When it comes to addressing racial equity issues in education, health care, and housing, racism is a barrier. But I would argue that fiscal conservatism is an even bigger barrier.
In Minnesota’s policymaking debates about racial equity, this is the unacknowledged “elephant in the room.” It is what makes all of the hopeful dialogue about addressing racial equity feel hollow to me.
DFL Governor Tim Walz, Speaker Melissa Hortman, and many others deserve a lot of credit for leading on police reform. Despite the failure to pass police reforms during the recent special session, I suspect they’ll eventually enact some police reforms. This is in large part because police reform is relatively inexpensive.
But beyond police reform, I’m pessimistic when it comes to DFLers being willing to address other major forms of systemic racism in society, such as in health care, housing and education.
That’s because most DFLers and all Republicans seem completely unwilling to make the case for higher taxes.
Elected officials need to get courageous and make the case that privileged white people like me need to pay higher taxes in order to build a more equitable state. I’m not naive about this. I’ve worked in and around politics for thirty five years, so I know tax-raising is excruciatingly painful for politicians, particularly in an election year. But if we truly care about making racial justice progress in this agonizing “educable moment,” there truly is no other way.
To cite just one example, Minnesota has long had some of the worst achievement gaps in the nation, gaps that open as early as age one. The roots of k-12 achievement gaps are early education opportunity gaps. Year after year, about 35,000 low-income Minnesota children can’t access the high quality early learning and care programs that they need to get prepared for school. Those 35,000 left-behind low-income kids are the children who are most likely to fall into achievement gaps in the school years and other types of disparities throughout their lifetimes. The lack of new revenue is why our 35,000 most vulnerable children continue to be left behind every year.
Similar tales can be told about many other issues, such as health care and housing. We know what to do in those areas as well, but we don’t do it, because the changes would necessitate requiring Minnesotans to pay higher taxes.
I understand why politicians are afraid of being branded tax raisers. But the inescapable truth is that lawmakers’ long standing insistence on perpetuating the fiscal status quo is perpetuating systemic racism.
So we need to start talking honestly about the fiscal side of these racial justice issues too. Until we do, progressive leaders’ lofty rhetoric about racial justice gains is just idle chatter.
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.
We’re all thinking it, but are afraid to say it out loud. If Trump loses the Electoral College in a close race and refuses to leave the White House on January 20, 2021, claiming he actually won but was cheated, what will the guys in and around the White House with the guns do?
It feels paranoid to even discuss this. This is what people living under dictatorships in Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Congo, and Gambia discuss, not citizens of the self-described “greatest democracy on earth.” America has long have been admired for its ability to follow-up bitter political campaigns with the peaceful transition of power. Our ability to consistently do this is arguably our single greatest achievement as a nation.
But with Trump, we can no longer be sure that the peaceful transition of power will be a given. Keep in mind what Trump’s former right hand man Michael Cohen said: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Trump himself, has more than said as much, as documented by The Atlantic:
“In December (2019), Trump told a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally that he will leave office in ‘five years, nine years, 13 years, 17 years, 21 years, 25 years, 29 years …’ He added that he was joking to drive the media ‘totally crazy.’
Just a few days earlier, Trump had alluded to his critics in a speech, ‘A lot of them say, ‘You know he’s not leaving’ … So now we have to start thinking about that because it’s not a bad idea.’
This is how propaganda works. Say something outrageous often enough and soon it no longer sounds shocking.”
One thing is almost certain: Even if Trump suffers a clear defeat in the Electoral College, he will still claim mass cheating. Remember, this is the guy who made the false assertion that “millions” voted illegally in California, and that was after he won the Electoral College.
If he loses the Electoral College, and subsequently faces the prospect of multiple criminal prosecutions as a civilian, his claims of fraud will get even more desperate, expansive, and outrageous. The question is, will armed authorities in and around the White House listen?
(By the way, I’m being vague here, because I’m not sure who would ultimately be responsible for removing the President. Secret Service? U.S. Marshals? The military? We don’t have historical precedence to guide us here. )
Trusted Third Parties Needed
By January 20, 2021 at noon, the Secret Service, U.S. Marshal Service, and U.S. military no longer would be under Trump’s control, unless they decided that Trump’s claims of cheating were correct, and that Trump therefore was reelected and is still their boss.
Will those armed authorities agree with Trump’s claims of election cheating? I’m not sure. “Was Trump cheated in the election or not” is not something that will be easy for armed authorities to judge. After all, they’re not experts in election law or in a position to investigate claims of election fraud.
In trying to sort out the Trump claims of election cheating, I would hope that the guys with the guns will look to third parties who they find credible. The courts obviously will be in play, but that will take quite a bit of time to reach a final decision in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to the courts, we need third parties that can act more quickly than the courts, and be credible with the American people and the armed officials who may need to remove Trump on January 20th.
Bipartisan Presidents Weigh In Jointly
Here’s my hope: We need a bipartisan group of former Presidents from the past three decades to unanimously weigh in on this by mid-November.
Specifically, I propose that Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle (the second in command under George H.W. Bush, because he passed away), and Jimmy Carter privately pledge to each other right now that they will stand together to counter any false claims of mass fraud and publicly affirm the presidential election outcome as soon as it becomes apparent.
I understand that it could be that the election outcome won’t be clear enough for the quintet to make a unanimous declaration, and their decision has to be unanimous for it to carry the necessary weight. In that case, all of this is mute. (I also definitely understand that Trump could easily win reelection, and that it might not even be close enough to be contested.)
But if the bipartisan group can agree on the outcome, they should commit to jointly and publicly announcing the outcome in November, before Trump has a chance to send several weeks to sell his conspiracy claims unrebutted.
Why ex-presidents, and a vice president proxy? First, their political careers are effectively over, so they can’t credibly be accused of wanting to further their political careers. Second, they’re bipartisan, so it will be more difficult for Trump and his cult to marginalize them as a “partisan group.” Third, they have knowledge and credibility on the issue of fair elections, because they’ve worked in that world up close for decades. Fourth, ex-Presidents have extra gravitas, so their announcement will feel weighty, newsworthy, and historic. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the Secret Service and Generals are used to following these former Commanders-in-Chief, and likely have residual respect for at least some of them.
If the nightmare scenario I describe here plays out, an early bipartisan declaration of the past three decades’ ex-Presidents won’t guarantee that the guys with the guns will do the right thing and remove Trump. But it’s the best thing I can come up with to try to avoid an event that could mark the end of democracy in America. For something that historically consequential, we need a plan.
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.
When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, a loud minority of Americans are over it. They’re moving on, man. They’re shrugging off the 56,752 COVID-19 deaths American have experienced over the past 9 weeks.
After all, they’re not dying. And as a meme shared by a conservative friend recently cheerfully noted, the “Current Survival Rate for COVID19 in the US is 98.54%. Let’s share this story. Positive vs. Panic.”
Come on, man, we want to do stuff! Sports watching! Road tripping! Beer drinking! Freedom, mofos! I mean, the fucking glass is 98.54% full! LIBERATE!
Think about that. Really think about it.
This COVID-19 pandemic, which is still very much raging, has already killed the equivalent of the much-mourned 9-11 attacks (3,000 deaths). That is, if the 9-11 attacks occurred again and again and again, for 19 days in a row. Is that really something we should shrug off?
The nine-week old pandemic has already killed as many Americans we lost in the Afghanistan War (2,440), which is in its 19th year. Twenty-three times as many, to be precise. No big deal?
In just nine weeks, COVID-19 has quickly killed far more Americans than are lost in a typical year to opioid overdoses (46,000), traffic deaths (36,500), and gun violence (40,000).
In the next day or so, the pandemic will have killed more Americans than we lost in the decade-long Vietnam (58,220), by a far the bloodiest war of my generation. And that’s a big “meh” too?
Oh and by the way, COVID-19 seems to be just warming up. Many states still haven’t hit their peaks. Most experts believe a second deadly spike is coming next fall, sooner if more states go all Georgia or South Dakota on social distancing roll-backs. COVID-19 still has a lot of room to spread in rural America and much of the rest of the world. And most believe a vaccine is likely more than a year away.
What a perfect time to go back to the bar!
As this excellent one-minute ad brought you by prominent Republicans involved in The Lincoln Project notes, during the pandemic we are seeing “two types of Americans — those who sacrifice and those who demand:”
“Two types of Americans have emerged during this pandemic — those who sacrifice and those who demand.
Those who sacrifice, they’re the leaders working tirelessly to save American lives. The millions of Americans who have chosen to stay home, despite the hardships. The first responders, the nurses, the doctors. People who put themselves in harms way to help others, no matter the cost to themselves.
Those who demand, they protest. Threaten. Scream, with words of selfish entitlement. They fight, but only for themselves, for their interest, their desires. Putting their wants ahead of what’s right, no matter the cost to anyone else.
Yes, there are two kinds of Americans. We already know which kind of American Trump is. The same one he’s always been. The important question is, which one are you?”
The question of whether to end most social distancing protocols at this stage is not a close call. Beyond lives, research is even showing that social distancing is saving the nation money.
“A new study by researchers at the University of Wyoming finds that the essential shutdown of the US economy to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 can be justified economically.
A team led by economics professor Linda Thunstrom crunched some numbers and found the lives saved through social distancing and shelter-in-place orders around the country far outweigh the expected cost to the economy, dollar-to-dollar.
‘Our benefit-cost analysis shows that the extensive social distancing measures being adopted in the US likely do not constitute an overreaction,’ Thunstrom says. ‘Social distancing saves lives but comes at large costs to society due to reduced economic activity. Still, based on our benchmark assumptions, the economic benefits of lives saved substantially outweigh the value of the projected losses to the US economy.’
‘Our analysis suggests that the aggressive social distancing policies currently promoted in the US probably are justified, given that no good contingency plans were in place for an epidemic of this magnitude,’ the University of Wyoming researchers wrote.”
Still, many of the same people who can’t seem to stop sharing flag-waving memes about how they’re honoring the sacrifice of American soldiers, first responders, and health care providers can’t be bothered to sacrifice any more time away from bars, restaurants, and stadia to save their neighbors and front-line workers from arguably the worst clear and present danger of their lifetimes. But actions speak louder than memes.
What’s happening to Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx is not a pleasant thing to watch. Though unknown to most of us before the pandemic, they built long and impressive careers, both by being competent in their profession and by carefully nurturing their reputations. Now though they’ve both becomes creatures of Trump culture, part of his supporting cast. A cast mostly of grotesques.
I know I’ve referred to this many times before, but it continues to apply over and over and over again. Everything Trump Touches Dies. (TM: Rick Wilson.) From the $400 million (in 2020 dollars) shoveled to him by his Klansman father, which he proceeded to squander, to his mis-managed airline, his bogus university, his fraudulent foundation, all his ex-wives, his porn star hookups, bankrupt casinos and mistreatment of lackeys like Chris Christie, Reince Preibus, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Lev and Igor, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Ryan and on and on, Trump has either sullied or compounded the self-sullying of everyone he’s drawn into his wobbling orbit.
And now it’s Fauci and Birx’ turn.
Fauci has been noticeably absent from Trump’s most recent afternoon press rallies, including last Thursday’s where it was up to a stricken-looking Deborah Birx to tap-dance and prevaricate around Trump’s brain-seizing riffs on injecting disinfectants and sticking UV lights up our where-evers. Then Sunday, Birx was the one pushed out on “Meet the Press” and Jake Tapper to explain away some more and deflect attention from what the rest of the entire planet of intelligent humans regarded, unmistakably, as lethal misinformation wrapped around unconscionable ignorance.
I take no pleasure in saying Birx has torched her credibility, but her feet are on fire. She has in effect become a Trump enabler. Which is to say her role, publicly, has become less that of an advisor and more that of an apologist. She’s become the loyal assistant to an ill-informed, anti-science demagogue, which is precisely the opposite of the virtues she built her reputation on over forty years in her chosen profession. To stay any longer, she is risking historic culpability in what will be regarded as the most catastrophic failure of presidential leadership in American history. (And yes, I know I’ve said that before, too. But it bears repeating, like a mantra.)
People like Fauci and Birx, at the top of their bureaucratic food chains, have talents beyond “mere” scientific knowledge. Fauci in particular is regarded as a remarkably skillful player at the game of massaging, finessing and herding serious, high-brow egos toward a common goal. But in Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who can’t tell the difference between the Hippocratic Oath and Fantasia’s dancing hippos, there is no foundation in knowledge or professional empathy to work with.
In Fauci and Birx we are … again … looking at career company players who can not break free of the rules and protocols that brought them stature and prominence. Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Chief of Staff and Marine General John Kelly, ex-oil company CEO Tillerson, whoever wrote “Anonymous”, former Goldman, Sachs President Gary Cohn and even Robert Mueller, Fauci and Birx to this point have not been able to say what must be said. Namely, that Donald Trump not only has no clue what he’s talking about, but has no capacity whatsoever to deal with the biggest crisis the country has faced since WWII.
Like the other estimable reputations mentioned above, Fauci and Birx have so far refused to accept that the rules that brought them to this point of their careers have no weight or value in proximity to Trump. He regards their credibility and sense of duty to the standards of their profession as exploitable weaknesses to be bent to the service … of his reputation, which is to say the fantasy he creates for it.
The irony is that were they to announce their resignations — with unequivocal criticism of the stark, on-going failures of Trump — their standing as the foremost go-to truth-tellers on the pandemic would only increase. Trump would no doubt do everything he could to vilify and demote both. But since each would remain deep in the loop in terms of the science and logistics of pandemic response, they would remain vital, much sought after sources of critical information.
Given a choice between a daily unfettered Fauci & Birx pandemic update or one from their Trump-appointed replacements, (Jared? Pence?), which would you watch? Which would you believe?
More to the point, out from under the reputation-poisoning weight of Trump enabling they could speak freely and like intelligent adults to an adult public.
I’ve noticed how this pandemic has added a new collection of common statements and questions among people with whom my wife and I socialize, distantly. The common, nearly universal statements are along the lines of, “My god! Did hear what he said/did today?” But a common question I never before heard so frequently, is “What are you watching?”
Those with the luxury of not having to home-school, maintain full-time work obligations or tend to an ill relative have been maxing out their couch potato quota. Being both Catholic and a small town Midwesterner who grew up surrounded by Lutherans, I still have a dim view of people who watch TV in the middle of the day. The tube only comes on after … you’ve earned it. Daytime TV watching was for shut-in old ladies and alcoholics. It’s still that simple.
But after dinner, after putting up a couple hundred bales of hay … or pretending to pay attention in school, a guy out in Montevideo could kick back free of guilt.
So it is today. When paying attention to what is really happening can drive you nuts faster than insipid soaps and sit-coms.
With that in mind, and purely as a distraction, I’ve worked up a list of What I’ve Been Watching, and Listening To since the corral gate closed.
The Plot Against America (HBO). Not exactly light or escapist, but a terrific adaptation of the Phillip Roth novel, wherein (our guy) Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election, cozies up to Hitler and unleashes torrent of pent-up facism and anti-semitism across the land, specifically on a working class Jewish family and their neighbors in Newark, New Jersey. John Turturro and Winona Ryder are the only two name “stars”. But the production heft of the show comes from the presence of producer/writer David Simon, of “The Wire” fame and also “The Deuce”. The six-part series quite pointedly diverts from Roth’s novel in its ending. (Here’s a spoiler alert interview with Simon on his thinking.) But in its telling, the verisimilitude of the sets, locations, props are first-class Hollywood … with plotting and dialogue compliments of one of the country’s greatest novelists. It’s a statement on who covers pop culture today that “The Tiger King”, the depressing equivalent of being trapped in an elevator with a dozen MAGA grifters, received overwhelmingly more press attention. (I’ve had exactly no one tell me they watched “Plot Against … ” .)
Ozark (Netflix). Clearly the writing team behind this series spent a lot of time dissecting “Breaking Bad” for what made it so compelling. And they decided one magic ingredient was … ever escalating stress and tension. I’ve been a fan since the get-go, maybe from spending some time in the ‘Zarks and sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. (I have my souvenir “Big Johnson’s Halfway Inn” t-shirt.) But maybe mostly because it’s always had Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, two excellent if just-below-the-radar actors. (Bateman has directed several episodes.) The adventures of a corporate numbers guy from Chicago getting cross-wise with the mob and being forced to flee to oblivion … i.e. the Ozarks … where he proceeds to mix up the Missus, the kids and everyone he meets with local heroin dealers, hillbilly trailer trash, the Kansas City mob and the inevitable psychotic Mexican drug cartel, all while running a cheesy floating casino has always been fingernail-chewing fun. But it got even more desperate this season. Not to give too much away, but let’s just say Mrs. Marty Byrde (Linney) develops ambitions of her own. Favorite supporting characters: Darlene, the not so loving spouse of the local poppy farmer, and of course Ruth, Marty’s aide de camp, a child of trash with the feral cunning of El Chapo.
Westworld (HBO). The first season of this series was close to classic television. But then you get Anthony Hopkins in anything and you’ll be convinced it’s Criterion Collection stuff. The way season #1 played with the soon-to-arrive dilemma over what really is consciousness, and then, if something inorganic displays consciousness is it therefore “human”? made for a remarkably intelligent mainstream TV show. Thanks, I strongly suspect, to familial connections to acclaimed film director Christopher “Dunkirk”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Inception” Nolan, (his brother Jonathan and wife Lisa Joy run “Westworld”), the show has always worked off an impressive budget. (If you’re a studio exec, it can’t hurt to keep Big Nolan happy.) That said, the second season was a mess. Besides the fundamental dramatic problem of diluting suspense by having every character you gun down, chop up or set afire “rebooted” by a refreshed algorithm, the entire season was pretty much all gunning and chopping and jumping back and forth in time. The “Westworld” on-line chat rooms didn’t seem to mind. But what I felt was a series floundering and searching for the next leap up into serious, speculative science. And that element arrived four episodes into this season’s run. The almost-already-here question of gigantic data bases knowing so much more about you than you yourself know finally showed it’s face. Worse, the data bases and algorithms know so much they can “predict” your future. In effect you are living the life they permit you to live. And have I mentioned the budget for this thing? Stunning production design. I’m hanging with it.
Citizen K (Streaming on iTunes and others.) Even if you’ve heard of “the oligarchs”, the Russian tycoons who leapt in and seized control of huge chunks of the economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, you probably haven’t spent as much time with any one specific character as you do in this new documentary by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side”, plus “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and nearly a dozen others. The character here is one of the original oligarchs, Mikhail Khordokovsky, a guy who managed to corner a massive chunk of the Russian oil industry when benighted Boris Yeltsin came to the early-90s oligarchs for a loan to stave of economic collapse … and win reelection. It is simply impossible to watch Donld Trump operate and not see the guiding, mentoring hand of Vladimir Putin in his flagrant abuse of the truth and creation of a constant, competing alternative reality. Putin is the master. But unlike Trump, who is both a fool and lazy, Putin is disciplined and remorseless. Here, as Gibney tells the story of the war between Putin and Khodorkovsky, (essentially all the original oligarchs have been ruined if not killed and replaced by new oligarchs who owe everything to Putin), we understand the average Russian’s “helpless serf” need for a “strong man” to protect them from chaos. Excellent stuff.
Also, a couple podcasts that have moved up my list of faves.
“Hacks on Tap” Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod and ex-GOP strategist Mike Murphy take 45 minutes a couple times a week to zing each other and try … try … to make some sense of the Trump administration dumpster fire. Murphy long ago bailed on any idiot who would support a certifiable nut job for the White House, so don’t expect any MAGA zealotry. But these two old pros know “the game” inside and out. Likewise they’re on speaking terms with everyone in the game today who isn’t wearing a scarlet “T” on their chest. Recent conversations brought in guests like ex-Obama Chief of Staff and ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who managed the entire show without dropping an F-bomb, and longtime GOP campaign operative Mark McKinnon, (the guy with the big hat on Showtime’s “The Circus.) The consensus of the latter was that Joe Biden needs to actually do this “fireside chat” idea that’s been kicking around. Sit down for an hour every week with Oprah, or David Letterman or, hell, Gail Collins from The New York Times and show America the guy this crew knows to be a regular, decent — empathetic — human being.
“The New Abnormal” Ten, twenty, thirty years from now the line, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” will be stamped like a watermark on this era, and credit will have to go to the guy who authored it, former Republican “master of the dark arts” Rick Wilson. Wilson has had two best-sellers — so far — ripping Trump, the Trump cult formerly known as the Republican party and TrumpNation, a matched set of new ones. The first book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, was as close to what I’d imagine Hunter Thompson doing with Trump as anything out there. And now — via his side hustle gig with The Daily Beast — (always behind the paywall) — Wilson, who lives down on the Redneck Riviera in the Florida panhandle and loves guns as much horses — has teamed up with uber New Yorker Molly-Jong Fast to deconstruct as much of Trump’s self-serving blithering as two humans can without risking strokes. The show just launched this week. But given Wilson’s high-profile on cable pundit-fests — (on MSNBC he once referred to Trump’s best-seller as “The Shart of the Deal”, a line that went over the head of the female host but cracked up other, cruder panelists) — this thing will catch on quick. And always wait for the end, where Wilson and Molly offer their picks for “Fuck That Guy” … of the week. (Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a truly contemptible low-life, got Wilson’s nod.)
It is truly a fool’s errand trying to make sense of anything Donald Trump does, beyond assuming he sees it as being in his very personal self-interest. But given that –and only that — that as an incontestabe reality, I still can not understand his refusal to ramp up and coordinate nation-wide testing for COVID-19.
If you accept that every move he makes is sociopathically-focused on getting himself reelected in November, and by that I mean shamelessly re-writing recently (recorded) history, scanning the radar for any and every possibility to lay blame for this catastrophic debacle on someone else and encouraging his troll-cult of “gun enthusiasts” to actively rebel against the states on whom he’s sloughed off the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government, the lack of “testing thing” still makes no sense.
I don’t know about you, but I long, long ago stopped thinking that Trump — a man who can’t read note-card memos much less books and thinks Captain Bligh was a role model for “very powerful” leadership — makes many or really any of the policy decisions in his White House. Clearly, he has no interest in doing anything other than the ceremonial, lights-and-cameras-on work of being President.
(The latest example were his “Liberate Minnesota!”, “Liberate Michigan!” and “Liberate Virginia, and save your great Second Amendment! It’s under siege!” tweets. These were tweets posted not as he was in his gold-trimmed jammies late at night, getting ready to go nighty-night after a snack of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nor were they even in the early AM, a bit groggy and entertaining impure thoughts about the blonde on “Fox and Friends”. No. They were just before noon, in the middle of a supposedly all-hands-on-deck, 24/7 fight against an international pandemic, and seconds after watching some nitwit on FoxNews. He was watching fcking TV! Point being … he never works at his job. Someone else is doing that.)
The assumption, already well-documented through contemporary reporting and almost certain to be verified in the “after action” investigations into what — to repeat myself — is the worst dereliction of duty and failure of executive function by a president in U.S. history, is that Trump “policy” such as it is is a product of the imaginations of others. Like, for example, 34 year-old former high school malcontent/Joe Goebbels-like senior advisor Stephen Miller. And the chronically-bungling senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. And likely the various old tycoon cronies like Tom Barrack — (one of) the guys who did what he could to profiteer off the 2008 collapse, the inauguration and every Trump move since, along with whoever followed him into the men’s room, and of course the deep thinkers on talk radio and FoxNews.
But even then, with Trump as this vain empty vessel playing useful idiot for America’s worst characters and impulses, it makes no sense not to use the Defense Production Act and divert a fraction of the fire hose of deficit-exploding money for a Manhattan Project-style nationwide testing program. Testing, ordered by him (or whoever) and directed by him (or one of his many “task forces”) would without question have the effect of restoring a semblance of order and a functioning economy … before the election.
As we know from those pesky things called numbers, testing in the USA is slowing down rather than speeding up.
As dismaying as it it to imagine, Trump would be rewarded for at least doing that, never mind so completely screwing up the response to a forseeable and well-predicted international disaster.
So why isn’t Team Trump, Miller, (or the latest chief of staff and ex-North Carolina hill country real estate broker Mark Meadows), Jared, Ivanka, Sean Hannity, etc., pushing him on this? It’s not like he’d have to, you know, do anything. He wouldn’t have to show up in a WalMart parking lot and stick swabs up voters’ noses. He wouldn’t have to even break into any of his free-styling gibberish-and-invective spewing afternoon press rallies to express a moment’s worth of empathy for the 35,000 – 40,000 already dead. Hell, he could even go out and play golf! (They might even let him use the ball-washers.)
The only explanation that makes any sense is that someone, somehow has already made it clear that his failure to date is so far beyond the range of Herbert Hoover, (as in Hoover times-100), that the only election strategy now worth pursuing is to pour everything into the blame game. Blame everything on the states, states with Democratic governors in particular. THEY refused to do their job! THEY refused to test! THEIR incompetence is what has held down the economy. And THEIR whining about needing Trump’s help only shows THEIR ineptitude and weakness.
Without testing there’s no imaginable way the economic tragedy of Trump’s incompetence will have dissipated by November. With testing — at the level of hundreds of thousands per day — there is at least a real-world chance that recovery would be sufficient enough to allow millions to return to work.
And at that point thousands would forget/ignore how all this got so off-the-charts bad and vote to give Dear Leader another chance.
I won’t say that perspective and proportion are the first casualties of a crisis. But those two virtues of rational thinking have a way of quickly becoming endangered species.
While we don’t yet know the origin of COVID-19, (U.S. intelligence says it picked up no alarmed chatter among Chinese officials indicating an accidental outbreak in one of their bio-chemical labs), we do have a vividly clear picture of how thoroughly, totally and unequivocally the Trump administration has bungled — through fundamental incompetence, self-interest and naked mendacity — the preparation for and response to the pandemic. It’s all there already in the official record. Facts have been established.
But we don’t live, and — perspective alert — no human has ever lived in a world where facts alone control how critical decisions are made. As many have noticed, this is a partisan pandemic. Just as climate change instantly became a partisan battleground. Just as Galileo announcing that Copernicus was right that the Earth revolves around the Sun got him branded a heretic by the Catholic church and thrown into house arrest for the rest of his life.
It doesn’t help much, nor will it do anything to prevent Team Trump from continuing to blunder, ignore science and miscalculate the best available data. But there is a perspective on this calamity — the worst exercise of executive authority in American history (and that, I’ll debate anyone, is fully proportionate) — that I find somewhat reassuring.
A disclaimer here is that I’ve come to see validity in the brain science research that says some if not most of our tribal/partisan divide is a factor of evolutionary biology. As creatures who only a dozen or more centuries ago first figured out how to grow crops, we smugly think we’ve come along way in terms of making quality decisions based on what can be proven with the science we have. But just as with bonobos, hyenas and snail darters some are quicker on the draw than others. As with all evolution in all species, there’s a range in cognitive abilities, usually for good societal reasons.
This sort of thing — quite possibly a textbook example of a little information being a dangerous thing — is always in my mind as I watch, usually aghast, as Trump or one of his media enablers prattles on in wave after unapolgetic wave of misinformation.
So I perked up the other day when author/historian Jon Meacham suggested almost in passing that what we see today with this partisan pandemic is really just the latest battle of The Enlightment. Six hundred years later, we are still locked in the unfinished business of bringing the entire human species out of the dark ages of religious superstition, witchcraft, intellectual serfdom and blind loyalty to whoever holds power over our physical well-being.
I suspect Meacham’s been thinking about this because of the many fascinating ways that The Black Death of the middle ages set the stage for the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But the key point is The Enlightment was merely a tipping point. By no means did every member of the race suddenly reject superstition and embrace rationality. Evolutionary steps are never uniform across a species. IThe Enlightenment was merely when enough people of reason were able to network among themselves to establish a formidable, rational, scientific rebuttal to the superstitions that had failed to protect the 75-200 million who died of the plague.
But “enough” is far different than “all.” Which helps to explain the so often astonishing number of 21st century Americans, (not some lost tribe of the Amazon), who still believe in the fantastical. Like the 55% who say they believe in angels. Or the 39% who don’t “accept” the theory of evolution. Or the disparity of Americans who believe Jesus was born of a virgin, (73%), compared to those who believe humans have something to do with climate change, (61%).
As I say, I don’t know that applying this perspective helps all that much when the 21st century equivalent of necromancers, alchemists, pharisees and court jesters are making a forseeable pandemic several factors of magnitude worse than it should have been. But it may serve to fortify you and those around you for the fight to come, post-pandemic. The fight to step up the next rung on ladder of Enlightenment and prevent this kind of catastrophic failure from ever happening again.
The fight where fools, philistines and misanthropes are quarantined from power.
It’s not an exaggeration to say our election system is seriously ill. Hurdle after hurdle exist on the path to voting, and millions regularly choose to sit out the chaos. Layered on top of all of that, we now have a lethal pandemic that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), predicts will make an encore appearance in the fall, precisely when we’re holding one of the most consequential elections in our history.
All in all, it’s not great a look for the self-proclaimed “greatest democracy on earth.”
But suppose someone told us they had developed a magical elixir for our election problems. I’m talking even better than Trump Water™ and hydroxychloroquine. Something to eliminate the most significant hurdles, such as the significant time and timing issues. Something to end waiting in long lines. Something to allow the “new normal” Stay At Home sensibilities to safely coexist with Election Day.
People with an even passing familiarity with this issue understand that we have that magical elixir right under our noses – vote-by-mail, or vote-at-home. Under such a model, voters are sent their ballots in the mail. They don’t have to go to polling places to obtain them. Then, they can return them in person or via mail.
That’s it. No traveling to polling places. No lines. No work schedule conflicts. No child care barriers. No discriminating election judges. No tight time constraints. No requirement to enter a potentially dangerous COVID hot spot. It’s not a panacea, but it would be a significant improvement.
Yeah But
Untested, you say? We have already been doing vote-by-mail successfully for decades. We’ve offered vote-by-mail to millions of soldiers, absentee voters in all 50 states, many voters in California, and all voters in Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii.
Vote-by-mail is old news. It is tried-and-true. In places where vote-by-mail is used, there is no great movement to go back to a polling place-centric model, because vote-by-mail works better.
Expensive, you say? Without the need for expensive polling place staffing, machines, and infrastructure, vote-by-mail saves between $2-$5 per voter, according to research out of Colorado. Cost considerations shouldn’t be the primary reason we implement vote-by-mail, but they also shouldn’t be a reason that we don’t.
Fraudulent, you say? In the wide swath of America that is already voting by mail, there is no evidence of fraud, and bar code and automated record-matching technology continue to make it more secure than ever. The non-partisan Politifact finds that Trump’s frequent claims of fraud are, well, fraudulent.
This lack of widespread fraud shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, who wants to risk a $25,000 fine, as they have in Oregon, over gaining a single vote, or a few votes, in a pool of millions? As it turns out, almost no one.
Democratic plot, you say? The non-partisan do-gooders at Vote At Home explain this one well:
Utah, the 4th full Vote at Home state, is decidedly “red.” Republicans also dominate Montana and Arizona, where 70% of voters automatically are mailed their ballots as “permanent absentee” voters. Nebraska and North Dakota, also Republican dominated states, have also expanded the use of vote at home options. While Oregon and Washington, the first two states where VAH initially took hold, are today more “blue than red,” both states have elected Secretaries of State who are Republicans – and big fans of this system.
On a more tactical level, the Republican party, whose base is disproportionately elderly, should probably reevaluate this issue in the pandemic era. If I were a Republican turnout strategist, I would worry about depending on their huge block of frightened elderly Americans being willing to bring their over-flowing basket of comorbidities into crowded polling venues during a pandemic.
But you know what? As a Democrat, I want those elderly MAGA-hat wearing seniors to have easy, safe access to voting. I want as many people voting as possible. If my party can’t win a majority of the votes in an election where everyone has an equal opportunity to safely and fairly participate, then my party needs to get it’s ass back to the drawing board to come up with better policy ideas.
Other questions, you say? Read this well-sourced document produced by Vote At Home. Spoiler alert: None of the other excuses hold up to reason or research either.
Don’t Get Your Hopes Up, Yet
The reasons to adopt universal vote-by-mail are patently obvious, and an overwhelming majority of Americans of all political stripes agree. A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey found that nearly three-fourths (72%) of Americans, including about two-thirds (65%) of Republicans, support mail-in ballots to protect voters from respiratory disease.
The experts at the Centers for Disease Control agree:
Encourage voters to use voting methods that minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations. * Encourage mail-in methods of voting if allowed in the jurisdiction.
But as with so many issues with overwhelming majority support – such as expanding access to Medicare, higher taxes for the wealthiest 1% and corporations, background checks for gun purchasers, marijuana prohibition, helping Dreamers become citizens, cutting Social Security and Medicare, higher minimum wage, paid maternity leave, and more – Trump, McConnell and their supporting cast in the U.S. Senate are the barrier. Cue David Byrne: “Same as it ever was.”
None of those things will happen until Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate Majority are removed in the fall. None. In Minnesota, Senate Republicans are similarly promising to block a wise vote-by-mail proposal recently floated by Secretary of State Steve Simon.
So while many people around the world are required to put their lives at risk in armed conflicts to establish or preserve their democracy, millions of Americans in 2020 likewise could be required by Republicans to put their lives at risk in deadly germ-infested schools, churches, community centers, and fire stations to preserve their democracy.
Give me democracy, or give me death? In a vast sea of Trump-McConnell era outrages, forcing Americans into this life-and-death choice on November 3rd may be the most outrageous development of all.
In every American crisis there’s a moment like the one after the 2018 Parkland High School slaughter. A woman found her way into an exclusive Republican fund-raising event on toney Key Biscayne across the water from downtown Miami. She wheedled her way through the crowd of politicians and big ticket donors until she found Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House.
Polite and deferential to start, she eventually asked Ryan if he was, “Here celebrating the death of 17 children.” At this point the silver-tongued Ryan waved her off saying that despite being the star attraction at a political fund-raiser he, “didn’t want to talk politics”. The line is a variation on the tried and true, “Now is not the time to talk [insert whatever the crisis of the moment is all about.]” (Here’s a few more examples of the same thing.)
There’s an amusing but deadly dark tussle going on amid the torrent of COVID-19 news. This, in case you’ve been distracted by the rapidly escalating death toll, the administration ordering thousands of body bags and dodging basic questions like when will it produce enough tests to moderate the near total lockdown of American society, is the matter of suing FoxNews and other key members of the right-wing disinformation network. For what? For their culpability in the spread of the contagion.
Sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed tech columnist Kara Swisher launched into Sean Hannity in her Tuesday column, using her 80 year-old mother, a Hannity super-fan as an example of the very high cost of the crap (a polite word) regularly spewed by Hannity to his millions of credulous listeners and viewers.
“Facebook was not my mother’s source of misinformation (in fact, the company has been trying to improve in this area). It was not the fault of Dr. Google, which has at least pushed out more good information than bad. And my mom doesn’t use Twitter. Instead, it was Fox, the whole Fox and nothing but the Fox. Many children of older parents have come to know this news diet as the equivalent of extreme senior sugar addiction mixed with a series of truly unpleasant and conspiracy-laden doughnuts.”
While a lawsuit over Fox’s role in feeding Donald Trump and TrumpNation ludicrously erroneous and arguably lethal misinformation, to the point that Fox-Trumpers continued on with activities that led to the infection and deaths of god knows how many others is a delicious thing to imagine. A kind of Scopes Trial for the Trump era. Another sweaty courthouse lawn somewhere. Perhaps Palm Beach in July. A trial of not just Trump, but the larger network of astonishingly cynical interests that have enabled and invested in him.
But that, as Swisher writes, isn’t going to happen. Modern America doesn’t work that way. Nevertheless, Hannity has gone ballistic, calling Swisher every name he can use on air (and Twitter) while – of course – failing to disprove any of the accusations of naked mendacity she posed against him.
He’s sweating. He can feel the first draft of history’s dim view of what he’s done.
TrumpNation is up on its arthritic hind legs, snarling and hissing through the few good incisors they have left that liberals are exploiting the pandemic to undermine Trump. It’s a more personalized, cultish variation on, “Now is not the time … to assess blame for how bad this pandemic has become in the richest and most technologically advanced society on the planet.”
But it very much is. Now is the time to make damn certain there is no doubt in a fat majority of Americans’ minds why this is as bad as it is, and why it could have been much less worse. Fewer infected. Fewer dead. Fewer livelihoods destroyed.
Given everything that is known and provable — just at this pointin the crisis — of what Trump knew, what he was told by our intelligence agencies, by the likes of the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonier and what he then failed to do, what diametrically opposed “untruths” he told his gullible, credulous fan base about the likelihood and lethality of what was coming is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of character and duty.
And as much as I wish I could say that is hyperbolic. It’s not. Look around you.
Among the Usual Sage Heads of punditry and establishment media there’s this attitude that it’s est to wait. “This will all get sorted out once the crisis is over,” and “there will government hearings.” Please. As with any meaningful response to our weekly gun slaughter, “Now is not the time … ” is the all-important first step to … doing nothing. To letting the perps skate, and enduring the same tragedy all over again.
If you’re out there rattling your phone lines, your e-mail, your Facebook postings, your Zoom meet-ups, your Twitter accounts and your socially distant dog walks with your neighbors pounding the point that this is, verifiably and conclusively, the worst failure of an American president in the country’s history and that it is still failing, good on you. That’s informed citizenship. That’s a sonic wave with potentially critical vibrations.
In order to defeat the virus, fraud and incompetence have to be brought under control … now. Not a year from now in some musty D.C. hearing room with Devin Nunes cross-examining Anthony Fauci.
Governors and mayors and first responders have their hands (too) full because of Trump (and FoxNew’s) malfeasance and mendacity. Support them every way you can. But don’t mistake the importance, right now and for weeks and months to come, of seizing this moment.
What moment? The moment to write history. To establish beyond any doubt who fcked up and how badly. As you may have heard, history is written by the victors.
Sometimes, even the great Washington Post buries the lede. Disguised in a terrific story with a bland headline that only a supply chain manager could love (“Desperate for medical equipment, states encounter a beleaguered national stockpile”) was this disturbing and fascinating pandemic response story: “Florida Is Only State to Receive Everything It Asked For”
That’s the salient nugget Political Wire chose to highlight from the Post story, even though it was buried in paragraph twelve of the Post’s 2,500 word tome. Political wire got the headline prioritization right.
While the Post’s headline and lede didn’t promote the most ethically troubling part of its reporting, the three reporters who worked on the article, Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sen, and Beth Reinhard, certainly did great reporting about the differences in how various states say they are being treated by Team Trump during the pandemic response.
Beyond the widely publicized problems that hotspot states like New York and Washington have been having with the Trump Administration’s response, the Post piece documented how other states also are struggling due to lack of adequate federal help:
Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.
Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.
“The governor has spoken to the president daily, and the entire congressional delegation has been working as one for the betterment of the state of Florida,” said Jared Moskowitz, the emergency management division’s director.”
“Florida has been an exception.” While my jaw dropped when I got to that part of the article, the Post shrugged it off: “Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines.”
How about this for a potential “political line?” Unlike the underserved New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maine, the fully served Florida is one of the six states widely considered a “battleground state” that will determine the outcome of Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.
“Those will be the six most critical states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, told Newsweek.
“There will be others that’ll be important in varying degrees,” he said, “but those will be ones we’ll ultimately look back on and say, ‘How many of them did Democrats win back and were they able to win enough to win the presidency?'”
Given Florida’s undeniable status as a crucial swing state in Trump’s 2020 Electoral College calculus, it’s critically important for any news publication to pose this very legitimate question: Is lifesaving equipment being distributed based on patients’ needs or political needs?
I’m open to the possibility that there is an epidemiologically sound explanation for why Florida has been at the head of Team Trump’s pandemic response line, while bright blue hot-spot cities like Boston and New York City are not. Skeptical, but open. But to ignore the obvious political angle, not pose that legitimate question to Trump officials, and bury the Florida exception in paragraph twelve is baffling.
What’s even more puzzling to me is why people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi apparently aren’t raising the same legitimate question. Because the reckless game Trump seems to be playing here is not just ethically untenable, it’s also politically perilous.
This isn’t intended to be gratuitous dude-bashing. My Y chromosome is a pre-existing condition that fundamentally shapes me, and I’m pretty darn fond of myself. While I sometimes half-heartedly try to avoid some forms of my innate Neanderthal-ness, it seems pretty baked into my DNA. I scratch inappropriately. I groom only sporadically. I mansplain with the worst of them.
But this business about men not social distancing in the Covid-19 Era is embarrassingly stupid and/or arrogant, even for us. An Altarum survey tells the tale: Nearly one-quarter (24%) of men say they are going to public spaces “a lot” or “far more than usual,” compared to only 10% of women.
Why? Confronted about going to a public place with Covid-19 cases increasing rapidly, I can predict the reaction of many of my male friends. A smirk. A shrug of the shoulders. A devil may care twinkle of the eye. “You can’t live your life afraid of everything,” they’ll say. “If it’s my time, it’s my time.”
For those of you who don’t speak Dude-ish, allow me to translate what these guys are trying to convey to the world: “I’m a bad ass. I’m courageous.”
Obviously, in this context, this is complete and utter bullshit. Yes, courage sometimes means going into dangerous situations, and public gatherings in the middle of a pandemic are dangerous. But let’s be real, fellas. You’re going to the dangerous situations to get yourself a beer, laugh, a corporate brownie point, or a thrill, not to rescue someone.
Going into these dangerous situations for those reasons isn’t rushing into the smoke. It’s more like what suicide bombers do to themselves and innocents.
As has been widely reported, Covid-19 is often carried by people who are asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic, so none of us knows who has the lethal germ-bomb duct-taped to our chest. Walking into public gatherings armed with that knowledge isn’t remotely courageous. It’s either ignorant or deplorably self-centered.
So fellow dudes, you won’t catch me scolding you for your utterly defensible scratching decisions. But could we get just this life-and-death decision right?
