#^d 2020-04-26 #^h Weekend Roundup
It's rather staggering how much stuff one can come up with to read in a week. Also how little of what follows directly concerns the 2020 elections, which should be pivotal -- especially, now that it so clear to all concerned that the stakes are critical -- yet seems way above the heads of the party leaders. There are three items below that touch on Biden: one on his PAC's worrisome China-baiting ad (Bessner); one on his ambitious stimulus proposal (Grunwald); one on his VP choices (Hasan). I suppose you might count a fourth (Kilpatrick) on Sanders' campaign and supporters, but I don't mention Biden there, and I'm pretty much done with looking at campaign post-mortems. I also saw, but didn't link to, various articles arguing that Biden needs to veer left to unify the party and/or to develop a more effective campaign (I suppose the Warren-for-VP push might count there). Actually, I don't much care who Biden picks (aside from my getting irritated by how pushy the Stacey Abrams campaign has become), or whether Biden starts giving lip service to left arguments. In some ways, the less of that he does, the less he'll wind up walking back from when/if he wins. And, quite frankly, Warren and Sanders will be more effective in Congress, outside of the Biden administration -- not that I don't wish them luck steering some patronage to people who actually do have the public interest at heart.
On the other hand, there are tons of Trump pieces below: many of the Trump is a moron/Trump is insane variety, which is probably the easiest call to make. Some align with the Trump is an autocrat/fascist meme, some going so far at to insist that he is bent on the destruction of democracy. I don't stress pieces in that vein. There's no reason to think Trump wouldn't be amenable to a right-wing putsch, I see him mostly as a front man and a diversion. It's other Republicans -- the serious ones -- who are the real threat, as should be clear from the more obscure articles below, the ones about corruption, about their relentless assault in the environment, about their efforts to skew the electorate in their favor to perpetuate their graft and their imposition of anti-democratic ideology. Personally, I wouldn't mind dispensing with the Trump show, but he does do a remarkable job of illustrating the derangement of his apparatchiki.
Some scattered links this week:
Yasmeen Abutaleb/Josh Dawsey/Ellen Nakashima/Greg Miller: The US was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged: "From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost."
Kate Aronoff: The world order is broken. The coronavirus proves it. "Rich countries have pushed economic policies that set poor countries up to fail."
Zack Beauchamp: A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity's show helped spread the coronavirus.
Daniel Bessner: The last thing we need is a "new cold war" with China. Looks like both Trump and Biden are taunting each other for being too close and friendly to China -- Trump's refers to "Beijing Biden," while Biden's ad charges "Trump Didn't Hold China Accountable" for Covid-19. (Trump preferred to hold the WHO responsible for China's late disclosures, if indeed that's what they were.) Both are playing a dangerous game, not because China isn't beyond reproach, but it's more than ever important to move from conflict to cooperation on the world's many problems. And also it should be admitted that the US has little if any claim to moral high ground. I also worry that Biden's efforts to come off as tougher against China and Russia might give Trump another chance to pass himself off as the anti-war candidate -- as he did with Commander-in-Chief fetishist Hillary Clinton. Related:
Marc Caputo/Meridith McGraw/Anita Kumar: Trump owed tens of millions to Bank of China.
Michelle Ye Hee Lee: Democratic super PAC launches $15 million ad blitz slamming Trump on China and coronavirus. The PAC is American Bridge.
Nahal Toosi: Biden ad exposes a rift over China on the left.
Philip Bump/Ashley Parker: 13 hours of Trump: The president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy. By "little" I think they mean "zero."
Katelyn Burns: The Trump administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to push for more deregulation.
Jane Coaston: FreedomWorks is supporting the anti-shutdown protests -- and applying for government funding.
Jessica Corbett: Calling US Postal Service 'a joke,' Trump demands four-fold price hike for customers amid Covid-19 pandemic.
Caleb Crain: What a white-supremacist coup looks like: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898.
Eleanor Cummins: Celebrity quarantine posts are inflaming tensions between the haves and the have-nots. Related: Chuck Collins: Let's stop pretending billionaires are in the same boat as us during this pandemic.
Igor Derysh: Senate Republicans snuck $90 billion tax cut for millionaires into coronavirus relief legislation.
Anthony Faiola/Ana Vanessa Herrero: A pandemic of corruption: $40 masks, questionable contracts, rice-stealing bureaucrats mar coronavirus response.
Lee Fang:
John A Farrell: Breaking the grip of white grievance: "The 2020 campaign is shaping up into a referendum on Trumpism."
Susan B Glasser: Fifty thousand Americans dead from the coronavirus, and a president who refuses to mourn them. Well, now that you mention it:
Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department official who has been named White House coördinator for the pandemic response, often mentions the human toll of the disease and thanks the medical caregivers risking their lives. On Wednesday, Vice-President Mike Pence began his brief remarks with a nod to the "loss of more than forty-seven thousand of our countrymen." It was just the sort of thing you would expect Pence to say, and yet notable for how different it sounded compared with the President. Trump began that very same briefing by saying, "Our aggressive strategy to battle the virus is working." It is, he said, "very exciting, even today, watching and seeing what's happening." What was happening, though, was another day on which more than two thousand Americans died of the coronavirus, a fact that Trump did not mention.
Personally, I don't mind having a president who doesn't get choked up over human tragedy. I don't think we should look to the president for emotional affirmation or even sympathy. I don't think we need to be flying flags at half-mast. And I find it hard to imagine anyone becoming president who doesn't start out with an oversized ego. But I do think that the only reason for tolerating a president who is a total jerk is if he (or someday she) at least has a staggering ability to make sense of the big picture. But Trump is not only self-centered to an embarrassing degree, he's a total fucking moron. He's insufferable at the best of times, and this doesn't even rise to the level of bad.
Michelle Goldberg: Coronavirus and the price of Trump's delusions. The op-eds pretty much write themselves:
Frank Bruni: Trump is self-destructing before our eyes.
Martin Longman: The president is impossibly stupid.
Amanda Marcotte: Now that Trump has suggested we shoot up Lysol, can cable news stop airing this crap?
Matthew Miller: It's not just the bleach. Trump is a catalog of bad ideas that tax resources.
Jennifer Senior: President Trump is unfit for this crisis. Period.
Rebecca Gordon: Strange attractors: On being addicted to Trump and his press conferences. Compares Trump's daily Covid-19 briefings to the Vietnam War "Five O'Clock Follies" -- evidently written before Trump declared that he "could see the light at the end of the tunnel" (a line Robert McNamara famously used to express his optimism about Vietnam, which speaks volumes about how clueless Trump is).
I think what provides me (and so many others) with that nightly hit of dopamine is the sheer brazenness of the president's lies on show for all to see. Not for him the mealy-mouthed half-truth, the small evasion. No, his are, like the rest of his persona, grandiose in a way that should be beyond belief, but remains stubbornly real. . . .
So it's no surprise that he also uses media ratings as the metric by which he judges the performance of everyone working to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. For him, governing is nothing but a performance.
Michael Grunwald: Biden wants a new stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion. Much of that is Green New Deal. Also note: Jon Queally: As poll show nearly 90% Democratic support, Biden told hostility to Medicare for All 'no longer tenable position for you'.
Mehdi Hasan: Dear Joe Biden, here's why you should pick Elizabeth Warren as your running mate: Not as persuasive a case as could be made. For one, thing, I wouldn't start with the actuarial tables. And while I'd like to see Biden extend a "bridge to the left of the party," his need there is less to secure voters than to establish a better grasp on policy ideas. Warren helps him most specifically there: even when Biden appears befuddled, she can talk about issues with authority, insight, and compassion. Warren's great weakness as a presidential candidate was her inability to expand her base beyond college-educated professionals, but that (plus enthusiasm among young voters) should help shore up a conspicuous weakness of Biden's. (On the other hand, Biden already does as well as any Democrat can with white working class voters, as well as with non-whites.) Another point that should favor Warren is that she likes to present herself as a fighter, and could mount a refreshingly aggressive attack on Trump and his corrupt administration -- among other things, that would offer quite a contrast to Trump's obsequious "vice-poodle" Pence. Of course, one doubts that Biden's handlers will risk someone they perceive as a loose cannon. Even if they did, they'd pressure Warren to become a mere surrogate, which would squander her unique advantages. When Kerry picked John Edwards as his 2004 running mate, I hoped that Edwards would add a dash of Southern populist fervor to the patrician Kerry. Instead, he instantly transformed into Kerry's lawyer/mouthpiece, adding nothing, and helped lose. Very easy to see lawyer/prosecutors like Harris and Klobuchar doing just that. As for the much-touted Stacey Abrams, well, I hate to sound like Trump, but I like politicians who win. (When I did a google search for "biden vp picks" all three "top stories" pictured Abrams, as well as one of three "videos": the other two were worse: "Podesta on how Biden should pick his V.P." and "Jill Biden: I'd love for Michelle Obama to be VP pick.") As for names being bandied about, see Ella Nilsen: What we know about Joe Biden's possible vice presidential picks.
Jon Henley/Eleanor Ainge Roy: Are female leaders more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?
Maia Niguel Hoskin: The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests.
Zoë Hu: A new age of destructive austerity after the coronavirus: "The economic vultures of yesteryear are already scheming about how to head off the prospect of a better world when the pandemic ends." With Trump as president, Republicans have been exceptionally eager to prop up the economy with massive deficit spending, even if they have to cut deals to route some of that money to ordinary people, but that's not going to last. You may recall what an emergency it was to prop up the banking system in 2008, yet once the bankers got theirs (and the presidency changed from R to D), nobody else mattered enough: we got nothing more than harrangues about excessive deficits and the need for austerity. So the pain of recession spread and persisted and festered, and while profits rebounded spectacularly, all regular people got was underpaid jobs, diminished benefits, and increased risk. As noted elsewhere, McConnell has already started to sandbag "stimulus" bills that he deems overly generous to the wrong people, and with CBO making a $3.7 trillion deficit projected, the deficit scolds and austerity prophets will have a field day. Only question is why should we believe them now/again?
John Hudson/Josh Dawsey/Souad Mekhennet: Trump expands battle with World Health Organization far beyond aid suspension.
Sean Illing:
Why the government makes it hard for Americans to get unemployment benefits: "The system is dysfunctional. It was designed that way." Interview with Pamela Heard, author of Administrative Burdens: Policymaking by Other Means.
There is no anti-lockdown protest movement: "There are protests, but this isn't a movement, and it's not the Tea Party 2.0." Interview with Theda Skocpol, who has a couple books on Tea Party politics: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2012, with Vanessa Williamson), and Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (2020, ed. with Caroline Tervo).
Millennials are getting screwed by the economy. Again. Interview with Annie Lowrey, author of Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.
Rebecca Jennings: Nobody's buying clothes right now. So stores are filing for bankruptcy.
Connor Kilpatrick: Why are they so mad at Bernie supporters? "We're stuck with them, but they're stuck with us, too." Related:
Paul Heideman/Hadas Thief: Bernie's campaign strategy wasn't the problem.
Catherine Kim: It took a pandemic for cities to finally address homelessness: "Some cities are housing homeless people in hotels. But a long-term solution is sorely needed."
Ezra Klein: Why we can't build: "America's inability to act is killing people." Credits Francis Fukuyama with the hideous term "vetocracy": a system designed to inhibit and frustrate change, where many special interests find themselves able to veto development while few (if any) are able to overcome other vetos. Klein details three vetocracies: the federal, the state and local, and the capitalist.
Paul Krugman:
McConnell to every state: Drop dead. Related:
Fox's Steve Doocy suggests letting states go bankrupt to cut pensions and balance budgets.
Josh Barro: Why Mitch McConnell's state bankruptcy idea is so stupid.
David Frum: Why Mitch McConnell wants states to go bankrupt:
McConnell seems to be following the rule "Never let a good crisis go to waste." He's realistic enough to recognize that the pandemic probably means the end not only of the Trump presidency, but of his own majority leadership. He's got until January to refashion the federal government in ways that will constrain his successors. That's what the state-bankruptcy plan is all about.
The right sends in the quacks: "Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts."
All of these factors making modern conservatism a happy hunting ground for fake experts have reached a kind of apotheosis under Donald Trump, a grifter president whose whole political strategy is based on catering to white male grievance, and who both disdains expertise and always values loyalty above competence.
Dan Lamothe: Pentagon plans to dispatch Blue Angels and Thunderbirds in coronavirus tribute: Well, they mean "tribute to health-care workers and first responders" rather than to the virus itself, but that doesn't begin to resolve the cognitive disconnect. This really just shows that in the gravest national security crisis to hit America in many decades, the lavishly funded, much vaunted US military has absolutely nothing to offer or even reassure us.
Jim Lardner: Mapping corruption: Donald Trump's executive branch.
Ernesto Londońo/Leticia Casado/Manuela Andreoni: 'A perfect storm' in Brazil as troubles multiply for Bolsonaro: Possibly the world's foremost coronavirus denier -- Brazil is up to 53,000 confirmed cases and 3,670 deaths -- on top of many other offenses, including resignation of "a star cabinet member," several criminal investigations, and talk of impeachment -- couldn't happen to a nastier piece of work. Also note: Boeing terminates $4.2 billion deal to buy stake in Embraer unit. Not the sort of monopoly-girding investment a company makes when its own business is in free fall.
Dylan Matthews: Trump's new bailout program for farmers and ranchers, explained.
Laura McGann: America doesn't want another Tea Party: "Don't let Fox News fool you. 81 percent of Americans do not share the views of anti-quarantine protesters."
Ian Millhiser: Justice Alito's jurisprudence of white racial innocence: "Alito gets very upset if you suggest that racism exists."
Luke Mogelson: America's abandonment of Syria: "Many Syrians thought the U.S. cared about them. Now they know better." Stupid mistake. I can't even imagine where they could have gotten that idea. From America's utterly reflexive support of Israel? From America's long-standing but limited military alliances with Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia? From the long siege of Iraq, followed by invasion, occupation, and cynical orchestration of civil war to divide the opposition. From America's even longer-running devastation of Afghanistan? From 40+ years of sanctions and worse in Iran? From overthrowing Ghaddafi in Libya and leaving the country in chaos? From arming the Saudis for their assault on Yemen? From all those drones flying hither and yon, taking potshots as supposed jihadis? Is there anything in US policy toward the Middle East that even remotely suggests we care about anyone who lives there? Hell, the US government can barely be bothered to care about Americans in America.
Nicole Narea: Trump's executive order to stop issuing green cards temporarily, explained.
Ella Nilsen: Getting unemployment has been a nightmare for millions of people across the country.
Kee B Park/Christine Ahn: South Korea is a model for combatting Covid-19, it should now take the lead in diplomacy with North Korea. Not sure that the two points follow, but Trump (and his hawks) has bungled his opportunity to work out a deal with Kim Jong Un. And frankly, why should the US be able to veto whatever deal the Koreans work out?
David Roberts: Coronavirus stimulus money will be wasted on fossil fuels: "Oil and gas companies were already facing structural problems before Covid-19 and are in long-term decline."
David Rogers: Trump administration ducks and dodges to justify wall spending.
Aaron Rupar:
Why Pence's favorite talking point about coronavirus testing is misleading.
Trump just mused about whether disinfectant injections could treat coronavirus. Really. You know, I've been in meetings where someone would get up and remind us that "there are no dumb questions," but some questions are just really dumb. [PS: Here's a meme that's been going around: "Just to clarity the medical term for injecting disinfectants into the body is called embalming."]
Trump and Fox News want to send their hydroxycloroquine hype down the memory hole: "They've suddenly stopped talking about an unproven drug they touted as a possible miracle cure. It's not an accident."
Trump just said the US has done more coronavirus testing than the rest of the world. Not even close.
Why Trump's efforts to blame Obama for the coronavirus make absolutely no sense.
Dylan Scott: How the Covid-19 pandemic will leave its mark on US health care. Five subheds:
Geoffrey Skelley: Americans are largely unimpressed with Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His approval ratings did get a break early in the crisis, but he's been sinking for a few weeks, now negative 9% on the generic approval question, below water on handling the pandemic, with very/somewhat worried about the economy adding up to 86.5%. Of course, lots of people still have a blind spot where it comes to him, hence the very cushy "largely unimpressed" in the title.
Michael Specter: Trump's firing of a top infectious-disease expert endangers us all.
Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown's plan to protect consumers from financial ruin.
Taylor Telford/Kimberly Kindy: As they rushed to maintain US meat supply, big processors saw plants become covid-19 hot spots, worker illnesses spike. Map doesn't include any spots in western Kansas, but I noticed a concentration of cases in Ford County (Dodge City), which has 38% more cases than Sedgwick (Wichita), despite having only 6.5% of the population. Finney County (Garden City) has a population similar to Ford, with about 30% as many cases, which still is a much higher infection rate than Sedgwick. Ford and Finney counties are probably the two largest beef feedlot and packing counties in the state.
Nick Turse: US airstrikes hit all-time high as coronavirus spreads in Somalia.
Anya van Wagtendonk:
71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits.
Trump dismisses his daily coronavirus press briefings as "not worth the time & effort". I don't think I've ever been moved to quote a Trump tweet before, but this one is revealing:
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!
I get that "Lamestream" is meant as an insult, a catchy play on "mainstream" that has become reflexively automatic among those so disposed, but if you think a bit, it's pretty lame as insults go, especially given that the highest aspiration of mainstream media is to be so fairly balanced the stories speak for themselves. Singling out lameness is Trump's way of asserting that should entertain rather than merely report. So does his point about "record ratings." Given that Trump is incapable of reporting information or even conveying reassuring emotion, the only reason for anyone to watch him is that the briefings are somehow inadvertently entertaining. Maybe that's where the "hostile questions" come in? I mean, Trump knows better than most that hostility is entertaining -- isn't that why his campaign events are so full of hostile rants? Why shouldn't the media put its inherent lameness aside for an occasion with no other merit and feed off Trump's hostility? Why not prod him along a bit, and give the Trump haters as well as the Trump adorers a cheering interest? As for "Fake News," nowadays that's nothing but Trumpspeak for reports that are insufficiently flattering. That "Fake News" has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 3-4 years is the inevitable result of its only subject appearing as an embarrassing moron in his every public appearance.
Robert Wright: Let's kill the aiding-and-abetting meme once and for all! His examples are attacks on political figures for aiding, abetting, giving comfort, or just showing a modicum of respect for foreign leaders or nations, especially those that Americans have long been trained to suspect or despise (like Russia and China, Iran and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, but anti-Arab prejudice is strong enough that Saudi Arabia could also work, but never Israel). The recent rivalry between Biden and Trump to see who is most negative on China is an example. One example Wright cites is George Packer: We are living in a failed state, where Packer likens Trump to French general and Vichy collaboration leader Philippe Pétain: "Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster." I agree that Trump has done (and continues to do, scarcely losing a step to the pandemic) a lot of things that spell disaster for most Americans, but none of them even remotely resemble what Pétain did to France and (much more to the point) for Nazi Germany.
Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou: How the coronavirus is surfacing America's deep-seated anti-Asian biases. I'm skeptical here, not that Trump isn't riling up the indiscriminate haters in his fan base, but that the relatively few who attack and the more who slur Asian-Americans know anything of the history of anti-Asian racism in America. Granted, it's not so ancient that I can't remember it in my lifetime (and Trump's older than I am), but by then the old prejudices had been transformed by wars which counted at least some Asians as allies.