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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: When journalism turns its back on afflicting the comfortable [1]
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Date: 2023-05-08
And then he noted David Bossie was invited:
That's it. That's the Saturday end for everyone's credibility right there. It's David Bossie, a career ratfcker who has never taken a breath of air that he didn't use to befoul American politics, a man who threatened American democracy years before Donald Trump got around to it, and who, just to complete the circle, took a job in 2016 to help El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. What respectable journalistic enterprise would invite him to anything except a long walk off a short pier? Every actual journalist in that room should have walked out as soon as he stepped across the ballroom threshold. He should have been pelted with dinner rolls before the entree was served. What the hell is the White House Communication Director doing asking this scurvy vandal to pass the salt? What the hell is the Secretary of Commerce doing swilling expense wine next to the likes of this guy?
Charlie has a way with words.
x July, 2011: “Registered voters by a significant margin now say they are more likely to vote for the "Republican Party's candidate for president" than for President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, 47% to 39%.”
https://t.co/8VEiDOapPn https://t.co/JDF3gx4pFj — Oliver Willis (@owillis) May 7, 2023
Washington Post:
Biden faces broad negative ratings at start of campaign, Post-ABC poll finds The president’s approval ratings slip to a new low, more Americans than not doubt his mental acuity, and his support against leading GOP challengers is far shakier than at this point four years ago Biden’s approval rating is underwater among a slew of groups that supported him by wide margins in 2020. He stands at 26 percent approval among Americans under age 30, 42 percent among non-White adults, 41 percent among urban residents and 46 percent of those with no religious affiliation. Among independents who voted for Biden in 2020, 57 percent approve while 30 percent disapprove. Among independents who voted for Trump, 96 percent disapprove.
x Correct. And @POTUS's 538 average is higher now than it was when this happened, instead of a "red wave":@CNN: "President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have pulled off a midterm election for the record books."
https://t.co/3g5MhoOinL https://t.co/ka1cl3x8ih — Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) May 7, 2023
As Oliver Willis notes, not much use in polling in 2023, a year before the election. You don’t get low numbers without Democrats helping, and those votes will come back when faced with a practical alternative. A lot can happen including, obviously, the economy and indictments. But if I were a normie, I’d not be engaged just yet.
Kevin Young/”Restructuring Faith” on Substack:
I Voted For Trump And other confessions that led to the collapse of my Conservatism In many ways, I am still trying to understand who I am. And while I may not be able to quantify what I currently am, I can assure you that I wasn’t trying to collapse my idealogical walls. I swear. Far from it. I wasn’t looking to destroy the Conservatism that had surrounded my life since birth. I wasn’t looking to blow up the very thing that brought comfort, protection, and insulation from the outer chaos of the world. Conservative fundamentalism does that. It’s offers safety. It promises to bring law and order to chaos and messy things. But I am getting ahead of myself…. It took 8 minutes and 46 seconds for my wall to be reduced to rubble. The exact length of time that a white police officer’s knee was on George Floyd’s neck. 08:46 One man, Officer Derik Chauvin, pulled a brick and the wall came down. Even now, that moment reduces me to tears. “I can’t breathe.” The wall that had taken 43 years to build took 8 minutes and 46 seconds to come crashing down. The life that I once knew was gone in a moment. It was as if everything that I had believed, known, and professed clicked like a gear into a different setting and then fell back into place. Everything shifted. I was in a new place. I had a new way of seeing. I was a new person who I did not recognize.
Nick Cohen/”Writing from London” on Substack:
The liberal despair of Rafael Behr Personal breakdown and political collapse Before the heart attack the UK’s rolling crisis provoked a mental collapse. As a Westminster journalist, caught in the minutiae of politics, Behr, like millions of others, had no idea his country carried a sickness. He would never have published such a bald and naïve sentiment, but deep down he believed in the comforting myth that the UK was a practical, empirical nation, with no time for the insane ideologies and bawling demagogues that endangered other, less fortunate, lands. After the rise of the SNP, and then Corbynism, and then Brexit, and then Johnson, and then Truss, belief in native common sense suffered a heart attack of its own – a potentially fatal one. Behr came of age in the 1990s when the UK was briefly comfortable in its own skin. He was from the second generation of an immigrant family. His ancestors, like mine, were Jewish refugees from Tsarist persecution in Lithuania. His parents grew up in South Africa, but moved to London because they could not stomach the Apartheid regime. The second-generation can go one of two ways: it can violently reject the land their parents chose for them – my grandfather and great uncle became communists; or it can feel that their parents’ refuge is their natural home.
x Also, this is one of those situations like the joke about the guy whose ship sinks and he prays to God to save him and then passes on a lifeboat, Coast Guard, helicopter, etc then gets to heaven and asks God why he didn't save him and God is like "I sent you all that stuff."
https://t.co/6PDTEvJ4s4 — Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn 🇺🇦 (@waitmanb) May 7, 2023
Simon Rosenberg/”Hopium Chronicles” on Substack:
The May Jobs Report - US Economy Remains Remarkably Strong, Republicans Are Trying to Ruin It While Biden Is Working to Keep the Economy Strong, Rs are Pushing Us Into Recession and Default It is not a stretch to state that the GOP’s economic track record over the past 30 years has been among the worst in the history of the United States. The Biden economic track record, on the other hand, has been very strong: GDP growth over 3%, 3 times what it was under Trump
6 times as many Biden jobs as last 3 GOP Presidents combined
best COVID recovery in G7
lowest unemployment rate in peacetime economy since WWII
lowest poverty/uninsured rates ever
very elevated wage gains/new business starts
Almost 2 job openings per unemployed person
real earnings up in 2022
the deficit went up every year under Trump and has come down every year under Biden
domestic oil production on track to set records in 2023
historic investments in our future prosperity (infrastructure, CHIPs, climate, health care) Look at the jobs created per month over these Presidencies - Rs at just 10k per month over 16 years. Biden is running at 50 times that so far. Yes, 50x! The jobs created just this month - 253,000 - is TWO YEARS of job growth under these last 3 GOP Presidents.
x many efforts to effect change fail repeatedly over many years, until political circumstances and public opinion change and then they don't fail. efforts to enact civil rights protections and expand access to health care, for example
https://t.co/zwzbrydfDx — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) May 7, 2023
Phillips P. OBrien/”Phillips’s Newsletter” on Substack:
Kinzhals vs Patriots and the fact that System matters; Bakhmut and Russian losses; A Drone attacks the Kremlin and some People attack the ISW To understand why I believe this is really important, we need to step back to before February 24, 2022. At that point, major figures in the analytical community, were arguing that Ukraine should not be provided with such advanced systems. It was thought that the war would not last long enough for them to make a difference, that Ukraine could not stand up to Russia in a conventional war, that it would take too long for the Ukrainians to be trained up on them, etc, etc. Such an argument seemed based in an overall ‘realist’ understanding of how power and war should be understood. For realists, such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and others, political systems and domestic politics are relatively unimportant factors in state behavior. Mearsheimer even defined realism in this way quite recently. ““Realism is a theory that basically says states care about the balance of power above all else. States want to make sure that they have as much power relative to other great powers as possible. It’s a theory that pays little attention to individuals and pays little attention to domestic politics.” In this vision, all states regardless of type, work constantly to improve their relative position in the power structure, so spending much time wondering about how different political systems or individual leaders behave, its not terribly important. Now, as I’ve said for a long-time now (and hopefully much of my published research backs this up) the type of system fighting a war actually matters hugely. Dictatorships are generally inefficient and prone to leader-worship, leading to really bad strategic decision-making. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan all were severely handicapped by being dictatorships in World War II. On the other hand, democracies can be more flexible and less prone to making terrible decisions based on the whims of their leaders, than dictatorships. They are also far more likely to create more advanced armed forces (partly because they actually don’t want to sacrifice their populations if they don’t have to).
x Igor Girkin is very pessimistic today. He says it is time to start thinking about preventing Russia from falling apart because military defeat is near.
Translation:
Regular readers and listeners should remember the assessment of the situation that I laid out (and expressed)… pic.twitter.com/HAsUjOFmyG — Volodymyr Tretyak 🇺🇦 (@VolodyaTretyak) May 7, 2023
Brian Rosenwald/”The World According to Brian” on Substack:
How Biden can win on the debt ceiling & more notes My weekly roundup of politics and media Now that’s not to say that Biden should capitulate — far from it. But he needs to be able to say to the American people, look folks (yes, anything Biden would say includes folks), I negotiated in good faith. But they wanted me to cut funding for cancer research, to take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans, to set back our path to energy independence and addressing the climate crisis, and to rip medical care away from the neediest among us. And I won’t do that. You didn’t elect me to do that, and I won’t sell out our long term well being or the Americans struggling most to appease legislative terrorists. That’s the kind of message that won Bill Clinton the budget fight in the winter of 1995 and 1996. Paint House Republicans as cruel and heartless for targeting their budget demands at the neediest in society. This time Biden can also make them look foolish for demanding a reduction in funds for science and technology as we enter into a new Cold War type competition with China — which won’t be sparing any expenses. If Biden can say that, even if the economy tumbles, he’s less likely to bear the brunt of the blame than if he says, “sorry I’m not negotiating, because they’re being irresponsible.” For those not immersed in the world of Washington politics, who don’t know the history of the debt ceiling, and who don’t understand that Republican comparisons to credit limits and credit cards are flat out lies, that position makes it sound like Biden is being the petulant, unreasonable one. Now there is a caveat here: if Biden is willing to resort to extraordinary measures to head off any sort of economic cataclysm — claiming the 14th Amendment gives him authority to ignore the debt ceiling, etc — and dare the courts to block him, then his strategy may be more workable.
x This from the Wisconsin GOP speaker is rarely acknowledged after a result, that 'tough on crime' attacks don't work like clockwork like people just assume they do -- April 4 (with Wisconsin & Chicago) was an encapsulation of that.
https://t.co/HRd6Z2mt3w — Taniel (@Taniel) May 5, 2023
Washington Post:
A Nebraska lawmaker chose his voters over his party with abortion vote In the days since state Sen. Merv Riepe cast the lone vote that blocked a near-total abortion ban in his conservative state, he’s faced protests at his office, the cold shoulder from irate colleagues and calls for his resignation. A stranger left an angry note inside his home mailbox. Yet, the 80-year-old Republican has also raked in accolades, becoming an unlikely hero for those fighting to protect abortion access in Nebraska and around the country in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion advocates wept in the Capitol after Riepe’s April 27 vote. A downtown Omaha novelty store is now selling blue T-shirts and tank tops that say “Hot Merv Summer” in bold, white type. Riepe’s vote reflects a growing realization among some Republicans that staking extreme positions on abortion might be politically perilous. Since Roe, which guaranteed the right to abortion, was struck down, Republicans have faced pressure from the far-right to ban the procedure in states across the country. But voters, including those who identify or lean Republican, have signaled an uneasiness with taking restrictions too far.
x There’s a war raging against normal politics. Insurrections, election denial, debt-ceiling threats to the nation’s credit, radical gerrymanders, attacks on our public schools & libraries—all reflect the mainstreaming of fringe politics.
My column (free)
https://t.co/argeV8ZzSx — EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) May 7, 2023
One doesn’t need to think that Trump had a stroke to think that this is weird and he should never be anywhere near the White House.
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