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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Bothsides-ism strikes back over Biden documents [1]

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Date: 2023-01-16

Ezra Klein/NY Times:

Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams For decades, the cliché in politics was that “Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” The Democratic Party was thought to be a loosely connected cluster of fractious interest groups often at war with itself. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” Republicans were considered the more cohesive political force. If that was ever true, it’s not now. These days, Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart. [Here are the three reasons: Republicans are caught between money and media.

Same party, different voters.

Republicans need an enemy.]

x The conspiracy theory mindset eats itself.

In political terms, they've really got something—an actual wrong thing Biden actually did—but can't help themselves. Have to make it the biggest scandal ever, with nefarious secret elements they'll promise are out there but can't show. pic.twitter.com/9rc7qQ1zHr — Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) January 15, 2023

Bob Smietana/Pulitzer Center:

Who Are the Christian Nationalists? A Taxonomy for the Post-Jan. 6 World For the record, sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry describe Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.” But not everyone who meets the definition claims the moniker “Christian nationalist,” and some who do are only barely recognizable as traditional Christians. Here are six loose networks of faith leaders and followers who fit some part of the definition:

x In 2022, there were many demands in US for recounts in races that weren't close to delay certification of the midterms. Democracy experts fear they were a dry run for 2024 if R's don't get the result they want. Rural counties w GOP officials are more vulnerable to the pressure. https://t.co/opKZlSLlwQ — Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) January 15, 2023

Michael Podhorzer/Substack:

Red Wave, Blue Undertow This analysis provides compelling evidence for a very different explanation of the midterm results than what most analysts are offering – an explanation which I have been arguing was possible for more than a year. Even before November 2021 (when Democrats suffered major losses in Virginia and elsewhere), I argued that America is an anti-MAGA majority country when it knows that MAGA is on the ballot. 1 That produced record-breaking turnout in both 2018 and 2020. I have consistently underscored that to the extent that Americans understood the stakes of the midterms to be about defeating MAGA, they would once again show up in sufficient numbers to bar the door. All that was needed to confound the usual midterm rout for the president’s party was making sure that 2020 voters understood that, just as they didn’t want Trump for President, they certainly didn’t want his criminal accomplices and MAGA fascists to take over Congress and their state capitals.

x NEW: @Newsday analysis of Santos campaign spending showed tens of thousands of dollars went to opaque entities — formed months and even days prior — with no history of campaign work, no listed principals, no public footprint https://t.co/xFOShXlFzE w/ @ScottEidler — Paul LaRocco (@paullarocco) January 15, 2023

NY Times:

Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans George Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party, yet many Republicans looked the other way. Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study. The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.

George Santos (if that’s his real name, and maybe it isn’t) is the gift that keeps on giving.

TPM:

Campaigns Linked To Santos Left Donors Feeling Ripped Off After Questionable Credit Card Charges Santos lost the 2020 race soon afterward. However, the donor’s brief interaction with Santos’ first unsuccessful House bid was the beginning of a long odyssey that they said resulted in more than $15,000 in false credit card charges. Some of that money inexplicably went to the campaign of Tina Forte, another Republican congressional candidate in New York whose campaign had links to Santos. “It’s just wrong on so many levels,” the donor said.

x It is always helpful (but far from universal practice) to listen to people who know what they are talking about@MarkSZaidEsq @BradMossEsq https://t.co/06AuAAikNe pic.twitter.com/D0paBIklhP — Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) January 14, 2023

Michael R Strain/Project Syndicate:

Averting a Debt-Ceiling Disaster Sometime this summer, federal borrowing will bump up against its legal limit unless Congress can agree to raise or suspend the “debt ceiling.” With Republican fanatics already planning to use the issue as blackmail, it is incumbent on the rest of Congress to get to work on a deal to sideline them.

x 1/ The Wagner Group's apparent success in capturing Soledar appears to have been a Pyrrhic victory, with the mercenaries suffering such massive casualties that their future and ability to recover are now reportedly in doubt. ⬇️pic.twitter.com/vzsphjuyS4 — ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) January 14, 2023

Lawrence Freedman/Substack:

Makiivka and Bakhmut: The Impact of Russian Casualties One can understand why elements in the regular army find Prigozhin and his Wagner group irritating, but I have seen no evidence that he has been denied supplies deliberately. Gerasimov has described Bakhmut as a priority. On 21 December, when Russian hopes that the city could fall imminently were high, he said, ‘The situation on the front line has stabilised, with the main efforts of the Russian troops concentrated on completing the liberation of the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.’ So what is going on? The simplest explanation is that the Russian military does not have enough to go round and that Prigozhin is making an extremely unsubtle bid for a larger share of what is available. The Economist has noted, after shaky relations earlier in the war, Prigozhin had appeared to find a way to work with the regular army, especially after his candidate, General Sergei Surovikin, was put in charge of the overall operation. But the more Russian forces suffer shortages the more Prigozhin objects that he is not getting his fair allocation. From Surovikin’s perspective questions of priorities will be getting more difficult and he may wonder how much he can favour the Bakhmut front when he has units elsewhere that need support.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/16/2147369/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Bothsides-ism-strikes-back-over-Biden-documents

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