No good options: Trump lost his war

If only most of the world weren't going to suffer for his foolish hubris.

From Noah Berlatsky: 

You lost a war. Now what?

Trump ... launched a war of aggression against Iran without clear goals, without building domestic political support, without coordinating with allies, and without logistical preparation.

This was not a formula for success, and sure enough, when Iran seized and closed down the Strait of Hormuz instead of capitulating immediately, Trump and his team of dunderheaded and cowardly fascists hesitated briefly and then gave up. Ever since, the president has been searching for a way to back out of his enormously unpopular war in a way that doesn’t make him look like the cowardly dunderheaded fascist he is.

Unfortunately for Trump, though, the people who won the war (that is, Iran) have little to no incentive to let him set terms to make himself look good, or even adequate. Neither do other leaders in the region. As foreign policy scholar Elizabeth N. Saunders explains, Trump has two choices: “Humiliation or (increasingly futile) escalation.”

Escalation is a terrible option for Trump. The US has already shown that bombing alone cannot defeat the Iranian regime. That leaves a ground invasion as the only possible path to something like victory. 

But a YouGov poll at the end of March found that only 14 percent of US adults support sending ground troops into Iran. Among independents, nine percent support ground troops against 66 percent who oppose, and even among Republicans an invasion is a loser, with 30 percent support against 37 percent opposition.

These figures are dismal enough to suggest that significantly ramping up the war could actually cause Trump’s terrible overall approval to fall even further — especially with Republicans (73 percent of whom support the war), and especially if significant numbers of US service people are killed in combat.

So that leaves accepting humiliation.

Unfortunately for Trump, taking the L is also a bad option, because while analysts and experts recognize that he’s lost the war, most of the public hasn’t yet gotten the message. In a poll last week, 32 percent believed that the US is winning the war, while only 16 percent thought the US was losing; 37 percent believed the US would eventually win. That is a significant number of people who are going to be startled if Trump negotiates a “deal” and there are weeks of headlines about how the US lost.

... To sum up, if Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options, which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him. 

My emphasis. Before reading this, I had not realized that the majority in the U.S. don't yet know Trump had managed to launch a military campaign that our armed forces could not "win" at an acceptable price in lives -- Iranian, U.S. and others. If they weren't being chickenshit, the relevant generals and admirals undoubtedly told him this. Even Trump isn't dumb enough to get his advice from Pete Hegseth. I think ...

For some reason, major U.S. media keep trying to pretend that Iran is going to give Trump a way out. The New York Times has one of those silly headlines as I am writing: "U.S. Officials Say They Are Closing In on Arrangement to Reopen Strait of Hormuz." And then the more likely accurate subhead: "President Trump has not signed off on the emerging framework, according to U.S. officials. But it could set the table for extending the cease-fire and more substantive negotiations." That is, no genuine deal.

Media outlets have been passing along the same false story for weeks. I'll believe it when I see it. I guess we can deduce why so many of us don't yet know the mighty USofA lost Trump's war.

Trumps goes bonkers; pundits insult Americans' common sense

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic points out the pathetic essence of media coverage of Donald Trump's current mad enthusiasms. Too many commentators assume Trump's outbursts are just fine by the foolish people of this country. Tomasky isn't buying it: 

... I think a lot of pundits, trying to imagine the thoughts and emotional responses of the “normal” Americans they may never have met, assume that people just reflexively fall for tough talk. That tough talk and common sense are the same thing. But they aren’t.

It’s important to understand this, especially this week, because Trump is apparently about to take this country down two very dark and, I suspect, deeply unpopular paths. The first is his thuggishly over-the-top response to the shootings of those two National Guard officers in Washington. The second is this regime-change war we’re evidently about to embark upon against Venezuela.

These are not bold moves that reflect sturdy middle-American common sense. They are desperate acts of a desperate and unpopular man who is surrounded, in his life and news-consumption habits, by a retinue of flunkies—many of them billionaires or Botox junkies or both—who wouldn’t know middle-American common sense if it smacked them in the face.

We know Pete Hegseth, Trump's cosplaying Secretary of Defense, is really just acting out "adolescent bloodlust," when he orders kill shots against some unknown guys in small boats in the Caribbean. And then tries to shove off responsibility onto a military officer.

Over seventy percent of us suspect that, however awful Venezuela's strong man may be, we have no proven cause for a war. Fifty-six percent don't think even making war on Venezuela would reduce the flow of drugs. (That seems wise, since Venezuela is not a major source of drugs to the US market.)

We know the crime of one murdering Afghan guy, exiled to this country because he worked with our military against the Taliban in his homeland, cannot be used to trigger massive exclusions of Black and brown migrants. 

The media owe it to its consumers and customers to tell the truth: Trump is flailing -- losing his marbles -- and trying to save himself by leading this nation to terrible places that suit his broken soul.

Eyes on the prize: "what are you going to do about it?"

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo would certainly want to say his web newsroom is a very small fish in the media ocean. But he built it from nothing; it's solvent; and it feels unique to me, anchored by Marshall's sense of history and society. (Like Marshall, I'm a dropout from academic history studies who never stopped learning from our past.)

He has potent thoughts about the Trump regime's attempt to cow and conquer our information sources in the wake of the Kirk assassination. I think Marshall would say this was always where Trump was going; the murder of one right wing agitator is just a convenient pretext.

Marshall's insights are not all bleak. The old media system is collapsing, but interest in consuming what he calls "non-gelded" media is likely to replace or even exceed what is repressed by corporate conglomerate dynosaurs that do Trump's bidding. The moment makes this possible.

Nonetheless his summation of our situation is bracing. Here's a portion of it: 

... most elected Democrats remain in the mode of believing they are a party of government temporarily out of power. They are that too. 

But really they’re an opposition party in the midst of an attempted authoritarian takeover of the American Republic. That means many things. But here’s one of the most important. Last night Sen. Chris Murphy went on Bluesky (and likely other platforms) denouncing [Trump Federal Communications Commission  Chair Brendan] Carr’s criminal and unconstitutional actions — a “history making abuse of your power” he called it. Murphy went on to say, “It will define your legacy and one day you will come to regret punishing free speech and trying to destroy democracy.”

It was the best thing I’d seen any elected official say in response to yesterday’s events and one of the only meaningful ones. But on the next round, I’d recommend Murphy put a finer edge on those remarks. 

I don’t care and I suspect Carr doesn’t care about one day regretting some principle he transgressed. He knows what he’s done. Just one year ago he was on X saying that “free speech” is the “counterweight” to tyranny. “That’s why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream,” Carr wrote at the time. He knows what he’s doing. 

I want lawmakers to be telling people like Carr and his ilk not that they’ll have regrets but that they’ll face consequences.

I hear all these people telling me how there won’t be a 2026 election, or that it won’t be free and fair or a bunch of other things. My question to them, or maybe to you is, what are you going to do about it? 

History is long. No one is in the saddle forever. It is critical for an opposition to give the people a vision of forward trajectory in time, that this isn’t the end of the story, that consequences can be delayed but not evaded. It’s such a demonstrable point. Think even of the longest lasting fascist or authoritarian dictatorships. Franco? About 35 years. Pinochet? 16 years, ousted by a referendum. 

I don’t imagine this will last for even a tiny fraction of that length of time. My point is simply to demonstrate the incontestable point: no one remains in the saddle forever. That’s true even in the most extreme cases. A reckoning comes and everyone needs to be on notice.

Trump is already unpopular. He is getting more unpopular. His actions are unpopular. 

It is the elites, the big diversified corporations and monopolies who have tossed aside most rapidly Americans’ instinctive disdain for kings and dictators. 

It’s down at the most democratic level of our system where the resistance is strongest and growing — juries that refuse to indict or convict amid Trump’s bogus crime crackdown, voters who are showing they’ve had enough. 

He slashes at the civic orthodoxies and values we were all raised on. This remains his opposition’s greatest advantage. It simply needs to be exploited. 

Adam Smith says there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. There’s a lot of ruin in a democracy. We’re in a very bad situation. To me, all I care about is what to do in response. ...

Do read it all.

And we are not powerless ...

Last night I learned that late night comic Jimmy Kimmel had been fired by Disney/ABC when I saw a friend's social media post: "we are canceling our subscription to Disney tonight!" WTF???

Apparently Kimmel had committed "wrong speech" about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Trump wanted the critical comedian gone and his hatchet man at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put the screws to the cooperative media conglomerate.

Our household doesn't have a Disney subscription, so we can't cancel that. 

But tireless Jay Kuo, lawyer and human rights activist, pointed to Christopher Armitage's useful prescription for letting the corporate big boys know that people are outraged.

Here's Kuo's abbreviated summary:

... corporations only understand when their money is at risk.

That means we aren’t powerless. We can do at least four things to hurt them where it matters:

1. Cancel Disney+ and tell them why.
2. Call/email/mail those companies to complain.
3. Screenshot and tag advertisers asking why they support censorship.
4. Share this playbook with others.

There often comes a point where those in power become cocky and badly overreach, misreading the room and handing the opposition an opportunity. When voices from all sides of the political spectrum come together in condemnation, we know we have hit such a point.

Wading into the culture wars with full-on censorship and cancellations will backfire. Comedians like Kimmel and Colbert are beloved figures who speak hard truths in entertaining, accessible ways to millions. The fascist right has nothing like their star power, and it has no sense of irony or comedy, which is why it is so threatened by such figures. 

... The right has managed to take a national conversation about Kirk’s murder and turn it into one about authoritarian censorship. That’s a huge unforced error, and we should exploit it. 

If we care about free speech and blunting fascism, we must keep speaking. 

Might Ukraine be winning its war against Russia? We wouldn't know.

The last few weeks of "diplomacy" over Russia's intent to destroy the independent nation of Ukraine have been pretty nauseating. Serious Americans should concede the obvious: our president gets his jollies from acting as Putin's ventriloquist's dummy, while Ukrainians struggle to stay alive and keep a weak and divided Europe on side. It's all just noise, empty noise for Ukrainians for whom the war is about life and death. Meanwhile the American media deliver up the nonsense as if it were meaningful.

Retired Australian General Mick Ryan studies wars, visits wars, and is the sort of guy who makes speeches at international "security"  conferences. His serious view of the Ukraine war is quite different from the common blather: 

Russia’s ability to convince certain foreign politicians that it is winning the war greatly exceeds its ability to actually do so.

There is an often-used metaphor that is employed to challenge Russian narratives about success in this war. It goes like this:

Imagine it is 2006. It is three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After three years, America has only succeeded in taking 20% of the country, has not yet toppled Saddam Hussein, and has suffered over one million casualties. Would we view this as ‘winning’?

I think it is a useful framework for examining military and strategic success and failure in this war. But I would add another layer to this metaphor which, I believe, really brings home the precarious position that Russia is in. The additional layer is this:

Imagine again that it is 2006, and in addition to the ongoing operations in Iraq with the conditions described previously, that Iraq is undertaking a widespread serious of strikes against oil and gas production, refining and storage facilities across America.

Do we seriously think that this would not have a massive impact on American politics, war policy and the economy? It would certainly have an influence on domestic views of winning and losing and would objectively indicate that America was not winning.

This is the situation that Russia now faces. It is making only minor gains on the ground for massive human and material losses. It is facing an expanding series of Ukrainian strikes against economic and military targets in Russia that it appears powerless to stop.

Let me restate my hypothesis: Ukraine’s long-range strike operations reinforce that Russia cannot win this war.

Yes, our media breathlessly report the U.S. is blocking Ukraine from using U.S.-supplied missiles to attack Russian oil depots.  But Ukrainians, fighting for their lives, have developed their own sophisticated arms industry; Ukraine [is] becoming the ‘Silicon Valley’ of defense as startups develop long-range drones and missiles.

“Fighting in the air is our only real asymmetric advantage on the battlefield at the moment. We don’t have as much manpower or money as they have,” said Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point.

Terekh spoke as she surveyed dozens of “deep-strike drones” that had recently come off the assembly line and would soon be used by Ukrainian forces to attack arms depots, oil refineries and other targets vital to the Kremlin’s war machine and economy.

Spurred by its existential fight against Russia — and limited military assistance from Western allies — Ukraine has fast become a global center for defense innovation. The goal is to match, if not outmuscle, Russia’s capabilities...

Maybe Trump can kill off this development for Putin. But it's going to be hard. The U.S. can no longer count on being able to tell other countries to jump and having them ask "how high?" And the intellectual habits of the U.S. "defense" establishment make Ukraine's increasing independence unimaginable among Trump's lackeys.

Paul Krugman recently shared thoughts about elite mind rot among U.S. "intellectual experts" with Phillips P. O'Brien. Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist who remains broadly curious; O'Brien is an historian of strategic studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland who watches wars. They agree that conventional wisdom can be both extremely durable and simply false.

O’Brien: ... it's a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it's much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don't know what they're talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed.

And that community existed in the analytical community, it existed in the intelligence community, it existed in the Pentagon and the ministries of defense. And instead of having a real introspection—like what the heck have we got wrong?—they have gone into self-defense mode. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they're being treated as if they have any idea of what they're talking about when they don't.

Krugman: The parallel in economics is there were a lot of people predicting that getting down from the high inflation of 2022 would require mass unemployment which was utterly wrong. And, you know, we all make bad forecasts, but it was clearly analytically wrong. It just had the wrong model of what this inflation was about. And those same people are still out there, you know, talking to Bloomberg every couple of days and making confident pronouncements. So, yeah.

O’Brien: I mean, we’ve all seen community behavior where a community would rather defend itself than actually look at its own methods, it seems to me. And that's what we're seeing now. Protection of reputation is all. In towns like Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, it's so important to be smart, and to be seen to be smart.

Meanwhile Trump sucks up to Russia's mad nationalist dictator and Russia's killing machine grinds on.

A practical guide to clearing the Trump-induced fog

At The Status Kuo, rights activist Jay Kuo offers a useful framework for rejecting the onslaught of BS that defines the Trump era.

Preparing mental defenses for a world of alternative realities

Trump’s lies are so legion, and his attacks upon our institutions and norms so widespread, that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The media, when it is doing its job, at best fact-checks the fake stories and reports. 

But missing from all of this is a solid way to bucket the lies and build resilience to them.Today I want to talk about four strategies to diminish the effect of Trump’s manipulations and lies. These aren’t exhaustive, but they can be helpful to keep us all from being washed away in the flood.

First, recognize gaslighting. A steady stream of lies can make anyone begin to question reality. As an abusive bully, Trump gaslights instinctively as a way to dominate. He wants us all to feel like we’re the crazy ones, not him. A way to defeat this, quite simply, is to reassert the truth publicly.

For example, Trump regularly claims that Ukraine is responsible for the war. He has repeated that lie so many times that his followers have bought into it. The indisputable truth, which we all experienced in real time in February of 2022, is that Russia invaded Ukraine. We shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but it is necessary in the face of Trump’s stream of lies, and it helps the people of Ukraine feel a little less crazy from hearing the upside down version all the time.

Second, understand his true targets. Punishing people who tell the truth doesn’t just impact those people negatively; it spreads a chill making others less willing to step forward. Trump knows that he only has to strike out against a handful of universities (or banks, law firms, media companies, you name it) and the ones he didn’t hit will think twice about crossing him. 

At least that is Trump’s hope. This is why Prof. Timothy’s Snyder’s first rule for resisting fascism is to not capitulate in advance. It’s one thing to fold your hand if Trump actually targets you. Few can withstand the full force of the government. But it’s entirely another to give up without a fight. Within our communities, professional associations, schools and social networks, we need to be on the lookout for capitulation and to call it out.

Third, watch for “alternative facts.” Kellyanne Conway was roundly mocked during Trump’s first term for coining the term, but this is a real and dangerous threat today. Examples range from what we saw this week from Trump’s Heritage Foundation economist presenting bogus and improbable “household income” gains to RFK Jr.’s ideologically motivated quest to link vaccines to autism.

The first sign that alternative facts are coming is that they will get rid of official science or fact-based reporting, just as they have done with the BLS Commissioner and her findings. This opens the door to subjective reports that are more favorable to the Trump regime. When you see them purging scientists, data analysts and statisticians, understand that they are paving the way for alternative facts. We must identify these publicly and call for all to reject them.

Fourth, listen for dogwhistles. We have witnessed Trump’s nonstop attacks on academic and scientific institutions, DEI and any critiques of our history. Most understand that this is red meat for his MAGA base. But the reason these attacks are effective often goes unsaid.

Trump has riled up uneducated voters and pumped them full of grievances, identifying “elites,” “illegal immigrants” and “DEI” as the cause of their economic problems, rather than the corporations and uber wealthy who are robbing them blind and actively destroying their remaining social safety nets. He has even managed to convince some liberals that the reason universities must be punished is because they allowed antisemitism to spread unchecked.

The fact is, Trump doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, or the plight of the working poor, or women athletes. He’s using these wedges to advance his own attacks upon the parts of civil society most likely to oppose him effectively.

It sure looks as if we're all going to get better and better at this as the Trump show ages and decays. 

Too hot for PBS

This is the sort of thing that makes it hard to go to the mat for Public Broadcasting as the Republicans, again, seek to kill it off.

The executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning “American Masters” series insisted on removing a scene critical of President Trump from a documentary about the comic artist Art Spiegelman two weeks before it was set to air nationwide on public television stations.

The filmmakers say it is another example of public media organizations bowing to pressure as the Trump administration tries to defund the sector, while the programmers say their decision was a matter of taste.

Alicia Sams, a producer of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse,” said in an interview that approximately two weeks before the movie’s April 15 airdate, she received a call from Michael Kantor, the executive producer of “American Masters,” informing her that roughly 90 seconds featuring a cartoon critical of Trump would need to be excised from the film. ...

... Sams pointed out that their film had already been approved for broadcast — the filmmakers agreed it would be shown at 10 p.m. rather than 8 p.m., so that certain obscenities would not need to be blurred or bleeped — and that the call came a week after a Capitol Hill hearing in which Congressional Republicans accused public television and radio executives of biased coverage (the executives denied that accusation in sworn testimony). ...

Here's the offending cartoon. 

Click to enlarge.

 Vintage Spiegelman, it seems to me.

A day to recommit to democracy

I'm finding the anniversary of the day Donald's dupes stormed the Capital building thoroughly dispiriting.

Yes, a majority of the electorate "pardoned" the incoming president in 2024, though recent polls say majorities still oppose pardons for the J6ers convicted by the Washington courts. The MAGA message machine may be able to change that. Or not.

It won't with me. The intellectual authors of the attack on the Capital and on the result of the 2020 election will always remain traitors to the nation's better aspirations and to the United States Constitution. They are still beneath contempt.

Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, in The Atlantic, make a plausible case that the dupe faction of us is unmovable thanks to our information diet. 

When the Democratic Party chose to make the 2024 election about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of this nation,” as President Biden once put it, it was under the assumption that the indelible images of January 6 would be able to maintain their resonance nearly four years later. 

That assumption, broadly speaking, was wrong. Confronted with information that could shake their worldviews, people can now search for confirming evidence and mainline conspiracist feeds or decontextualized videos. They can ask AI and their favorite influencers to tell them why they are right. They can build tailored feeds and watch as algorithms deliver what they’re looking for. And they will be overwhelmed with data.

The hum of the justification machine is comforting. It makes the world seem less unpredictable, more knowable. Underneath the noise, you can make out the words “You’ve been right all along.”

When people have become unmoored from experiential truth, only a cold, hard kick upside the head is likely to bring them back into material reality. The COVID pandemic might have done it but didn't; what will it take? Human nature and history are not cancelled by the Elon and Donnie show; something will upset this fantasy world, though it's hard now to see what. And whatever it takes is likely to inflict much pain on all of us.

On remembering January 6, here's former US Attorney Joyce Vance: 

As Democrats make tentative overtures and talk about bipartisanship at the start of this new administration, it’s important to understand that while there are moments for compromise, which is the only way government works, there are some things we cannot, and must not, compromise on. January 6 is chief among them. We cannot and must not pretend that Donald Trump did not inspire an insurrection. We should not forget that despite being reelected in 2024, he tried to steal the 2020 election.

January 6 should be the day we recommit to democracy, every single year. It must not become they day we forget about it.

A cheer for sand in the gears

Especially on the left, it's popular this year to dump on the response to Donald Trump's first ascension to the presidency in 2016.

In the Guardian, someone named Dustin Guastella condemns that "resistance" was "big on spectacle and short on substance." Watch out -- when someone says something lacked substance, you can be pretty sure they wanted that something to mean what they preferred, rather than being content to observe what it meant on its own terms. I kinda think getting millions marching for women, for science, against corruption was inherently a good thing, even if the on-the-ground consequences are not immediately apparent. 

And by the way, ignorance of the magnitude of the obstacles ahead sometimes enables progress in overcoming them.

Or take Michael Schaffer in Politico. He regrets that...

The bulk of those great public protest moments, for instance, were organized around issues of identity: The Women’s March, the mobilization against the Muslim ban, the fury about the Charlottesville protests, the 2020 racial-justice protests. ...

True -- but should insults from Trump and the MAGAs to civilized decency have been unmarked? 

Note also, he misses the vital category of efforts to protect immigrants.

Schaffer goes on to complain that "the resistance" launched mainstream press on a kind of sugar high but failed to save the legacy media, which seems to be true. Aside from the New York Times, legacy media is not longer where information is widely found. And even the Times kowtows to power often.

All this seems ridiculously short sighted to me. Present circumstances are different than 2016. Trump and the GOP actually won a tiny, but real, presidential victory; lots of Americans demonstrated their discontent with what Joe Biden had on offer. That matters.

Lawyers and other professionals will carry on a fight for rule of law. Democrats with any power (and guts) will stick up for a more benign version of both federal and state action on behalf of a better society. But for sure it is going to be a shit show.

But at some point, large groups of people are going to be moved to collective action on behalf of better values. That's what we do. 

Opinion columnist Charles Blow (gift article) who was very vocal during the last round makes some interesting observations:

It may not be clear what issue or person or group will galvanize opposition to Trump’s second term. But any assumption that an opposition won’t rise or any revisionist history that casts resistance as something unique to Democrats would be a misreading of contemporary movements...

... As Democrats look for a way forward, it should not be a surprise if what emerges as Trump’s opposition is ... hostile to the Democratic Party as presently constituted.

... when Trump takes office again, the response of the public to his policies will have sway, and if that response is disapproval, and if it becomes organized and focused, it could be a formidable obstacle to Trump fully realizing his aims.

Note that Tolkien opined this while looking at fascist Europe.

Meanwhile, millions of us are not going to take the repeat of the sociopath's ascendancy lying down. We're going to do the little things that make society more humane. We already are; see #strikeseason.

As events develop, we'll be looking for stress points, for where ordinary people can throw sand in the gears of theft, hatred, and cruelty. We won't know where we'll find them; but these MAGA frauds and blowhards are not some coherent, unstoppable force.

Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.

Dying in Darkness

I had to do it. Jeff Bezos' cowardly veto of his newspaper's endorsement of Harris-Walz was too much. How could I have any confidence in an institution devoted to covering Washington after seeing its leadership  run for cover (ineptly) at the approach of an aspiring fascist?

Historical experience suggests this won't shield Bezos unless he is more directly willing to lick Trump's ample ass; oligarchs lose under fascism. See also Mikhail Khodorkovsky who played footsie with Vladimir Putin to protect his oil wealth but lost it all and ended up in a gulag.

As media observer Nancy Gibbs writes: 

[The Post's] “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. ...

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

Follow-up on MAGA cloud cuckooland: coming after your brain

Apparently if you live in the media bubble that Simon Rosenberg so eloquently described yesterday, you get to claim that Officer Derek Chauvin didn't murder George Floyd. Wingers are making the story their concoctions versus your lying eyes. After all, the world saw the video ... and a jury sent Chauvin away for a long time.

Radley Balko, libertarian researcher into criminal justice and injustice, has the goods. The right wing infotainment system has seceded from consensus reality:

For a few precious days after the death of George Floyd, there was at least a clear consensus across the political spectrum — there was near-unanimity that what Darnella Frazier captured on her cell phone was a crime. An outrage. A thing to be denounced.

As Floyd lay handcuffed on his stomach, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s back for nine minutes as Floyd became unresponsive, then went limp, then died. Even the most vocal police supporters condemned Chauvin’s actions, though with obligatory disclaimers that Chauvin was a rogue, aberrant bad apple, and that no one should judge all law enforcement officers by his actions.

The consensus wouldn’t last. As protests heated up around the country, far-right pundits began to break away. They pointed to Floyd’s criminal record, the violence at some of the protests, and the allegedly radical positions of the organizers. Dennis Prager, the radio host and founder of a fake university, marveled to his audience how “decent” MPD officers had been to Floyd....

With Tucker Carlson and dingbat Bari Weiss on the case for MAGA nonsense, can reality hold out?

Undernews breaks through

This is just delicious. The right wing media sphere has got itself in a panty-soiling tizzy over a dance performance of the Nutcracker in the White House about which Jill Biden tweeted. You can watch the performance at that link.

Apparently none of the right wing media opinion makers ever saw a production of Hoffman's 1816 fable, such a corny staple of Christmas delight.

Ron DeSantis thinks he's onto something according to a fund appeal using a picture of the production:

Jill and Joe Biden are taking your tax dollars and throwing them at radical activist groups to parade through the halls that leaders like Ronald Reagan used to march through. There is truly no clearer picture of our country's decline than the dereliction of duty by our President. ...

Such confidence that his supporters must be narrow minded morons. Now we know Ron is one ... but all of them? 

Catherine Rampell [gift article-enjoy] has the story:

Hide your children, hide your wives. A radical force is sweeping the nation, threatening to destroy everything that God-fearing Americans hold dear.

That threat, according to Fox News? Tap-dancing, one of the most quintessentially American art forms there is.

Last week, first lady Jill Biden shared a festive holiday video of tap troupe Dorrance Dance performing their swingin’ spin on “The Nutcracker,” set to a jazz arrangement by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. ...

More seriously, David Frum [gift article] has described how MAGA acolytes become confirmed in believing so much nonsense in the concept he calls "undernews". 

During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.

Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.

In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.

This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans. ...

That's the point. We don't hear it, but millions of our sibling citizens marinate in this stuff -- and end up scared of a tap dance performance.

Not my kind of encounter with Jesus

If you watched the Stupor Bowl live, and didn't silence the commercials as you might ordinarily, you were treated to slickly produced ads from something called HeGetsUs.com. 

I figured I should suss out who is selling what kind of Jesus and pass the information on. Here's what CNN reports:

In between star-studded advertisements and a whole lot of football, this year’s Super Bowl watchers are being taken to church.

“He Gets Us,” a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, is running two ads during the game as part of a staggering $100 million media investment. ...

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

... While donors who support “He Gets Us” can choose to remain anonymous, Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

It hurts when Jesus is used to belittle and repress people. I do not trust these sponsors.

Oh, I'm not not being entirely fair calling the big game "the Stupor Bowl." I just didn't have a horse in the race this year. But it was an entertaining game, unlike so many such contests.

Trump's cadre of "dereliction of duty" enablers

Maybe they thought they were playing a game. Just tweaking the libs. Or raising their ratings by inflaming the suckers who trust them. And then things got all too real. 

 

The despairing texts to the White House from these Fox News personalities during the insurrection, revealed by the January 6 investigation, tell a story. Greg Sargent explains: 

If you’re going to cast doubt on our elections as an organizing and galvanizing tool, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when people decide they must act on those lies.

... But to these Fox hosts, graphic depictions of that true intent — embodied in the rioters’ feral hunt for lawmakers to violently disrupt the election’s official conclusion — are just a bit too revelatory.

... Lying about our elections isn’t tantamount to endorsing violence in response. But telling people they’re being tyrannized by an all-powerful, multi-tentacled leftist enemy that wields our democratic processes as illegitimate instruments of subjugation can lead quickly to the thought that the only recourse is to take matters into one’s own hands, outside those processes.

 The Washington Post's Aaron Blake shares some of their pleas.

Fox host Laura Ingraham to [White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows: “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

I wish the Wapo had had the decency not to call the texts "juicy." That headline is soul curdling if you think elections matter. The investigation isn't a thrilling game of gotcha. We are living amid a life and death struggle over the continuation of a mostly honest, almost majority-rule, democratic polity.

• • • 

While releasing some of the insurrection commission's findings yesterday, Liz Cheney described Donald Trump's actions that terrible day as "dereliction of duty," a crime in the military, though not perhaps in civilian life. After sifting through the growing evidence that Trump delighted in the mob violence he'd incited to overthrow the election, the Post's Phillip Bump concludes:

... The Jan. 6 committee is unmasking the effort. But then what?

• • •

Anne Applebaum's book about how previously conventional rightwing opportunists became active fascists is illuminating here. The enablers have made choice after choice to morph into the malevolent anti-democratic force they have become.

Journalism's current diner genre

A long, largely sympathetic, feature in the Washington Post is number 1 at the moment among the most read stories. Once again, this is journalism treating human subjects as specimens in an exotic zoo. Remember all those reporters braving diners in Ohio after the 2016 election?

The reporter found an aggrieved right wing thug who lost his job after being an asshole to a freelance journalist with a camera at a protest in D.C. in November. Enterprising anti-fascist internet sleuths saw the pictures and managed to get him fired from his job as a iron-worker. His wife, not a participant in the scuffle, also lost her job, perhaps because the publicity over his loutish behavior -- or perhaps because Walmart was penalizing her for absences with a bad back. 

The right wingers are aggressive Trumpists; the anti-fascists are -- well -- anti-fascists. Hey, in many corners of this big country, there's that level of conflict between neighbors. We the people have very different visions of a good society and some of us act out for our choices, more and less peaceably. It's all amplified by media that spread passions far and wide. The conflict is over real, vital, moral and material futures.

But the Post completely fails to contextualize its dramatic story of an encounter between visions until this 13th paragraph -- the essential backstory to its gripping cartoon characters:

Conservatives typically portray militant antifascists as the far-left equivalent of violent armed groups on the hard right, but right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipse those from the far left and cause more deaths, a Washington Post analysis showed. The FBI regards far-right extremists as the most active and lethal domestic terror threat. 

That's the story in a nutshell -- the rest is under-examined color commentary. Evidently we can't resist giving the aggrieved terrorist genre plenty of clicks.

Beware the implicit message ...

I find this headline ominous. You might expect that a poltical party which repeatedly lost elections would be struggling to assemble a majority coalition. But that's not how a Washington Post headline writer sees things.

Republicans -- too many of them anyway -- don't seem to be focused on assembling a coalition made up of enough voters to win elections with the most votes. You know, the usual 50 percent of the electorate, plus 1. Voter suppression measures, baseless recounts, and lying seem to be their toolbox to resume what they consider their proper status as the governing party.

And too much of the media neglect to critique the implicit lie.

Can it with the click bait!

Apparently, to the mainstream media, the proper headline is obvious. Both the Guardian and the Times lead with the same shouting banner: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she is a sexual assault survivor".

Though that statement is certainly one thing the Congresswoman says in an Instagram post about the appropriate terror she experienced while hiding from the thugs who had invaded the Capitol on January 6, it shouldn't be taken as the center of her message.

It's little surprise she's a survivor of sexual assault. After all, she's young, conventionally attractive, and had to work for her living. Her trauma is not that unusual, except perhaps to headline writers.

What's extraordinary about the Congresswomen is her ability to place her life, for which she feared in those scary moments, in the context of the everflowing river of human struggle for justice. Here's the Guardian's abbreviated clip of AOC's message. See for yourself what her story is about.

Weasel words

This is not the most important vexation in this moment, but this New York Times headline provoked me.

Either the Native American population dependent on the hospital were abandoned by the overlords of the U.S. Indian Health Service or that population is in the grip of a delusion. Which is it, Times? 

If you don't have an answer, you don't have a story. I wouldn't ask this of some amateur blog -- but the "newspaper of record" ...