Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: : What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
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On October 7, 2023, fighters from Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 400 soldiers and around 800 civilians. They raped, injured and kidnapped hundreds of others. By October 13, the Intelligence Ministry of Israel had produced a plan for how to deal with these attacks. Led by the Likud Party member Gila Gamliel, the document … Continue reading The Gamliel Plan
The press did not fail to learn from 2016. It learned what drew eyeballs. Do reporters want to find themselves flung out of windows after January 20, 2025 under a Trump dictatorship? Seems so, the way they rushed to cover the poisoned special counsel report on “painfully slow,” old Joe Biden’s handling of sensitive materials. His exoneration was buried beneath coverage of a gratuitous, MAGA-reinforcing narrative in the report raising Biden’s age as an issue. The path the press chose, The New Republic subhead reads, “suggests we’re stuck in 2016 again.” We know what Trump thinks of the media. We know he admires how Vladimir Putin and other world strong men control theirs. He dreams of ruling with an “iron fist,” like the Chinese president. We know what sort of second term he has in mind. A dictatorship, more or less, with himself unfettered by law to do as he pleases. Including to whom he pleases. So, does the American media have a death wish? Apparently, but reporters will be making the owners money all the way to the sidewalk.
Advice for Biden This piece by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic makes a good point: [M]istakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed.
Yes, we’re talking about Republicans Michael Tomasky’s leadership of the New Republic has been a breath of fresh air. If you haven’t given it a look in years you need to go back to it and check it out. I don’t think it’s ever been this good.And Tomasky himself is writing a lot and it’s all characteristically sharp. Take this insight which I think is right on, made in the wake of the monumentally embarrassing week for congressional Republicans: Republicans today are consumed by this primal need for immediate gratification. They’re the party of the dopamine rush. Go read an article about the brain, and you’ll learn in five minutes that dopamine helps regulate pleasure, and pleasure is great, but too much dopamine leads to delusions, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis. The entire party has a massive and collective mental disorder, a severe chemical imbalance in what remains of its collective brain, which explains why it kneels so slavishly before a psychotic man with the emotional regulation of a 5-year-old.
Let’s just put this week in the past, shall we? Have cocktail and enjoy: Aaaaaah…..
Ex-Fox hack humiliated by world-class propagandist Guess Tucker Carlson forgot to tan his balls before interviewing Vladimir Putin. The Russian dictator chewed him up and spit him out. It was “a consummation Devoutly to be wished” for the perpetually puzzled former Fox News host. Tucker, was it good for you? Putin couldn’t care less. Digby has long said of the American far right, “shamelessness is their superpower.” But how much of their behavior is shamelessness and how much is lack of self-respect? MAGAs less well-heeled than Carlson compensate for their deficits with large-capacity magazines and family-impoverishing personal arsenals. Carlson had his self-respect (in a phrase the right loves to use) “shoved down his throat” by the Russian strong man. CNN‘s headline seems to summarize the event: Putin walks away with propaganda victory after Tucker Carlson’s softball interview Politico: Few expected anything ground-breaking to emerge from Tucker Carlson’s sit-down with Vladimir Putin, conducted in Moscow on Tuesday and published on the conservative pundit’s website Thursday.
Dream bigger “When does a political fight over some people’s rights feel like some people’s fight — and when does it feel like everyone’s?” asks Anand Giridharadas at The Ink. His topic is “de-siloing” our struggle for rights for specific groups and instead universalizing their struggles. We are too easily trapped in our own narrow narratives and sucked into right’s. Special counsel Robert K. Hur knew he would catch hell from MAGA Republicans for his investigation concluding without indicting President Biden for his retention of privileged materials. So on Thursday Hur redirected the public narrative away from “no criminal charges are warranted” to Joe Biden is senile with a few poisoned adverbs and adjectives. No one will talk about Biden’s innocence now, or the remarkable achievments of a great president. They’re too busy stomping around in the right’s “he’s too old” framing. What the left must do to de-silo their defense of liberties is less rhetorical jujitsu than speaking in terms that bring everyone into the fight.
When will Democrats understand that they get no points for being nonpartisan? Perhaps someday Democrats will learn their lesson but I’m not holding out much hope at this point. I’m referring, of course, to their inexplicable habit of allowing only Republicans to hold the job of Special Prosecutor. This has been going on for decades now and the results have been predictable. The idea is to prove how noble and non-partisan they are in comparison to the hacks on the GOP side and it just ends up coming back to bite them. The habit goes back to Watergate after President Richard Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon had Cox replaced with one of his supporters, Texas Judge Leon Jaworski, whom everyone assumed would be sympathetic to the president. As it turned out he was appalled by what he saw and issued subpoenas for the tapes which wound up in the Supreme Court as US v Nixon. However, it was later revealed that Jaworski didn’t agree with the Grand Jury’s recommendation to criminally indict the president and resigned from the job just as the cover-up trials began.
That would be rude There was lots of talk this week about Nikki Haley losing to “none of the above” in a nevada primary that Trump didn’t participate in and Trump was in Nevada patting himself on the back for his so-called triumph in the rigged caucus that Haley didn’t participate in. It was, all in all, something of a shit show. But get a load of this: Both Biden and Trump have the nominations locked up. Haley is a protest vote at this point, We don’t know how many Haley voters will hold their nose and vote for him next November but I would guess that most of them will. But the numbers he’s putting up in these primaries shows that he’s going to need every last one of them. Maybe at some point we’ll see the media talking about that. Until then, tell a friend. That may be the only way they’ll hear about this.