Thursday, March 28, 2024

"ANTI-INTERVENTIONIST" MAGA COMMENTATORS ARE BEING AWFULLY POLITE ABOUT PRO-INTERVENTION JOE LIEBERMAN

Commentators frequently tell us that right-wingers in the era of Donald Trump have abandoned internationalism and interventionism in favor of "America first" isolationism. The Trump-era right, we're told, hates "globalists" -- which is sometimes a euphemism for "Jews" and sometimes just a reference to whoever gets America into wars (for instance, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney).

We know this, and we also know that Trump-era right-wingers are extremely rude, in imitation of the master. We know that they won't be polite when Joe Biden dies, or the Clintons, or Nancy Pelosi, or Jimmy Carter. They hate these people and won't be shy about saying so. They won't decide that's it's wrong to speak ill of the dead.

So why is the allegedly anti-interventionist pro-Trump right being so nice in the aftermath of Joe Lieberman's death? Why is no one denouncing him as an evil Democrat globalist?

I guess I understand why Roger Stone is being nice: Lieberman first won his Senate seat by defeating Lowell Weicker, an antagonist of Stone's beloved Richard Nixon.


Stone supported Lieberman back then, but that doesn't fully explain the kind words -- Stone did political work for George W. Bush and now despises him.

The rest of MAGA Nation seems to have nothing at all to say about Lieberman, good or bad. There's nothing new about Lieberman at the Infowars site, or at Alex Jones's Twitter. Marjorie Taylor Greene's two Twitter accounts say nothing about Lieberman. (The person she's mourning right now is a New York City cop who was killed on Monday, because denouncing crime in "Democrat" cities is consistent with her brand.) There's nothing about Lieberman in Donald Trump's Truth Social feed or Donald Trump Jr.'s Twitter feed. Meanwhile, random pro-Trump right-wingers are posting the kinds of comments and memes you'd have expected to see if Lieberman had died in the pre-Trump era:


Gosh, if I didn't know any better, I'd guess that opposition to interventionism and globalism doesn't really mean all that much to Trumpists, except to the extent that it's a useful stick to beat Democrats (and anti-Trump Republicans) with. They don't really care that Lieberman supported an interventionist foreign policy -- to them, he's a guy who drove Democrats nuts, so he shouldn't be criticized.

Trump and his high-profile backers know that they might look a bit hypocritical if they actually said nice things about Lieberman. But anti-interventionism is clearly not very important to anyone in MAGA Nation. What's most important is whether you're an enemy of MAGA Nation's #1 enemy, which is the Democratic Party. Joe Lieberman passed that test easily.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

THE SOCIOPATHIC NARCISSISM OF 24/7 RIGHT-WING MEMING

Noah Berlatsky tells us about the depraved response of the onlight right to the Baltimore bridge disaster:
During a Newsmax hit ... American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp suggested the container ship failure was somehow caused by “drug-addled” employees and covid lockdowns. Fox host Maria Bartiromo, meanwhile, linked the disaster to “the wide open border.”

... the platform formerly known as twitter was absolutely overrun with racism. A number of users with significant platforms linked the bridge collapse to DEI [and] spread bigoted tropes about Baltimore’s mayor....
DEI? Yup, they blame everything on DEI now.


Berlatsky sees this as strategic:
Conspiracy theories undermine faith in a shared truth or a shared community. MAGA isn’t really trying to get people to believe any one story. They’re just trying to sow doubt. If nobody can be trusted, if everyone is corrupt, then Trump and his ilk are no worse than anyone else....

In addition to undermining trust in the political process, conspiracy theories also undermine our trust in each other. This is especially important for MAGA during disasters because, as Rebecca Solnit has pointed out, disasters are often a moment when people demonstrate a great capacity for self-sacrifice, community, and solidarity. Solnit’s 2009 book “A Paradise Built in Hell” discusses how during disasters — such as the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake — people risk their lives for one another, care for each other, cook for each other....

MAGA, in particular, is a movement built on stoking divisions and cultivating paranoid fear of Black people, immigrants, LGBT people, Muslims, Jews, and other marginalized people. Spreading conspiracy theories following disasters is a way to prevent the formation of solidarity, community, and trust.
I agree, but I'd add that the reduction of every major news event to hateful memes is a way of saying to fellow right-wingers (and potential right-wingers): Yes, even in this moment, you and I are the people everyone should care about. We're straight white people. We are the center of the universe. All other people -- non-whites, LGBT people, the Democratic politicians we hate -- are inferior. Even in this moment of tragedy, we are still the world's main characters. If we can only drive all liberals and queers and feminists and dark-skinned people from politics, we will rule, as we're meant to. So don't develop feelings for the people who've been hurt. Remain narcissistic and self-focused. It's not only acceptable, it's patriotic -- after all, everyone who's not like us is subhuman and undeserving and ridiculous.

So we have this:


And some attacks on the politicians and policies right-wingers hate, collected here:


Many people ask why Trump voters -- and Republican voters in general -- vote against what would seem to be their own economic intrerests. This is why. Trump and other Republicans tell them they have value and other people don't. They say those other people deserve to suffer, while members of the right-wing tribe don't. They give voters permission to hate, and to reject empathy. That may not win every election for the GOP, but it wins the party more elections than it deserves to win.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

RONNA McDANIEL IS ACTUALLY HAVING A VERY GOOD WEEK


Ronna Romney McDaniel is out at NBC:


You might think McDaniel is going through a difficult time, what with the many attacks on her credibility from major on-air figures at NBC and MSNBC. But think about it: McDaniel was ditched by Donald Trump and was no longer seen as sufficiently loyal to MAGA, yet now she's a right-wing martyr. That's very, very good for her post-RNC career.

Republican propagandists are deliberately lying about the anger over her hiring. Mick Mulvaney, for instance:
“This has nothing to do with Ronna McDaniel’s behavior during Jan. 6 or the 2020 election,” Mulvaney said Monday during an appearance on cable news channel NewsNation. “NBC just cannot stand having somebody from the right on their sacred airwaves. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hysterically funny.”
And Fox News:
NBC's Ronna McDaniel meltdown marks latest news outlet to face revolt from liberal staff for GOP platforming

... Notably, none of NBC's on-air talent expressed any outrage when the network in 2022 not only hired President Biden's press secretary Jen Psaki after having discussions as she was serving in the White House but also gave Psaki her own show.
And RedState:
Pathetic Delusion - the Democrat Operatives at NBC News Wail When a Republican Joins the Roster

... When its stable of former Democrat operatives find it intolerable when a lone Republican operative is brought on, it speaks clearly to the slanted foundation at NBC News. It becomes pathetic when the people who want to lecture us about how things are corrupt cannot even see how they blatantly appear to the general public.
A week ago, MAGA Nation considered McDaniel an insufficiently loyal has-been. Now she's seen as a victim of the all-powerful liberal mob. After all this, she can get more money from (I assume) Fox News than she was ever going to get from NBC -- and she'll get to keep the NBC money ... and maybe she'll sue NBC anyway.

She's a walking, talking bloody shirt now, like Donald Trump. This will turbocharge her career the way indictments turbocharged Trump's post-presidency. Thanks a lot, NBC, for giving her this boost.

Monday, March 25, 2024

JAMES CARVILLE IS A CREEP -- AND IS AS ELITIST AS THE DEMOCRATS HE CRITICIZES

Maureen Dowd appears to be charmed by a squirm-inducing story James Carville told her about a celebration in one of the classes he used to teach:
A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.

“I get a $25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’

“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’

“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’”

A female student had complained about the sighing line.

He wanted to mutter to the dean, “Her boyfriend has never heard that sound,” but he simply said, “OK, I’ll endeavor to do better.”
Carville is 79. It's creepy for an old man to say this to a class full of people young enough to be his grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren.

Also -- and yes, I know I'm compounding the cringe -- what Carville said is wrong.


I use this method to open champagne bottles, and the corks always (quietly) pop, which is ... um, probably not a sound you want to hear in the boudoir. This sommelier knows how to avoid the pop altogether, but this isn't the sound of ecstasy either:



"A nice gentle sigh of happiness," the sommelier says. For a bottle of champagne, maybe. Not for a person.

Later in Dowd's column, she reminds us of Carville's anti-"elitist" posturing. You know how this goes:
Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”
In Dowd's column, Carville compounds this by gendering it. Even if you don't think the champagne story is misogynist, this is:
Lately, he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters.

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’ ..."
But none of this ever shows up in the polls. Last month, Gallup asked voters to name "the most important problem facing this country today." Here's a list of every problem mentioned:


I don't see "woke stuff" on that list.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released earlier this month asked respondents to name "the most important issues facing the country today." Respondents could name more than one issue. "Political correctness/cancel culture" was tied for 16th place, well behind immigration (36%), price increases/inflation (33%), the economy and jobs (24%), crime and drugs (17%), guns (17%), and a host of other issues.

Also, Carville's obsession with terms like "Latinx" proves that he's just as much of an elitist as the people he criticizes. For most Americans, this term is a non-issue -- polling in 2020 suggested that only about a quarter of Hispanics were aware the term existed. No one seems to have polled the rest of us, but I'd bet that the percentages of white and Black voters who recognize the term are minuscule. Yet we've had story aftetr story after story about the Democrats' alleged Latinx problem, always in the elite media. Being concerned about this is "faculty lounge" thinking.

I won't deny that Donald Trump's macho bluster appeals to some voters, of all ethnic groups, precisely because he's perceived as more masculine than Joe Biden (and, obviously, Hillary Clinton in 2016). But Democrats won the "Who is more manly?" war in 1992 and 1996, and again in 2008 and 2012 -- and Democrats also won the popular vote with a female candidate in 2016 and a candidate Maureen Dowd (and others) incessantly tried to feminize in 2000. And Democrats are winning a lot of races in which Trump isn't on the ballot.

Trump's chest-thumping has its appeal, but he's just one Republican, and I can't see anyone else like him on the horizon for the GOP. (His son and namesake, who could easily be the party's 2028 nominee, can't pull it off.) So while I think the Democratic Party has some long-term problems, I don't think this is one of them.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

TRUMP ISN'T THE ONLY REASON EVANGELICALS ARE "RAUNCHY"

Last week, The New York Times published a piece by Ruth Graham headlined "Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here." Graham wrote about a recently published right-wing calendar:

The “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features old-school images of sexiness — bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath....

In [one] image, a crucifix hangs prominently on the kitchen wall behind a woman in a tiny skirt, apron and platform heels. On the platform X, the model — Josie Glabach, who goes by “The Redheaded Libertarian” — said she was working to provide for her family, and defended her conservative bona fides in part by referring to her family’s Catholic faith. Using vividly vulgar language, she wrote that she doesn’t care “if the fact that I look hot doing any of it offends your senses.”
This calendar is controversial in Evangelical circles:
Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical commentator and podcaster, condemned the calendar as “soft porn” marketed to married men, and saw it as proof of growing polarization between Christian and secular conservatism. Other prominent Christian conservatives joined her in expressing their disgust.

But the calendar itself suggested that Christian and secular conservatism are not exactly as distinct as Ms. Stuckey and others might wish. The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, frequently speaks at church events and evangelical conferences, and frames her cause as a “spiritual battle.”
Graham, of course, blames the increased raunchification of Evangelicals on Donald Trump:
... a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.
At Threads, David French recommends a despairing essay on the same subject by Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian and critic of the edgiest right-wingers. In the essay, titled "Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore," Moore spreads the blame around:
Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancĂ© down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.

Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.
(The congresswoman who joked about postponing sex with her fiancé in a National Prayer Breakfast speech was Nancy Mace. The "fuck off" member of Congress was Marjorie Taylor Greene. And Pastor Wilson described women whose interpretation of Scripture differed from his as "a couple of cunts." Glad I could clear all that up.)

This seems like a relatively new development, but some Evangelicals have wanted to be like this for quite a while. Back in 2006, I wrote about this Newsweek story:
Last Saturday morning, 200 Christian men gathered in a downtown warehouse in Nashville for a daylong spiritual extravaganza. Inside, strobe lights flashed, and tracks by the Killers thumped from speakers stacked on either side of a stage. Four large video screens showed clips of karate fights, car chases and "Jackass"-style stunts. Then the music lowered and Christian comedian Brad Stine appeared. With his rat-a-tat delivery and aggressive style, Stine quickly whipped the crowd into a chorus of “Amens!” “A lot of guys out there wouldn’t have the balls to be here,” he shouted. “Are you ready to be a man? Are you ready to kick ass? Are you ready to grab your sword and say, ‘OK family, I’m going to lead you?’ Buckle up. This is GodMen!”

The event was the first of what Stine and other organizers hope will be a series of testosterone-fueled Christian men’s gatherings across the country. Their purpose: to reassert masculinity within a church structure that they say has been weakened by feminization.
The tunes at this event weren't exactly "Amazing Grace."
The GodMen also reject typical Christian music. It “doesn’t usher me into the presence of God,” says Smith, Stine’s manager. “It just ushered me into boredom.” Not so with the GodMen band that played on Saturday. On stage, as a series of words flashed on screens—BOSS, BOLD, BRASH, BULLY, BLUNT—the band ripped into their first tune, “Testosterone High”: “Forget the ying and the yang/ I’ll take the boom and the bang/ Give me another dose of testosterone.” ...

When the GodMen band seized the stage again, they tore into an anthem called “Grow A Pair!”: “We’ve been beaten down/ Feminized by the culture crowd,” they sang. “No more nice guy, timid and ashamed/ We’ve had enough, cowboy up/ In the power of Jesus name/ Welcome to the battle/ A million men have got your back/ Jump up in the saddle/ Grab a sword, don’t be scared/ Be a man, grow a pair!”
This was around the same time that many right-wingers were claiming to be "South Park Republicans." In 2005, an essayist for the Manhattan Institute gleefully described one South Park episode:
Consider season nine's hilarious - and disturbing - opening episode. The boys' gay teacher, Mr. Garrison, decides to get a sex change. The procedure is shown, graphically, to be a horrific self-mutilation, which is already a brave bit of truth-telling in an era of "transgender rights." But you've never seen anything on television like what follows.

Mr. Garrison, now a "woman," mistakenly thinks he's pregnant - and that makes him very happy because he can rush off to get an abortion, and so prove that he's a real woman. Here's the key exchange, at a Planned Parenthood center:

Garrison: Hello, doctor. Looks like I need an abortion.

Doctor: An abortion?

Garrison: Yeah, I've got one growing inside of me. Now are you gonna scramble its brains or just vacuum it out?

The doctor then tells Mr. Garrison that he can't have an abortion because he can't get pregnant: His sex change is ultimately cosmetic. Mr. Garrison is crestfallen: "You mean I'll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?" The doctor responds: "Nnn ... that's right."

[Matt] Stone and his fellow thirtysomething colleague, Trey Parker, portray both abortion and sex-change operations in ways Robert Bork would endorse wholeheartedly - but do so in one of the most offensively vulgar half-hours in television history. Now that's subversive.
All of this -- twenty years ago and today -- conforms to Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily. In the 1960s and immediately afterward, the left was identified with sexual liberation, and the right with its opposite. But in periods when feminism, respect for LGBTQ rights, and a focus on consent and mutual respect seemed to dominate on the left, the right decided to emphasize the opposite -- which was a good fit, as it turned out, because right-wingers hate LGBTQ people, hate feminism, and want heterosexual sex, but exclusively on straight men's terms.

Right-wingers talked less about all this in the Obama years, when liberals elected a straight male sex symbol as president. But since then, Democrats have run a feminist woman and an old codger as president, so Trump pretended to be the stud he may have been a few decades ago, and the right followed. But the tendencies were there all along.

And it's not just Trump. In seemingly non-political online spaces, "manosphere" influencers are encouraging young men to dominate women and be "pimps" while also expressing contempt for women who have active sex lives. Other influencers encourage women to be "tradwives" who marry young, stop working outside the home, cede decision-making to their husbands, and bear lots of children. This is the right hoping to remake the sexual zeitgeist, or at least persuade a significant number of young people that present-day sex and romance are a liberal plot against them. And that's the context for Elon Musk's recent online pronouncements that hormonal birth control is dangerous, a message that's also being spread to the young by junk-science influencers.

All this is consistent with the raunchy Evangelical movement, which I fear will outlive Trump.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

THE RIGHT'S BLAME-AMERICA-FIRST RESPONSE TO THE MOSCOW TERROR ATTACK

More than 100 people are dead in a terrorist attack on a concert hall at the outskirts of Moscow. ISIS claims responsibility, and U.S. officials agree with that assessment. Russia, not letting a crisis go to waste, says the attackers were trying to flee to Ukraine when they were captured.

And on the American right, the real culprit has been found: the CIA.


I don't think U.S. government contractor Elon Musk has blamed the CIA yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

I should note that there's no real distinction between blaming Ukraine for this attack and blaming the CIA -- to the modern right, it's all part of one big "globalist" "deep state" octopus, which includes NATO:


BONUS: This is from patriots.win, the message board that used to be r/TheDonald on Reddit:


They hate America when they don't control it.

Friday, March 22, 2024

GOP VOTERS IN 2021 SAID, "WE STILL LOVE TRUMP!" MERRICK GARLAND SHRUGGED IT OFF.

In a very good New York Times story about Merrick Garland's lack of urgency in bringing Donald Trump to justice -- the result of which will be, in all likelihood, that neither of Trump's federal trials will start before Election Day -- we're told that one reason Garland and his colleagues weren't aware of the time pressure on them is that they found it unimaginable that Trump might be the GOP presidential nominee again:
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.

In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.
I've always assumed that an excess of fastidiousness delayed these indictments. Some of you told me that I'm not a lawyer and therefore can't understand that the sauce has to simmer for the precise amount of time described in the recipe -- even a tiny compromise makes it inedible. Apparently, despite being an ignoramus, I had a point.

But I want to talk about the idea that in 2021 Nobody Could Have Foreseen a third presidential nomination for Trump. That's nonsense. Here's CNN's Harry Enten on January 30, 2021, ten days after Trump left office:
... make no mistake: This is still Trump’s Republican Party.

You see it in the actions of Republican state and local parties trying to punish those who went against Trump. You see this in a majority of congressional Republicans voting to uphold an objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Joe Biden.

And more than that, you see it in the polling, which indicates that Trump’s in a historically strong primary position for an ex-president. Indeed, he’s polling tremendously well among Republicans in the context for any future presidential nominee....

After the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, Trump’s still cruising in a potential 2024 primary. A majority of Republicans (57%) said in an Ipsos KnowledgePanel poll that he should be the 2024 nominee.

Against named opponents, Trump easily leads the field. Among those who either voted for Trump in 2020 or are Republicans, Trump’s averaging about half the primary vote. No one else is even close.
At CPAC at the end of February 2021 -- a few days after Mitt Romney said that if Trump decided to run in 2024, he was "pretty sure he would win the nomination" -- Trump teased a third presidential run, then won the convention's 2024 presidential straw poll with a majority of the vote. At the next CPAC, in June 2021, the same thing happened:
Former President Donald Trump bathed in the adulation of an adoring crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference Sunday as he easily won the informal straw poll of attendees when they were asked who they’d like to see run for the White House in 2024....

Trump once again teased a 2024 run on Sunday: “I could have a nice, beautiful life and here I am on a Sunday in Texas.” The crowd began to chant “Four more years! Four more years!”
(Between the two CPACs, Sean Hannity asked Trump about a third run and Trump said, "I am looking at it very seriously, beyond seriously.")

Trump's plans for 2024 were so obvious in the first year of his post-presidency that Politico could run a story in July 2021 with the headline "Trumpworld Is Already Weighing Veeps for 2024. Hint: It Ain’t Pence." In September, Chris Cillizza published a piece with the headline "Donald Trump Is ‘99, 100 percent’ Likely to Run for President in 2024."

An October 2021 Quinnipiac poll found that 79% of Republicans wanted Trump to run in 2024.

How could Garland and his associates not realize that Trump wanted to run, and would be the front-runner for the nomination if he did run?

At the time, I was aware of Trump's enduring popularity among the GOP electorate. In April 2021, in response to a Ross Douthat column about Ron DeSantis's presidential prospects, I wrote:
Douthat is suggesting that DeSantis could beat Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries. That's insane. No one will beat Trump if he runs. That will be true even if he's under indictment. (Being under indictment would make him even more popular among Republican voters -- he'll say "witch hunt" every day and the rubes will go wild.)
But Merrick Garland, a very smart man, had no idea.