New Zealand has suffered only four deaths per million!

MONDAY, MAY 18, 2020

Now, let's consider Australia: By common agreement, New Zealand has done an excellent job handling Covid-19.

What explains New Zealand's success? Only in the New York Times would you read something as silly as this:

TAUB (5/16/20): After New Zealand began its lockdown on March 25, [Prime Minister Jacinda] Ardern addressed the nation via a casual Facebook Live session she conducted on her phone after putting her toddler to bed. Dressed in a cozy-looking sweatshirt, she empathized with citizens’ anxieties and offered apologies to anyone who was startled or alarmed by the emergency alert that announced the lockdown order.

By contrast, Mr. Trump has tried to anthropomorphize the virus into a foe he can rail against, calling it a “brilliant enemy.” But while that may have encouraged his base, it has not aided American efforts to contain the pandemic. The United States now has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world.

What explains New Zealand's relative success? (For data, see below.)

We can't necessarily answer that question. But we're fairly sure that the nation's success hasn't been caused by the fact that Prime Minister Ardern wore "a cozy-looking sweatshirt" when she addressed the nation. Nor would we link it to the claim that she had just put her toddler to bed.

Meanwhile, note the almost fanatical innumeracy which seems to be gripping the Times. In this high-profile piece from Saturday's paper, Amanada Taub included the grossly misleading fact that the United States "has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world."

That's true, of course, but it isn't relevant to Taub's insinuation. Among major nations, the U.S. currently ranks ninth in deaths per million population, and we're nowhere close to first.

We only have "the highest death toll" because we're the world's third-largest nation by population, behind only China and India. When it comes to this simple point, the New York Times is almost as innumerate as President Trump himself.

Trump constantly ignores population size when he triumphantly declares that we lead the world in tests. The Times keeps countering with the innumerate clam that we lead the world in deaths. As we noted on Friday, the same misleading claim had appeared in Mara Gay's otherwise excellent editorial essay in that day's editions.

In that sense, the New York Times—its reporters and its editors both—are almost as dumb as Trump is. That said, let's return to Prime Minister Ardern's cozy attire, along with her slumbering toddler.

That ridiculous passage about the sweatshirt was part of Taub's attempt to claim that female heads of state have been doing a better job confronting the coronavirus than their male counterparts.

That may or may not be true. Let's consider New Zealand.

Taub started her report with praise for Prime Minister Ardern. This is the way it went:

TAUB: Monday was a day of triumph for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Thanks to the efforts of the entire nation, she said, New Zealand had been largely successful in meeting its ambitious goal of eradicating, rather than just controlling, outbreaks of Covid-19. The lockdown she had put in place on March 25 could now end.

Ms. Ardern’s success is the latest data point in a widely noticed trend: Countries led by women seem to be particularly successful in fighting the coronavirus.

Have countries led by women been particularly successful? As you'll see, we aren't hugely sure.

But that was the premise which led to the claim about the cozy-looking sweatshirt. Under present arrangements, anything which fits some prevailing narrative is fit for the New York Times.

In fairness, New Zealand does have a good track record. Below, you see its current standing, as compared to a neighboring country ruled by one of those men:

Deaths from Covid-19 per million population, as of May 18:
New Zealand: 4
Australia: 4

Oops! Taub failed to mention the fact that Australia, ruled by a man, has the same low death rate that New Zealand does!

Taub cited three other female heads of state—those in Germany, Finland and Taiwan. She didn't mention Belgium—which, despite its female head of state, has the highest death rate in the world:

Deaths from Covid-19 per million population, as of May 18:
Belgium: 784
United States: 276

Does the United States have "the highest coronavirus death toll in the world?" Once you adjust for population, it isn't even close!

For various reasons, assessing these matters isn't enormously easy at the present time. For a Washington Post report concerning Belgium's high death rate, you can just click here.

Concerning the general question, you can consider Taub's report for yourself. But the "N" in question is very low, while the "narrative quotient" is high.

New Zealand has a low death rate—but so, alas, does Australia! This is part of the way cogitation works in this, the age of the tribe.

INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE: Tara Reade, denounced by those who know her!

MONDAY, MAY 18, 2020

Recalling what Bazelon said: Way back at the dawn of time—on April 30, 2020—Emily Bazelon offered two warnings concerning Tara Reade.

Bazelon offered her warnings during a podcast at Slate. Speaking with a pair of male colleagues who were being extremely correct, Bazelon offered these winged warnings about Tara Reade's accusation:

BAZELON (4/30/20): You know, in some cases, we’ve had people who’ve seemed incredibly durable as witnesses in terms of their credibility coming forward. So I’m thinking of Anita Hill. I’m thinking of Christine Blasey Ford. And I don’t see Tara Reade in that category.

Now, I realize in saying that I’m basically showing my own bias against people who are alleged victims who also have a lot of, like, questionable actions in their past. I mean, reading about Reade’s activities with this horse rescue operation she was involved with, where the owner and employees are saying, like, "You stole stuff from us," and it just looks really like not credible.

And I guess my own basic bias is that, if you are going to bring a really long-ago serious allegation against a public official, and you can line up some pieces of corroboration but not real proof, your reliability is going to be on the line. And we should not err in the direction of deciding to let people destroy the careers of the men they accuse in those settings without some real sense that we are sure, because otherwise we are in a world in which the MeToo movement has turned into a place where we’re perilously close to letting people who, who lie, or who have problems, destroy other people.

There was more to what Bazelon said that day. Because we transcribed the bulk of her warnings, you can peruse them here.

Concerning the passage posted above, we're sorry that Bazelon used the term "bias" in describing her own words of caution. In our view, she wasn't displaying a "bias" at all.

In our view, Bazelon was displaying painfully basic common sense as he advanced her warnings. As we noted in real time, she did so in the face of two male colleagues who kept changing the subject to avoid what she had said.

At any rate, let's simplify! In the passage posted above, Bazelon said she that she didn't regard Reade as highly credible. She specifically cited an incident in which Reade was accused of stealing from a horse rescue operation—an incident her male colleagues didn't seem to want to discuss.

In the more general sense, Bazelon offered a pair of warnings concerning accusers like Reade. Sometimes accusers are lying, she said. And sometimes accusers "have problems."

Sometimes accusers are lying, and sometimes accusers "have problems!" For those reasons, Bazelon said, we need to "exercise caution in believing high-profile accusations which can destroy other people."

As events of the past thirty years have shown, those accusations can also change the course of world history, bringing death to innocent people all over the world. Perhaps for that reason, Politico's Natasha Korecki has "interviewed more than a dozen people, many of whom interacted with Reade through her involvement in the animal-rescue community."

Korecki conducted these interviews "as part of an investigation into Reade’s allegations against Biden—charges that are already shaping the contours of his campaign." Having said that, good lord:

Last Friday afternoon, Korecki published a lengthy account of what those people told her about Biden's accuser. We'll strongly suggest that you read every word, but at one point, the nub of Korecki's findings came out sounding like this:

KORECKI (5/15/20): [M]any of those who knew her well in recent years said she frequently lied or sought to manipulate them, in many instances taking advantage of their desire to help a person they felt was down on her luck.

“You can use these words: manipulative, deceitful, user,” said Kelly Klett, an attorney who rented Reade a room in her home in 2018. “Looking back at it all now, that is exactly how I view her and how I feel about her.”

“She has a problem,” said Lynn Hummer, who owns a horse sanctuary where Reade volunteered for two years, beginning in 2014.

She described Reade as “very clever, manipulative. ... I do think she’s a liar.”

For the record, Hummer is the person to whom Bazelon referred when she mentioned the claim that Reade had stolen from the horse rescue operation.

According to Korecki, Hummer said that Reade is a "liar," and that she "has a problem." As you can see, Kelly Klett said similar things, as did other people with whom Korecki spoke.

Meanwhile, those are the specific concerns which Bazelon voiced. That's what Bazelon said!

Is Tara Reade lying about Biden? Now, exactly as before, we have no way of knowing.

People with problems can get attacked too. In some cases, a sexual assault can be the source of a person's later "problems."

That said, something else is plainly true—and, as Bazelon noted, we've had a string of examples, whether confirmed or apparent, dating back to Gennifer Flowers in 1992:

Especially in cases involving public figures, sex accusers are sometimes lying. Sometimes, accusers may perhaps be delusional, due to some previous problem.

They may be lying to gain attention. They may be lying for profit. They may be taking money from Putin. That's always possible too!

Korecki interviewed a range of people who say they've been scammed by Reade down through the years. We suggest you read every word of Korecki's report, but we'll offer three cheers for her work, with four cheers for Bazelon's thoroughly sensible warnings.

We'll offer no cheers for Dickinson and Plots, Bazelon's male interlocutors. They were exquisitely correct that day—correct in every respect. Have we mentioned the fact that people are dead all over the world because of such past correctness?

Two other reports casting doubt on Reade's accusations have appeared of late. One came from Laura McGann of Vox.

McGann receives only two cheers. We're stingy for a reason:

According to McGann's report, she has been in contact with Reade since April 2019. To McGann's credit, she never published a report about Reade's ever-shifting claims.

"I couldn't prove it," McGann writes at one point. At another point, she writes this about one of Reade's constantly shifting claims:

"But that wasn’t the narrative I wanted. I wanted the truth."

To the credit of McGann and Vox, she didn't report what she couldn't confirm. On May 7, she did publish a lengthy report—a lengthy report which also casts substantial doubt on Reade's claims.

Once again, McGann and Vox deserve full credit for failing to rush into print. So why does he only get two cheers? She gets only two cheers because, at various point, her report includes such problematic remarks as these:

MCGANN (5/7/20): All of this leaves me where no reporter wants to be: mired in the miasma of uncertainty. I wanted to believe Reade when she first came to me, and I worked hard to find the evidence to make certain others would believe her, too. I couldn’t find it. None of that means Reade is lying, but it leaves us in the limbo of Me Too: a story that may be true but that we can’t prove.

Should a reporter "want to believe" certain types of claims? Wanting to believe some such claim, should a reporter "work hard to find the evidence to make certain others would believe [it], too?"

In our view, that's a Halloween-inflected version of the reporter's mission. Rather plainly, though, that's what happened at Rolling Stone in the journalistically gruesome case of the UVa fraternity gang rape allegation, a claim which turned out to be false.

At Rolling Stone, an experienced reporter wanted to believe the claim. This led her to blow past various warning signs concerning the accuser, "Jackie," a young woman who rather plainly "had a problem" and needed some help, as we humans sometimes do.

"Jackie" apparently ended up getting help, the kind of help we people sometimes need. First, though, her false accusation caused tremendous harm to various parties, with reporters and editors at Rolling Stone "wanting to believe" her tribally pleasing tale.

Unlike the reporter at Rolling Stone, McGann didn't publish prematurely. But even now, does she understand the basic logic of a case like this? We were struck by these passages:

MCGANN: Eight women have now said they’ve been made uncomfortable by Biden in public settings. Reade is the lone woman to accuse him of sexual assault. This is a situation out of her control, but it means that reporters can’t build a story about Biden around a pattern of behavior, where multiple accusers boost one another’s story. Instead, reporters are looking at Reade’s account in isolation—and that account has changed.

[...]

If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.

In those passages, McGann says that the lack of other accusers "is a situation out of [Reade's] control." She says the need for such types of corroboration, or for some type confirmation, "isn't fair to an individual survivor."

In those passages, McGann still seems to be boo-hoo-hooing on behalf of Reade, who has changed her story a million times. According to McGann herself, Reade has offered a string of unconvincing accounts of why she has done so.

"It isn't fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation?" The fact is, McGann doesn't know if Reade is a "survivor" of anything at all!

She doesn't know if Reade's a survivor! But does she know that she doesn't know? We'd say that still isn't clear.

In truth, Reade may simply be lying, whether for attention or for money. Given some of her crazy writings, she may be on the Putin payroll. There's no way to know that she isn't.

Putting profit from Putin to the side, Reade may be lying, or she may be delusional. Such situations exist in this world, just as Bazelon noted.

Last Friday, the PBS NewsHour also published and broadcast long reports casting doubt on Reade's accusations. In this post for New York magazine, Jonathan Chait links to all of these reports, at Politico, Vox, PBS.

We're going to give Chait one cheer, not three, for what he says in that post. We may be especially jaundiced at this site, but we hear hints of tribal positioning games when he starts like this:

CHAIT (5/15/20): When Tara Reade first made her assault allegation against Joe Biden, I thought the charge was more likely to be true than false. To be clear, I had no intention of changing my vote. The allegation came too late to reopen the nominating process without doing violence to the expressed will of the electorate. And I’ve always believed the primary criteria for voting on a candidate is their policy impact (which is why I wrote a column in 2018 defending Republicans who still supported Roy Moore over Doug Jones). But I did feel bad about voting for a candidate I suspected had done something terrible.

Since then, however, three detailed reports—by Vox’s Laura McGann, PBS NewsHour, and Politico’s Natasha Korecki—have delved into Reade’s allegations. Neither reaches a definitive conclusion. But all of them on balance add a lot of grounds for skepticism. At this point, Reade’s allegation seems to me to be more likely to be false than true.

Before these debunking reports appeared, Chait "thought the charge was more likely to be true than false." He doesn't explain why he thought that, or why he had formed a provisional judgment at all, but this keeps him on the side of the tribal angels.

Meanwhile, don't get him wrong—he was still planning to vote for Biden! This stance also conforms to the tribal agreement which had taken shape as of Friday last. Our tribe had now decided that, while we should continue "believing women," we didn't have to let the purity of our unfounded assessments affect the way we vote.

Did Chait "feel bad about voting for a candidate [he] suspected had done something terrible?" Out here in the real world, he wasn't going to vote for six months! To our ear, this too sounds like the performative tribal morality which had Bazelon's male interlocutors changing the subject whenever she suggested that Reade might be lying, or that she might even "have problems."

Chait didn't know whether Reade's accusation was true. Why did he think the ugly charge was likely to be true? Why did he think anything at all? Skillfully, he didn't say.

Starting in 1992, we've gone through similar charges from Gennifer Flowers, from Kathleen Willey and from Julie Swetnick. We've had Stormy Daniels seeking cash for a report about one alleged instance of fully consensual sex ten years in the past.

Along the way, we also had the false accusation in the Duke lacrosse case, followed by the false accusation in the UVa case. But people like Chait are still pretty sure that we should believe such accusations, even when we have noway of knowing whether they're true or they're false.

All the way back on April 30, Bazelon offered a pair of winged warnings. We offer four cheers for Bazelon, with the standard three cheers for Politico's Korecki.

Concerning the basic logic of such situations, we human beings, with our flawed intellectual architecture, still have a long way to go. We'll have more on this case as the week proceeds, and on other examples of our species' extremely frail intellectual infrastructure.

We'll look at The Crazy and at The Dumb, as seen in more than one tribe.

How on earth did life begin?

SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2020

Regarding Flynn, Hsu gets it (more) right: We've mentioned at least three different trees during these pandemic Saturdays.

We've mentioned sacred Thoreau's "sympathy with the alder." We've mentioned Anne Frank's "bare chestnut tree glistening with dew," which left her "so moved and entranced" that she couldn't speak.

We've mentioned the pear tree just off our own back deck, which forms part of this morning's review of the Michael Flynn case. We haven't yet mentioned Frost's "window tree," perhaps the most perfectly rendered tree in our brief human history:

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud...

So now we've mentioned it too.

Our pear tree loves to grow. Extending to the west, it has formed a canopy over the deck. Extending to the south, it is now forming a canopy over the stairs to the deck.

Pandemic seclusion has encouraged us to consider this tree in the way we always should have.

Why do such living things grow at all? With this question in mind, we returned to a book we perused when it appeared back in 2016:

A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life

How on earth did life begin? Right in their preface, before they get started, Mesler and Cleaves tell us this:

We still don't know how life began. No one was there to witness the event, and almost all the geological record of that period has long since been erased by billions of years of constant geologic change.

What we do know is that by at least three and a half billion years ago, a single-celled living organism appeared on a sterile Earth. We don't know how it got there, but we can infer that it emerged from nonliving matter...

As best we can tell, this book wasn't reviewed by the major newspapers, except for the Wall Street Journal ("thoroughly engaging"). For the Science magazine review, you can just click here.

At any rate, a living organism somehow emerged from rocks and water—and from the presence of "energy," whatever that familiar term might actually mean. From there, we moved ahead to trees, and onward to such living organisms as us humans.

How did we get from rocks and water to something that's alive? For a question which may be even harder, how did we get from single-celled organisms to organisms possessing consciousness, even analytical skills?

We'll only say this—as a general matter, it's easier to get from consciousness to matter (or to the belief in matter) than it is to get from matter to consciousness. At any rate, this is just a way to praise the Washington Post's Spencer Hsu for getting it (more) right than the New York Times recently did.

In this morning's Post, Hsu offers a profile of Emmet Sullivan, the judge in the Michael Flynn case. The New York Times beat the Post to this mark, profiling Sullivan in Thursday morning's editions.

In this matter, slower but steadier won the race. Hsu's profile is generally positive, but it's much more balanced than the fan-person profile which appeared in the Times.

The profile is generally favorable. Hsu stresses Sullivan's "intolerance for official misconduct." As he closes, he tells us that Judge Sullivan "loathes double-talk," no matter where it comes from.

The profile is basically favorable. But along the way, Hsu cites a dew examples of Sullivan's occasionally unusual conduct, telling us that some observers have "griped about the judge's bluntness."

As if to torture blue tribe readers, Hsu even tells us this:

HSU (5/16/20): In 2016, Sullivan roiled the political waters when he criticized Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address while secretary of state, at one point during a public records lawsuit decrying the “drip, drip, drip” of revelations about her email use. “When does it stop?” he said.

Admittedly, that's an extremely fuzzy account of what Sullivan did in that instance. Still, though, "first, you cry."

In our view, Hsu's profile was much more balanced, and much more informative, than the piece which appeared in the Times. We're never told that Sullivan is fiercely or ferociously independent, let alone that he is both.

For our money, there's a conceptual problem which appears early on, a conceptual problem which tilts the scales against Flynn's current position. Still and all, this profile might even help us understand that the world consists of many imperfect players, that it isn't always angels v. demons all the way down.

Somehow, we got from rocks and water to living things, even to living things with analytical skills. That said, we haven't perfected those skills as yet. In our view, it's important to remember that fact when watching "cable news" TV shows or even when reading our high-end newspapers.

As for trees, one of the great souls offered the passage shown below during her own enforced seclusion. It appeared in the version of her diary which she had rewritten during her final year:

SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1944

My dearest Kitty,

Yesterday was Father's birthday. . . and the sun was shining as it's never shone before in 1944. Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It's covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.

Father received a biography of Linnaeus from Mr. Kleiman, a book on nature from Mr. Kugler, The Canals of Amsterdam from Dussel, a huge box from the van Daans (wrapped so beautifully it might have been done by a professional), containing three eggs, a bottle of beer, a jar of yogurt and a green tie. It made our jar of molasses seem rather paltry. My roses smelled wonderful compared to Miep and Bep's red carnations. He was thoroughly spoiled...

Our analytical skills remain imperfect; that' an important point which we should keep in mind. Morally, we have a very long way to go. Many people are living in very cramped quarters, with no pear tree out back.

That said, teenagers were already able to see in the way that passage suggests, even in 1944. The chestnut tree was even more beautiful that year. We'd see that as something to build on.

Mara Gay's superb essay on the virus!

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2020

Though we also were struck by this: We were sorry to see that Mara Gay has been very ill with Covid-19.

We were glad to see that she's on the road to recovery.

In this morning's New York Times, Gay writes a very instructive essay about her experience with the virus. Her essay starts like this:

GAY (5/15/20): The day before I got sick, I ran three miles, walked 10 more, then raced up the stairs to my fifth-floor apartment as always, slinging laundry with me as I went.

The next day, April 17, I became one of the thousands of New Yorkers to fall ill with Covid-19. I haven’t felt the same since.

[...]

The second day I was sick, I woke up to what felt like hot tar buried deep in my chest. I could not get a deep breath unless I was on all fours. I’m healthy. I’m a runner. I’m 33 years old.

"In the emergency room an hour later, I sat on a hospital bed, alone and terrified, my finger hooked to a pulse-oxygen machine," Gay says as she continues.

Again, we're happy to report that Gay is home and feeling better, but still not close to well. Below, you see her self-description. Also, you see what she wants you to know:

GAY: I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping.

I want Americans to understand that this virus is making otherwise young, healthy people very, very sick. I want them to know, this is no flu.

Every word Gay writes is worth reading, though we'll also include the passage shown below. We're including it because we think it's also important, though Gay's improving health, and her wishes for others, take prominence today.

We strongly recommend Fay's essay. Late in the piece, we were brought up short by the passage show below. We were struck by this for two reasons:

GAY: Why are more people dying of this disease in the United States than in anywhere else in the world? Because we live in a broken country, with a broken health care system. Because even though people of all races and backgrounds are suffering, the disease in the United States has hit black and brown and Indigenous people the hardest, and we are seen as expendable.

We do live in a broken country. That point is very important.

But how about Gay's question? Why are more people dying here than anywhere else in the world?

Mainly, it's because we're the world's third largest nation by population! This is what deaths per million population look like this very day, as we type. We're omitting a few tiny nations, showing the highest death rates:

Deaths from coronavirus per million population, as of May 15:
Belgium: 773
Spain: 587
Italy: 523
United Kingdom: 501
France: 420
Sweden: 361
Netherlands: 329
Ireland: 305
United States: 265
Switzerland: 216

Are "more people dying here" than in Belgium or Spain? It never ceases to amaze, the way our brightest high-end journalists don't seem to grasp the importance of adjusting for inflation / population / demographics / whatever else may apply. Even at our highest end, the most elementary handling of statistics seems amazingly hard.

(Tara Westover calls that an education. We call it anthropology.)

For the record, here are some other numbers of interest. So far, Sweden is badly losing the Nordic states race. Meanwhile, South Korea:

Deaths from coronavirus per million population, as of May 15:
Canada: 146
Germany: 95
Denmark: 93
Austria: 70
Finland: 53
Norway: 43
Japan: 6
South Korea: 5
Australia: 4
New Zealand: 4
Singapore: 4

We make one other point. Gay is, at 33 years of age, a member of the New York Times editorial board. In our view, it's a sign of the possible confusion of the age that she seems to include herself with those who are said to be regarded or treated as expendable.

Does that really make sense? How does that seem to others?

Gay's essay is superb. We hope she's more healthy and hale every day. WE hope she offers more superb essays. That one passage did catch our eye.

What we saw on cable TV (pre-virus)!

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2020

The longing to lock Flynn up: Back in 2016, Donald J. Trump wanted to lock her up.

Michael Flynn wanted to lock her up too. We thought his behavior was stunningly bad, bordering on the half-crazy.

Now we're engaged in a great tribal war. Over Here, on the blue team, we now want to lock Flynn up.

We can't say we agree with that, at least not as Flynn stands charged. For starters, we aren't in favor of locking people up just as a general matter.

That said, Jonathan Chait is hoping to lock Flynn up. Or so it seems to us, reading between the lines:

CHAIT (5/14/20): Gleeson’s appointment [by Judge Emmet Sullivan] does not guarantee Flynn will be sentenced. But it does seem to make that outcome at least very possible: It’s hard to imagine why Sullivan would take such an extraordinary step without giving the judge he appointed real authority. Indeed, Sullivan today raised the prospect Flynn could be charged with contempt of court.

[...]

In the end, the court can’t win: Trump can simply give Flynn a pardon. But there is a reason Barr maneuvered to prevent such a blunt outcome. He wanted his dirty work cloaked in the patina of legitimacy and vindication. Unfortunately for him, there are still people in the legal system who are unwilling to trash the rule of law.

Doggone it, that copy seems to say. In the end, we might not be able to lock him up!

That copy also assumes the worst about William Barr's possible motives. In that passage, Barr is said to be willing to trash the rule of law. In these thoroughly tribalized times, such ascriptions concerning the others have become the norm Over Here.

Marc Thiessen plays on the red team; Chait plays for us on the blue. That said, Thiessen isn't crazy, crazily stupid or nasty—and in some ways, he seems to agree with something Chait said!

Today, Thiessen discusses the Flynn case in his column for the Washington Post. Like Chait, he believes there are people within the legal system who are willing to sidestep the rules—but look who he says they are:

THIESSEN (5/15/20): The [Justice Department recently] found that there was no legal justification for the FBI to question Flynn in the first place, because the interview was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation” of Flynn...In his plea, Flynn “stipulated to the essential element of materiality” without being informed that the FBI had already cleared him in the underlying investigation.

That fact alone is disgraceful. Even more outrageous is that the bureau interrogated Flynn about communications the Justice Department says were “entirely appropriate.” He was the incoming national security adviser, and his “request that Russia avoid ‘escalating’ tensions in response to U.S. sanctions … was consistent with him advocating for, not against, the interests of the United States.” There was nothing in the calls to suggest he was being “directed and controlled by … the Russian federation.” And the FBI did not need his recollections of the calls because it had word-for-word transcripts.

It seems clear that the purpose of the interview was to set a perjury trap. The agents did not inform the White House counsel before the interview so as to catch Flynn by surprise; they did not share the transcripts with Flynn during the interview (which would have allowed him to refresh his memory); they did not warn him that making false statements would be a crime—all of which are standard procedure. Even so, both of the agents who questioned him came away with the impression that “Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.”

For these and other reasons, the Justice Department withdrew the charges against Flynn. The fact that the judge in the case is refusing to accept the department’s decision—and has appointed a former judge to contest it—only perpetuates the FBI’s miscarriage of justice.

Friend, do you know how to rebut those claims (and others)? We're going to guess that you don't.

The situation is complicated, with a wide range of murky facts. And especially since American news became all Covid-19 all the time, it's hard to find an attempt to sort out the facts which isn't pure blue-or-red tribal.

For ourselves, we're struck by this:

As far as we know, no one thinks there was anything wrong, as a matter of principle, with Flynn speaking to Kislyak during the transition period. Nor has Flynn been charged with doing something illegal during those phone conversations.

He ended up being charged with making false statements to the FBI about what was said in those phone calls. These means that our tribe wants to send him to jail for making false statements about conversations in which he isn't said to have broken any laws.

(If he actually did make false statements, that is. As you can see in the passage from Thiessen, that point seems to be subject to a degree of dispute.)

Why did Flynn make those false statements? We have no idea. For years, it was widely said that his behavior made no sense, since he would of course have known that Kislyak's phone calls all would have been monitored.

For whatever reason, that puzzle doesn't seem to be raised as frequently any more, nor did we ever see anyone resolve it. It's all part of the air of confusion surrounding this heavily tribalized case.

At any rate, do we really want to see this guy go to jail for making those misstatements? Remember, at Flynn's December 2018 sentencing hearing, the prosecution (the Mueller team) wasn't necessarily even seeking prison time. It was Judge Sullivan's peculiar outburst concerning Flynn's possible "treason" and "treasonous" conduct which brought the possibility of prison time to the fore.

As far as we know, Sullivan has never explained his peculiar outburst, which he "clarified" that afternoon. But no sane person has ever suggested that Flynn was somehow committing "treason" by making false statements to a couple of FBI agents, if that's what he actually did.

Nor does anyone care about any of that. Over Here, we just want to lock this guy up.

All in all, this has been a puzzling, peculiar story. The way we're sold it by our blue sachems involves heaps of true belief.

For starters, we're supposed to truly believe that the bad people are all Over There. We're supposed to assume that there is no way the FBI could have misbehaved in the way it handled this matter with Flynn.

Over There, in the red world, people like Thiessen are willing to say that the interview with Flynn was a deliberate "perjury trap." Over Here, we're supposed to think that's totally nuts. More specifically, we're now expected to take a "what, us worry" approach to those recently-released notes from the FBI's Bill Priestap.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is part of our blue tribe. Below, you see the way she described Priestap's notes when they recently appeared.

We highlight the most striking part of the Priestap notes. People like Thiessen don't like that note. We don't think our team should either:

LITHWICK (4/30/20): The new information [Republicans] cite is just-released handwritten notes from Bill Priestap, former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, suggesting that FBI agents interviewing Flynn in early 2017 should decide between whether to get Flynn “to admit to breaking the Logan Act” when he spoke to then–Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period, or try to see if he would lie in response to questions about the incident. (Flynn opted for lying.)

The unsigned, one-page, newly released note indicates that “we have a case on Flynn & Russians.” In a section titled “Afterwards,” it stated, “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” The notes add:

"I don’t see how getting someone to admit their wrongdoing is going easy on him … If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ & have them decide. Or, if he initially lies, then we present him [redacted] & he admits it, document for DOJ, & let them decide how to address it."

Priestap's intentions haven't yet been explored to any significant degree. Not does anyone in either tribe actually care about that.

That said, the highlighted note does strike us as deeply unfortunate. It seems to suggest that someone on the FBI team wanted to try to get Flynn to lie so they could get him fired!

Does anyone think that a bunch of Comey hacks should make such outcomes part of their playbook? It may be that Priestap was arguing against that cavalier approach, but it seems fairly clear that someone must have arguing for it.

Meanwhile, does anyone think that Flynn was actually up for a Logan Act violation? Are those notes just the latest example of the Comey Crowd Gone Wild?

Before the coronavirus hit, we spent a couple of years watching the "formal federal prosecutor" crowd on blue tribe cable TV. As the months went by, we were struck by how unimpressive they tended to be—most especially, by how cavalier they seemed to be concerning the use (and misuse) of prosecutorial power.

Forget the nonsense they sold, every night, about the fabulous Robert Mueller, who was going to take Trump down. When the actual Mueller finally appeared, he was nothing like the person they had described—and his probe hadn't gone to the various places they told us it surely would.

Meanwhile, these adepts were routinely quite cavalier about the ways our three million federal laws could be used to lock various targets up. Such thinking may explain the gross misconduct which was directed at the hapless Carter Page—and the prosecutorial misconduct didn't stop there.

On March 31 of this year, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a remarkable study. News of the study was wiped away by news of a newer virus, but he found that the FBI had engaged in misconduct on every request for a FISA warrant covered in his report!

They hadn't played by the rules even once! If you're blue, you never hear about matters like this. If you're red, you hear about nothing else, and what you hear is embellished.

Dahlia Lithwick is part of the blue tribe legal analyst crowd. She seems like the nicest person on earth, but she also strikes us as one of our less helpful analysts. (See today's dreamscape, in which we're urged to "pathologize America first.")

In this recent interview with Slate's Mary Harris, Lithwick hands you the tribal line concerning the pursuit of Flynn. Concerning the possibilities that Comey and the FBI played fast and loose in their approach, she simply says, at several points: "This is what prosecutors do all the time" / "This happens all the time."

This is what they do all the time! It doesn't seem to have entered her head that that could be the problem!

Did Michael Flynn lie to the FBI? If so, why did he do that?

We can't answer either question. Meanwhile, based upon his behavior during Campaign 2016, we consider Michael Flynn to be almost as crazy as Trump.

That said, no one much wanted to lock him up until Judge Sullivan melted down in that unexplained performance. Today, we're tribally told that Sullivan is "fiercely independent" and "ferociously independent," and that he "doesn't suffer fools."

In short, our team must truly believe in Sullivan, as we now do with Comey.

The Mueller team wasn't looking to get Flynn locked up, nor do we know why he should be. But in these highly tribalized times, none of this actually matters.

On Fox, viewers are told that Flynn was the target of a perjury trap, and that he pled guilty only because the Mueller team was threatening to lock up his son.

Over Here, we're told that he pled guilty twice, full stop. And that we should lock him up or else he'll get off "scot-free."

Our nation is tribalized all the way own. You are being propagandized pretty much wherever you look.

Laffer conjures Pedestriangate!

THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2020

His visit to dead person's curve: President Trump has coined a new term: Obamagate.

Far right on cue, supernal economist Arthur Laffer has arrived with Pedestriangate.

Pedestriangate is Laffer' way of explaining how the coronavirus death count ever got so absurdly high. Yesterday, Erin Banco delivered the dope at the Daily Beast:

BANCO AND SUEBSAENG (5/13/20): “My view is the president is totally correct that we need to have medical transparency,” said Art Laffer, a longtime conservative economist who has counseled Trump and other key administration officials on coronavirus response and how to “open” the economy amid the pandemic. “When you attribute a death to the coronavirus today, what that means is that the guy had the coronavirus and died. It doesn’t matter if he got hit by a car and died, and he would still be categorized as a coronavirus death... You need the whole transcribed medical records on a disk so people can sit there, maybe without names, and look for causes and correlations.”

In fairness, Laffer may have conjured an absurd example to make a larger point. On the other hand, with so many people now sheltered in place, it's hard to get hit by a car!

Gentlepersons, start your napkins! Among us self-impressed rational animals, the foolishness never ends!

Loving Sullivan, loathing Barr!

THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2020

Life in these tribalized times: Friend, do you suffer a famous misfortune? Do you "live in interesting times?"

Let's put that a different way. Is it possible that you live in highly tribalized times?

If you do, you will likely be propagandized every day of the week. Consider Michael Crowley's report in this morning's New York Times, a report about Judge Emmet Sullivan, the federal judge who is handling the Michael Flynn case.

Are you being propagandized when you read Crowley's report? We're going to say that a case could be made.

Below, you see paragraphs 4 and 8 of Crowley's report as it appears in our New York Times print edition. In a bit of a mix-and-match, you also see the the headline which now appears online.

Below, you see paragraphs 4 and 8 from our print edition. In paragraph 4, Crowley is referring to a 2008 case in which Judge Sullivan threw out the corruption conviction of Senator Ted Stevens, charging prosecutorial misconduct:

CROWLEY (5/14/20): Judge in Flynn Case Renowned for His Independent Streak

[...]

The [Stevens] case cemented Judge Sullivan’s reputation for fierce independence and low tolerance for government misconduct—a reputation in the spotlight again now that he is entertaining a challenge to the Justice Department’s extraordinary motion to dismiss its criminal case against Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser.

[...]

“He’s ferociously independent,” said Reid H. Weingarten, a prominent criminal defense lawyer and partner at the Washington firm of Steptoe & Johnson who has also argued before the judge. “He doesn’t suffer fools.”

Good lord! By the time we'd read eight paragraphs, we'd been told that Judge Sullivan is both fiercely independent and ferociously independent. We'd also been told that he doesn't suffer fools.

In the the version of Crowley's report which now appears online, some editor has cleaned up the duplicate reference to Sullivan's fierce/ferocious independence. But in the headline, we're now told that the judge is renowned for his independent streak.

Simply put, we're being told that we should place our faith in this particular prince. We aren't being told that this particular judge may sometimes get out over his skis, as he did in the aborted sentencing hearing for Kelly in December 2018.

During that hearing, Sullivan seemed to accuse Flynn of treason, a capital offense. As you may recall, he walked back his peculiar remarks in an afternoon session.

At present, Sullivan seems to be tilting in the blue direction with respect to the Flynn case. He may be right in doing so. Similarly, he may have been right in throwing out the criminal conviction of Stevens, a conservative Republican who lost his Alaska Senate seat during the prosecution which Sullivan dismissed as corrupt.

At any rate, because Sullivan is tilting blue, you may find yourself propagandized with respect to his fierce independence, his ferocious independence, and his independent streak. Such importunings may sometimes occur in highly tribalized times.

You may not find yourself reminded of the fact that Sullivan, like everyone else, possesses imperfect judgment. You may not be asked to recall high-profile examples of same.

Was Sullivan right to dismiss the conviction of Senator Stevens? As we sit here today, we can't tell you, and let's face it:

You have no idea either!

That said, riddle yourself this. In throwing out that conviction, Sullivan was alleging gross misconduct by the federal prosecutors who were trying to put Stevens in prison.

In the current case, Attorney General William Barr is alleging significant misconduct by the federal prosecutors who charged Flynn with a federal crime. In paragraph 7 of his report (as it appears in our print edition), Crowley touches upon the possible conflict raised by these dueling concerns:

CROWLEY: Criminal defense lawyers and legal analysts in Washington said it was hard to predict how Judge Sullivan might act [in the Flynn case]. While he has expressed personal “disgust” in court for Mr. Flynn’s actions, he has also displayed a low tolerance for the sort of prosecutorial misconduct that the Justice Department claims as a justification for ending its case against Mr. Flynn.

Conflict! In fact, Sullivan got way out over his skis in stating his "disgust" for the conduct he suggested might constitute "treason." But he has also displayed "a low tolerance for the sort of prosecutorial misconduct" being alleged by Barr.

Question! So federal prosecutors sometimes display imperfect judgment in the way they conduct their affairs? Do some prosecutors even drift over into the lane which can be scored as "prosecutorial misconduct?"

Obviously, yes—such things sometimes happen. But in this highly tribalized time, we blue consumers will rarely be reminded of that fact. It's even less likely that we'll be encouraged to wonder if that could have happened in the Flynn case, where such upright figures as James Comey were making major decisions.

Comey was once a blue consumer beast. Now he's a tribal untouchable. We blue voters are encouraged to avoid thinking about the possibility that he may have overstepped in the decisions he made—decisions which apparently left Sally Yates, another blue tribe hero, feeling "flabbergasted" and "dumbfounded" at one particular point.

(In the language of Sunday's Washington Post, Yates was "taken aback.")

We blue consumers will never be asked to imagine the possibility that Attorney General Barr, rightly or wrongly, may be acting in accord with his actual beliefs with respect to the Flynn case. In tribalized times, we tend to get handed heroes and demons, and not a whole lot in between.

Let's put that another way. Under current casting arrangements, Barr isn't fiercely independent. Unless you switch over to Fox!

Tomorrow, we may even offer a word on Barr's behalf, joined to a condemnation. For today, though, we will close with something we've long found amusing.

Heroes like Comey chased Kelly around because of his phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak. Right at the start of a frequently awful interview with Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Marty Harris describes "the heart of who Michael Flynn is" and the heart of the ongoing case:

HARRIS (5/14/20): It’s worth getting at the heart of who Michael Flynn is. Flynn was a shoo-in to be Trump’s national security adviser. Some even floated his name as a potential vice president. Though Flynn had been the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, his views had moved sharply to the right over the years.

Before Trump even took office, Flynn was getting involved with highly sensitive foreign policy. A few weeks after the election, Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., gave Flynn a call. He was worried about sanctions Obama had put in place as punishment for Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. [Kislyak] was wondering: Should Russia respond here and escalate things? And Flynn tells him, Just sit tight. That’s why we’re talking about a criminal investigation into Flynn now, four years later.

According to this fairly conventional summary of the case, Flynn told Kislyak not to retaliate against the U.S. as a result of the new sanctions. As a result, the Russkies didn't!

The Russkies didn't retaliate against the United States! On this basis, we're somehow supposed to be angry at Flynn even "now, four years later."

That has always struck us as a puzzling though comical story. But these are highly tribalized times, and stories like that will take hold.

Tomorrow: What we saw on cable TV during the Mueller years

Sullivan over his skis: The Washington Post's Aaron Blake describes Judge Sullivan's semi-meltdown concerning Flynn's possible "treason:"

BLAKE (5/13/20): [P]erhaps the most controversial aspect of the December 2018 sentencing hearing was when Sullivan invoked treason. Sullivan asked the government whether it had considered charging Flynn with that much more serious offense, given that Flynn had discussed sanctions with Kislyak shortly after then-President Barack Obama had imposed them on Russia.

“I really don’t know the answer to this question, but given the fact that the then-president of the United States imposed sanctions against Russia for interfering with federal elections in this country, is there an opinion about the conduct of the defendant the following days that rises to the level of treasonous activity on his part?” Sullivan asked.

The government said it hadn’t considered charging Flynn with treason, but Sulivan pressed again: “All right. Hypothetically, could he have been charged with treason?”

Sullivan later clarified that he wasn’t alleging that Flynn might have committed treason but that he was merely probing how generous the government had been in its plea deal.

According to Blake, Sullivan later "clarified" that he hadn't meant treason when he kept saying treason.

Was that really a "clarification?" The use of such forgiving terms may be common in tribalized times.

What it said in yesterday's New York Times!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2020

Trump's bogus claims about testing: Monday afternoon, President Trump and at least one major flunky conducted a press event right there in the famous Rose Garden.

The event was held beneath two signs. Each of the signs said this:

AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD IN TESTING

Does America lead the world in testing? To some extent, it all depends on what the meaning of "leads the world in testing" is!

That said, the blatant misstatements came thick and fast as soon as the president and his flunky started speaking. Early on, the commander in chief said this:

TRUMP (5/11/20): This week, the United States will pass 10 million tests conducted—nearly double the number of any other country. We’re testing more people per capita than South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland, and many other countries—and, in some cases, combined.

[...]

Thanks to the courage of our citizens and our aggressive strategy, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved. And we have saved—and if you look at on a per-100,000 basis, we’re at the best part of the pack, right on the bottom. Germany and us are leading the world. Germany and the United States are leading the world—lives saved per hundred thousand.

That first passage was technically accurate, but it was grossly misleading. The second passage was simply false, to the extent that anyone knew what Trump was talking about.

Soon, though, up jumped Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health and the day's designated flunky. Giroir's statement wasn't simply grossly misleading. We'd have to score this passage as just blatantly false:

GIROIR: I think it’s clear that America does lead the world in testing. I’ll go through some of the charts that show that we lead quantitatively. I will also suggest that we lead in the diversity of tests, which are very important to establish the testing ecosystem to keep America safe. And clearly, as we’ve said multiple times, no one beats America when it comes to quality.

So let’s start potentially with the next slide.

This may be hard to see, but if you look at the line on top, that’s the total numbers of tests done by the United States. No other country in the world comes close to the total numbers. Again, as the president has said, today we will top over 9 million tests. And if you look at per capita—everyone talks about South Korea being the standard—today, we will have done more than twice the per capita rate of testing that was accomplished in South Korea. No matter how you look at it, America is leading the world in testing.

Plainly, the admiral seemed to say that the United States "is leading the world" in per capita testing. That, of course, is blatantly false—and surely, the admiral knew that.

In yesterday morning's report, we discussed the Washington Post's utterly hapless, front-page attempt to correct these groaning misstatements. Simply put, the Washington Post was overmatched by this stunningly simple task.

The Times did better than the Post—but how much better? Today, let's review what the Times' news report said.

Due to our computer woes, we hadn't seen the Times' report when we posted yesterday. The Times did much better than the Post, but we couldn't truthfully say that the Times did well.

Below, you see the chunk of the Times report which addressed per capita testing. The Times completely outdid the Post, but did it do sufficiently well?

THREE REPORTERS (5/12/20): The new White House policy on masks came as Mr. Trump tried to reinvent his government’s troubled history on testing for the coronavirus, claiming that the United States was “unmatched and unrivaled” in its testing capacity but ignoring the early failures to provide testing that allowed the virus to spread invisibly for months.

Declaring once again that “if somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested,” Mr. Trump said that his administration was working with states to allow them to conduct 12.9 million tests in May, insisting that the testing ability in the United States compares favorably with other countries.

“We are testing more people per capita than South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland and many other countries,” he said, ignoring countries where testing on a per capita basis is higher, including Germany, Russia, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and at least 20 others, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data.

Flanked by large posters that proclaimed “America leads the world in testing,” Mr. Trump also declared victory over the pandemic, saying that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed.” Later, under questioning, he revised his comments, saying he only meant to say the country had prevailed on increasing access to testing.

Concerning per capita testing, the Times was able to do what the Post amazingly couldn't. The Times was able to report a basic fact:

At least two dozen other nations have done more testing than the U.S. on a per capita basis.

The Washington Post hadn't even been able to do that! That said, the Times never mentioned Giroir's flagrant, howling misstatement—and in that passage, they seemed to say that Trump had only been claiming that "the United States compares favorably with other countries" (our emphasis).

As the Times noted, the signage said the U.S. "leads the world," not that we "compare favorably." In the matter of per capita testing, that's what the admiral plainly said.

Continuing, the Times seemed to apply soft soap to other flat misstatements:

THREE REPORTERS (continuing directly): But the president’s claim that “we’ve prevailed on testing” was also premature, even by his government’s own standards. Though the United States has ramped up testing from 150,000 tests per day from a month ago to 300,000 per day recently, the current rate still remains far behind the five million daily target he himself set last month.

The president’s claim about testing being available for anyone was also misleading. It is one thing to have enough testing capacity for everyone who is symptomatic or has been in contact with someone who has tested positive, but that is quite different from having enough to provide reassurance to people considering returning to normal life.

The president announced that his administration had begun distributing $11 billion for testing approved by Congress almost six weeks ago and claimed that Germany and the United States were “leading the world in lives saved per 100,000.” That was also an exaggeration.

Germany does have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world, at 9.13 deaths per 100,000 people. The United States, by comparison, has a rate of 24.31 deaths per 100,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That is lower than several other European countries, like Britain, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Sweden, but it is also higher than that of Canada, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Iran, Brazil and many others.

By any rational standard, Trump's "claim about testing being available for anyone" wasn't simply "misleading." His claim was flatly false.

Also, as you can see from the Times' own report, his claim about Germany and the United States leading the world wasn't an "exaggeration." It too was flatly false!

Many liberals talk about "lies" in ways they can't hope to support. The Times kept tilting the other way. Can anyone here play this game?

Final point:

Trump has been making wild misstatements at these briefings on a thoroughly regular basis over the past several months. It's amazing to see how permissive the upper-end press corps has been concerning these constant misstatements.

In the Times, Admiral Giroir escaped any mention; Trump was lathered with varieties of soft soap. The Times did outperform the thoroughly hapless Washington Post. But is it possible that we "rational animals" simply weren't built for these tasks?

What permissiveness looks like: At yesterday's Senate hearing, Mitt Romney directly criticized Giroir for what he said on Monday. Romney was willing to name check the admiral, but the Post and the Times were not!

What people are told about son of Flynn!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2020

The tribalization of everything: Just to offer some basic context, we aren't big fans of Michael Flynn, to the extent that we hold an opinion.

We remember his performance at the 2016 Republican National Convention. We remember it as one of the craziest things we've ever seen in a major political setting.

We refer to the way he led chants of "Lock her up!" from convention delegates during a prime-time address. Just in case people didn't know, he specifically noted that he was talking about "Crooked Hillary."

Four years later, the performance doesn't look as crazy as it did in real time. That said, the native New Englander of a certain age will be familiar with the combination of the slightly distorted, angry face mixed with the light regional accent.

You can see part of the chanting here. For a longer look at the nonsense, you can just click this. We don't recommend hating the others, but Flynn struck us as "a little bit nutty" that night.

Then too, there was Michael G. Flynn—son of Flynn.

In the fall of 2017, it was widely reported that son of Flynn had become a subject, perhaps a target, of the Mueller probe. In this report for NBC News, Lee, Ainsley and Dilanian profiled the somewhat unhinged younger Flynn:

LEE, AINSLEY AND DILANIAN (9/13/17): The younger Flynn, 34, has a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and an associate degree in golf course management. He is married, has one son and lives in Northern Virginia. He worked for a golf company and then a healthcare management firm between 2008 and 2015, and since 2014 has worked for the Flynn Intel Group, according to LinkedIn...

He was a controversial figure during the presidential campaign and during the Trump transition, known for writing inflammatory comments on Twitter and circulating conspiracy theories.

He perpetuated a so-called "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that surfaced in the days before the November election alleging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had used the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington to run a child sex-trafficking operation. About a month later, in December 2016, a North Carolina man fired gunshots in the pizzeria allegedly in response to the false "pizzagate" story. At the time, Flynn wrote on Twitter: "Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story."

During the Trump transition there were questions about whether Flynn had an official role. He had a government transition email address and was said to be helping his father, who had been named national security adviser. But after the shooting at the "pizzagate" restaurant, Pence, who was in charge of the transition, said Flynn "has no involvement in the transition whatsoever."

Did son of Flynn really believe that Crooked Hillary "had used the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington to run a child sex-trafficking operation?" As has become increasingly clear, we humans are capable of believing wide arrays of crazy claims.

This is a basic human tragedy. For the record, we can't tell you what the younger Flynn really believed versus what he merely said.

At any rate, the younger Flynn had been playing a major role in his father's big-bucks lobbying group. By the fall of 2017, this fact had led to widespread reports that he might be subject to indictment by the group being led by Robert Mueller, of whose brilliance and fairness we liberals were being widely assured.

Flynn and Flynn don't strike us as the most impressive tandem. Then again, when Mueller appeared before the Senate, he didn't seem anything like the commanding figure we'd heard described, night after night and month after month, on our favorite "cable news" channels.

Can anything be believed in an age like this? We can't answer that question. But we've been struck, in recent weeks, by the different claims our warring tribes hear about a wide array of topics.

This includes what people are told concerning the prosecution of General Flynn—Michael Flynn the elder.

Flynn the elder has been in the news of late. After a three-year pursuit which left him semi-bankrupted, we liberals have been told that he may be about to get off "scot-free" for a crime to which he pled guilty.

So goes tribal rhetoric. But we've been struck by the different things people are told about Flynn depending on what channel they watch. Here's what people are angrily told on Fox:

Flynn Senior only pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI as a way to shield his son from prosecution.

If you watch Fox, you've seen that claim made with regularity. Nor do you have any reason to believe the claim is untrue.

If you watch CNN or MSNBC, you're unlikely to know that this claim is being made at all. Increasingly, we're amazed by the volume of things one tribe is told—things the other tribe won't even hear about.

Did General Flynn plead guilty to protect his son? We have no way of knowing. Nor do we know if any such deal was made in good faith by both sides.

Had Mueller turned out to be the person we'd heard described, we'd have more confidence in the behavior of those in his eponymous probe. But Mueller didn't turn out that way, and viewers of Fox are widely told that the threats against son of Flynn were corrupt on the side of the Mueller probe.

For the record, some people we liberals are told we can trust have said that General Flynn copped that plea on behalf of his son. Back when Flynn the elder made his deal, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes wrote such things as this, and also this:

HENNESSEY AND WITTES (12/8/17): One week after former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s plea deal, it still is not all that clear what it means. Close observers of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election are divided—with some suggesting the plea signifies a dramatic breakthrough for the prosecutor and others suggesting it signifies a comparatively weak hand on his part on matters of collusion. The fortune-tellers have pored over the tea leaves, and the results are in dispute.

The reason is the plea’s narrowness compared to the astonishing swath of public allegations of potentially criminal conduct on Flynn’s part. Reputable newspapers had reported Flynn’s failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, failures to disclose foreign contacts as required on his security clearance forms, large transactions with foreign actors, involvement in a strange influence-peddling scheme over nuclear plants, and even involvement in a kidnapping plot. Press accounts have indicated that Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr. also had exposure and that protecting his son was a priority for the elder Flynn. Yet the plea itself was limited. It was only one count for a set of false statements to the FBI. Not a good look for Flynn, to be sure, but far less than what most observers were expecting.

HENNESSEY, WITTES ET AL (12/1/17): If Mueller were prepared to settle the Flynn matter on the basis of single-count plea to a violation of [false statements], he was almost certainly prepared to charge a great deal more. Moreover, we can infer from the fact that Flynn accepted the plea deal that he and his counsel were concerned about the degree of jeopardy, both for Flynn and for his son, related to other charges. The deal, in other words, reflects the strength of Mueller’s hand against Flynn.

We have no idea if that's why Flynn pled. Nor do we know if the people running the Mueller probe were behaving in good faith when they assembling that litany of possible charges against Flynn the elder, or when they threatened son of Flynn, assuming they actually did.

Our observation today is anthropological, and it's fairly simple. As our society splits into warring tribes, members of the two warring tribes are persistently exposed to vastly different arrays of alleged facts and sachems.

Over at Fox, viewers are told that Flynn offered a guilty plea to protect his son. They're also told that people like Mueller and Comey—or perhaps, the people who were really conducting the Mueller probe, one of whom is often named—weren't acting in good faith all through the length of the pursuit of Flynn.

At CNN and at MSNBC, we aren't exposed to such thoughts. Meanwhile, we've now been encouraged to see Comey as a figure of rectitude—a major switch from the earlier days when we were encouraged to see him as highly suspect.

Our tribe has flipped on other such figures, with our most trusted cable stars failing to explain why they themselves have so totally flipped. We now trust Andrew McCabe, who was once flamboyantly denounced on the Maddow show. In a similar vein, we've been told very little about the massive misconduct within the FBI in its pursuit of Carter Page, who we once were told was a witting Russian asset.

Over There, our neighbors and friends hear one set of factual claims. They're told to trust and distrust various public figures.

Over Here, we get a different story; rarely the twain intersect. This represents the politicization and tribalization of everything. Stating the obvious, you can't run a major nation this way.

For ourselves, we don't trust James Comey's judgment or his rectitude, and we did see Robert Mueller's sobering performance.

Beyond that, we sometimes hear what they're saying on Fox. We suspect it isn't all crazy, though some of it plainly is.

Tomorrow, we'll show you something we read in Sunday's Washington Post. It was buried deep inside a front-page report. No link was provided.

For ourselves, we aren't fans of Flynn and Flynn, but we aren't real high on Comey either. We don't recommend that you hate anyone, but given the politicization of everything, is such double vision allowed?

Tomorrow: Sally Yates' reaction

The things people hear Over There: Substantial chunks of what people hear on Fox do seem to be a bit crazy. Tucker Carlson, who once urged Trump to take the virus seriously, has been massively off his pandemic meds of late.

By way of contrast, we're the people who believe that Elizabeth Warren really did think she was Native American; who believe that Stormy Daniels was a feminist hero; and who thought Michael Avenatti was so impressive that he should run for president. It's quite a thrill to belong to the tribe where wisdom and judgment prevail.

We simply aren't up to this task, part 2!

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2020

Absurd work from major Rhodes Scholar: We humans simply aren't up to this task. Consider last night's absurd performance by cable star Rachel Maddow.

Maddow opened her program on a rare note of concern. She said that something seems to be wrong with President Donald J. Trump.

Stating the obvious, something has seemed to be wrong with Trump for a very long time. Apparently, Maddow has just noticed.

"What is wrong with the president today?" she actually asked at one point.

Justin Baragona described Maddow's short monologue concerning this topic at The Daily Beast. This is the way he started:

BARAGONA (5/12/20): MSNBC host Rachel Maddow expressed concern for President Donald Trump’s emotional well-being on Monday night, claiming the president was “visibly struggling” and unable to “keep it together” after he stormed out of a press briefing earlier in the day amid tough questioning by female reporters.

At the tail end of a Monday afternoon press conference in which the president misleadingly boasted about the nation’s coronavirus testing capacity, Trump fumed after Asian-American CBS reporter Weijia Jiang confronted him over his answer to her question about America’s rising death toll, wondering aloud why he told her to go “ask China.” He then huffed off after CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, whom he had just called on, attempted to ask him a question.

Maddow, kicking off her primetime broadcast by noting that she typically follows a “general rule” of concentrating on what the administration does and not what the president says due to his propensity for falsehoods, told her audience she was “going to make a little bit of an exception” this time.

“Because I think this is something we should all see,” the progressive anchor declared. “Just because I think it is worth knowing, in all seriousness, that the president, right now, in the midst of this crisis, is visibly struggling.”

She thinks it's worth knowing, in all seriousness!

Stating the obvious, the president has been "visibly struggling" for a very long time. He has stormed out of press briefings before.

He has insulted many reporters, men and women alike. Last month, he even started telling male reporters that their questions were "nasty."

Apparently, Maddow has just noticed this disordered behavior, or she feels that she has to pretend. She offered a thousand heartfelt disclaimers, suggesting that the president may simply have had a bad day. Or maybe it's just the pandemic!

BARAGONA (continuing directly): Adding that there is “something wrong or he’s just not doing OK,” Maddow said that “the president apparently just is not able to keep it together right now in his public appearances” before playing a clip of him leaving the presser.

“What is wrong with the president today?” Maddow later asked. “We don’t know. Something is wrong.”

After saying it could possibly just be stress getting to the president, Maddow concluded by pointing out that even though Trump and his administration have been pushing the narrative that the pandemic is in the past, there’s now an outbreak of the coronavirus in the White House itself.

It could possibly just be stress? Stress has been getting to Trump, in disturbing ways, for a very long time.

Something has been visibly wrong with Trump for a very long time. People more honest than Maddow tried to start a discussion of this topic in 2017. She still won't directly cite their concerns, not even today.

Is Donald Trump psychiatrically or cognitively impaired? Maddow still isn't willing to ask such questions in a simple, straightforward way.

Lawrence O'Donnell has often done so during MSNBC's 10 PM Eastern hour. One hour earlier, Maddow is still playing it safe.

Last night's presentation was corporatized soft soap at its silliest and its most plain. We advise you to read the full Daily Beast account, then watch the ridiculous tape at the Maddow site.

(Headline: "Something appears to be wrong with Donald Trump.")

Simply put, we humans weren't built for tasks of this type. Anthropologically speaking, multimillionaire TV stars play their games; we rubes can't see through the con.

Simply put, we aren't up to this task!

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2020

The Washington Post tries to correct Donald Trump's latest large groaner: Friend, have you ever tried approaching the news with an anthropological eye?

If you have, you may have noticed what we notice most days. As a matter of basic anthropology, we human beings simply weren't built for this task.

On the most obvious levels, we seem to lack the intellectual capacity fo even the simplest assignments. Consider the question Trump was asked at yesterday's non-daily non-briefing.

The correspondent who asked the question is being hailed for her courage and for her brilliance. That said, her question went like this:

REPORTER (5/11/20): You’ve said many times that the U.S. is doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing.

TRUMP: Yes.

REPORTER: Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you, if every day Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?

The question makes a type of sense, though only on a somewhat meta or "philosophical" level. That said, the question leaves a wildly inaccurate premise unchallenged.

Is it true that the U.S. is "doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing?" Putting it a different way, is the U.S. doing better than everyone else at all?

It isn't obvious how you should measure such things, but rather plainly, the answer to those questions seems to be no. That said, consider what happened when the Washington Post decided to tackle this question.

This morning, the Post attempted to tackle this question in a front-page report. Four reporters shared the byline. Sadly, the work they produced was straight outta second grade.

Sad! As noted, the report appears on the Post's front page. Online, the headline says this:

Trump claims U.S. outpaces world in coronavirus testing, but numbers tell different story

The Post was going to tackle the numbers! The Post was going to tackle the president's claim that we outpace the world in testing!

What resulted was a sad, hapless mess. After a bit of piddling around, the four reporters' nugget presentation went like this:

FOUR REPORTERS (5/12/20): The United States as of Sunday had completed nearly 9 million coronavirus tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project. While an enormous number, the figure is equivalent to just 2.74 percent of the U.S. population and does not give a full representation of the virus’s reach within American society.

There are far higher levels of per-capita testing in other parts of the world. In tiny Iceland, the figure is an extraordinary 15.4 percent, but that amounts to about 54,000 tests across a population of 352,000 people.

Yet major industrialized economies with large outbreaks also have fared better in testing than the United States: Italy has conducted tests equivalent to 4.31 percent of its population, and Germany is at 3.35 percent. The United States also is still behind its northern neighbor, Canada, where its 1.09 million tests are equivalent to 2.95 percent of the county’s population.

Everything the reporters say in that passage is correct. The problem, and it's a very large problem, lies in what they omit.

Nine million is "an enormous number," the reporters decided to say. But that amounts to just 2.74 percent of the U.S. population, they correctly report. Other countries have tested more!

The problem here involves what doesn't get said about Trump's wildly inaccurate statement. From that passage, a reader may well get the idea that we actually do lead the world in volume of testing, except for the few nations named.

That doesn't come close to being accurate. But in a front-page report which claims to critique Trump's latest wild claim, that's the bogus impression many Post readers will get.

In fact, many countries have tested larger portions of their population than the United States has. The Post never cites a source for its international figures, but their numbers track closely to those shown at this site.

How many countries out-test the U.S.? It isn't just tiny Iceland and those three larger nations. Many countries have out-tested the United States! Some of the numbers look like this:

Coronavirus tests by percentage of population, as of May 12:
Iceland: 15.9%
Luxembourg: 8.8%
Lithuania: 7.1%
Denmark: 5.8%
Portugal: 5.4%
Israel: 5.4%
Spain: 5.3%
Belgium: 5.1%
Estonia: 4.9%
Ireland: 4.3%
Italy: 4.3%
Latvia: 4.2%
New Zealand: 4.1%
Russia: 4.0%
Norway: 3.8%
Switzerland: 3.7%
Austria: 3.7%
Australia: 3.4%
Germany: 3.3%
Canada: 3.0%
Singapore: 3.0%
United States: 2.9%
United Kingdom: 2.8%
Finland: 2.3%
France: 2.1%
Sweden: 1.5%
South Korea: 1.3%

Does it look like we're "outpacing the world" in any way when you look at those numbers? We've left out many other smaller countries which are out-testing us too.

(Example: Bermuda, 7.2%.)

This is the metric the Post chose to use in today's front-page report. But in a typical case of statistical bungling, the Post completely failed to convey the extent to which Trump's latest wild claim is wildly and crazily wrong.

From there, the four reporters moved on to offer the assessment shown below. We'd call this bungled too:

FOUR REPORTERS (continuing directly): While Trump moves to increase testing, the United States continues to be, by far, the world’s coronavirus hot spot. There are now 1.34 million confirmed cases, more than the sum of cases in the next six countries—Spain, the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, France and Germany. U.S. deaths passed 80,000 on Monday.

Does the United States "continue to be, by far, the world’s coronavirus hot spot?" Is the United States the world's hot spot at all? It all depends on the metric you choose to report.

In that passage, the four reporters chose to use the metric of "confirmed cases," a term which may mean different things, or relate to different realities, in different countries. How about if they had chosen a different metric—the metric of "deaths?"

There are problems with that metric too. At present, there is no problem-free metric. That said:

Below, you see the current totals for the United States and the other countries the Post named, excluding Russia. (Russia's statistical reporting seems a bit squirrelly.) In this graphic, we're comparing reported U.S. deaths to reported deaths in five European nations whose total population virtually matches that of the U.S.:

Deaths by coronavirus, as of May 12:
United States: 81,911
Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, France and Germany: 124,088

The total population of those five nations basically matches that of the United States. If we choose the metric of deaths, is the U.S. "the world’s coronavirus hot spot by far?" Is it "the world's hot spot" at all?

In the past year, we've suggested that you try viewing the world through a new, different lens. We've suggested that you abandon the traditional lens according to which "man (sic) is the rational animal."

Instead, we've suggested that you test-drive a lens according to which man (sic} is the tribal, script-reading and bungling animal. You'll routinely see this premise supported when you watch high-level journalists try to work with statistics, data, numbers—in truth, with any type of information at all.

These upper-end journalists today! They tend to have a very hard time adjusting for inflation. They tend to have a very hard time adjusting for population size.

They constantly bungle basic test scores. They persistently bungled the data from Flint concerning levels of lead exposure.

Don't even imagine that creatures like these will be able to unpack our hopelessly complex economic statistics. As a species, we simply weren't engineered to accomplish such tasks.

This morning, everyone is hailing a question which reinforced the president's latest ridiculous howler. The Post attempted to challenge the howler—attempted that task, and failed.

Donald Trump's endless, over-sized howlers constitute a matter of national security. That said, our journalists simply aren't to the task of reporting this fact to the public.

Go ahead—try that new lens. Many journalists went to the finest schools, but look at the product they hand us!

BREAKING: Live and direct from the pet peeve...

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2020

...and information departments: Personally, we can't really see why a newsperson would say this:

TODD (5/10/20): Richard Haass, given your expertise, I want to ask, I want to look at this from a global perspective here. Because the other part of this is, this is odd. The United States is the infected country. It's the country that others around the world don't want to emulate right now.

We're not the country that's leading the response to the pandemic, or it doesn't feel this way. What does that mean to you going forward? And how concerning is that to you? [Todd's emphasis]

The United States is "the infected country?" In fact, a lot of countries have been "infected." Here are the current death rates, per million population, of the countries tracked by Kevin Drum on a daily basis:

Deaths per million population, to date:
Spain: 566
Italy: 509
United Kingdom: 484
France: 394
Sweden: 323
United States: 242
Switzerland: 216
Canada: 131
Germany: 91

We wouldn't recommend that anyone emulate various aspects of the U.S. approach to this ongoing disaster. Also, there's no perfect way to compare any two countries on a resources/demographics/geography/onset-of-the-pandemic basis.

That said, the death rates in some of those Euro countries are far ahead of our own (to date). It remains to be seen where the numbers will stand when the pandemic is finally over, assuming it ever is.

Our view? Anti-Trumpism really is driving some liberal and mainstream orgs toward snarky, inaccurate coverage and commentary. In a new example, Meet the Press has apologized today for doctored editing of something William Barr recently said.

That particular bit of snarky editing and paraphrase has been widespread within our own liberal tribe. As we started to suggest this morning, it seems to us that coverage of Barr and Flynn has been rather shaky Over Here within the tents of our own infallible tribe.

True belief and its companions aren't exclusively found Over There. It's a virus within our own tribe too.

According to major anthropologists, we humans have always been wired this way. It isn't just The Other Guys. It's our own basic instinct too.

We'll extend these thoughts tomorrow, to the extent our computers permit.

Here at the incomparable Howler...

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2020

...we wonder as we wander: Here at the incomparable Howler, we wonder as we wander. We've especially wondered, of late, at the different stories the warring tribes hear concerning the prosecution of Michael Flynn.

That said, we continue to struggle with a sprawling yet uncooperative computer system. For that reason, we think we won't post today.

The reds are told one thing about Flynn. The blues hear different allegations and facts.

It's a terrible way to play the game. But this is the world we all live in.

For a primer in the way we humans are wired to escape uncertainty, we'll recommend Christina Cauterucci's new essay at Slate. But please don't ask us to give you a link. True belief is human and easy, our computers today are hard.

At least in theory, a new computer arrives tomorrow. How will we ever tell HAL?

Special bonus submission: Here's that missing link.

Technical problems afflict our computers...

SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2020

...but also our national discourse: Technical problems have been afflicting our computers. If we're not up and running on Monday, the answer will likely lie there.

"Technical problems" are also afflicting our failing national discourse. Consider the ongoing effort to decide whether Tara Reade's accusation is true.

Nothing's quite so depressing as running back through the accusations which have dotted our electoral landscape since early 1992. It's demoralizing to review the way the mainstream press evaluated the claims of Gennifer Flowers and Kathleen Willey. Then too, we have the widely believed but false accusations in the Duke lacrosse case and the UVa gang rape accusation.

You can add Julie Swetnick's claim to that group. Do we liberals still believe that her claims were true? And why did that question disappear?

In the broader sense, have we liberals ever tried to come to terms with the way we fell in line behind the tribal pied piper, Michael Avenatti? Have we ever tried to explain why we regarded his client, Stormy Daniels, as a "feminist hero," rather than as a misguided person who hoped to score some major cash in the midst of a White House election?

It's depressing to recall the way the mainstream press failed to discuss the credibility problems displayed by Flowers and Willey. A similar impulse plays out today in the case of Reade, who very much may, or perhaps may not, be telling the truth about Biden.

Involved in this is the hard-wired human attraction to so-called "motivated reasoning," in which we tend to believe the claims which align simplistically with our preconceived view of the world. In which we embellish the evidence which supports the claim we want to believe, while disappearing sources of doubt.

One "progressive" after another has embellished the evidence which seems to support Reade's claims. This doesn't just happen Over There on the crackpot right. Our self-impressed but failing blue team has long been sunk in this practice.

Tied up in this is The Silence of The Logicians. In the current matter, we're dealing with an aspect of "epistemology," the study of what sorts of things we can reliably claim to know.

For thirty years, our discourse has turned on whether we could or couldn't believe a series of sexual accusations, some of which were surely true, some of which were not. We've been struggling with this daring back to Gennifer Flowers, but Have you ever seen a philosophy professor descend from his or her aerie to lead us through the types of steps we must make in such situations?

Citizens, please! We've been almost wholly abandoned by our academic elites. At the same time, we've been left to the devices of twenty-something pseudo-journalists who often reason in the manner of brainwashed true believers.

The Professor Mannes are always there to further embarrass a lapsed profession. To bring the note of comedy in, consider a somewhat comical term—"credibility."

Is Tara Reade's accusation "credible?" It all depends on what the meaning of "credible" is!

That said, almost any claim can be scored as "credible." Surely, no term is more forgiving and all-encompassing in the whole English language.

Almost any claim can be scored as credible, but "credible" isn't the same thing as "true!" Unfortunately, it's often played that way by people who want to move from the possibility that Reade's accusation is true to the statement that we should believe it.

In truth, almost any claim is "credible," including Joe Biden's denial. This is especially true given the logic our tribe has created, in which an accuser's reversals and self-contradictions can almost be taken as further evidence that her claims really are accurate.

True believers will announce that Reade's claim is credible, failing to note that Biden's denial is "credible" too. Consider this passage from a recent news report in the Washington Post:

LINSKEY AND SULLIVAN (5/3/20): Even so, the Biden allegations are prompting a struggle for many activists.

“Two things can be true,” said Rebecca Katz, a liberal Democratic operative. “There may be allegations that are credible, and also that Joe Biden might make a much better president than Donald Trump. And it is a real struggle trying to confront that.” She added, “If you’re going to say that you believe women, then you need to believe women.”

Even Lynda LaCasse, the former neighbor who provided some corroboration for Reade by saying Reade told her about the alleged incident several years after she said it happened, voiced ambivalence after seeing Biden’s MSNBC appearance.

“He looks very believable, too,” LaCasse said Friday in an interview with Democracy Now!, an independent news program. “But I’m hearing this today, and I heard Tara a long time ago telling me that. So, I’m struggling with it, with the election now.” She still intends to vote for Biden, she said.

LaCasse is a frequently cited "corroborating witness." According to LaCasse, Reade seemed believable back in 1996 when Reade told LaCasse whatever she actually told her. But Biden's denial seems believable too! To her credit, LaCasse doesn't seem to know quite what she should think!

This second judgment by LaCasse—Biden seems believable too—is rarely stated by the true believers. Meanwhile, there is Katz, seeming to toggle from "credible" to "true," at least as she's been quoted.

Also, because Reade's claim is "credible," Katz seems to think that we should believe it. She even seems to be back in the world where we should believe all such claims, as long as they're made by women. This is the comically awful parody of logic with which our failing tribe is hopelessly aligned.

Our national discourse has been in a freefall for many decades. We started building this site in 1997 because we thought the situation could no longer be ignored, even then.

Trump has taken things to a new level, but we liberals and progressives are ripe with Our Own Trumps. Meanwhile, a code of silence surrounds decades of howling incompetence by the upper-end mainstream press.

This includes the decades of war against Clinton/Gore/Clinton which put Donald J. Trump where he is. By rule of law, that long war cannot be discussed.

The upper-end press corps won't tell you about it. Neither will our legion of sleeping professors, who burble, slumber and snore.

During the twenty-month War Against Gore, our logicians could have helped us ponder the logic of paraphrase. Over the course of the past many years, they could have helped us with the epistemology of sex and assault accusations.

We don't know of a single philosophy professor who ever stepped forward to help. Instead, we have the Professor Mannes offering hapless parodies of competent professional service.

We've been in freefall for many years. Given the rise of partisan tribal media, we see on particular way out of this cascading mess.

Biden is awful, Trump is worse. Each candidate may be cognitively impaired. But just look at everyone else!