Saturday, August 22, 2020

REPUBLICANS BELIEVE EVERYTHING IS A CONSPIRACY

QAnon has an elaborate narrative involving cannibal pedophiles and the heroes (led by Donald Trump) who will someday crush them -- but QAnon doesn't have a monopoly on right-wing conspiratorialism, primarily because the right was already conspiratorial long before QAnon came along.

Here's a tweet from the president this morning:



Trump is just saying out loud what much of the GOP electorate believes: that the coronavirus isn't particularly dangerous except to old people and people with certain medical conditions, that we liberals know this, that we're engaged in a conspiracy to sustain a fake panic until Election Day, and that we'll drop the subject the minute the polls close.

They have no idea how sick of the pandemic we all are, how tired we are of wearing masks, of mostly confining ourselves to our homes, of juggling work and childcare and schooling, of not visiting our parents or hugging our friends, of fearing that if we get sick we'll be among the unlucky ones who die or suffer long-haul medical consequences. We want this to be over. If it's a conspiracy, why did we crush the curve up here in the Northeast? Wouldn't we have wanted New York City and New Jersey and Massachusetts and Rhode Island to look the way they did in April and May, in order to sustain the fake panic?

But this is nothing compared to Rush Limbaugh's grand unified conspiracy involving Black Lives Matter, antifa, and the coronavirus:
I mean, they’re tearing up places in California. They’re tearing up places in Oregon, state of Washington, where Democrat businesses are and where Democrat people live. The question is, if Biden wins, does this stuff continue? If Trump wins, does this stuff continue? Under what scenario does this stuff stop? ...

I think the reason it’s continuing is because the Democrat Party has determined that it is a positive thing to help them win reelection for all of this chaos to occur. I think they want people to believe that it is all related to Trump, that this rioting, the looting, that the chaos is understandable. It’s understandable these people would hate Trump. He’s a racist bigot. It’s understandable. We don’t think we should try to stop [them] or quiet them down. This is peaceful protests. These are mothers upset that Trump wants to take their health care away.

So it’s an active political calculation that this wanton destruction of Democrat cities will delay the opening of Democrat cities and states, which will, therefore, delay the speed of the recovery of the American economy, which, at the end of that progression, ends up hurting Trump.

All of this — like I told a caller yesterday — everything happening, no matter how illogical you might think, everything happening is part of the Democrat Party effort to stop Donald Trump, to defeat Donald Trump, everything. Black Lives Matter being allowed to run amok, Antifa being allowed to run amok, New York, California, Washington, Oregon, governors and mayors not putting a stop to this, all designed to create chaos that they can blame on Donald Trump.

So theoretically if Trump loses, then they would say, “Oh, yeah, it’s gonna end at some point.” A lot of people think the virus is gonna end on November 4th. I mean, the big news about the virus, the virus as an ongoing, daily concern will also end after the election, either way. But I don’t think it’s gonna stop until these people are dealt with. I’m talking about Black Lives Matter, Antifa, they’re gonna keep going for as long as they’re being paid to do it, as long as it is of value to them.
So I guess, according to Limbaugh, we're allowing the looters (who are paid, of course -- the word "Soros" isn't uttered, but it's implicit) to just keep looting because we want to continue the coronavirus lockdowns because the lockdowns hurt the economy and hurting the economy hurts Trump. It's unclear whether Limbaugh is too ignorant and provincial to realize that the unrest doesn't slow the economy at all -- that it's generally confined to late-night hours and small swaths of big cities, and that city-dwellers are perfectly capable of continuing to work and otherwise go about their business in spite of the unrest, or would be if the virus weren't an ongoing danger -- or if Limbaugh knows better and just assumes that his audience is ignorant and provincial, and gullible. (Of course, a great deal of office work previously done in big cities is now being done remotely from employees' homes.)

I don't know what Limbaugh is suggesting at the end there -- he seems to be leaving himself an out in the event that Election Day comes and goes and -- to the bafflement of his audience -- "Democrat" cities and states are still trying to keep the virus under control and demonstrators are still angry about racial injustice. The explanation, of course, can't be that we're sincere about this. The explanation can only be that our sinister conspiracy is still "of value" to us.

And, of course, the conspiracy is one big octopus, encompassing everyone from Joe Biden to Democratic mayors and governors to a bunch of Black Bloc window-breakers to, I guess, the FDA.

There's projection in this, of course. Republicans ginned up Ebola hysteria during the 2018 midterm campaign, then dropped the subject after the polls closed (which meant that the media dropped it as well). But Ebola never actually gained a foothold in America, so the hysteria was never justified; it could be dropped after it served its purpose because Ebola was never a COVID-level public health crisis in America. And on the right, fringe radicals and the mainstream really are largely in sync on basic goals (electing more Republicans, owning the libs). By contrast, liberals and leftists fight all the time. (Look, here's an upcoming gathering of socialists and other progressives looking to start a new left-wing political party, just in time to de-motivate progressives who might have been thinking of voting for Biden.)

But right-wingers believe this stuff largely because they're conspiracy-minded -- and they were that way long before QAnon.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:10 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 21, 2020

IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GOP AND QANON, I SEE WE'VE MOVED INTO THE "DENY EVERYTHING" PHASE

The GOP is now pretending that it has nothing to do with this Q fellow:
Vice President Pence said Friday that he has no knowledge of the QAnon conspiracy theory and that he dismisses it “out of hand.”

Pence was pressed in a pair of news interviews Friday morning on the conspiracy theory after President Trump earlier this week complimented its followers by saying they “love our country.”

“I don’t know anything about that conspiracy theory,” Pence told “CBS This Morning” host Tony Dokoupil when asked if he or Trump actually believed in QAnon....

Dokoupil continued to press Pence, accusing him of “adding oxygen” to the conspiracy theory by not denouncing it as false.

“I don’t know anything about that conspiracy theory. I don’t know anything about QAnon, and I dismiss it out of hand,” Pence replied.
The questioning in the second interview was a bit more pointed:
In a Friday morning interview on [CNN's] New Day, [anchor John] Berman confronted the vice president about Trump’s wink and nod to the group.

“The president seemed to embrace QAnon — which is a group that the FBI has warned very likely motivates some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity,” Berman said — as Pence shook his head. “This is a group that peddles theories that say that some politicians and high-profile Hollywood celebrities are members of a satanic cult, that are also cannibals. They say that coronavirus is being disseminated by George Soros and Bill Gates with the help of 5G networks.

“The president says they love America. So how do those beliefs embody a love of America?”

“You said the president seemed to embrace that,” Pence replied. “I didn’t hear that. I heard the president talk about he appreciates people who support him.”
And then there's this:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has denounced the QAnon conspiracy theory, becoming the highest-ranking congressional Republican to publicly condemn the theory.

McCarthy said during an interview on Fox News on Thursday evening that “there is no place” in the GOP for the theory....

The unfounded theory drew broader attention after Marjorie Taylor Greene won the GOP primary for Georgia’s 14th District last week. Greene previously embraced the theory in YouTube videos but has since attempted to distance herself from it, saying it no longer represents her views.

“Let me be very clear," McCarthy told Fox News. "There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party. I do not support it and the candidate you talked about has denounced it."
Here's what Greene said last week:
"No, it doesn't represent me," Greene said of the "QAnon candidate" label she's garnered in the national media....

She said she got curious about QAnon during the Russia collusion investigation into Trump but has since found "misinformation" and chose another outlet by running for political office.

"I was just one of those people, just like millions of other Americans, that just started looking at other information," Greene said. "And so, yeah, there was a time there for a while that I had read about Q, posted about it, talked about it, which is some of these videos you've seen come out. But once I started finding misinformation, I decided that I would choose another path."
She's apparently not disavowing her past racist and Islamophobic remarks.



But I guess QAnon is a bridge too far these days if you're an ambitious GOP politician.

Greene's campaign advertising is now Republican boilerplate:
In her first TV ad that launched Tuesday on cable TV, Greene drives her Humvee out on an open field and shoots an AR-15 gun at tins that represent gun control, open borders and the Green New Deal -- blowing each one up.



So prominent Republicans now say QAnon is bad. And yet:
Late last month, as the Texas Republican Party was shifting into campaign mode, it unveiled a new slogan, lifting a rallying cry straight from a once-unthinkable source: the internet-driven conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The new catchphrase, “We Are the Storm,” is an unsubtle cue to a group that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. It is instantly recognizable among QAnon adherents....

The slogan can be found all over social media posts by QAnon followers, and now, too, in emails from the Texas Republican Party and on the T-shirts, hats and sweatshirts that it sells. It has even worked its way into the party’s text message system — a recent email from the party urged readers to “Text STORM2020” for updates.
I've seen it argued that this isn't necessarily a QAnon reference:



Were Trump supporters using the phrase "A storm is coming" in 2016? I found this from that year at a blog for a right-wing radio show called Liberty's Thunder:



But I assume that the use of this phrase rather, say, than the more famous "Where We Go One, We Go All" is meant to provide deniability. QAnon? Who, us? We had no idea that was a QAnon slogan! It may have been in use before QAnon, but QAnon has embraced it, and QAnon believers will aprreciate the nod and wink to their movement.

With Pence, McCarthy, and other Republicans -- Ben Sasse, Liz Cheney -- denouncing QAnon, I assume the GOP is now treating it the way Republicans starting with Nixon treated racism: as a means to win votes, but always in code (at least until Donald Trump came along).

Now, of course, Trump has made overt racism largely acceptable in the GOP. Kevin McCarthy isn't denouncing Marjorie Taylor Greene's racism. But the GOP is clearly going to try to pretend that it's not the QAnon party, while seeking to benefit from the affiliation.

Posted by Steve M. at 7:26 PM 0 comments

THERE WON'T BE A BRAYDEN HARRINGTON AT THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION

A consensus has formed around the final night of the Democratic convention: Joe Biden exceeded expectations and gave the speech of his life -- but the most moving moment of the night belonged to Brayden Harrington. Here's what some New York Times columnists and contributors said when asked what last night's best moment was:
Wajahat Ali Brayden Harrington, a 13-year-old with a stutter, said Joe Biden listened to him and gave him courage. Brayden stood up and addressed the nation last night, and he gave us the best reason to vote for Biden....

Jamelle Bouie Brayden Harrington. I’m sure I won’t be the only person to say this, but it took a tremendous amount of courage for that young man to speak to the country about his disability. As someone who spent years in speech therapy as a child, I found it very affecting and powerful....

Liz Mair Joe Biden’s speech, and the lead-in video, were both great. But Brayden Harrington, who told his story of bonding with Biden over their shared stutter, stole the show and absolutely killed it.



Yastreblyansky writes:



And it's hard to imagine Trump waking up the morning after his big speech and learning that his oration was widely praised, but someone else moved the audience even more. Yas is right: Trump would never acknowledge a disability. But it's possible to imagine a 13-year-old speaking at the Republican convention about a shared grievance -- perhaps a child who lost a parent to a crime Republicans want to blame on Democrats.

If this hypothetical child gave an extraordinary speech, Trump would be graceless. If reporters asked him about it, he wouldn't praise the kid. He'd bring the subject back around to himself and talk about how great he thought his own speech was. By contrast, I'm sure Joe Biden will be absolutely delighted at the response to Harrington.

Trump doesn't even take pride in the fact that his son and namesake, Don Junior, is a wildly popular figure on the right. Junior is, according to one pollster, the second most popular potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate among Republican voters, after Mike Pence:



Can you imagine Biden's reaction if he'd been elected president in 2008 and his son Beau was seen as a top contender for the presidency in 2016 or 2020? He would have been thrilled.

Yes, Trump praises Ivanka. But he seems to regard her as platonic (we hope) arm candy, a hot babe whose presence by his side reflects on him. (The alternate reading is that Trump thinks: "I built this. Isn't it gorgeous?") Whereas Biden seems genuinely to admire the hell out of his wife and his late son, and genuinely likes to share the spotlight with the rest of his family (including son Hunter, who made a few appearances this week), as well as other Democrats and ordinary citizens.

Except by Ivanka, Trump can't bear to be upstaged. One reason he chose Mike Pence as his running mate was that he could tell Pence would never upstage him. (He doesn't know that about Nikki Haley, which is one big reason he won't dump Pence for her.) Biden, of course, chose a charismatic running mate with a big personality who's a better speaker than he is. He seems fine with that.

CNBC reported last week:
With less than 10 days to go before the start of the scaled-back Republican National Convention, plans are taking shape for what will be a four-day celebration of President Donald Trump....

Trump will be the central focus of the convention on each of the four days, organizers said, a plan that breaks with the long-standing tradition of waiting until the last day of the convention to showcase the presidential nominee.
Biden had a long moment of glory last night. I'm sure he's very happy that Brayden Harrington had a great moment, too.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:59 AM 0 comments

Thursday, August 20, 2020

RIGHT-WING SCAMMERS: THEY'RE NOT ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY

Biggest story of the day:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser and an architect of his 2016 general election campaign, was charged on Thursday with defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall, which was intended to bolster one of the president’s signature initiatives: erecting a barrier on the Mexican border.

With a wounded Air Force veteran and a Florida venture capitalist, Mr. Bannon conspired to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors by falsely promising that their money had been set aside exclusively toward building a new section of border wall, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan. Prosecutors said that after siphoning money from the project, Mr. Bannon plowed nearly $1 million into paying off his personal expenses.
As Paul Waldman notes, there's a lot of this kind of thing on the right:
... the scheme that Bannon has just been criminally charged with is indeed a species of penny-ante grift. Yet it’s the sort of grift the American right has been running on its own voters for decades....

Its roots go all the way back to the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, out of which grew a nationwide grass-roots network of conservative activists and supporters. Innovators such as direct-mail king Richard Viguerie realized that these people — or more specifically, lists of these people and their addresses — could be a powerful tool to collect money, a few dollars at a time....

You could raid that trove to aid conservative causes, but you could also use it to get rich. It wasn’t hard to figure out which buttons to push — the liberals are destroying the country, please send a check to save America! — and the donations would pour in.

... this system was awash in scammers, people who pleaded for donations but never actually used them to aid the causes they claimed.

When they aren’t hawking political products, they’re peddling miracle biblical cancer cures or erectile dysfunction cures or “glyconutrients” and all other manner of snake oil, certain of the gullibility of the conservative masses ready to type in their credit card numbers.

Whatever the cause of the moment is — defeat Barack Obama, support the tea party, help Trump, build the wall, stop antifa — it will become a vehicle for these scams.
But let's not frame this as "conservatism is just a big, fraudulent cash grab." Many people use conservatism to separate people from their money, but scamming on the right isn't always strictly about money.

For years, the NRA has bilked conservatives by making assertions that are every bit as fraudulent as the claims made by Bannon and his associates. We Build the Wall said all the money was going to construct Trump's border barrier; the folks at the NRA said that the money it received was going to prevent gun-averse politicians from seizing the guns of every armed citizen in America. They said this even though no politician actually wants to do that. (Some may want to confiscate all assault weapons, but no one is talking about preventing Americans from buying other kinds of firearms, or keeping the pistols, shotguns, and traditional rifles they already have.) It's now clear that officers of the NRA were making a tidy profit from this deceit -- but it also served to keep voters loyal to the Republican Party. It was, to a large extent, a scam for votes.

Republicans tell their voters a lot of lies to win votes. They say full-fledged Marxism is imminent in America. They say American cities and towns will soon be subject to Sharia law or antifa-driven anarchy. They say Christianity will be outlawed.

And they lie about legitimate threats, insisting that they're nothing to worry about. Climate change is a hoax! Russiagate was a witch hunt! COVID-19 is no worse than an annoying bout of the flu! Anthony Fauci wants to make millions for his Big Pharma buddies from a COVID vaccine! Bill Gates wants to use the vaccine to implant microchips in every American!

And now there's the biggest scam of all -- QAnon.

Many of the people spreading these scams aren't following them up with a direct request for money. But scamming is an ethos on the right. The conservative media uses these scams to sustain readership and ratings. The GOP, which has no broadly popular policy ideas, uses these scams to continue winning votes.

Ultimately, the real scammers are the conservative plutocrats who want voters to continue sending Republicans to office, but who also want Republican officeholders to do nothing on those voters' behalf after they're elected, because Republicans' only task when in office is to cut taxes and regulations on the rich, and to fill all judicial vacancies with judges who'll do the same.

When you see a successful non-monetary scam on the right, that's who ultimate scammers are. They're not directly scamming people for cash. GOP politicians and right-wing media figures are dong the scamming, selling conspiracy theories for Republican votes. The plutocrats are getting the cash.

Posted by Steve M. at 7:24 PM 0 comments

OBAMA VIOLATES A NORM THAT WASN'T GOING TO BE A NORM MUCH LONGER

What Barack Obama said about Donald Trump last night wasn't extraordinary -- it was what most of us have been saying about Trump for years. (In fact, it was a milder, more measured version of what we've been saying.) What's extraordinary is that it came from Obama, a former president. Former presidents aren't suuposed to criticize their successors.

For several years, Obama respected this norm. But why bother now? If the polls are right, and we manage to have a reasonably fair election -- two big ifs, I know -- the next ex-president will be Trump. And if Trump is no longer president starting January 20, that norm is gone. Trump's first post-presidential tweet attacking Joe Biden will be posted before Biden has a chance to lower his hand after taking the oath of office. Trump will attack Biden daily. He'll attack Biden in tweets, in Fox & Friends phone-in interviews (assuming Trump doesn't get his own show on Fox or. on One America News), and in the rallies Trump will almost certain begin staging again as soon as the pandemic is contained.

No norm can survive Trump. That will be true even if we manage to drive him out of office. So there's no point in respecting this norm now.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:36 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

THE HUBRIS IS THE ONLY THING THAT MIGHT SAVE US

President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have clearly been trying to sabotage the postal system because they know that Trump will lose a properly conducted election with a large number of mail-in votes. But they thought they could just dismantle sorting machines, remove mailboxes, and cut overtime without anyone noticing or doing anything to try to stop them. The president, whose formative experiences with the media taught him that you can get whatever kind of coverage you want if you feed a handful of journalists and gossip columnists a few juicy stories and quotes, appears to have been unprepared for the possibility that an independent press would vigorously cover his misdeeds and describe them accurately. DeJoy was forced to back down. He promised he'd suspend the sabotage until after the election.

But the damage is already done, and is unlikely to be undone, as ABC News reports.
As questions over recent changes implemented at the U.S. Postal Service continue to mount, new images obtained by ABC News appear to show mail sorting machines -- critical pieces of equipment used to speed up the mail delivery process -- sitting in parts in a postal facility in Portland, Ore.

The machines are wrapped in yellow caution tape after having recently been decommissioned and broken down into parts within the last month, according to the postal employee who took the photos....

At least six sorting machines at the Portland facility alone have already been taken offline in the past month, according to Joe Cogan, the head of Portland's postal union. Their fate remains unclear....

Sorting machines have been removed in cities across the country in recent weeks, according to local reports in Michigan, Oklahoma, and Kansas, among others. Similar issues were raised when images emerged showing the removal of some blue mail collection boxes across the country.

On Tuesday ABC News Washington, D.C., affiliate WJLA broadcast photos of what sources reportedly told the outlet were sorting machines being disassembled recently at a postal facility in Maryland.
They've already gotten away with quite a bit of sabotage, but they also seem to have thought that their sabotage wouldn't become an issue in the campaign, and that the press will meekly agree with Trump on election night when he says that there's no need to count mail-in ballots because he won the in-person vote.

In the 1980s, Trump had New York City gossip journalists wrapped around his finger; over the past decade, he's had a similar level of control over his favorite media outlets, Fox News and OANN. He doesn't seems to understand that the rest of the news media won't simply declare him the winner with millions of votes still to be counted, and will report it if there's an attempt to trash millions of ballots that were legally cast. It will be an easy story to report because he's being so brazen about wanting to do it.

So the hubris might be the only thing that saves us in November. Trump's cheating will be so obvious that he might not be able to attempt it without a real public outcry.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:11 PM 0 comments

WEARING A SUIT IS TRUMP'S SUPERPOWER! AND OTHER BRILLIANT INSIGHTS FROM GATEWAY PUNDIT (updated)

I made my way to Gateway Pundit this morning, and there's a lineup of posts that's dreadful even by GP's usual standards. I'll start with this one:
President Trump Wears Full Suit at Campaign Stop in Blistering Arizona Heat, Calls Out Basement Dweller Biden – ‘You Think Biden Could Do This?’

President Trump traveled to Yuma, Arizona, on Tuesday as part of his four-state campaign tour this week.

It is 115 degrees in Yuma today but supporters lined up in the blistering heat to see the President speak.

President Trump showed up to the Yuma airport hangar in a full suit like a boss....

Meanwhile, feeble Biden is hiding in his basement.

Trump called out the basement dweller: “You know, it’s 122 degrees in this place? You think Joe Biden could do this?”
That's right -- the ability to wear a suit on a hot day is how we're supposed to choose a president now, and Trump, well, he's nailed that. After flying to Arizona in an air-conditioned jet, he stepped off the plane and stood still at a podium in a suit. That alone merits four more years! Sleepy Joe couldn't pull that off!

What else? There's the expected congratulations post for Laura Loomer, who won the Republican congressional primary in Floriday's 21st District. The post, oddly, doesn't mention the fact that President Trump congratulated Loomer on her win, a reaction that once would have been considered controversial given the fact that, as The Washington Post notes, Loomer "once called herself a #ProudIslamophobe, has called Muslims 'savages,' and has contributed to conspiracy site Infowars.... Loomer’s work with Infowars ... spread false claims that the murder of 20 children and six staff members at the school was a hoax and aired similar claims about the Parkland mass shooting."

But Loomer's win isn't the only Florida victory Gateway Pundit is celebrating. There's also this:
Republican Anna Paulina Luna Wins Primary in Florida’s 13th District – Will Face Democrat Charlie Crist in November

Citizen Free Press writes:
Laura Loomer wasn’t the only outspoken woman to win big in Florida tonight. Republican candidate Anna Paulina Luna kicked ass in Florida’s 13th District. Luna will take on Charlie Crist in November. Luna, 31, a veteran, garnered nearly 36 percent of the vote, or more than 22,000 votes of the nearly 62,000 ballots cast in the race.
A photo of Luna accompanies this post:



And, because too much is never enough, another photo:



Dear David Brooks: You want to know what the future of the Republican Party looks like? This is what it looks like.

What else? Here's a post that refers to Bill Gates, menacingly, as "the Vaccinator."
Bill Gates, the Vaccinator, wants the entire world to be vaccinated with “several doses” of a coronavirus vaccine.
Yeah, and? Some vaccines require more than one dose. I'll take whatever the scientific consensus recommends. See you in the ICU!

And the lead post? Oh, it's just about a guy threatening violent rebellion against county government in California if public health measures continue.
A veteran and business owner living in Shasta County, California is completely fed up with the authoritarian Covid lockdown orders so he gave a stern warning to the Board of Supervisors....

Carlos Zapata warned the masked officials in the Board of Supervisors chamber that a revolution is brewing....

“Right now we’re being peaceful and you better be happy we’re good citizens, that we’re peaceful citizens but it’s not gonna be peaceful much longer — and this isn’t a threat — I’m not a criminal, I’ve never been a criminal but I’m telling you real good citizens are going to turn into real concerned and revolutionary citizens real soon. And nobody else is gonna say that. I’m probably the only person that has the balls to say what I’m saying right now.”

“We’re building and we’re organizing and we’ll work with law enforcement or without law enforcement but you won’t stop us when the time comes because our families are starving!” he said.

“This is a warning for what’s coming because it’s not going to be peaceful for much longer! It’s gonna get real!” Zapata said adding he went to war for this country and he’s ready to fight for this country even if it’s against its own citizens.
California has now had more COVID-19 cases than any other state in the Union.

As The Intercept's Robert Mackey recently noted, the Trump White House recently invited a Gateway Pundit correspondent into the briefing room.
On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure, he solicited one from Alicia Powe, a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.

Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.
GP's Jim Hoft is regularly called "the stupidest man on the Internet." That's wrong. Hoft is a successful purveyor of disinformation who's helping to keep millions of Americans ignorant and receptive to extreme Republican ideas. He's dangerous, not stupid.

****

UPDATE: I posted a couple of photos of congressional candidate Anna Paulina Luna above, but I didn't mention the slogan that appears on the splash page of her campaign site:



Holy crap.

Posted by Steve M. at 8:40 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

I'M SURE YOU'LL BE ASTONISHED TO LEARN THAT EVERYTHING TRUMP SAYS ABOUT THE SWINE FLU PANDEMIC IS WRONG

Today the president sent this tweet:



Subsequently, he spoke about the Obama administration's swine flu response at a news conference:



Is that true? Was there terrible Gallup polling for the Obama administration during the swine flu pandemic? Hmmm, let's see:



In a Gallup poll released April 29, 2009, the Obama administration's response to H1N1 got a 66% approval rating.

Trump says his Gallup numbers on the coronavirus pandemic are much better, but he's currently at 36% approval on that, and the best number he ever got was 60% in March (it dropped to 50% in April and 42% in June before arriving at its current low).

This isn't the first time Trump has attacked Obama and Biden on swine flu. Back in April, he tweeted this:



The Washington Post did a fact check -- which is interesting not just because Trump's characterization of the Obama administration's response was wrong, but because of what we learn about the very specific number Trump used.
[Trump] railed about the death toll ... inflating the figures to 17,000....

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that from April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010, there were 12,469 deaths in the United States because of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus. That was the midpoint of an estimate that ranged from a low of 8,868 to a high of 18,306. As we noted, Trump often cites this figure as 17,000.

But that was an after-the-fact report, based on statistical modeling of excess mortality....

Only after the swine flu pandemic had passed did researchers use a time series analysis to estimate how many excess deaths in a given period could be attributed to the swine flu but were not counted in the official death statistics. About 6 in 7 deaths are believe to have been missed in the laboratory-confirmed count during the swine-flu pandemic, though such calculations count any death in which the flu might have been a contributing factor. Many deaths are triggered by the flu but occur later, via secondary bacterial infection or exacerbation of underlying chronic diseases, even as flu symptoms may have disappeared.
In other words, in April, Trump was taking a CDC estimate of swine flu deaths, settling on a high number in the estimated range, and accusing Obama and Biden of being responsible for a great deal of death. But researchers arrived at that estimate using techniques that right-wingers angrily criticize when they're used to determine the death toll of the coronavirus. When public health authorities try to estimate COVID-19 deaths, right-wingers become furious. Counting any death on which the virus "might have been a contributing factor"? That's a liberal plot to make Trump look bad!

And yet here he was using an estimate produced using that technique in order to attack Obama and Biden.

Of course, America's COVID-19 death toll is now roughly ten times the swine flu death estimate Trump found so appalling. So I guess that explains why this morning's Trump tweet didn't have any numbers in it. Even Trump is smart enough to walk away from that "17,000 deaths" talking point.
Posted by Steve M. at 1:34 PM 0 comments

AN INFOMERCIAL VS. A NUREMBERG RALLY

I don't know how I feel about the Democrats' virtual convention -- the people I follow on Twitter seem to like it, though I'm concerned that it's coming off, for the most part, as a bland infomercial. But maybe, after nearly four years of Donald Trump, bland is good.

Michelle Obama was very good. The headline of Robin Givhan's Washington Post piece sums it up: "Michelle Obama’s Speech Was Like an Eloquent Neighbor Expressing Sorrow for What Our Country Has Become."
She sounded like a wounded citizen. She sounded like a woman in pain.

By the end of her speech, her voice was breathy and her eyes began to shine, and it seemed as though she might cry. That she might weep for the future of her country if its citizens couldn’t roust themselves from these unfathomable lows and claw their way up toward the light.
Givhan is also right about the rest of what I watched:
The speakers were not firebombing the audience with their rage. Their tone was more of exhaustion and exasperation.

From the Republicans who were supporting Biden to the former Trump voters who had changed their allegiance, it was as though the anger had burned off over the course of 3½ years and all that was left was steely determination.

Or, perhaps, it was just too difficult, too strange to stand in front of a camera yelling into the void instead of a convention hall packed with cheering citizens. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders’s tone was more urgent than angry.

People weren’t mad. They’ve been mad for years. They’ve moved beyond mad. Their voices were quieter. They were even smiling. Now, they are at their wits’ end.
"Too difficult ... to stand in front of a camera yelling into the void"? It's not difficult. People build entire careers doing that on YouTube.

It certainly won't be difficult at the GOP convention next week, although, given Republicans' indifference to the dangers of the coronavirus, they may decide to put their speakers in front of audiences. There's a week to go before the Republican convention and we still don't know the names of the majority of the scheduled speakers, but the names that have trickled out make clear that it will be four days of rage and resentment.
Republican National Convention organizers are hoping that the allure of a St. Louis husband and wife photographed pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters will be enough to pull in viewers.

Republican Party officials said the armed couple, lawyers Patricia and Mark McCloskey, will participate in next week's convention and share their support of President Trump, The Washington Post reports. The McCloskeys were photographed in late June outside their home, wielding guns and pointing them at Black Lives Matter protesters who were marching by on their way to the mayor's house down the street.

Last month, both McCloskeys were charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon. They claim they were defending their home from the protesters, with Mark McCloskey telling Fox News, "We're not going to apologize for doing what's right."
And Breitbart reports:
Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann, who was viciously smeared by the establishment media and has won settlements from the Washington Post and CNN, will speak at the Republican National Convention....
I called that in February 2019.
I can easily see Sandmann, the smirking kid from Covington Catholic, having a speaking role at the Republican convention.
The Breitbart story names a few other speakers:
In addition, Andrew Pollack—whose daughter Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting at Stoneham Douglas High School in February 2018—will speak at the Convention, a Trump campaign official confirmed to Breitbart News. Abby Johnson, a former clinic director at Planned Parenthood who is now a leading pro-life activist, will also speak at the Convention....

Sources familiar with the plans told Breitbart News that each of these cases—in particular, those of Sandmann, the McCloskeys, Pollack, and Johnson—illustrate the potentially disastrous consequences of Democrat governance.
Here's a Miami New Times story about Andrew Pollack:
Pollack began making political moves the day after his daughter's murder. "I put the news on, and I saw every fucking news station, even Fox, was focusing on gun control," Pollack says, "when we should be focusing on fixing the schools."

The following week, he appeared on Fox and slammed Chris Wallace for even mentioning an AR-15 ban. When Governor [Rick] Scott attended Meadow's funeral, Pollack agreed to help him pass legislation that would focus on immediate changes, such as adding armed guards, rather than laws the grieving father saw as unrealistic, namely gun control.

In the months since, Pollack has become the face of the conservative post-Parkland movement. He's an enthusiastic Trump voter ("If [Hillary Clinton] won, to me it meant society was finished," he says. "I just didn't like the political-correctness bullshit.") He nurses a deep resentment toward immigrants, particularly Muslims. ("They don't have the same ideology as we do. They can't be westernized.") And he is unsympathetic to concerns that increased security presence and stricter discipline programs could negatively affect students of color. ("The whole black caucus voted against the safety bill. I think like 90 percent or something... It's not about color.")

... Pollack's grandfather moved to the United States in 1933. It was here where he met his wife, a Polish seamstress. They married in their 30s and lived without citizenship for years. At one point, the couple was deported, then snuck back over the Canadian border.

"It's funny. Everybody is talking about illegals — my grandfather was illegal for a long time." Pollack says. "Of course, big difference from the immigrants we got today."

Why?

"I don't know. They get handouts. They don't work as hard. It's different," he says, with no basis in fact.
The RNC might not be all rage. Another speaker mentioned in the Breitbart story is South Dakota governor Kristi Noem -- the one who prepared for a meeting with President Trump by having a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore built that included Trump's face. So the speakers who aren't being chosen for their ability to inspire rage among the already persuaded are being chosen for their ability to flatter the president most enthusiastically.

In other words, it'll be precisely the Republican convention we should have expected.

Posted by Steve M. at 7:45 AM 0 comments

Monday, August 17, 2020

TRUMP DIDN'T NEED QANON, BUT MAYBE THE GOP DID

Jeet Heer has a theory about why QAnon rose to prominence:
QAnon is a byproduct of the Trump era and is likely to be part of his lasting legacy, long outliving his presidency. QAnon is best understood as a myth that helps Trump supporters reconcile themselves to his manifest flaws as a man and political leader. Trump thrives on negative partisanship, which requires that he be seen as preferable to his rivals. Given numerous reports of his sexual predations and corruption, the only way he can be acceptable is if his foes have committed the worst crimes imaginable.
I disagree. Right-wingers seemed to have had very little trouble reconciling themselves to Trump's sexual predations even in 2016, just as they've never had trouble with the multiple marriages of Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Rush Limbaugh (Limbaugh is also rumored to have engaged in sex tourism), and just as they admire Jim Jordan despite the fact that he's been accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse at Ohio State. (They don't have thoughts about Trump's corruption because it's never mentioned in the right-wing media bubble.) Even the most devout Christians among them don't need a convoluted conspiracy theory to make peace with Trump's sexual sins. He gave them the judges! And he fights for the faith they really believe in, which is Republicanism, and against what they consider the real devil, the Democratic Party. QAnon wasn't necessary to make them comfortable with Trump.

But it may be that QAnon is helping to keep them loyal to the Republican Party. Remember, prior to Trump, they'd just lived through eight years of Barack Obama, and many of them are old enough to remember living through eight years of Bill Clinton. They might have noticed that, on some level, things weren't all that bad in those sixteen years, even though they hated Obama and Clinton. Meanwhile, the Republican Party doesn't do much to make their day-to-day lives better -- sure, it fights for their guns (although Obama and Clinton never actually took them), and it opposes abortion and gays and non-whites and education and science, but all that, if you're a right-winger, is just preventing bad stuff from happening. What does the Republican Party do that's a positive good?

QAnon says: The leader of the Republican Party is hatching a secret plot to round all the pedophile cannibals in the world.

Wow! That's a good thing! It doesn't get anyone healthcare, or return good-paying jobs to rural America, or rid the country of opioids. But rounding up pedophile cannibals is still awesome!

I agree with Heer about this to some extent:
If we understand QAnon as a conciliatory myth that evolves to excuse the horrific truth about Trump and Trumpism, then it is likely to have a long life after he is defeated. It’ll become a Lost Cause myth about how a great man was felled by a sinister conspiracy.
But I think a Trump defeat would have led to a Lost Cause myth even without QAnon. Trump and his allies were talking about the sinister "Deep State" even before most of us had heard of QAnon. Trump was offering an excuse for his possible defeat from the very beginning of his term. The Deep State was all the conspiracy they would have needed to turn a defeated Trump into a martyr.

They love Trump because he hates us. He hates us more than Reagan or George W. Bush ever did. Hating us has long been the glue keeping the GOP coalition intact. It certainly isn't being held together by a record of accomplishment.

Trump's "Deep State" talk gave GOP voters even more reason to hate -- and then QAnon came along and said, They not only control the world, they also molest children and eat them. So they'll love Trump forever, even (or perhaps especially) in defeat -- but they would have even if the Deep State and the Democratic Party agenda were their only reasons for hating us.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:20 PM 0 comments

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE, COVID CRACKPOTTERY -- AND QANON

Axios has a disturbing story today about another alleged COVID-19 miracle cure being touted by the president.
To the alarm of some government health officials, President Trump has expressed enthusiasm for the Food and Drug Administration to permit an extract from the oleander plant to be marketed as a dietary supplement or, alternatively, approved as a drug to cure COVID-19, despite lack of proof that it works.

... The experimental botanical extract, oleandrin, was promoted to Trump during an Oval Office meeting in July. It's embraced by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, a big Trump backer, who recently took a financial stake in the company that develops the product.

Lindell told Axios that in the meeting, Trump "basically said: ...'The FDA should be approving it.'"

... There is no public data showing oleandrin has ever been tested in animals or humans for its efficacy against COVID-19, but the extract has shown some evidence of inhibiting the virus in a non-peer reviewed laboratory study.

... HUD Secretary Carson has enthusiastically promoted oleandrin to Trump administration officials and to the president himself.
You may recall that in 2015, when he was running for president, Carson promoted a dubious nutritional supplement manufacturer:
During Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate, Ben Carson put in a plug for Mannatech (MTEX), even while dismissing as "propaganda" the suggestion he had ties to the seller of nutritional supplements, which has a questionable track record that included claims its products could cure Downs syndrome, cystic fibrosis and cancer.
Axios reports that Lindell, who's very close to the president, arranged a White House meeting with Trump for Andrew Whitney of Phoenix Biotechnology, who's promoting oleandrin. Lindell, we're told, has "said he has been taking the unapproved botanical and has shared it with his family and friends. He said he believes it has kept him from getting COVID-19 and has cured other people. (No published clinical studies show the botanical cures or prevents COVID-19. Nor has the FDA said the product is safe or fit for this purpose.)"

To be fair, this isn't as crazy as what Trump's second ex-wife has been saying lately:
Thursday afternoon, Marla Maples, the television personality best known as Donald Trump’s second wife, shared an Instagram photo from notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates cracking up like a cartoon villain. “We get rid of cash and coins,” the overlaid text reads. “We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!”

“Education is key...Ask questions...Dig deeper...,” Maples wrote over the Instagram Story, which bore the vague header: “The digitalized economy?” ...



Maples, who dabbles in wellness influencing, has periodically mentioned the global pandemic to her Instagram following of 114,000—recommending Vitamin C IV drips, morning prayer, and an idiosyncratic hand-washing method in which she pours a mug of water on her hands without soap.
Maples's ex also appears to be a fan of Robert Kennedy Jr., according to Bill Gates in a recent interview.
The irony is that this is a president who is a vaccine skeptic. Every meeting I have with him he is like, “Hey, I don’t know about vaccines, and you have to meet with this guy Robert Kennedy Jr. who hates vaccines and spreads crazy stuff about them.”
I think it's possible that alternative medicine has something to offer, but it can lead people in dangerous directions -- and, naturally, Facebook is assisting in that process. Last week, NBC News told us the story of a woman in an anti-mask video that went viral:
In February, five months before she became known as "QAnon Karen," there was no one more terrified of the coming pandemic than Melissa Rein Lively.

"I bought the N-95 masks. I bought the hazmat suit," she said. "In my mind, a zombie movie was imminent."

At the time, Rein Lively said her career was at its peak. Her self-owned marketing company had just helped launch the high-end restaurant Nobu in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hyatt Hotels had signed on for marketing help.

By July 5, she had gone into a Target store and trashed the mask section, streaming her rage in a viral post that drew over 10 million views. Before the police closed in on her garage, she livestreamed her own mental breakdown on her company's Instagram account, telling police to "call Donald Trump and ask him" why she shouldn't be arrested for her actions.

She was, she told the police, the "QAnon spokesperson."
How does something like this happen?
While QAnon bubbled on the fringes of the internet for years, researchers and experts say it has emerged in recent months as a sort of centralized hub for conspiracy and alternative health communities....

Users like Rein Lively who started off in wellness communities, religious groups and new-age groups on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the pandemic were then introduced to extremist groups like QAnon, aided by shared beliefs about energy, healing or God — and often by recommendation algorithms....

Rein Lively followed a similar path as a growing community of conspiracy theorists, radicalization experts told NBC News.

Cooped up inside her home and losing work due to the pandemic in the weeks before her outburst, Rein Lively filled the time she would've spent hanging out with friends and emailing clients by diving down conspiracy-fueled rabbit holes on Facebook and Instagram, worsening her feelings of isolation and fear.

Some find themselves believing in elaborate conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, 5G wireless technology, vaccines and masks, which researchers say are in part pushed by an algorithm and shared community members that group all of the theories together.
In May, a Yahoo/YouGov poll found that "44 percent of Republicans believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements."

I don't want to believe that we're doomed as a society, but crackpottery is rapidly becoming the new mainstream.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:37 AM 0 comments

Sunday, August 16, 2020

OMIGOD! MORE BIDEN SUPPORTERS ARE VOTING AGAINST TRUMP THAN ARE VOTING FOR BIDEN!

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gives Joe Biden a 9-point lead over Donald Trump, and a 7-point lead in battleground states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Good news, right? But we're getting the usual warning:



In another sign of potential softness in the Democrats’ support, 58% of those who back Mr. Biden say their vote is more in opposition to Mr. Trump than in favor of their chosen candidate. By contrast, those planning to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump are more enthusiastic about their choice, with almost three-quarters saying their vote is more for him than against Mr. Biden.
But is that bad? Here were the numbers four years ago:





Four years ago, Hillary Clinton was the candidate more likely to attract voters who were voting affirmatively. Before Trump led a personality cult, he mostly attracted voters who opposed Hillary. And that was enough to get him to the White House.

I know -- he lost the popular vote. But negative partisanship allowed him to make it a race when the polls showed him trailing. Now Biden is leading and he has negative partisanship on his side. Anger against the other side is a powerful force in American politics.

I'm usually a gloomy guy, but I'm nearly certain that Biden will win if it's more or less a fair election. Of course, Trump is doing everything in his power to cheat. But if we can minimize his ability to do that, Biden will win -- though that's a big if.

Posted by Steve M. at 12:59 PM 0 comments

Saturday, August 15, 2020

WHY IS THE THOROUGHLY UNLIKABLE DINESH D'SOUZA SO POPULAR WITH RIGHT-WINGERS?

In the past few days, Dinesh D'Souza has been binge-tweeting dishonest attacks on Kamala Harris, focusing specifically on her racial identity.







Does this hectoring persuade anyone apart from committed Trump-loving right-wingers? No, Harris is not descended from slaves who lived in the United States. But she has black Jamaican ancestors. Black people came to Jamaica the same way they came to America: on slave ships. Yes, Harris is descended from a slave owner, but she's undoubtedly descended from slaves as well. That's also true of many blacks who trace their lineage to Southern plantations.

Apart from rage-junkie Republicans, does anyone seriously want to have this debate? Do even moderates want to challenge Harris's identification with other black Americans? And do moderates even pay attention to Dinesh D'Souza? His audience seems to consist exclusively of right-wingers (and liberals who hate-follow his career).

Theres no evidence that D'Souza ever changes anyone's mind. So why do right-wingers like him?

The short answer, obviously, is because they think he "owns the libs." For Republicans, the drive to see libs being owned appears as primal as normal people's desire for food or sex.

But the right also likes D'Souza because he postures as an intellectual. Now, I'm not saying that right-wingers like intellectuals. They despise intellectuals -- or, to be more precise, they despise legitimate intellectuals, who generally disagree with them.

But they love anyone on the right who acts as a ... what's the right term? A "counter-intellectual"? They want someone who seems to talk like an intellectual while disputing everything recognized as true by actual intellectuals and other well-informed people.

That's why they like Newt Gingrich, who was once an actual professor (of sorts), and especially liked him early in the 2012 presidential campaign, when he kept demanding Lincoln-Douglas debates, first with Mitt Romney and then with President Obama. The way the latter challenge was received on the right was: Everyone thinks that Kenyan socialist is so smart, but he can't even speak without a teleprompter! And no one's ever seen his college records! Newt is much smarter than Obama is! Obama is afraid to debate him!

Ted Cruz, an Ivy-educated lawyer who clerked at the Supreme Court, has a similar reputation: He's seen as a counter-intellectual who can bring the libs down a few pegs. Hell, even Donald Trump, who brags that he's "really smart" and a "genius," is seen as able to defeat the evil libs in a battle of thinkology.

I see the popularity of D'Souza as of a piece with the rise of Jordan Peterson and QAnon. It's not that intellectualism is bad exactly, it's that the sign of true genius is that you disagree with whatever is said by people who are generally regarded as credentialed or well informed. So D'Souza fights with historians who know their stuff, or Trump fights with Anthony Fauci, and they must be brilliant because, in the modern world, disagreeing with established facts, and with people who have expert knowledge, doesn't make you a crank -- it makes you a person who's "taken the red pill."

The notion that believing experts and established facts makes you a naive sheep and believing crackpottery makes you a true thinker isn't confined to the right, of course, but the right is its natural home, because right-wingers regard thinkers, intellectuals, and people who actually know what they're talking about as a genuine threat to their movement. They want all those people to lose at their own game -- and they genuinely believe defeat can come at the hands of clowns like D'Souza.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:07 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 14, 2020

WHY TRUMP'S POSTAL ELECTION THIEVES ARE ALSO TARGETING UNCONTESTED STATES

The Postal Service is practically boasting that it won't deliver your mail-in ballot on time, according to The Washington Post.
Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.

The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes.
We might be tempted to believe that the bad guy here is not President Trump's hatchetman, Louis DeJoy, the recently appointed postmaster general.
The ballot warnings, issued at the end of July from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, and obtained through a records request by The Washington Post, were planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump, as postmaster general in early summer.
Except that according to a Vice/Motherboard story titled "Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting," the plans coincide with DeJoy's appointement rather precisely.
One of the documents ... suggests these changes were in the works before Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor and Republican fundraiser, became postmaster general, because it is dated May 15, a month before DeJoy assumed office and only nine days after the Board of Governors announced his selection.
(Emphasis added.)

To me it seems obvious that DeJoy was in on the planning of this as his appointment was being finalized.

The Postal Service is clearly trying to steal the election for Trump. But if so, why the warnings to states that are obviously red or obviously blue? Why bother to sabotage the system in nearly every state?

And why remove sorting equipment in states Trump can't swing to his side? Look at this map from the Post story:



Of the six largest reductions in sorting capacity, two are in obvious swing states: Michigan and Pennsylvania. Two are in states that weren't expected to be swing states but now appear to be: Texas and Ohio.

But why the sorting reductions in New York and California? Trump won't lose those states no matter what happens, right?

Yes, but Trump's popular-vote loss in 2016 is a wound that's never healed for him. He doesn't just want to steal an Electoral College win. He wants to steal a popular vote win. Which were the only two states Trump lost by more than a million votes? California (which he lost by more that 4 million) and New York.

Here's a prediction: Even if this election theft fails, Trump will claim some sort of victory. If there's as much mail voting as we expect and it's somehow handled properly, the mail voters will probably be disproportionately Democratic, because of the right's politicization of the pandemic.

That means that while Biden might win, possibly by a large margin, once all the votes are counted, he might be trailing on Election Night. If that happens, and if Biden is ultimately declared the victor, I expect Trump to claim "the greatest landslide in American history on Election Night!" -- in other words, he'll boast that he won a partial count of the votes. (He'll claim he won this partial count by an unprecedented margin even if his Election Night lead is fairly slim -- he knows no history, so he has no idea that, to take one example, Franklin Roosevelts won the popular vote by 24 points in 1936.) Trump and the GOP voter base will declare for all time that Trump won because he won the partial count; they'll insist that the counting of any vote after midnight on November 3 was electoral fraud.

Trump is determined to get a win no matter what, and he'll claim one even if it he ultimately loses.

Posted by Steve M. at 6:50 PM 0 comments

TRUMP MIGHT CONTINUE KILLING PEOPLE EVEN IF HE LOSES IN NOVEMBER

A new poll has good news for Joe Biden ...
Democrat Joe Biden's lead has expanded to double-digits against President Trump in the presidential election, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds. Biden now leads Trump 53% to 42%, up from an 8-point advantage at the end of June.
... but not-so-good news about the coronavirus:
... more than a third of Americans (35%) say they won't get vaccinated when a vaccine comes available; 60% say they will. There are huge splits by education and party on this. Those with college degrees are 19 points more likely to get vaccinated than those without (72% to 53%), and Democrats are 23 points more likely than Republicans (71% to 48%).
A higher rate of vaccination would put us closer to herd immunity and thus reduce the spread of the virus, but it seems likely that skeptics will hold out, and that skepticism will be concentrated among GOP voters.

But there's a good chance that the numbers will be even worse than this poll indicates. Consider what's about to happen.

The election will be in November. The president would like us to believe that a vaccine could be ready before Election Day, but experts say that's a long shot, and even if there is an approved vaccine, doses probably won't be widely available until the end of the year at the earliest. Both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates believe it's more realistic to expect that Americans will be able to get vaccinated in 2021 -- possibly early in the year.

Now consider what Republicans already believe about this pandemic: that it's a hoax created with the express purpose of defeating Donald Trump. That Democrats will cease talking about the virus as soon as the polls close in November.

Now imagine that Joe Biden wins in November, and a successful vaccine emerges from all required testing phases just after the election, in late November or December or January.

Then Republican voters will really believe the fix was in all along.

And Trump will compound the problem. Even if he loses in a landslide, he'll insist he was defeated by a vast Deep State conspiracy, a victim of China and Soros and Gates and mail-in voter fraud. He'll give regular phone-in interviews to Fox & Friends and he'll probably announce that he's running again in 2024. He'll continue to be the effective head of the GOP.

And when he's asked whether he'll get the vaccine, he'll say, "No, I'm not going to get it. I think it's a hoax, a Democrat hoax. I think the China virus was always a hoax, and this is a hoax."

And that will inspire even more Americans to hold out. They'll see Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their families getting vaccinated on camera, and they'll see Trump refusing, and this will be even more of a culture-war flashpoint than it already is.

Of course, if Trump wins, he'll treat the vaccine as his glorious triumph. Then Republicans might be willing to get vaccinated.

Or maybe they're so far gone that they'll continue to believe the whole thing was a hoax -- especially if, as I suspect, Trump declares that the vaccine is incredible and tremendous and the greatest vaccine in the history of vaccines, but he's not getting it, because (he'll imply) he's so genetically superior he doesn't need it. Mike and Karen Pence will get it, possibly on camera, and Jared and Ivanka will leak their vaccination to the media, but Trump will still be a holdout. And more people will die.


Posted by Steve M. at 8:22 AM 0 comments

Thursday, August 13, 2020

ON VOTE-BY-MAIL, TRUMP SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD, AND IS GETTING AWAY WITH IT

The press is revealing that it's not equal to the task of reporting on President Trump's efforts to hamper mail-in voting. Here's a Washington Post story:
President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

“Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”

During the Wednesday briefing, Trump told reporters he would not approve the $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs. But he went further in remarks Thursday morning, blaming Democrats’ efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.

“There’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting.... They voted during World War I and World War II,” Trump told Bartiromo.
In a deadly pandemic, when many voters -- but more Trump supporters than Trump opponents -- want to vote without going to a polling place, where is the effort in this story to make voters understand that Trump is engaged in the sort of election interference we think doesn't happen in a civilized country like ours?

Okay, maybe the Post's straight news story doesn't convey that -- so how about this analysis, headlined "Trump Blurts Out His True Motive on Mail-In Voting"?
Back in March, President Trump seemed to blurt out the real reason he opposes expanded voting by mail in the 2020 election. Referring to provisions in the Democrats’ coronavirus stimulus bill to vastly increase funding for voting by mail, he said on Fox News that the bill had “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

He’s doing it again.

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.

“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
But this analysis still isn't making the important point: This is a democracy, and while elected officials are partisans, they should be strictly non-partisan when dealing with election issues. If they use their power to put a thumb on the scale in their own favor so they'll win more elections, that's corrupt. That's a sign of an illiberal state. That means we're living in a degraded, debased parody of democracy.

This needs to be explained to people. Americans don't understand it instinctively. That's why there's never been an outcry against the GOP's long-standing "voter fraud" witch hunt, or the other efforts by Republican state officials to limit voting in Democratic-leaning precincts, such as closing down polling places so presumed Democratic voters often have to spend all day waiting to vote.

Americans have never fully grasped the anti-democratic inclinations of the GOP, and most are likely to say "Well, that's just partisan politics" based on the reporting of Trump's remarks. And meanwhile, the Trump crony who's running the postal service is removing mail-sorting equipment from postal facilities without explanation, while instituting other changes that are resulting in slower mail delivery, at a time when polls say that 72% of Democrats are at least somewhat likely to vote by mail this fall, but only 22% of Republicans.

Democratic leaders aren't doing a good job of conveying the profoundly anti-democratic nature of this, either.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to Trump's claims during an interview on MSNBC, saying the $25 billion for USPS was proposed by the agency's Board of Governors, not Democrats.

"In the legislation we have $25 billion, that is the number that is recommended by the Board of Governors of the US postal service," Pelosi said in the interview, also noting that "a bipartisan Board of Governors, 100% appointed by Donald Trump, they recommended $25 billion dollars."

Pelosi added that in previous congressional bills on the coronavirus, "the President has stood in the way of any money for the postal service."

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's campaign called Trump's comments an "assault on our democracy," in a statement.

"The President of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years," Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
Biden is at least cites the threat to the election -- though he interleaves it with other concerns. And maybe I shouldn't blame him. Not getting your meds in the mail is a problem many voters can easily grasp. The threat to democracy is ... abstract.

But do we have no pride in our system of government anymore? Is it impossible to convey the notion that if we can't conduct fair elections, then the GOP and the Trump administration have turned America into a banana republic? Shouldn't this make proud Americans upset?

As long as this can be dismissed as just the normal jockeying for advantage in an election season, Trump will get away with it. Democrats need to make the question of whether we can hold fair elections a matter of national pride -- and the media should report on it as a matter of national decay, which is what it is.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:30 PM 0 comments
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