LIBELING DOMINION WAS PROBABLY A SHREWD BUSINESS DECISION FOR FOX

Yes, they knew they were lying -- not that it will matter.

In the days and weeks after the 2020 elections, the Fox News Channel repeatedly broadcast false claims that then-President Donald Trump had been cheated of victory.

Off the air, the network's stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them "mind-blowingly nuts," "totally off the rails" and "completely bs" - often in far earthier terms.

The network's top primetime stars - Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity - texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television....

Those revelations and far more surfaced in legal filings made public late Thursday afternoon as part of Dominion Voting System's blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox and its parent company.

Fox's superstars attacked colleagues who told the truth about the vote because Job #1 at Fox is protecting the brand. Fox's decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden before any other news organization was seen as extremely bad for the brand, as Dominion's brief notes:

... on November 9, the impact of Fox's Arizona call became more evident to Fox executives. Carlson told [Fox News CEO Suzanne] Scott directly: "I've never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it." ... Scott immediately relayed the email to Lachlan Murdoch.... She told [Fox senior vice president Irena] Briganti that [D.C. bureau chief Bill] Sammon did not understand the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ which she found astonishing given that as a top executive it was Sammon's job "to protect the brand." ... And on that day -- "day one," as Scott termed it -- Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back.

The election was the top news story in America for the next two and a half months. The damage to the brand was clear throughout that period -- in January, after Biden's inauguration, it was reported that Fox was only the third most watched cable news channel in the post-election period, behind CNN and MSNBC. But promoting election conspiracies was probably what Fox needed to do to retain enough viewers to mount a comeback early in 2021.

We know how that comeback happened:

Fox News is now on its third segment about "cancel culture" in the last 65 minutes. Beyond parody. pic.twitter.com/6O132TtvQf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 29, 2020

Fox News has mentioned "critical race theory" nearly 1,300 times in the past 3.5 months -- doubling month over month https://t.co/GUnBC7sb4P pic.twitter.com/w7DmIr9Nr3

— Media Matters (@mmfa) June 15, 2021

Cancel culture, CRT, "grooming," Hunter Biden -- Fox has generated audience-pleasing content since 2021, but election conspiratorialism got Fox through a rough patch with a lot less damage than two and a half months of telling would have caused. Fox was again the most-watched cable channel in 2021. In the spring of 2022, rival One America News Network was dropped by DirecTV, and Newsmax was dropped last month.

The $1.6 billion in damages Dominion is seeking seems like a lot of money, but it's about a month and a half of revenue for Fox Corporation. And there's no reason to believe that Dominion will be awarded this amount or anywhere near it, nor is there any reason to believe that any payout will happen soon.

Fox on-air personalities repeatedly spread lies about the election, and saved Fox's brand. It seems quite possible that the decision to spread these lies made Fox more money than it will ever pay out. The viewers are back. Tucker Carlson is the most politically influential media figure in America. At Fox, life is good. So it was probably worth the cost.

DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC, WILL THE VACCINES EVEN BE LEGAL?

Republicans are a menace:

Two Idaho lawmakers have introduced a bill to charge those who administer mRNA vaccines with a misdemeanor.

Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, and Rep. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale, sponsored HB 154. It was introduced in the House Health & Welfare Committee on Feb. 15 by Nichols. According to the bill text, "A person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state."

... Nichols ... later clarified she was referring to the two COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.

... The bill requires a future vote in the committee to pass onto the House floor for debate.

I don't know Idaho politics, so I don't know whether this bill has a chance of passing. I'm hoping it doesn't -- but even so, its introduction is one more step down a slippery slope.

The bill was introduced the same day Ron DeSantis's handpicked state surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, posted this on the Florida Department of Health website:

The State Surgeon General is notifying the health care sector and public of a substantial increase in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports from Florida after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period (Figure 1).

The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.

Well, of course there wasn't a big increase in reports of adverse effects during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign, for two reasons: (1) H1N1 wasn't a life-altering event for most Americans, so many of us never got vaccinated, and (2) there wasn't a massive anti-vaccine propaganda campiagn in 2009 led by first-tier right-wing pundits and "experts."

It's important to remember that anyone can report an adverse reaction to VAERS, including people waith political agendas who haven't actually experienced ill effects. The reporting system was set up in the hope that people would honestly report ill effects they'd had following vaccinations; some might be unrelated, but others might be worth investigating, especially if a number of people reported the same adverse effects. But as the website of the school of public health at Johns Hopkins notes,

Anti-vaccination fringe groups have attempted to spin false stories using VAERS data, adding to misinformation about the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations....

VAERS is a publicly available, searchable database of reports that have not been verified. It simply contains whatever people have voluntarily reported. Moreover, the CDC and FDA do not restrict what people can report, as long as it happened at some point following a vaccination.

That means events that happen even years later and have no obvious connection to a vaccine, such as feelings of anger, end up reported in the system, says [Dr. Kawsar] Talaat [of the Institute for Vaccine Safety]. “It’s very open and public and searchable. Since it’s so transparent, people don’t really understand what it’s for. They think it’s things that are vetted and have causal relationships with the vaccine.”

Dr. Ladapo cites VAERS data as if he's one of the people who believe VAERS reports are vetted. Undoubtedly he knows better and is simply citing the data because he doesn't like the mRNA COVID vaccines and sees the VAERS reports as an effective propaganda tool.

Please note that if Ron DeSantis is elected president, Ladapo will probably be named America's surgeon general, or given another prominent position in the federal government.

I'm looking at these stories back to back and I'm wondering what will happen if there's a new pandemic during a DeSantis presidency, especially if Republicans control both houses of Congress. Complete GOP control is quite possible after the 2024 election -- and we might soon face another pandemic, possibly bird flu, as Zeynep Tufekci recently noted:

This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died....

The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.

Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.

If this happens, what kind of vaccines might become available? Every available flu vaccine except one needs to be incubated in an egg -- a problem when the flu itself threatens the health of poultry. One possible alternative, according to Tufekci:

The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines ... don’t depend on eggs. Scott Hensley, an influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.

Sooner or later, we're likely to face a public health crisis for which the best response is an mRNA vaccine. But I don't know whether Republicans will ever allow another mRNA vaccine to be distributed in America. Republicans are in a banning mood these days -- surgical abortion, abortion pills, CRT, ESG, medical care for trans people, drag queen story hours. I don't think it's crazy to imagines that mRNA vaccines will be next -- nationwide.

IS TRUMP TELLING REPUBLICANS TO COMMIT VOTER FRAUD?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump "is having a change of heart" on mail voting:

His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes....

Mr. Trump highlighted the move in a fundraising email this week, saying, “The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.”

The email added, “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In December, Mr. Trump told Breitbart News that the GOP has no choice but to “live with the system that stinks,” while maintaining “a mail-in ballot will always be corrupt” and that Republicans should seek to change laws.

Trump is describing methods of voting that Democrats and independents, as well as a smaller number of Republicans, use legally and honestly -- but he's addressing a crowd that thinks Democrats use them to cheat. His audience believes that Democratic "mules" stuff dropboxes with ballots cast in the name of illegally registered voters, or dead people who should have been dropped from the rolls years ago, or legitimate voters who have no idea that votes for Democrats are being cast in their names.

Quite a few Republicans have been caught committing voter fraud in recent years, some of whom claim that Democratic election fraud is widespread. The percentage of GOP voters who believe that Democrats cheat in every contested election is large. So many Republicans are likely to believe that the only way they can win is to cheat themselves.

We know that Trump cares only about winning -- preserving democracy isn't important to him. So he'd be happy to win in 2024 as a result of election fraud, as long as the fraudsters get away with it.

So yes, I think he's telling GOP voters to cheat. And I think that's how they're interpreting the message. I don't how many of them will try to cheat, and I don't know how many will manage to cheat waithout getting caught. But I think we can safely predict a serious uptick in attempted ballot box stuffing by Republicans in 2024.

HALEY WON'T WIN PRIMARY VOTES BY ATTACKING TRUMP ON NORTH KOREA, EVEN IF HE DESERVES IT

This should be a way for Nikki Haley to discredit Donald Trump, but it won't work:

When Nikki Haley opens her presidential campaign on Wednesday she will be joined by Cindy Warmbier, whose son died days after he was released from North Korean prison in 2017....

Warmbier credits Haley with giving her the strength to continue fighting against the North Korean regime after the death of her 22-year-old son, Otto....

Warmbier had admired Haley’s determination when it came to North Korea sanctions and asked for the meeting when she was in Washington, DC, for then-President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

“It took someone like Nikki Haley to light the fire under me,” Warmbier said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “She took me out of that survival mode and put me in a fighter mode.”

This is clearly meant to draw attention to Trump's mancrush on Kim Jong-un, although Haley and Mrs. Warmbier avoid mentioning Trump's name. In February 2019, a few months after she left her job as UN ambassador, Haley publicly disagreed with Trump about Kim:

President Trump has criticized North Korea's role in Warmbier's death in the past. But since he began building his reputation as a diplomat and dealmaker on his budding relationship with North Korea's Kim, his rhetoric has changed dramatically.

... after a meeting with Kim in Vietnam ended abruptly without a deal, the president said that he believed the North Korean strongman when he says he was not responsible for the young American's death.

"He tells me he didn't know about it, and I take him at his word," Trump said of Kim during the press conference. "I don't believe he would have allowed that to happen…. It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen."

Haley responded:

Americans know the cruelty that was placed on Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime. Our hearts are with the Warmbier family for their strength and courage. We will never forget Otto. ❤️🇺🇸

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 28, 2019

But it doesn't matter. Voters who like Trump -- even voters who used to like Trump but now think Ron DeSantis or some other candidate would be more electable -- aren't ready to say Trump's approach to North Korea was bad. They like to think of him as having been the tough guy who was never pushed around by any foreign leader. There's no reason to think that they'll allow the facts to change their mind.

Republicans have been this way for years. They saw Ronald Reagan as a tough guy who stood up to global bad guys, so they ignore terrorist attacks on Americans in Lebanon, and shrug off Iran-Contra. They regard him as fiscally prudent, so they don't allow themselves to think about the massive budget deficits he ran up. They hate immigration, so they choose to ignore the fact that he was the last president to offer amnesty to immigrants who were in the country illegally.

Republican voters don't want to believe that Trump, a man they voted for twice, allowed himself to be pushed around by a commie dictator. In their eyes, that would make him a Democrat! So they'll keep telling themselves that he was tough and there was nothing wrong with his response to the Warmbier case. No one wants to admit being deceived by a fraud, so they'll ignore the obvious fraudulence of Trump's toughness.

REPORTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE (GOP) POLITICIANS FEEL COMFORTABLE, SAY FOX NEWS AND TEAM DeSANTIS (BUT I REPEAT MYSELF)

DeSantis World isn't even pretending that it believes in a free press, and Fox News thinks that's just fine:

A local reporter in Florida was caught on a hot mic saying her job is to make Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis "uncomfortable."

During a livestream of an event attended by DeSantis in Jacksonville, First Coast News reporter Atyia Collins was heard chatting with someone about her role at the press conference.

"No my job is to ask the tough questions and make him uncomfortable I guess," Collins said.

The reporter is correct. In a country with a free press, journalists are supposed to ask questions the powerful would rather not answer.

Later on in the exchange, Collins spoke about how her web manager urged her to "just run up to him" as he gets off the stage and "just yell questions at him," something she did not believe would work.

"He already doesn't like the media," Collins is heard saying.

DeSantis rapid response director Christina Pushaw called out the "journactivist" on Twitter.

For a little more than a year, Pushaw was DeSantis's gubernatorial press secretary, but what that really meant was that she was a Twitter troll paid by Florida taxpayers to agitate on DeSantis's behalf. She later became the director of rapid response for DeSantis's reelection campaign -- that's the most recent job on her LinkedIn page. She hasn't found another job or been rehired by the governor's office, which means that a presidential campaign is imminent and she'll be the spokesperson for that as well. She's clearly still flacking for DeSantis. Here's what she tweeted about this reporter:

For reference, this is the journactivist today: pic.twitter.com/A6J0cRIil6

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 14, 2023

Pushaw has been trying to make the word "journactivist" happen, presumably because "fake news" is identified with Trump and "Lügenpresse" is associated with ... well, you know. It's an ugly, cumbersome word, but Pushaw has more than a quarter million Twitter followers, so it's catching on a bit.

When you define anyone who asks you tough questions as not really a journalist, all while freezing out journalists who might be adversarial and working hand in glove with (and helping to create) an ecosystem of friendly media partisans, you're a lot more dangerous than Trump, who said "fake news" a lot but also spent a lot of time talking to Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and other alleged enemies.

DeSantis also made clear last week that he'd like to make it much easier for politicians to sue journalists for libel, a goal Trump also talked about but DeSantis actually seems to know how to accomplish:

... Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida convened a round-table discussion about the news media....

Over the course of an hour, Mr. DeSantis and his guests laid out a detailed case for revisiting a landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the press from defamation lawsuits.

Mr. DeSantis is the latest figure, and among the most influential, to join a growing list of Republicans calling on the court to revisit the 1964 ruling, known as The New York Times Company v. Sullivan.

The decision set a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, and for years it was viewed as sacrosanct. That standard has empowered journalists to investigate and criticize public figures without fear that an unintentional error will result in crippling financial penalties.

But emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent willingness to overturn longstanding precedent, conservative lawyers, judges, legal scholars and politicians have been leading a charge to review the decision and either narrow it or overturn it entirely....

“How did it get to be this doctrine that has had really profound effects on society?” he said at the event, which featured two libel lawyers known for suing news organizations and a conservative scholar who recently published an essay titled “Overturn New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Portions of this took place before a backdrop that was a tad Orwellian....

The Alito court is probably coming for Sullivan no matter who wins the presidential election, so maybe DeSantis isn't the person we need to worry about. But he's setting a new standard for illiberalism. He wants to destroy what he calls "the legacy media." We'll get scarily close to that goal if he's president.

CALLING IT NOW: NIKKI HALEY WON'T EVEN BE A RUNNING MATE

What does Nikki Haley think she's doing? What Republican electorate does she imagine will respond positively to this?



Haley alienates the typical Republican voter from the very beginning of the video. Over an image of her hometown, she says:

The railroad tracks divided the town by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not Black, not white, I was different.

She goes on to say that her parents told her to focus on similarities rather than differences, and said that America is a great country -- but the damage is already done. Right-wingers hate being told that institutional racism has existed in America within living memory. They regularly say, "Why does everything have to be about race?" Right up front in this video, as Republican voters will see it, "everything" is "about race."

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark says that Haley comes off as the perfect Republican presidential candidate for 2015. But 2015 was when Trump began his presidential campaign with an explicitly racist speech that put him in first place in GOP opinion polls. I'd say maybe she's the perfect GOP candidate for the 2000 campaign, which was won by a candidate who sold himself as a Spanish-speaking "compassionate conservative" -- except that it's hard to imagine a woman of South Asian descent winning then. (That year, John McCain was the victim of a smear campaign in Haley's home state when rumors spread that he'd fathered a Black child; the truth was that he and his wife had adopted a daughter born in Bangladesh.) It's really hard to imagine any moment when GOP primary voters might have embraced Haley.

The next part of the video has some red meat for the base. Over images of right-wing voters' enemies (the 1619 Project, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Haley says:

Some look at our past as evidence that America's founding principles are bad. They say the promise of freedom is just made up. Some think our ideas are not just wrong, but racist and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"I have seen evil," she says -- and then cites genocide in China and the killings of protesters in Iran, adding,

And when a woman tells you about watching soldiers throw her baby into a fire, it puts things in perspective.

This is Haley sending the kind of signal a late-twentieth-century presidential candidate might have sent: I have foreign policy experience! I have foreign policy experience! But GOP voters don't care. Trump had no foreign policy experience in 2016 and it didn't matter to them. Also, GOP voters want to be told about the evil being done to people like themselves. What about the fascist Democrats right here in America? What about the global persecution of Christians? (Republicans believe that Christians are the most persecuted people on earth, with the possible exception of white conservatives on the Internet.)

From there Haley talks at length about how awesome life was in South Carolina when she was governor, which is fine but lacks the zing of Ron DeSantis's life in Florida is amazingly great while everyone else in the country lives in the lowest circle of Hell, thanks to wokeness.

At the 1:55 mark, Haley says:

And when evil did come, we turned away from fear toward God and the values that still make our country the freest and the greatest in the world.

She's talking about the 2015 mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Black church in Charleston. She doesn't mention her decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds under pressure from anti-racism activists. In fact, she doesn't mention the nature of the "evil" deed at all. (Voiceovers from news broadcasts are edited to omit references to the victims' race and the shooter's race and ideology.) She's trying to have it both ways. But just alluding to a racist murder -- race again! -- will alienate GOP voters, who'll see her as trying to curry favor with liberals.

Then Haley talks about how the GOP has been faring in elections:

Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. That has to change.

But Republican voters don't believe this. They believe that when Democrats win, it's because they cheat.

There's an effort to equate Democrats with foreign adversaries that might connect with Republican voters a bit:

Some people look at America and see vulnerability. The socialist left sees an opportunity to rewrite history. China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied -- kicked around.

This is the closest Haley comes to modern Republican thinking. She says this while we see images of Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, alternating with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

But that leads to:

You should know this about me: I don't put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you're wearing heels.

Everyone tells me that Ron DeSantis can't win the nomination, much less the general election, because his personality is too unpleasant. But here's Haley trying to be cheeky and personable, and succeeding to some extent -- and it falls flat. She doesn't really seem like someone who fights her enemies and relishes the fight. DeSantis looks as if he hates his enemies and genuinely wants to hurt them. Trump too. That's why they're the two top contenders. Haley comes off as a people-pleaser who's just pretending to be a fighter.

And also, of course, pundits see the reference to "bullies" as a coded attack on Trump, but it's so coded that it hardly seems to be about Trump at all.

Haley can't win the presidential nomination, but I don't think either Trump or DeSantis will want a running mate who concedes any arguments to liberals or moderates, such as agreeing that white racism continues to exist, or that Republicans might be off-putting to many swing voters. They also won't want a running mate who's half-hearted about the culture wars. So she won't be on the ticket in 2024.

YOU MUST HAVE THESE PEOPLE CONFUSED WITH SOME OTHER REPUBLICAN PARTY

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore recognizes that Senator Tim Scott's presidential campaign is highly unlikely to lead to the nomination:

... in a field of candidates implicitly and explicitly promising to usher in a glorious post-Trump future for the GOP, Scott will need an ideological identity that goes beyond legitimizing his party’s “color-blind” racial policies....

The two distinctive policy ideas that Scott is most associated with are ... tax preferences for private capital investments in low-income areas and “school choice.” ... Scott’s going to need something a little more novel than promoting these chestnuts that virtually all Republicans support anyway.

But as the usually astute Kilgore strains to imagine how a Scott campaign could succeed, he loses his grip on reality:

One of Scott’s best assets in what could be a vicious primary season dominated by Trump and DeSantis is his sunny disposition.

“He truly believes that God is great and America is great and we are provided with incredible opportunities. So I think a Ronald Reagan ‘Morning in America’ hopeful America vision is one that Tim has, lives and breathes and is really needed in our country,” Republican senator John Barrasso told the [Wall Street] Journal.

It’s possible Republicans could grow sick of nuclear exchanges that drive up the negatives of the big-time candidates and hurt the party as well. Scott could catch on as the beneficiary of a murder-suicide scenario involving the equally saturnine Floridians Trump and DeSantis.

Ed, just stop. Republican voters don't want "sunny." It's questionable whether they even wanted "sunny" in the Reagan years. (Right-wingers didn't use the phrase "own the libs" back then, but that's what they thought Reagan did, and that's what they liked. His attacks on Democrats, liberals, and government may have come with a wink and a smile, but they were meant to sting, and his policies were meant to make us howl.)

If Republicans somehow reject the two leading nasty people in the race, or if the two of them exit the race early, or stay out altogether -- all extremely unlikely scenarios -- then the GOP base will be desperate to find someone who's equally nasty. Maybe Mike Pompeo can fill that role, or maybe there'll be a late entry by Mike Flynn or Mike Lindell, Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump Jr.

Or maybe it'll be the person who's the subject of the lead story at the Fox News website right now:

A photo of former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake attending Super Bowl LVII has gone viral, but for reasons you might not expect.

The former news anchor turned GOP firebrand was seen sitting during the controversial playing of the Black national anthem ahead of the game, which took place Sunday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

A photo of her refusing to stand for the anthem was posted on social media and quickly sparked a frenzy of people praising her decision.

"Never been easier to be a hero these days," wrote one user responding to the photo of Lake seated during the song.

Another Twitter user stated: "Good for her. No one should support this. It was created to divide the country."

"I’m just here for THE National Anthem," Lake responded to one Twitter post about the photo.

Lake is a failed candidate who lost a winnable race, but she's the center of what Fox considers the most important story of the moment -- because she's disrespecting this song. And she's being cheered for this.

Given the specifics of this story, it's hilarious that anyone thinks a Black senator could win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. And it's hilarious that anyone thinks being positive and upbeat can win it for anyone. GOP voters love divisiveness. They love darkness and "saturnine" politicians. That's how they'll vote in 2024 even if they don't vote for Trump or DeSantis.

TRUMP CALLS DeSANTIS "MEATBALL RON" BECAUSE "GOOMBAH RON" WOULD CONFUSE IOWANS

Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times seem to be too posh to understand one of Donald Trump's insult nicknames for Ron DeSantis:

Since November, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Mr. Trump has periodically hit out at his potential rival.... he has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as “Meatball Ron,” an apparent dig at his appearance....

I'm pretty sure DeSantis's appearance is not the point of the nickname.

Sure, Urban Dictionary's definitions of "meatball" include some references to appearance ("fat narcissist, especially one prone to deception and theft"; "A fat Bitch who can't jump"), as well as intelligence and savvy ("Noun: Usually applied to persons of evidencing a lack of common sense"; "Meatball is a term to describe a rather dumb person. We all know the kind of people who never get the joke when its told. That is a meatball and they usually lack common sense"). But then there's this definition:

a miserable, short italian kid who always thinks hes right

"Meatball" was also a term used by some of the women on MTV's Jersey Shore to refer to themselves. (Urban Dictionary: "a girl who is very short, under 5 ft 1, thick, with a big ass and boobs to match. She is always a blast to be around and knows how to party! Made popular by Snooki and Deena." Snooki, who was born in Chile but was adopted by an Italian-American family, said she would have endorsed Trump if he'd run for president in 2012, then appeared on the post-Trump Celebrity Apprentice in 2016.) At the Racial Slur Database, "meatball" is listed as a slur referring to Italians ("Self-explanatory"). And in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, "meatball" is defined as "a dim-witted, gullible person," but one example of its use is from the 1988 crime novel Shakedown by Gerald Petievich, best known as the author of To Live and Die in L.A.:

I'm pretty sure that's not just a generic insult.

Trump grew up in a city that was very conscious of ethnic tribes. We know he still sees the world the way he saw it when he was a young man working alongside his racist father. A recent news story noted that Mary Trump, Donald's niece, told Rachel Maddow in 2020 that residents of Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where the former president grew up, were "scandalized when 'the first Italian family moved in.'"

So, yeah, maybe I'm hypersensitive because I'm also of Italian descent, but I think this is about DeSantis's ethnic background. Bender and Haberman should have suggested that possibility, too. But letting Trump give the nickname a soft launch in the nation's Paper of Record is excellent journalisming, isn't it, Maggie?

HOW TO WRITE A RON DeSANTIS PUFF PIECE WITHOUT THE ICKY RON DeSANTIS PART

Right-wingers love Ron DeSantis for his nastiness and cruelty, but how do you promote him to moderate voters who might believe that a politician should have skills other than owning the libs in as sadistic a manner as possible? Since DeSantis (a) has no other skills and (b) has committed himself to lib-owning so fully that it suffuses all aspects of his very unpleasant personality, I guess you have sell him the way Charles Gasparino does in this New York Post column -- by excluding him from the sales pitch entirely.

Gasparino begins with several paragraphs of Biden-is-a-senile-old-coot boilerplate, followed by a swipe at Donald Trump ("another old dude who offers up his own set of personal baggage so large, we don’t have room in this column to describe it"). Then he writes:

And yet there is a ray of hope — sunshine, to be precise — beaming down south in Florida. If you want to see the American experiment flourish, spend a few days down there, particularly in the melting pot known as Miami, as I recently did.

Gasparino continues:

Florida is more than just Disney World and orange groves these days. Big tech, Wall Street, crypto, hospitality and amazing restaurants are the state’s — and city’s — lifeblood.

I like how he throws "hospitality" in there, as if there was no tourism in Florida until DeSantis was inaugurated in 2019. (My parents honeymooned there -- in 1954.)

So are the people who are arriving, many of them immigrants, a lot of them transplanted northerners, all of them seeking opportunity that statists like Joe Biden have been discouraging for decades.

So these immigrants left countries where Joe Biden isn't the head of state and came to the country where he is head of state ... to avoid his policies?

Again, spend some time talking to these strivers as I did. They’re grinders. Not just the brokers and bankers, but the people who work during the day in restaurants, then drive an Uber at night.

That actually sounds pretty hellish. It also sounds exactly like the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants residing in Brooklyn and Queens.

My cabdriver told me how he’s a first-generation Cuban American. His family came to Miami in the 1970s.

And he's still just a cabdriver? Even though the streets are paved with gold in Florida?

The now-glitzy South Beach area was largely a “dump,” as he put it. No longer, he proudly explained as we passed a booming stretch of restaurants and high-end fashion shops that employ the locals and give them a chance at a better life.

The South Beach revival was well established when I visited in 1997, which would have been a few months after DeSantis graduated from high school. I don't think he gets the credit.

At a restaurant, I was served by a waiter from Italy, who escaped the stifling economy of the southern region known as the “Mezzogiorno.” He left some years ago and by the sound of it, he’s never going back because he can actually make a decent living here without paying off the local Mafia boss.

So now Biden is responsible for poverty and organized crime in Italy? For a doddering old dementia case, he gets around.

I touched base with a friend of mine, a local born in Cuba who came here and made it pretty big as a bond salesman. Before talking business, he gave me a tour of Little Havana. We had lunch of arroz con pollo at the amazing Versailles Restaurant....

Which has been in business since 1971, despite the fact that Florida was an unlivable hellscape until Ron DeSantis became governor in 2019.

... the downtown business district, which back in the 1990s looked like a ghost town in the middle of the day, is bustling with financiers. New construction of luxury high-rises and office buildings is seemingly everywhere.

I hate to admit it, but Gasparino is right. Even the liberal New York Times acknowledges this! Here's a Times story headlined "Downtown Miami in Midst of a Building Boom." (Oh, wait -- it's from 2006.)

Of course, Miami and Florida aren’t utopia; drugs, gangs, fentanyl, illegal immigration, homelessness, they’re all here. So is Florida Man. But people don’t come here for utopia. They come for the chance that Sleepy Joe won’t give them.

Even though Biden is president of all fifty states, including Florida.

DeSantis is completely absent from this puff piece. Maybe that's because the governor was too busy collaborating with newly created right-wing propaganda sites to give an interview even to a Murdoch-media fanboy. Or maybe it's because Gasparino knows that describing DeSantis's actual approach to governing -- or his approach to any kind of human interaction, for that matter -- would alienate the Post's readers, many of whom aren't right-wing ideologues.

I continue to believe that DeSantis would be a strong candidate in 2024 -- Republicans will close ranks around him, the "liberal" media will treat him with kid gloves while bashing Biden, and many low-information swing voters who are dissatisfied with the state of the country will just shrug and say, "Let's give someone new a chance." But he's a profoundly unlikable person, which means his campaign staff -- which includes all of the Murdoch media -- will have to create the DeSantis equivalent of 1968's "new Nixon," someone who's really not that bad a guy once you get to know him. But with DeSantis, that might be impossible. Maybe this is the best they can do.

BIDEN WON'T BEAT DeSANTIS BY TALKING ABOUT HIS PAST SUPPORT FOR CUTTING SOCIAL PROGRAMS

New York magazine's Eric Levitz believes that Democrats who fear Ron DeSantis are overlooking his obvious vulnerabilities, one of which is this:

Before his present incarnation as a populist purple-state governor, DeSantis was a pro-austerity, right-wing House member....

During his 2012 congressional campaign, DeSantis expressed support for privatizing Social Security and Medicare. In 2013 and 2014, DeSantis deemed Paul Ryan’s infamous proposals for balancing the federal budgets insufficiently austere. Instead, as Josh Barro notes, DeSantis voted to replace those proposals with the Republican Study Committee’s more radical budget blueprints. The RSC’s 2013 fiscal vision would have raised the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare to 70, slowed the growth of Social Security benefits, and ended Medicare as we’d known it, transforming the program from a health-insurance entitlement to a stipend that wouldn’t necessarily increase with rising health-care costs.

Even Republicans (mostly) support Social Security and Medicare, so this would seem like a potent attack in the primaries. But I think DeSantis will self-righteously declare that he supports Social Security and Medicare and anyone saying otherwise is just listening to a whole lot of lies from the liberal media. Also, Republican voters agree with 2013 DeSantis that government spending is awful in general, and is completely out of control.

If he makes it to the general election, he's home free, for this reason:

President Biden as a first-term senator in 1975 introduced a bill that would have limited budget authority for all federal programs to between four and six years, which experts say would have required new legislation to fund Medicare, Social Security and other federal programs.

The Biden measure bore striking similarities to the plan Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) unveiled in 2022 to sunset all federal legislation after five years — which is now at the center of a political firestorm.

It gets worse:

Biden doubled down on his legislation in the '90s, saying on the Senate floor that his bill would affect Social Security.

"When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security, as well," Biden said. "I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits."

"I meant every single solitary thing in the federal government," he said. "And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time."

Alas, there's video:

Speaking of people who want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Veteran benefits… #SOTU #sotu2023 pic.twitter.com/hRmvLcU2DY

— Wade Miller (@WadeMiller_USMC) February 8, 2023

It's true that Biden can say he was wrong back in the twentieth century. (The Republican ethos probably requires DeSantis to avoid saying he was ever wrong about anything.) Biden can pledge that he'll never sign a budget that cuts these programs, and dare DeSantis to do the same. Biden can point to video of DeSantis advocating cuts.

But swing voters are likely to come away thinking that neither candidate can be trusted on the issue. So Democrats need to find another way to beat this guy.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REMOVES ONE WORD FROM A STORY AND RIGHT-WINGERS REACT AS IF WE LIVE IN AN ORWELLIAN HELLSCAPE

In George Orwell's 1984, the Ministry of Truth rewrites news stories whenever the original text ceases to track with the official government line. After the editing, no trace of the original story remains intact.

To hear right-wingers tell it, The New York Times just edited one its own articles the same way.

The Times just published a story about how Senator John Fetterman is coping with the aftereffects of the stroke he had last year. But the story as it exists now is not identical to the story as it originally appeared. This has led to a right-wing freakout. At RedState, a piece by Nick Arama has this headline:

NYT Stealth Edits Report They Did Revealing Fetterman's Big Problems

Arama complains that the Times edited the story "but made no note of it, as they should have."

The headline of a Mediaite story by the right-wing writer Caleb Howe says that the Times piece was, according to the headline, "Edited After Backlash."

And then there's this guy, the editor of Pluribus, "an online project exploring the rising tide of illiberalism and its recent progeny, cancel culture":

Yep, a Google search still finds it, but it's gone in the article, no notes about edits. pic.twitter.com/EkhEUJvoFp

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) February 10, 2023

So how did the Times Ministry of Truth "stealth edit" the story? What's the massive deception here?

One word was deleted. That's all.

Howe explains:

“As Mr. Fetterman adjusts to his new life, the Senate and his colleagues are also adjusting to his special needs,” [the story] originally said....

“Special needs” was later changed after a fair amount of online backlash....

The article has been changed and now reads, “the Senate and his colleagues are also adjusting to his needs.”

And the Times didn't announce the edit in 96-point type with a red siren GIF! We truly live in a totalitarian hellscape.

But the change in wording won't help right-wingers understand what's going on with Fetterman. After reading the Times story, I worry that Fetterman doesn't have the physical stamina after his stroke to do everything a senator is expected to do. But the right treats Fetterman as if he's mentally enfeebled, based on the fact that he has auditory processing issues.

The detail from the story that turns up in right-wing headline after right-wing headline is this:

The most evident disability is a neurological condition that impairs his hearing. Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him. The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered.

That's a serious impairment, but the fact that Fetterman devised this analogy to explain it suggests to me that his mind is still sharp, whatever other impairments he might have. So do other quotes in the story that describe what it's like to talk to him as he uses devices that translate speech into text:

“We’re going to have to learn our own styles with it,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who said she experimented with the tablet at a recent Democratic caucus lunch. “What I was saying was accurate even when I talked fast. I wanted to make sure it was accurate. It was kind of to imagine what it would be like to be him.”

“He answers like you would answer anyone,” Ms. Klobuchar added. “It’s us that have to get used to it; he’s used to it.”

... Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, Democrat of Washington, said she approached Mr. Fetterman at a White House reception for new members....

Ms. Gluesenkamp Pérez said the tablet allowed for seamless small talk and dress code jokes.

“It’s just a slight delay,” she said. “I didn’t notice he was using it at first. Then I was like, ‘Why are they holding it?’ It took me a minute to figure out what was going on.”

The strain of doing the job may be wearing Fetterman down, but it seems as if he can still think, and if so, it's understandable that Pennsylvania voters saw his impairment but still chose him over Dr. Oz. I hope his health improves. I hope he can cope with the stress. But Republicans are wrong to treat him as a brain-dead invalid.

ANTI-LIBERALISM IS THE NEW UNIFICATION CHURCH

The Washington Post's story about questionable details in the biography of newly elected Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna isn't nearly as enjoyable as the ongoing George Santos saga. (The latest on Santos is that bad checks written on his account were passed to Amish dog breeders in exchange for puppies, which were then advertised as rescue dogs; when Santos spoke to prosecutors about the checks, he claimed to work for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the charges against him were dropped.) Nevertheless, Luna's story involves quite a bit of reinvention, if not quite a Santos-level personal reboot:

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.

By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.” She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration. She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have come as a surprise to some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year. A cousin who grew up with Luna said she was regularly included in family gatherings. Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records. And three years before her first congressional bid as a conservative, Luna registered to vote as a Democrat in Washington state, voting records show.

The onetime Democrat and Obama fan had turned into this by the time of her first congressional campaign, as a Florida Republican, in 2020:

This kind of thing seems to be happening a lot these days: a person who's had greater-than-average difficulties in establishing a self, and whose personal reinventions are accompanied by dishonesty or psychologically unhealthy behavior, ultimately finds mental peace and societal validation as an enemy of liberalism. In the past, people like this ended up in cult religions. Now they show up on Fox News.

Consider Tara Reade, who struggled through a series of career changes and left a trail of acquaintances feeling burned by her Santos-like dishonesty, then ultimately found fame as a (Putin-adjacent) alleged victim of sexual harassment (or was it assault?) by Joe Biden. Her story kept changing, and was rejected by dozens of former Biden staffers, but she found support among Democrat-haters on the right and the left.

Or consider Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was leading an ordinary suburban life until her marriage began to fall apart and she discovered (in approximately this order) extreme fitness, QAnon, right-wing media self-promotion, and the cult of Donald Trump. There's now a non-zero chance that she'll be president of the United States or Speaker of the House someday.

Or consider Candace Owens, who ran a liberal-ish blog that was critical of Donald Trump and other Republicans, then ran a site intended to doxx online bullies, at which point she was doxxed herself; she blamed progressives, then began to win the favor of Gamergaters and the rest of the online right. Soon she announced a conversion to Trumpist conservatism and now she's a right-wing superstar.

We could even go back to the George W. Bush years, when a professional gay escort born James Dale Guckert became Jeff Gannon, a member of the White House press corps and fawning Bush fan.

There's a place for all these people because (a) America is full of liberal-hating rage junkies and (b) there is a well-financed instrastructure that supports anyone, however emotionally unstable, with even a modest talent at sticking it to the libs.

Expect there to be more Santoses, Greenes, and Lunas in the future. The demand for them may be limitless.

Y KANT PAMELA PAUL READ?

In a column titled "What Liberals Can Learn from Ron DeSantis," Pamela Paul chastises Democrats for their response to the rise of Florida's governor -- but for the life of me, I can't figure out what she thinks we're doing wrong.

Paul writes:

Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.

We’ve made that mistake before.

It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. We’ve already cataloged the mistakes in media coverage and dissected what we missed that somehow made Trump a viable, let alone a desirable, candidate to occupy the Oval Office. But here we go again. As the Democratic political strategist Lis Smith has remarked, the left’s reaction to DeSantis looks just like its reaction to Trump: “He’s picking these fights. He’s saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters — whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is — have the same freakout.”

Let’s pay closer attention this time.

... we shouldn’t underestimate DeSantis.

Is Paul criticizing us for writing DeSantis off as unelectable -- or for freaking out because we fear he is electable? I'm pretty sure we can't be doing both simultaneously. Nevertheless, Paul seems to be making both accusations at once.

The Lis Smith quotes comes from the transcript of an October 2022 podcast. Paul seems to be using the Smith quote to accuse Democrats of underestimating Trump before the 2016 election, but Smith was talking about the mood among Democrats after the 2016 election, which is when she first met Pete Buttigieg, for whom she later worked.

Smith said:

When I first met [Buttigieg], it was over the phone in December 2016. He was thinking about running for DNC chair.... December 2016 is when the Democratic Party, sort of rightly so, was in full freakout mode, because no one could believe that we had lost to Donald Trump. And the media was in full freakout mode too because so few people had predicted this. All the polls were wrong. And Donald Trump seemed to fly in the face of everything that we thought America is and was. Yet he was able to prevail. So, Democrats sort of over-corrected—overreacted I think—at that moment. In the weeks afterwards, certainly in the years afterwards, you had Democrats going out there and saying, “To beat Trump, we have to be like Trump, and we gotta yell, we gotta scream. When they go low, we go lower. We kick them in the teeth.”

In the passage quoted by Paul, Smith wasn't talking about Democrats contemptuously dismissing Trump -- she was talking about Democrats trying to reverse-engineer Trumpism, which is pretty much the opposite. Smith said that Buttigieg

understood that it’s important not to play Trump's game—which is to say something outrageous, watch people's heads explode, dominate the news cycle for days, and then rinse and repeat. I'm sort of seeing the same thing happening with Ron DeSantis. He's picking these fights, he's saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters—whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is—have the same freak out. Then everything revolves around Ron. He's setting the debate....

Smith's point wasn't that above-it-all elitist Democrats are dismissing DeSantis the way they dismissed Trump. It's that Democratic attempts to out-Trump Trump were doomed to failure. Buttigieg, in her opinion, knew that the right way to deal with Trump was to be the opposite of him.

Pete understood that the best counterprogramming to Trump was to be the antidote to him in terms of style presentation, how he talked—but also in terms of policy.

You may not agree with Smith that the person who's solved the problem of how to counter Trump is Pete Buttigieg -- I certainly don't. But it's exactly the opposite of what Paul believes about DeSantis, which is: You gotta admit the guy has some good ideas.

The jury is still out on whether DeSantis’s unorthodox response to Covid-19 was a colossal error or an unexpected success or, more likely, something in between, but the fact that he took an aggressive approach to avoid the pains of lockdown on small businesses and families wasn’t lost on Florida voters. While other politicians prevaricated and dithered, DeSantis spoke with conviction and seemed to be doing something, and to many working families in Florida, that mattered.

... We can decry his stunt in shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but we should also be attending to the real concerns of people living in areas of heavy immigration.

... A law like the Stop WOKE Act of 2021 ... may come with an incendiary name and some egregious efforts to curtail free speech. But it’s important to recognize that aspects of it appeal to Floridians tired of racial and ethnic divisiveness and the overt politicization of what’s taught in the classroom.

As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school.

Lis Smith says: Don't try to counter Republican bellicosity with Democratic bellicosity. It's bad strategy. Pamela Paul says: Hey, Democrats, maybe those people punching you in the face have a point. Maybe you should try punching yourself in the face. I don't think the former editor of The New York Times Book Review even realizes that those messages are different.

DEAR REPUBLICANS: IF YOU WANT TRUMP TO GO AWAY, MAYBE YOU SHOULD STFU ABOUT TWITTER AND HUNTER BIDEN

Politico tells us today that the Republican Party is scheming to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 nomination. Big organizations such as the Club for Growth and the Koch network's Americans for Prosperity plan to spend money to defeat Trump. Donors are telling presidential aspirants that they shouldn't stay in the race if they're struggling to win primaries and are splitting the anti-Trump vote. A top GOP fundraiser says of Trump:

“He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

But at the same time, House Republicans and Fox News are pushing the notion that, actually, Donald Trump is right when he says the 2020 election was rigged -- a message that reinforces Trump's case for being renominated.

Here's Congressman Pat Fallon, a member of the House Oversight Committee, on Fox this morning talking about Twitter's response to the New York Post's reports on the Hunter Biden laptop:

Fallon says:

They kept using a dodge by saying, "Well, we're trying to fight foreign interference in the election cycle" when, ironically, they were the ones that were interfering with the election cycle. I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop story and the evidence that was in there, the Media Research Center ran a poll and said 17 percent of Democrats -- of Democrats! -- in key swing states would have changed their vote. President Trump needed a hundred thousand people, a hundred-thousand-vote swing. That's a potential 3.2-million-person swing! And they-- Twitter changed and altered the 2020 election.

(As Philip Bump noted in December, the wording of that Media Research Center poll question was absurdly inflammatory: “At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?” So I don't trust the poll results.)

And here's Congressman Clay Higgins:

BREAKING: @RepClayHiggins warns former Twitter executives this is just the investigation part “later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.. I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come”

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/FREASWOpgt

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023

Here's a fuller version of the key quote, from a Fox News story:

"You, ladies and gentlemen, interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election, knowingly and willingly," Higgins said. "That’s the bad news, it’s gonna get worse because this is the investigation part. Later comes the arrest part. Your attorneys are familiar with that."

And here's Sean Hannity on Fox:

As a reminder, there was ample evidence of collusion in the 2020 election, but not between Trump and Russia. Instead, Twitter, Facebook, Google, other big tech companies were coordinating, collaborating with not only the DNC, the Biden campaign, but the upper echelon of your FBI all united In one effort, they wanted to defeat Donald J. Trump and help elect Joe Biden. Now, the first example of this involves a very true Hunter Biden laptop story from hell.... Twitter, other big tech, they eagerly censored The New York Post, America's oldest newspaper because of their blind rage against Donald Trump....

What Twitter did in the fall of 2020 for Joe Biden was the in-kind donation of in-kind donations so big that you could actually never measure the amount of dollars it would have cost somebody to buy that kind of information suppression. They censored a scandal that could have turned the entire election.

We all know that Rupert Murdoch wants Ron DeSantis to be the 2024 GOP nominee, not Donald Trump. But Fox News is promoting the message that the election was rigged. This the genteel version of the Big Lie -- it doesn't involve phony Chinese bamboo ballots or satellites beaming fake votes in from Italy. But this is essentially Trump's message, and Murdoch's flagship news operation is repeatedly promoting it.

And big GOP donors are presumably still giving money to Republicans who won't stop talking about 2020 and election rigging. If the donors are convinced that Trump is a sure loser, maybe they should turn off the money spigot.

But they won't, and Murdoch won't stop giving these attacks wall-to-wall coverage. Sucks for them that the result could be that they're stuck with Trump again.

IT'S NOT GROOMING IF A REPUBLICAN HETEROSEXUAL DOES IT!

When I first read about Donald Trump's new line of attack on Ron DeSantis, I thought it was sleazy but likely to be effective. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm certain that it won't work:

Donald Trump ... reposted images of a young Ron DeSantis allegedly partying with high school teens....

One of them, who has her arm around the now-Florida governor, is smiling and appears to be holding a brown glass bottle....

The image ... appears to come from a 2021 blogpost by HILLREPORTER.com. The post cites a 'whistleblower' who said the girls pictured 'are believed to have graduated in 2002, making them seniors at the time.'

DeSantis, 44, taught history and government at the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, during the 2001-2002 year.

He was fresh out of Yale at the time....

The New York Times made reference to the blog post in its own article about DeSantis' time at the school....

'Two former students, both women, remembered him attending at least two parties where alcohol was served, but they said that the parties took place after graduation and that they were not bothered by his presence at the time, although they question it now....'

It was DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Pushaw, who mainstreamed the use of "groomer" as a slur, so DeSantis deserves this attack. But it will fail.

Matt Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old that was under investigation by the feds. Republican voters don't care. Donald Trump is the subject of multiple sex allegations. Republicans don't care. Andrew Tate, recently arrested in Romania and now being charged with human trafficking, literally boasts about grooming and imprisoning women, and also about having sex with teenagers as an adult. He continues to have many right-wing admirers. Ted Nugent once released a song called "Jailbait" about having sex with a 13-year-old, and he adopted a 17-year-old so he could have sex with her. Republicans love him.

To a Republican, it's simply not grooming if the groomer is male, heterosexual, and right-wing. So it doesn't matter what DeSantis did, as long as it involved girls. GOP voters will say it's fine.

JOE BIDEN HECKLES BACK, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS RECYCLES

Last night, President Biden wasn't quite at the level of Ariel Elias, the stand-up comic who drank a beer thrown at her by a heckler...



But Biden pushed back. Unlike previous Democratic presidents in this era of GOP demonization, he didn't try to remain high-minded and above the fray. He's the first Democrat in the office who seems to know he's in an alley fight, and who's done something other retreat in response to this kind of attack.



Back in the 1980s, I did stand-up for a while. I was terrible, but I learned to respect the craft. You want to tell great jokes, but hecklers make it impossible for you to do the work you're trying to do -- until you learn how to handle them. You can't expect the heckling to stop on its own -- the fever won't break. You will be heckled. You need to be ready.

Biden took on the bullies. That's good. In the manistream media, I'm sure there'll be a great deal of sighing about lost dignity. But it needed to be done.

****

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech. One passage in particular puzzled some viewers:

She said:

A trip I will never forget was on December 25, 2018. My husband Bryan and I had just cleaned up wrapping paper that had been shoved into every corner of our house thanks to our three kids, when I had to walk out on my own family’s Christmas, unable to tell them where I was going, because the place I’d be traveling to was so dangerous they didn’t want anybody to know that the President was going to be on the ground for even a few hours.

We boarded Air Force One in total darkness—there were no lights on the plane, no lights on the runway, our phones and computers shut down and turned in. We were going completely off the grid. Nearly twelve hours later in the pitch-black of the night, we landed in the war-torn part of western Iraq. It was again a similar scene—no lights on the plane, no lights on the runway. The only light you could see was coming from about a mile away in a dining hall where hundreds of troops—who were in the fight against ISIS— had gathered, expecting to celebrate Christmas with senior military leadership from around the region.

They had absolutely no idea that the President and First Lady were about to walk into that room. And when they did—it was a sight, and a scene, and a sound I hope I never forget. The room erupted. Men and women from every race, religion, and region, every political party, every demographic you can imagine started chanting in perfect unison over and over and over again, ‘USA, USA, USA.’ It was a perfect picture of what makes our country great.

One of the young soldiers yelled from the back, ‘Mr. President, I reenlisted in the military because of you.’ The President said, ‘and son, I am here because of you.’ Shortly after, that young soldier came up to me and said, ‘Sarah, you have a tough job.’ I told him ‘What I do is nothing. You take bombs and bullets. That’s a tough job.’ And in a moment that I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life, that soldier reached up, and pulled the Brave Rifles Patch he wore on his shoulder and placed it into my hand, a sign of ultimate respect, and said, ‘Sarah, we are in this together.’ Overwhelmed with emotion and speechless, I just hugged him, with tears in my eyes and a grateful heart for our heroes who keep us free.

This is recycled material. It's a slightly rewritten version of the first minute of Sanders's campaign announcement video:

I'm in —> https://t.co/8bmfl3ZPgp

Watch ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/khDPEk0orU

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) January 25, 2021

It's chilling now to see the date on that video -- January 25, 2021. Less than three weeks after the Trumpist insurrection at the Capitol, Sanders, in her first campaign video, chose to praise Donald Trump before she talked about herself. But politically it was the right decision: her red state loved Trump, and it was smart politics to say, in effect, I touched the hem of his garment -- vote for me. (Sanders got 83% of the vote in the gubernatorial primary and 63% of the vote in the general election.)

But repeating this now is ... weird. Sanders was supposed to be rebutting the State of the Union address, but here she was buttering up Trump in the hope that he'll pick her as his vice president. Clearly she didn't have the courage to drop the Trump part and go straight to the bit about the soldier, because that would be reported as a Trump snub.

I guess it never occurred to her to skip the anecdote altogether, since it had no relevance whatsoever to Biden or the State of the Union address. But she's only 40 years old. She has a career to build. That's what mattered to her. Alas for her, she probably would have done better for herself if she'd flattered Ron DeSantis.

SURPRISE! THE ISLAMOPHOBIC INSURRECTION DEFENDER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALSO A PUTIN APOLOGIST

In the opinion section of The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell writes:

The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war.

That's odd, because straight-news reporting in the Times says that Russia is still struggling in Ukraine:

Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia had been trying to launch “major offensive operations” since early last month, with the aim of capturing the rest of the Donetsk region, which includes Bakhmut. But it had “only managed to gain several hundred meters of territory per week,” because of a lack of munitions and maneuver units, the agency said in its latest daily assessment of the war.

“It remains unlikely that Russia can build up the forces needed to substantially affect the outcome of the war within the coming weeks,” the agency concluded.

Many paragraphs into his opinion piece, it becomes clear that Caldwell doesn't just believe the Russians are winning -- he believes they should win. He sings a sob story about Russia and Putin that could have come from Tulsi Gabbard doing a guest appearance on Tucker's show:

The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe....

Russians say the war is about preventing the installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound implausible to a Russian.

Many Americans cannot resist describing Mr. Putin as a “barbarian” and his invasion of Ukraine as a “war of aggression.” For their part Russians say this is a war in which Russia is fighting for its survival and against the United States in an unfair global order in which the United States enjoys unearned privileges.

Caldwell doesn't want to say it in so many words -- that might risk his status as a pundit who is welcome in polite circles -- but it's clear which country he regards as the villain:

... the Biden strategy has a bad name: escalation. Beyond a certain point, the United States is no longer “helping” or “advising” or “supplying” the Ukrainians, the way it did, say, the Afghan mujahedeen during the Cold War. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war — Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?

Caldwell, a Putin apologist now, not long ago was a January 6 apologist. In a Times op-ed last July, he insisted that the insurrection was no big deal:

Were we really that close to a coup? ...

The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.”

And it was perfectly reasonable for these fine folks to show up with weapons and bear spray:

Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.”

And hey, you gotta admit they had a point:

Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential.

Because, of course, we forced Republicans at gunpoint not to take advantage of the mail-in voting option themselves.

And in October, he described the work of the January 6 committee as McCarthyism:

Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War.

This is the same Christopher Caldwell whose 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, applied the Great Replacement Theory to Muslims settling in Europe. A laudatory Times review summarized its message:

Through decades of mass immigration to Europe's hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street."

Caldwell is loathsome in so many different ways. It's appalling that he's writing for the Times and not RT or the American Thinker, where he belongs.