them. All that before rolling up her investigation into a truly scary summation.
She writes, “I have known [a political-science professor at the University of Miami named Joseph] Uscinski for years … . Many people assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is predictable along ideological lines. That’s wrong, he explained. It’s better to think of conspiracy thinking as independent of party politics. It’s a particular form of mind-wiring. [Emphasis mine.] And it’s generally characterized by acceptance of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don’t know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us.
“QAnon isn’t a far-right conspiracy, the way it’s often described, Uscinski went on, despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s because Trump isn’t a typical far-right politician. Q appeals to people with the greatest attraction to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.”
She then moves to her closing statement.
She says, “QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. … The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.”
The nut of it all is pretty obvious: Such people, as described above, are the fiery, white-hot core of Trump’s base. To them he is a key figure in what they regard as a god-like, divine plan. Trump is, in effect, the earthly vessel for the long-awaited cleansing apocalypse. And because of their “mind-wiring” they are unable to be convinced otherwise or to ever abandon him.
This white-hot core is primed and eager to accept anything they’re told by QAnon, who could be anyone. (Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson is convinced QAnon gets most of his inside information from White House communications advisor, Dan Scavino. BTW: Here’s a clip of Wilson in early 2018, imagining a “Mad Max” post-Trump landscape.)
More to point in terms of what’s coming this fall, there’s every reason to believe this “religious” core will act on whatever irrational, magical thinking they’re guided toward by QAnon, some other “divine” source or by Trump himself. There’s certainly no reason to think they’re disillusioned. To the contrary, they’re prepping for the battle. By every indication, they will mobilize and vote for Trump in even greater numbers than they did in 2016.
Likewise, who is prepared to assume they’ll accept Trump’s defeat, if it happens this November?
When it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic crisis, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who issued a stay at home order on March 25, has earned 82% approval ratings, compared to 34% for President Trump, according to a Survey USA/KSTP-TV survey. Up until this point, stay at home orders seem to have actually been a political benefit to leaders courageous and wise enough to invoke them, not a burden. For instance as of early May, only about 20% of Minnesotans wanted the Governor’s stay at home order lifted.
But that is almost sure to change over time. In part because of President’s Trump’s constant call to ease restrictions, and calls for the public to resist them, we’re already seeing Americans getting more antsy, as evidenced by a recent Gallup poll that shows the number of people avoiding small gatherings decreasing by four points among Democrats, 10 points among Independents, and 16 points among Republicans.
Also a Unacast report card measuring social distancing activity, which earlier gave Minnesota an “A” grade, has downgraded Minnesota to a “D-” grade, a crushing blow to the earnest promoters of Minnesota exceptionalism.
Picking up on that sentiment, and following their President’s call to “LIBERATE Minnesota” from pandemic protections, Minnesota House Republicans are increasingly criticizing Walz’s stay at home order, and using a bonding bill as ransom to get it lifted. I’m not convinced “we’re fighting to stimulate the economy by blocking job-creating bonding projects” is the most persuasive argument, but that’s what they’re going with.
So, should Governor Walz further loosen distancing rules? As of May 6, the experts at the Harvard Global Health Institute say that only nine states have done enough to warrant loosening restrictions — Alaska, Utah, Hawaii, North Dakota, Oregon, Montana, West Virgina, and Wyoming. The Harvard analysts find that Minnesota is not one of them, another blow to Minnesota exceptionalism. Specifically, experts find that Minnesota needs to be doing more testing and seeing lower rates of infection from the tests.
There might be some modest steps Walz can take to ease the political pressure and help Minnesotans feel like they’re making progress. I’m not remotely qualified to identify them, but for what little it’s worth here is some wholly uninformed food-for-thought anyway:
For those with low risk factors — people who are young and healthy and are not essential workers — maybe the good Governor could allow masked and socially distanced haircuts. (Can you tell my new Donny Osmond look is starting to get to me?)
For the same group, maybe Walz could allow masked and distanced visits with members of the immediate family — offspring, siblings, and parents. (Can you tell I miss my daughter?)
Those two things seem to be particularly stressful to people. While far from risk-free, they aren’t recklessly risky. These kinds of small adjustments might help people (i.e. me) become more patient and compliant when it comes to more consequential rules.
Overall, Walz should listen to experts and largely keep stay at home orders in place until the experts’ guidelines are met. A new spike in infections and deaths will seriously harm consumer confidence and the economy, and that shouldn’t be risked. At this stage, most Minnesotans are not likely to flock back to bars, restaurants, malls and large entertainment venues anyway, regardless of what Walz allows.
Clearly, KARE-TV’s firing of morning weatherman Sven Sundgaard is, as they say in show biz, a story “with legs”. Whether because of a public hunger for anything that isn’t pandemic-related, or whether because of Sundgaard’s popularity within the local gay community, or simply because a lot of people like him personally, the story continues to command unusual public interest.
Most of what I’ve read on social media sounds like it’s coming from people outside the news profession. The vast majority are saying Sundgaard got a raw deal from KARE, (owned by Gannett/TEGNA), for simply retweeting a comment made by a popular Minneapolis rabbi. It’s a different story though, from current or former professional journalists. While most express sympathy for Sundgaard, few if any have made any criticism of the basis of a contractual “ethics” policy that produces a situation such as his.
The common attitude among pro journalists being, “There are rules, and he violated the rules”, without any (that I’ve read) questioning the basis of said rules. It’s as though, “If it’s in a contract, it’s proper.” End of discussion.
At this point I freely admit that among people who worked in the news game I am an outlier. And bigly so. I doubt there’s anyone still in journalism in this town who will say publicly what I have said before and will say again here. And even among those who have left the business, the fraction of those agreeing with this view is at best in the high single digits.
The essence of my argument against a media “ethics” policy that prohibits — or can be interpreted to prohibit — expressions of political opinion by employees in their private lives is that it is designed to avoid and tamp down criticism from people already implacably hostile to fact-based, professional journalism. Such a policy is at best a thin filter against bad faith critics of serious, committed, truthful reporting. And at worst, it normalizes, as a consequence of distilled and denatured journalism, an irrational and highly-biased counter narrative.
By that last line what I mean is this: What will we think if among the “continued violations” Sven Sundgaard committed against KARE’s “ethics code” it is revealed that he had called on the carpet for making approving comments about peer-reviewed climatological studies? Studies that conform to the thinking of 97% the world’s climatologists that human activity is the primary driving force behind climate change? It’s a nearly incontestable view at this point, but one that is all but wholly absent from TV weathercasting.
What will we think if KARE’s code of “ethics” has been interpreted to say that peer-reviewed science is a “political opinion” and therefore warrants a reprimand?
If a code of “ethics” prohibits applying science to weather forecasting, I’d call that “denatured” reporting.
Or, in Sundgaard’s case, what if his standing in the gay community is based to some degree on his advocacy for gay rights? What if that has been categorized as “political opinion” and therefore deservng of reprimand?
I spent a few years covering local newsrooms and talking to news managers about screw ups, blunders, public relations, public complaints and the nature of reporting news in ways that sustain and enhance profits. And I can tell you the majority of them, off record of course, were candid about simply avoiding the hassles of some weird fringy thing going viral. Who needs a lawn sign in some reporter’s yard, or a comment a staffer made in an e-mail swelling up into a ridiculous, irrational high-profile controversy about “bias”? Sure, these things are almost always driven by the same bad faith cranks. But who needs it? There’s no upside. Plus, there’s a very real bottom line. The spectacle alone … might impact ratings and therefore revenue. And when that happens, jobs are on the line.
Every serious news organization makes earnest efforts to keep political commentary out of basic reporting. Most employ tiers of editors to keep precisely that kind of thing off the air and out of print. To which, I generally say, “Okay, fine.” I can get plenty of the “whys” elsewhere.
But in Sundgaard’s case, as in silly stuff like lawn signs, we’re talking private expressions that are the right of every citizen. First Amendment stuff, in other words.
Sundgaard has been quoted saying he’s considering his options. I’m told by former KARE employees that his departure paperwork likely requires him to keep his mouth shut if he wants whatever severance/ benefits they’re giving him. More to the point, unless he’s the scion of a wealthy family, the likelihood of him alone being able to finance a lawsuit against Gannett, Inc. will be daunting, at best.
But we now live in an age of vast social media. It is a far, far different media environment than even 15 years ago. In 2020 every one of us has both the ability and incentive to be a publisher. (Many media companies encourage social media activity.) So the validity of employment contracts prohibiting everything from promoting factual science, to advocating for minority rights, to, hell, sharing the opinions of respected local faith leaders that — yes, bad faith characters — waving guns and historical symbols of oppression is ugly and sinister seems something worthy arguing out via class action.
When I first wrote about Sundgaard last week, I wondered if anyone in the journalism game would step up in his defense. What we’ve got to date was an opinion piece by former Star Tribune writer/editor Claude Peck … sympathizing with Sundgaard’s predicament but wholly endorsing the long-held rules of the game.
Said Peck, “Neutrality is partial and imperfect and even something of a charade, but asking journalists to refrain from political expression (and conflict of interest) is a good idea at media outlets that seek to report and present stories for readers across a wide political bandwidth. Not requiring political neutrality from news-side journalists (and I mean all of them, not just political reporters) has a corrosive effect on the practice of ambitious, well-rounded journalism.”
Peck and I crossed paths back in the hoary days of alternative weeklies, and I think of him as an entirely decent guy. But what he says in that piece is full-on, deep-establishment thinking. Truly the party line. And the bit about niggling stuff like lawn signs or the like having, “a corrosive effect on the practice of ambitious, well-rounded journalism” is something I’d love to see submitted for long-form transparent dissection.
Commercial journalism does not want the hassle of constantly defending itself against accusations of “bias” from bad faith actors. It’s bad for business. Therefore it aspires to a perspective of “neutrality” in anything with a whiff of potential partisanship.
But here’s the thing, “neutrality” is itself a political position. “Political” in that it is carved out, adopted, embraced and enforced for self-serving purposes.
Requiring “neutrality” in employees’ personal lives is not only an implicit concession that bad faith attacks have merit, and that the station/paper is incapable of producing “neutral” reporting, but worse, it serves to enhance the vitality and influence of unethical “miscreants”, as Rabbi Latz described them.
While, once again, we have a situation where only two people know for certain what if anything happened, we are all being forced to make a call. Assault or BS?
At this moment in the matter of “Is Joe Biden Just as Much of a Predator as Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump?” the ball is back in accuser Tara Reade’s court. Biden submitted to acceptably tough questioning from (long-time social friend) Mika Brezinski last week and flat out denied he did what Reade is now telling people he did. With that, the contemporary standards for public adjudication now requires Ms. Reade to present herself to some credible news outlet for similar interrogation.
Personally, I’d be happier with Biden if he chose someone like ABCs Martha Raddatz rather than an old friend on a liberal-leaning cable channel. If only because he’d be on higher ground if Reade opts for FoxNews, even if it’s with Chris Wallace and not one of their prime time chuckleheads. But whichever route Reade chooses … she has to step up to the mic.
To date, contrary to the predictable raging of the right-wing echo chamber, the “lamestream media” has now given Reade’s charges substantial and serious investigation. The problem for Reade though is that none have yet been able to come up with anything offering unequivocal proof she’s telling the truth. The best they’ve got to support her story of a 27 year-old incident is the call-in to Larry King’s CNN show in 1993 by a woman who sounds like, and may well have been Reade’s deceased mother. That, and an on-record statement from a Democrat-voting friend who recalls Reade telling her the assault happened. In other words … they heard Reade tell them a story.
Knowing how these things go campaign-wise, even if Reade never submits to a conditions-free interview, Republicans will howl and rant about a “liberal cover-up” and “hypocritical double-standard”, at least in relation to Kavanaugh. (With 24 women on-record accusing Trump of everything up to and including rape, he bears no comparison, and his devout, evangelical white base will continue to embrace him as God’s servant on Earth.)
The Kavanaugh “hypocrisy” of course falls apart if you were among those who actually paid attention to that drama. Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford, not only was/is a credible professional with a career to protect, she never made bizarre social media references about the “sensuous image” of Vladimir Putin. What she did do was suck it up, put her face, reputation and family safety on the line in front of an enormous TV audience and submit to cross-interrogation.
More importantly, where Biden is at least saying he will cooperate with a Senate investigation, the investigations into Ford’s accusations and charges of entitled frat-boy behavior on Kavanaugh’s part were strangled at birth. They were thwarted and neutered in the Republican-controlled Senate’s rush to confirm him — to a lifetime seat on the highest court of the land.
The righteous cry to “Believe the women!” has always been fatuous. No sane person goes around uncritically “believing” anything anyone says. The appropriate cry is, “Listen to the women!” That implies granting an accuser a respectful, non-threatening forum to tell the story they believe is important enough that all should hear.
With that in mind, the stage is all yours, Ms. Reade.
It’s not like any of us have to search far for something infuriating. But this business with KARE-TV firing a morning weatherman for … re-tweeting something a rabbi said … presses all of my buttons.
Now, I don’t personally know any of the characters involved in this remarkably spineless drama, other than John Remes, KARE’s general manager. According to the very minimal reporting on the incident to date, it was Remes who, um, enforced company policy. But everything that is visible about the firing of Sven Sundgaard is too familiar to the innocuous-oriented world of local TV news to ignore.
In an official statement — posted on Facebook, not delivered directly by Remes — the station GM makes no specific reference to the re-tweet, but instead justifies Sundgaard’s firing on “continued violations of KARE 11’s news ethics and other policies”. No further explanation. Thereby leaving the impression that the weatherman is guilty of a series of offenses, none of which can be mentioned because of, wait for it, corporate privacy policies.
The basic story is that Sundgaard, a Twin Cities native and 11-year employee (for whatever that’s worth), retweeted a comment by Michael Latz, head rabbi for Shir Tikvah, a temple in southwest Minneapolis well known for its commitment to liberal social issues.
Latz’ tweet read:
“Morning Consult, a reputable polling firm dropped a poll last week that stated 81% of Americans support our governor’s [sic] Stay At Home directives in oirder to save lives and slow the spread of COVID-19. 81% of Americans is approximately 272,000,000 people. I understand the press has an obligation to cover rallies at state capitols by the “liberate the state” white nationalist Nazi sympathizer gun fetishist miscreants. We must pay attention to armed extremists. And. Despite support from the President & the Chair of the Republican National Committee there were less than 10,000 of these protestors across the nation. Keep perspective.”
So okay, the rabbi may be admonished for the line about “white nationalist Nazi sympathizer”. But given any educated Jew’s familiarity with the Holocaust and the faces of incipient fascism, he gets a pass from me for jumping to that particular conclusion. As for the business about “gun fetishist”, and “miscreants” and “armed extremist”, what’s to debate? Would Mr. Remes care to step into the bright light of a public forum and disagree with any of those characterizations?
The Star Tribune story included a telling bit about increasingly desperate and subservient GOP Senate candidate/former talk-radio “host”, Jason Lewis tweeting on the very day Remes fired Sundgaard. Said Lewis, ” ‘Today’s forecast: mostly sunny w/ a chance of idiocy’, ‘#Covid_19 models are about as accurate as his forecasts. @kare11 should fire him’!”
Which Remes then did.
It is too facile to conclude that Lewis drove the decision, (especially since he let the anti-Sundgaard wave build in the right-wing fever swamps for 11 days before boldly leaping in to exploit the rage). But Lewis very much represents the all-too familiar existential fear of commercial news managers, TV in particular.
In the best of times, local TV executives are disproportionately reactive to anger and rage from the right wing echo chamber. Employees in any newsroom you care to ask are all too familiar with the eerily uniform flood of calls, e-mails and tweets from, as the rabbi put it, “white nationalist … gun fetishist miscreants.” (They get calls from angry minority and liberal groups as well, but rarely if ever in as great a number or in such disturbing cult-like lockstep.)
And with advertising revenue cratering faster than 2008, these are far from the best of times.
Local TV news is a low denominator game. It is constructed to offend … no one. Ever. It remains in business by assiduously avoiding conflict and controversy. It long, long ago even stopped offering regular editorial commentary on important issues. It’s business model requires marketing, along with the attractiveness of its anchors, a bland, edge-free variety of news reporting. A variety in which the station itself has no thoughts about, concerns over or stake in the appearance of … “armed extremists” on public streets.
Since Remes and KARE (owned by Gannett under it’s TEGNA umbrella) will hide behind their company’s “personnel privacy” policies as long as they can, we may never learn what other, if any, “ethics policies” Sundgaard continually violated. But until then you know, in the interest of protecting the former valued employee’s privacy, let the public’s imagination run wild! What else? Pedophilia? Embezzlement? Racketeering? Parking in Remes’ assigned spot?
It’s important to note that Sundgaard also declined comment on his firing. I suspect there is contract severance language requiring non-disparagment if not total silence.
Given the absence of any consistent media reporting or analysis in Minnesota, (a self-serving reference), it’ll be interesting to see if any entity of influence — the Strib editorial page, a pubic letter from a prominent local TV news “leader” — steps up in Sundgaard’s defense? Or at the very least to defend the right of employees to also be citizens and express concerns and opinions — about armed extremists — on their personal social media.
Far better though would be that mythical person(s) of influence examine the root of employers’ fears over First Amendment expression by citizen-employees? Is it really as shallow and cowardly as a potential loss of ad revenue?
Lacking even a minimum level of transparency — for a business based on the emotional appeal of its personalities — the public’s imagination will continue to harbor suspicions. Namely that KARE fired Sundgaard for retweeting what the majority of Minnesotans think when they see a small bunch of astro-turfed miscreants waving guns on public property.
