2924

No, we need to put them in camps, maskless, and let our country’s problems sort themselves out :)

2925

The argument is that the voters support those proposals, not that Republicans in the Senate support them.

I just heard him on CNN, and he called himself a ‘proud centrist’. Everyone believes their views are the right ones (else they would not have them), and everyone believes that everyone else should reasonably come to the same views (because they are the right ones), and everyone naturally believes those views put them in the center of right thinking.

But Kasich is not in the center. And if he thinks Republicans can cooperate with Joe Biden to accomplish meaningful things, what is his prescription for climate change legislation of a form that Republicans will agree to? What is his prescription for universal affordable access to health care of a form that Republicans will agree to? His comment on climate change was yes, I think we can do something on climate, but not this green new deal. We’re Americans, not socialists!

What he means is we are ready to enact tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and corporate welfare for oil companies and deal with the deficit by cutting / constraining social security and Medicare and Joe should agree to those things .

2926

I hear they just want to party and meet singles in my area.

2927

My auto-correct is undefeated

2928

This is really good:

2929

That is, in fact, a really good thread.

2930

btw, I have the answer for the third twit’s* question (Will Stancil). The logical fallacy has long been known as Murc’s Law. Ex: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/12/great-moments-murcs-law

*I semi-consistently refuse to call them “tweets” ¯\(ツ)/¯

2931

Excellent.

Also the media never learns, not even now. (Click on the link, it gets ‘better’.

2932

(swaps to here to avoid derailment of the election thread)

This does savor of Trumpworld, in that it is an obvious and flagrant lie.

Haberman spent four years deliberately obfuscating detail, penning countless stories where off-the-recorded anonymous stories offered vague concern about Trump’s actions with little or no specifics on what happened.

And she so lacked discernment that she pegged Hope Hicks and Javanka as Trump’s Dans and Amys - the go-getters who made things happen - and made them her complete focus of attention. When in fact the trio were Trump’s Garys, kept around to offer unthinking support, juice boxes, and a handy target for abuse when Trump wanted to blow off steam.

Like Trump, Haberman and her enablers at the Times live in their own bubble. So when her book finally comes out, telling us things other people reported earlier and better years ago, they’ll have a party to salute her as a warrior for truth and make jokes about the peons on the Internet who don’t appreciate the majesty of the Gray Lady. Afterwards they’ll head out to the Hamptons for a nice long boozy weekend. They deserve it, they’ll think, after all that work they put in saving democracy.

2933

FWIW, I think Gary would be a much better source than either Dan or Amy. No real agenda, liable to say more than he should, always with the Veep.

2934

In an ordinary administration this may very well be true. Conceivably a Gary might let slip something really juicy in among all the subservient adulation, and traditionally a president has a private side that remains concealed to all but an inner circle. Getting to a Gary would let you see into that hidden inner circle.

But there isn’t any hidden private side to Trump. If you want to know he’s thinking, he’ll be glad to tell you, 24/7 and in all caps on Twitter. This eliminates the reason for access journalism: there’s no point in carefully worming your way into the palace to reach the harem when the head concubine is already strolling around the marketplace naked.

The better journalists quickly adapted their techniques to Trump - e.g. Dale with his fact checking of Trump’s lies, Fahrentholt with his assiduous receipt checking that showed that the supposedly mighty Trump empire was in fact a grift. Haberman instead stuck to traditional access journalism and produced - nothing of note,* except some puff pieces with glamor shots of Hope Hicks.

  • Haberman’s name is on some big stories, e.g. the state tax ones - but only for calling up the White House and asking them for an official comment, not on the actual meat of the reporting.
2935

I like your take HumanTon, very succinct and clear on Haberman and “access journalism”.

2936

NBC News reporter Kasie Hunt said Friday that many Republicans currently in Congress deserve credit, that they “actually do the work that keeps the country on track.” Never mind what “on track” means to a party devoted to deregulating the state, exacerbating inequality, and using the immigration system to pursue various ethnic cleansing schemes—to say nothing of a do-little-to-nothing approach to a pandemic that’s already claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives. Material reality just doesn’t have any bearing on the situation. It can’t, in a world in which the GOP is presented as a reasonable counter to liberalism, studded merely with mild disagreements about the direction of the country for which everyone shares an abiding affection.

The memory-holing of the record of the American right-wing movement will have detrimental consequences. The reality reversal is harmful to history. It allows those who were—at best—complicit in the destruction of the U.S. regulatory state and democratic institutions over the last four years to skate on the consequences they have earned and provide the means by which they can reinvent themselves to do it all over again. The right depends upon the nation being fitted with a goldfish memory of its deeds to prevent larger accountability beyond occasionally, and narrowly, losing elections. It expects this cycle to continue.

On November 4, Brian Williams, the disgraced former anchor who has somehow resurrected his career to hold down the 11 p.m. hour, put this ball in play by asserting that the Lincoln Project should “take a well-deserved victory lap on the part of all these former leaders and strategists who got together to push the other side.” It’s unclear what, exactly, the Lincoln Project did to “push the other side,” given that the president increased his vote share among Republicans from 2016 and Democrats’ hopes for down-ticket successes went by the boards.

2937

Not sure this is this is a good metric given many sane people left the party. The people left are the Trumpists so I would expect them to go for their golden idol in an election at a very high percentage.

Biden did really well in places like the suburbs. Now I don’t know how much of anything you can credit the Lincoln Project for stuff like that but given the vote splitting we saw in many places I think it’s fair to say that a number of conservative voters voted for Biden this go around.

2938

Also, i think you’d need to look at vote share in very specific sections of the country where LP focused their final ads. There appear to be shifts in certain key regions, like southeastern Pennsylvania.

2939

Ok, fair enough (unsarcastically.)

2940

I’d normally be willing to wipe my ass with TNR, but that article is bang on in every particular. Thanks for posting.

There is no doubt that the Trump presidency, at times, blazed a path of corruption and illiberalism all its own, and often in the face of embarrassment and irritation from the Republican establishment. But it should never be forgotten that his administration enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—broad and sustained material support from the right, even as it put children in camps apart from their parents, gutted the environmental and interior regulatory state, and saw 230,000 Americans die from a mismanaged pandemic. Acting to sweep this recent history under the rug will court disaster. Instead of a return to normal, it will more likely put us on a path back to Trumpism.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this exact fucking playbook before as Bush has been totally rehabilitated into a slight goofy but loveable guy who paints pictures and calls back to a halcyon era of compassionate conservativism and bipartisan consensus. While his sneering contempt, daily idiocy, horrific war crimes, cronyism, and incompetence (sound familiar?) are shoved under the rug. And now you have the exact people responsible for Bush and that rehabilitation taking credit for Biden’s victory and using it to jockey themselves into a position where they feel like they can call the shots for Democratic policy and sideline the activists and political workers who are actually doing the real work. In 2024, expect a new anti-Carlson PAC and media organization led by Hope Hicks, Miles Taylor and Tony Scaramucci.

There is a simple truth that’s getting glossed over here: Trump is the natural culmination of the past five decades of the American conservative movement. But that’s not stopping the effort to reshape reality and separate conservatives into “good” and “bad” silos, which furthers the false idea that Trump is an aberration. That kind of mentality leads to visual atrocities like a political cartoon showing GOP Senator John McCain and Democratic Representative John Lewis looking down on the election results from heaven in delight. It’s a nice image until you remember that McCain supported Trump in 2016 long enough for him to beat back a Tea Party challenger and voted with the president 90 percent of the time until his death.

2941

Considering the GOP gained seats but lost the Presidency I would a priori assume the Lincoln Project had an effect unless proven otherwise.

2942

It depends what standard you judge them by. If you look at persuading voters with Republican party registration, they failed miserably.

2943

What data are you basing this statement upon?