Permalink to this post This essay was originally published in November of 2017 as part of a series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Zeran v. AOL case. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability […]
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Stuart Stevens knows Ohio. He worked for John Kasich, Rob Portman and focused on the state for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. This piece in the Atlantic about what’s happened to the state since then is a fascinating look at the fascist takeover of the GOP: What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government. In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.
Vance has said many, many repellent things in his quest to be MAGA’s favorite little boy. But this one really takes the cake: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.” Yeah, watching your dad beat the hell out of your mother or getting beaten yourself is a super healthy thing for kids. Everyone says he’s super smart. I’m not convinced. He’s slick. But he has said some really stupid things even by MAGA standards.
While the republic burns, the press chases clicks Watching Day 3 of RNC convention coverage last night on a couple of channels, I found most of it as horrible as Donald Trump finds Milwaukee. Republican speakers shamelessly spewed lies, distortions and smears. (Daniel Dale deconstructs just a few for CNN.) Republican conventioneers held signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! (CBS reports it was, in part, a deliberate troll intended to “make heads explode.”) The convention’s message is horrible, yes, but so is the coverage. But what made my head spin was a promo during a commerical break on MSNBC, the kind featuring a snappy clips of recent coverage. The montage was all Biden is old, will he or won’t he drop out, etc. Nothing about the stakes in this election for women and for international order and democracy. Nothing about Donald Trump’s incoherence, the GOP’s rejection of the rule of law, Project 2025 plans for terminating our republic (with extreme prejudice), our country teetering on the edge of dictatorship. The days of news divisions being loss leaders for TV networks were gone decades ago.
This is a good piece by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian about the effects of Trump’s assassination attempt. It’s truly sickening: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts. But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party.
I expected more, I must admit The best dispatch from the GOP convention so far comes from Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. It has seemed to me that the convention is a bit boring and listless all things considered. You’d think with their main man wandering around with a bandage on his head after an assassination attempt, the energy would be off the charts. And I would have assumed that the Really Big Showman would have orchestrated a much more exciting program even aside from that. But it doesn’t seem to be. There’s a good reason the man himself is falling asleep every night in front of everyone. It’s boring. You have to read O’Hehir’s vivid (and hilarious) prose to get the real flavor of what’s going on there but I think this observation is important to understand what’s really going on: The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history.
A bunch of polls out today showing that a huge majority of Democrats want a different presidential candidate but the race is still within the margin of error. So, as I have said before, Democrats will walk over hot coals to vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump;. The question remains how many of those independent swing voters and 3rd party types will do the same. The race is still stuck. This is the NBC poll: In case you’re wondering whether Harris does better well, yes and no, depending: [T]he poll showed Trump doing slightly better among white voters when matched up with Harris instead of Biden, leading her by 16 points among these voters, compared with his 14-point advantage here against Biden. (These subgroups of voters, however, all have substantially larger margins of error than the poll’s overall margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.) Among other demographics — by age, by gender, among Latino voters — there was very little difference between Biden or Harris. But the biggest differences between Biden and Harris in the matchup against Trump go well beyond demographics.
The Midas Cult strikes back Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to. His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them: “Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.” There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.
Meanwhile: I have serious doubts the Democrats can win with this dynamic. I don’t know that it will change if Biden gets out but it’s guaranteed that it won’t if he stays in. This isn’t the first time the press has put its thumb on the scale of the Democratic choice for president. We know that. In fact, they do it more often than not. Maybe this time it’s for the best but it doesn’t make it right. It usually doesn’t work out well for the good guys.