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.
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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.
Trump keeps saying he’ll be a dictator for one day so that he can close the border and “drill, drill, drill” which, as Philip Bump points out in the Washington Post, he came up with on the fly during a Sean Hannity interview. Apparently the cult just loves it: On Wednesday, UMass Amherst released the results of a poll conducted by YouGov in which respondents were asked about the concept. The framing of the comment was stark, excluding Trump’s specific plans for using his theoretical dictatorial power. It was just, “Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term. Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?” A plurality of respondents said this was “definitely bad” with 6 in 10 saying it was “definitely” or “probably” bad. Among Republicans, though, a third said it was “definitely good” with three-quarters saying it was at least “probably” good.
I know you recall that time he was at the CDC and said that he could have been a scientist because he “really understands that stuff” and “they all said so.” Get a load of this one from a few years back: He also aced the cognitive test you know. Better than anyone. All the doctors say so.
Republicans want their new weapon With the 2022 Dobbs decision abolishing womens’s federal right to an abortion, Republicans lost a campaign issue they’d campaigned on reliably for decades. It was like the Pentagon’s identity crisis after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon spent the 1990s not knowing who it should be planning to fight. Republicans have failed again and again since 2022 to block abortion protection amendments in the states, even as fringe right legislators all but lock women with doomed pregnancies into iron maidens as they bleed out. Abortion is on its way to being a third rail in Republican politics. The issue is now a political loser. To replace abortion, the GOP settled on Great Replacement theory, an isotopic variant of the Southern Strategy. Republicans stoke fears of brown-skinned hordes of immigrants pouring across the U.S. southern border to knock white Americans off the top of the social ladder. It’s not about race as much as power and status. Race is just the icing. Speaking with Sen.