Today's Press Poodle

Michelle Goldberg can be one of the Poodliest of the Press Poodles.

That said, she does show signs - on occasion - of pulling her head out of her ass.

Her OpEd piece today is one such occasion. Kinda.

(pay wall)

Four Stark Lessons From a Democratic Upset


By Michelle Goldberg

When I reached Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Monday morning, the Democratic representative-elect from Washington State was sitting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Her race against Joe Kent, a stolen-election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump, had been called on Saturday, giving her enough time to get to Capitol Hill for new-member orientation. Because of the Republican lean of her district, Washington’s Third, her victory was widely considered the biggest upset of any House contest; FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning. “A lot of people sacrificed to get me here,” she told me, speaking with particular gratitude of all the mothers who called in babysitting favors to knock on doors for her.

I’d gone to Gluesenkamp Perez’s district in September because I saw it as a microcosm of the midterms. Kent, a Fox News regular who put a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll, had ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the primary. Gluesenkamp Perez hoped that there would be enough moderate Republicans worried about the future of American democracy, and aghast at the end of Roe v. Wade, to offset Kent’s partisan advantage. The outcome, I thought, would tell us whether Republicans would pay any price for their extremism.

It is a profound relief to see that they have. Having spent a fair amount of time thinking about this bellwether race, I see four main takeaways from it.

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism.

During her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez spoke about having a miscarriage and being forced to make her way through a wall of protesters to get medical care at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While Kent called for a national abortion ban, she appealed to her district’s libertarian streak by including both gun rights and reproductive rights in her promise to “protect our freedoms.”

On Monday, she said that voters connected abortion bans to a broader narrative of right-wing radicalism. Even if voters thought abortion rights in Washington State were safe with Democrats in charge, the end of Roe showed that Republicans are willing to upend some basic assumptions undergirding American life. “It made people take Republicans, especially the extreme wing, seriously when they say they want to defund the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I.,” she said.

Heads Up: Here comes the Both Sides razor blade in the apple - although it's a tiny bit less obvious than what NYT editors usually require.

Please proceed.

3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber.

A common rap on liberals is that they’re trapped in their own ideological bubble, unable to connect with normal people who don’t share their niche concerns. This cycle, that was much truer of conservatives. The ultimate example of this was the Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, the human incarnation of a right-wing message board, who lauded the Unabomber manifesto and put out gun fetishist campaign ads that made him look like a serial killer.

Kent suffered from a similar sort of insularity. He attacked sports fans, suggesting it’s not masculine for men to “watch other men compete in a silly game,” a view common in corners of the alt-right but unintelligible to normies. Gluesenkamp Perez said Kent seemed shocked when, during a debate, his line about vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” didn’t go over well, which she took as a sign that he’d spent too much time “operating in the chat rooms.”

The ultimate expression of the right-wing echo chamber was the Stop the Steal movement itself. Conservatives might have been less credulous about it if they weren’t so out of touch with the Biden-voting majority.

4. Data isn’t everything.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.

Democrats obviously shouldn’t disregard poll numbers or data about the partisan breakdown of the electorate. But we underestimate the human factor in politics at our peril.

“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.

Qult45

Stochastic terrorism is a real thing, and it's one of the main weapons in the Daddy State arsenal.

So I don't have much sympathy for the rubes who've been suckered by a charismatic cult leader, but there's something to what Ms Rosenberg has to say here - something worth noting about how we need to be watchful so we're not helping to embolden these idiots, and making things worse inadvertently.

That said, I still have to lean towards "get your heads outa your asses, guys - then we can talk."

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion
The horror of people willing to die for Donald Trump

On Thursday afternoon, a man whom authorities have identified as Ricky Shiffer was shot and killed in a stand-off with police officers after he allegedly tried to break into a FBI office in Cincinnati. Reports suggest that he may have been motivated by a strong devotion to former president Donald Trump and by anger at the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.

But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.

It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. (The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses, according to Post sources.)

And goodness knows, Trump isn’t the only person whose acolytes behave wretchedly. Die-hard Johnny Depp fans and the stans who enlisted in rapper Kanye West’s online war against actor Pete Davidson are proof that nasty crusades of all types will never lack for recruits.

But it’s different when people start dying.

Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.

Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Post's View: After the Mar-a-Lago search, horrific violence follows reckless rhetoric

Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.

That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop bc the former host of celebrity apprentice wasnt allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the white house.”

It's easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.

Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.

The absurdity and maliciousness of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?

An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.

Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defense can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.

Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.

Today's Non-troversy

Jennifer Rubin has been among the best cheerleaders for the worst of "conservative" excesses in the past.

She has since become one of the best allies of the Resistance, acknowledging her mistakes and her failings, and saying straight out that she got some of it very wrong when she was so very Pro-GOP.

To the point: recently, there's been a a bit of a manufactured dustup regarding the absence of Biden Press Conferences.

For myself, I don't really care about that. I think it's understood that a president does those things as a way to peddle his wares directly - look at the gob-smacking backyard circus act that Qult45 put on with all the self-awareness of a flatworm. 

The real exchange happens at the the daily briefing with the the White House Press Sec'y (Jen Psaki as of now), and at any of the department-level pressers when there's news at hand and things we need to know about.

So anyway, Jennifer Rubin, WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Want a formal presidential news conference? Reporters need better questions.

Many media outlets have been pestering the White House for a formal presidential news conference. The premise that such a setting is the only one that can fully inform the public — as opposed to questions at other presidential appearances or during one-on-one interviews — is weak at best.

If daily briefings with the White House press secretary are any clue, collective questioning from the White House press corps can be replete with dumb, repetitive or superficial questions. In light of the utterly ineffective news conferences during the last administration (assuming the goal was truth-telling) and the inability of reporters to follow up on one another’s questions, I fail to see what is so special about a group news conference as opposed to a tough interview (e.g., the interviews the former president had with Fox News’s Chris Wallace or Axios’s Jonathan Swan).

Badgering the White House to use the word “crisis” rather than finding out what is happening at the border does not constitute serious journalism, nor does expressing incredulity when they are told President Biden does not want to respond to his disgraced predecessor. The job of a tough reporters is not to try to get the president to say a magic word or to confess that he is lying about not paying attention to something. Such behavior is performance art.

That said, the president should answer questions (in whatever format) on a regular basis. And the media should ask probing questions designed to elicit information and hold him accountable for rhetoric and actions. They might try some of the following:

• Had the Republicans made a counteroffer to your rescue plan in the $1 trillion range, would you have been willing to negotiate? Could the package have been $1.5 trillion and have the same result?
• How much debt is too much debt?
• How much of an infrastructure bill should be “paid for”?
• Should we raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations for the sake of tax fairness?
• What are you going to do about the attempt by Republicans to roll back voting rights? Will you support a modification of the filibuster if there is no other way to protect voting rights?
• How do you work with governors who refuse to follow basic guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thereby risking more lives?
• Does the U.S. exit from the Iran nuclear deal and imposition of China sanctions give you leverage? If so, how do you intend to use it?
• How do you reach tens of millions of Americans who are fed a daily diet of conspiracies and propaganda?
• What guarantees can you give workers in carbon-based occupations that a shift to a green-energy economy will not leave them worse off?
• Did you consider personal sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Why did you not sanction him directly?
• You are trailing other presidents in the number of confirmed nominees. Should we cut back on the number of political appointees or the number requiring Senate confirmation?
• What reforms for the federal judiciary would you consider?
• What will you do to address the situation at the border? Can we work in the home countries of migrants to keep unaccompanied minors from setting out on a journey to the United States?
• Is student debt forgiveness a subsidy for wealthier Americans?
• What role can the federal government play in reducing polarization and creating a common sense of purpose?
• Republican politicians resist the idea of “implicit bias” and deny “systemic racism.” How would you explain these concepts to the American people?

Real journalism, as practiced by real journalists - what a concept.

The Fog

‘I don’t know what to believe’ is an unpatriotic cop-out. Do better, Americans.

WaPo, Margaret Sullivan:

Since I became The Washington Post’s media columnist in 2016, I’ve developed a habit of asking people, wherever I travel, how they get their news.

In keeping with that, I had a brief chat last weekend in Sarasota, Fla., with a middle-aged man (a local used-car salesman, he said).

“Pretty much just from here,” was how he answered my question, indicating his smartphone. When I dug for specifics, he mentioned Fox News.

The impeachment hearings, which that day had offered riveting testimony from diplomat Marie Yovanovitch? He merely shrugged: Didn’t know, didn’t care.

That plenty of Americans share this apathy about what’s happening in their government is appalling, but hardly shocking.

Many clearly do care, as the movement of public opinion favoring impeachment suggests, but there’s a whole category that pollsters and pundits call “low-information voters.”

The New York Times published a story Monday with this headline: “ ‘No one believes anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News.” The reporters quoted a Wisconsin woman who said she didn’t know what to think of the various conflicting claims she’d heard about President Trump’s apparent abuse of power.

“You have to go in and really research it,” she said, and she doubted that many people cared enough to do that.

David Roberts, writing in Vox this week, explored “tribal epistemology” — the idea that “what’s good for our tribe” has become more important than facts, evidence, and documentation. He identifies a crisis that “involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality.”

Roberts, the Times article and Florida Man all point to the same thing: A lot of Americans don’t know much and won’t exert themselves beyond their echo chambers to find out.

This is the way a democracy self-destructs.

And what’s more, it’s not that difficult for American citizens to do much, much better.

Granted, the flow of news is unending — exhausting, even. And granted, there’s a lot of disinformation out there.

But apathy — or giving in to confusion — is dangerous.

“I’m terrified that the idea that it is all too much and it is okay to tune out is getting socialized as an acceptable response,” said Dru Menaker, chief operating officer of PEN America, the free-expression advocacy organization.

“Our country is being challenged to its very core, and we have an obligation to pay attention precisely because things are so overwhelming,” she told me by email.

I couldn’t agree more. And it’s not really all that hard to develop some constructive news habits.

It doesn’t take a research project into every claim and counterclaim.

If every American did any two of the following things, the “who knows?” club could be swiftly disbanded.

Subscribe to a national newspaper and go beyond the headlines into the substance of the main articles; subscribe to your local newspaper and read it thoroughly — in print, if possible; watch the top of “PBS NewsHour” every night; watch the first 15 minutes of the half-hour broadcast nightly news; tune in to a public-radio news broadcast; do a simple fact-check search when you hear conflicting claims.

For those who can’t afford to subscribe to newspapers, almost all public libraries can provide access.

“Whatever the president wants us to believe, there are tested and reliable news sources,” Menaker noted. “There are even more firsthand sources than ever where you can judge yourself — links to documents, video clips, hours of televised testimony.”

I would also offer this small list of things to stop doing: Stop getting your news and opinions from social media. Stop watching Fox News, especially the prime-time shows, which are increasingly untethered to reality.

If every American gave 30 minutes a day to an earnest and open-minded effort to stay on top of the news, we might actually find our way out of this crisis.

As Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, noted Tuesday on Twitter, it was on Nov. 19, 1863, that President Lincoln challenged his fellow citizens to rise to a “great task.”

Americans must dedicate themselves to ensuring, Lincoln urged in the Gettysburg Address, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

So, too, in this historic moment.

After all, authoritarianism loves nothing more than a know-nothing vacuum: people who throw up their hands and say they can’t tell facts from lies.

And democracy needs news consumers — let’s call them patriotic citizens — who stay informed and act accordingly.

Flag-waving is fine. But truth-seeking is what really matters.

Be Afraid

...because if you're not afraid, you might start acting like you're free.

From NYT OpEd:

A Long One

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Trump's shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America's two-party political system for what was probably a half-assed ego trip all along, adventure tourism for the idiot rich.

That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation's history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. Trump picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.

The only thing that could get in the way of real change – if not now, then surely very soon – was a rebellion so maladroit, ill-conceived and irresponsible that even the severest critics of the system would become zealots for the status quo.

As is usual for Taibbi, it's kind of long and navel-gaze-y and it's a bit emotionally nihilistic, but there's a truth to it that needs to be said, which is not just "Stoopid GOP - what the hell happened to you guys!?!"  

It is in fact partly that, but it's mostly: Hillary's not the horrible thing so many people are so eager to identify her as being, but she's also not the change agent so many of us think we need (at least she hasn't been for quite a while).

And for my own bad self, even though it's almost certain she'll win this thing, don't get happy. Don't start thinking we can hire her into the Oval Office and every shitty thing the GOP's been trying to pull will magically disappear.  The GOP will go on trying to pull shitty things, and a good politician like Hillary Clinton will go along with some of them in order to get a deal on some of things she wants to do.

Constant public pressure and the election of "left-leaning" congress critters will help Hillary stay with what we think we're electing her to do.

Upside Down And Backwards

The National Treasure formerly known as Charlie Pierce has today's take down on David Brooks: 

(yeah yeah - OK - "today" as in 4 days ago. I'm pleasantly otherwise occupied. Priorities hafta shift a little and I catch things up when I can)

Moral Hazard noticed that Master had left his computer on, and that there were words on the screen, arranged in paragraphs. He wandered over and put his paws up on the desk. He looked over at Master again. Master's eyes were open but he was not seeing anything. Moral Hazard read, and he understood. He walked sadly out of the room, through the kitchen, and out onto the fire escape over the alley. He let the afternoon breezes wash over him. He wondered if Master would ever wake up, or if anyone would notice if he did.

My own little bit: for all The Fountainhead fans, just turn things over; look at the mirror image, and it's easy to see that David Brooks is straight outa Central Casting - positively born to the role of Ellsworth Toohey.  A venal, self-serving word-weasel paid to reinforce The Noble Lie.  And to paraphrase St Ayn's own way of describing this thing: "the epitome of evil is the man who knows the truth and recognizes it when he hears it, but denies it and substitutes a conveniently profitable lie - meant to deflect the anger of the mob, and redirect it against the very tools they need to free themselves."

You can get regular and thorough David Brooks take-downs at driftglass.

And every Friday afternoon, check in with The Professional Left Podcast.

Crooks & Liars vs Naomi Wolf

C&L blogger Karoli is engaged in what I characterize as a cat fight with Naomi Wolf over Wolf's assertion that some city governments coordinated with DHS regarding the crackdown on OWS.

While I agree with a lot of the commenters that Karoli doesn't need to parse Wolf's statements quite so closely, I think Karoli is mostly right to remind us that intuition is important and should not be ignored, but real evidence is what we're supposed to be looking for - not suspicion and innuendo and assumption. 

Naomi Wolf Defends Herself By Ignoring Her Grand Conspiracy Theory