MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2024
Things may be somewhat worse: In their new Conversation at the New York Times, Bret Stephens (center right) and Gail Collins (center left) start out debating the pardon of Hunter Biden.
There's more! As they continue, they debate the wisdom of prospective pardons for possible targets of the incoming administration. Here's the way part of that goes:
Pardon You
[...]
Gail: The idea is to protect people who’ve angered the Trump camp with righteous behavior—like Liz Cheney and all the other members (and former members) of Congress who investigated Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riots.
Given the fact that Trump has been saying, as recently as Sunday, that he thinks they ought to go to jail, I can understand the concern. But pre-pardoning seems to suggest they’re actually guilty of something.
Bret: If I were Cheney, I’d pre-empt the pre-emption by refusing the pardon. If Trump wants to go after her or anyone else on some kind of enemies list, they should have faith in the justice system to do the right thing. The alternative is turning the pardon power, which was intended as a vehicle for personal mercy or for resolving emergencies of state, into just another all-purpose political weapon.
And so on from there.
All in all, the fact that this possibility has to be considered shows the mess we now seem to be in. As Stephens and Collins continue, their discussion moves to a second unusual idea.
Should President Biden use the bully pulpit in support of incoming President Trump? We'll focus on the highlighted remark by Collins:
(Continuing directly): On the other hand, what would you say to the idea of Biden publicly urging that the cases against Trump in New York and Georgia be dropped in the name of giving the incoming administration a clean start?
Gail: I would say, Say what?
Bret: Srsly, as the kids say. It would be a way of calling it even in the Trump-Biden feud. It would do something to erase the stain of self-dealing that came with Hunter’s pardon and it would look magnanimous, restoring some of the luster Biden lost.
Gail: Yeah, I guess you could say that the public voted not to send Trump to jail. But don’t put me down as a super enthusiast.
We’re in such a crazy moment, Bret. I’d say Trump critics were being paranoid, if it weren’t for his deeply terrifying pick for F.B.I. head, Kash Patel—who vowed to go after “the people in the media” and federal employee “conspirators” who he thinks led the public astray with attacks on Trump and his presidential campaign.
"We're in such a crazy moment?" We'll come back to that remark.
Eventually, the pair attempt to say which current Trump nominee seems to be the worst. That debate starts like this:
Gail: I think Patel is possibly Trump’s most troubling cabinet choice. But gee, there are so many. Who’s the one that scares you the most?
Bret: Tulsi Gabbard is my gold medalist. Nominating an apologist for former Syrian dictator and current Russia resident Bashar al-Assad as director of national intelligence means that if confirmed in the job, we’d need to rename her job title “director of national idiocy.”
As for the silver and bronze medals in this competition, I’m awarding them to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth. Help me decide who’s worse.
Within the warrens of Red America, opinions are likely to differ. On programs on the Fox News Channel, all the contributors seem to agree, at this particular point in time, that all the picks are top-notch.
With that, let's return to that comment by Collins. "We’re in such a crazy moment," she says.
We don't offer this as a criticism of Collins; her comment strikes us as a bit of a throwaway line. That said, it seems to us that a certain blindness may be involved in such a sanguine assessment.
Are we merely "in a moment" at the present time? Or has the so-called "democratization of media," mixed with the corporate strategy known as "segregation by viewpoint," combined to create a Babel effect? Are we locked inside an American Babel which may be hard to exit?
In Camus' allegorical novel, La Peste, the people of Oran are slow to see that they're caught in the midst of a plague. (Last Monday, we posted an excerpt.) Reading that remark by Collins, we flashed on Camus' famous novel again.
We're "in a crazy moment," she said. Might our real situation perhaps be more challenging—worse?
ReplyDeleteIt's so satisfying to watch Democrat scum squealing and panicking.
Fan-fucking-tastic!
Even if none of the super-high expectations of the second Trump presidency materialize, it has already been worth it.
Yeah, fuck the economy, public health, and national defense. As long as liberals are temporarily upset, right wingers will voluntarily consign themselves to the life of a penniless vagabond.
DeleteRight, without Brain-Dead Dear Leader and His Joy-Loving VP national defense is doomed.
DeleteAsk Laken Riley's parents how well Democrats defended their nation.
DeleteMs. Riley's parents have made their opinion about politicizing their daughter's murder quite clear. Why do you ignore them?
DeleteQiB, could be worried about other people’s kids?
DeleteLaken Riley deserved to die because she was eating our pets.
DeleteLaken Riley’s killer was in the US legally under a program Trump initiated.
DeleteYour use of "Democrat scum" tells us absolutely all that we ever need to know about you.
ReplyDeleteDG, anonymouse 3:42pm didn't confine his anger and insults to the anonymouse to whom he responded, he included all right wingers. How is that a different attitude from calling you scum?
ReplyDeleteGood question. I would say that 3:12 taunts and insults Dems, and exults in the pain they feel, while 3:42 bemoans the fact that Republicans will beggar themselves in order to inflict pain on Dems.
DeleteBut, of course, I agree with the point that I think you are trying to make -- that tarring all for the sins of a few is a mistake.
Just expanding upon the insight that conservative David Frum reached: “ If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
DeleteIt’s not an insult; it’s a fact.
DG - @4:09 routinely tars all for the sins of a few.
DeleteShe/he/it frequently calls anonymous commenters "anonymice" when she expels her venom in the guise of a comment response. That's just one example.
I see now in @4:09's response to you that she/he/it seems to be catching on by starting to individuate anonymous commenters by number.
It's only taken @4:09 a few years.
CC identifies as a woman; I would think any good progressive would honor her choice without making a thing out of it.
DeleteI mean, who gives a shit?
redraft, anonymices have decided to be anonymous. They have no nym and therefore one anonymouse is the same as another anonymouse. They have chosen to do this in order to unaccountable for what they say from one day to the next. Therefore one anonymouse is the same as every anonymouse. They desire no differentiation and shall not have it.one anonymouse post, is every anonymouse’s post.
DeleteI don’t differentiate anonymices “by number”. I have *always differentiated one post from another post by timestamp.
DG: “I mean, who gives a shit?”
DeleteCertainly not me. But thanks.
Redraft can address me as he or she.
DG, by the way, did you seriously “smart” over some anonymouse calling Democrats scum?
DeleteThere is no discussion here any more. Just mean-spirited sniping and empty insults. This is what it is like when the Dems give up and go away. Cable viewers abandoned MSNBC and CNN, not to switch channels but to take a break from politics and mourn tthe election results. They’ve left here too, so we see what discourse is like with just right wingers and trolls. Unreadable.
DeleteAnonymouse 11:36pm, who are you kidding? Anonymices are here to go after Bob. You ALWAYS go after him in the most derogatorily personal way that you can.Your idea of a “discussion” is 1500-word screeds against him. You insult people who defend him to the point of calling your fellow liberals frauds if they don’t agree with you.
DeleteI know that you couldn’t be honest at gunpoint, but even you shouldn’t try to float this phony baloney.
I just have to wonder why in the world it bothers you so much, ie, why it triggers you.
Delete
DeleteWe Soros-bots, Soros-trained monkeys, and Corbys are so vulnerable. So, so vulnerable!
Please be kind to us! Please, please, please!
What an asshole Somerby is.
I am Corby.
The big fear is that Democrats will turn the whole country into snowflakes, now that they made the Right a bunch of them.
DeleteSegregation by viewpoint isn't new at all. Sure, in the days when major TV networks dominated the land, there was a certain moderation among news outlets.
ReplyDeleteBut before television people got their news from newspapers and most major cities had at least two and some had many. And how did these organs differentiate themselves?
By ideological slant, naturally.
Partisanship has varied over time. When I was young NYC had 6 major newspapers: NYT, WSJ, Herald Tribune, Post, Daily News, World Telegram and the Sun. None were as partisan as today. OTOH the book Big Trouble says partisanship was bigger than now in the early20th century.
DeleteWhen you were young, New York City was called New Amsterdam.
DeleteYeah. Hearst and Pulitzer were just a couple of pussycats.
DeleteIt does have an effect when the media are manipulating social types and stereotypes, with algorithms that point towards discrete micro-cultures of talent-scouting and click-bait rather than connective tissue of society, understanding, coherence, that you want to get to. Those algorithms publish constant copy.
ReplyDeleteOn the ideological pole, I don't know if the entire public consciously made the decision of the full agenda of Darth Vader over New York Times Nerd Rage in 2024. Certainly 90 million people were not persuaded to vote at all. But it's also true, the corporate class of capital has been winning against the landed gentry in the American aristocracy by making intangible expressions of power like education and culture, more transactional and then covering what it was doing with a noise machine.
Our media and democracy being mechanical operations of capital is not impossible to articulate, but it's unfavorable obviously to say these things around political donors and ad-driven television shows who use them.
Regarding a more simple need like transportation, as the war in Gaza rallied drone stocks, which American aristocracy allows to boil over from time to time to get the attention off itself, to splinter off radicalism, and boost major markets, the other economies in the region were left shorter, and this pushed up the cost of oil. To the American voter, failure to deliver transportation costs was not connecting with Bidenomic's promise to lower inflation.
Consider the leverage a middle class as opposed to a poverty-based consumer and voter has on a politician under our current finance system. An "American voter" necessarily pushes toward a very panic-prone and precarious sentiment, since the big secret of capitalism is that capital does not intend to create a stable middle class, it never intends to deliver its own revolution. So the promises it makes through democracy will always be circumspect and somewhat dictatorial, in democratic or corporate media, the discussion is not about being out of capitalism's grasps, we have conversations just about how much shit happened to fall on people that day.
The kind of person savvy enough to manage capitalist functions under the name of a People's State is dependent on something closer to a radical middle class power than taking apart capitalism. So their movements stop abruptly at the coffers of the rich. So too the gilded age progressive FDR nostalgia paternalism is felt somewhat correctly as an offense to dignity while stock bubbles burst, businesses look for leverage, and politicians are left looking stupider than the rabble they try to look down on. They came up with a kind of capitalist secularist excuse to be obscenely wealthy while holding over the smug mannerisms of the past about your classlessness. That left an opening for religious fueled hysteria, a puppeted populism, which the corporate and ruling class ride out periodically as exceptional backslides disgracing the good name of democratic capitalism.
As convoluted as this all is, glorious or inglorious, progressive or reactionary, as it is to have one section of capital attack the other in history, the Babel you refer to is nothing more than the political economic system digesting itself the way it has since the 1800's.
Huh?
DeleteAn animal cannot survive by picking one fish and saying I'll swim wherever that one goes. You have to remove yourself from the feeding chain to survive.
DeleteSimilarly, a political movement cannot survive capitalism by looking at one leader in history who was already digested by the system, and wanting to go back to his ideology. You have to remove yourself from the digestion to survive, or become the next cannibalizer.
TL, DR. Don't assassinate anyone, OK?
DeleteTL;DR
DeleteYou are not obligated to choose a side in a fight that is non on your behalf.
Although dramatizing pols and media make it sound like we're in a crazy moment, I don't agree. We're at peace. Our economy is reasonable. Covid is no longer the huge problem is had been. Crime and illegal immigration are worse than they should be, but not bad enough to affect the lives of most of us. Biden's decline and Trump's immorality are bad, but, again, not bad enough to affect the lives of most of us.
ReplyDeleteWe currently have competent people running the government. Have you seen Trump’s nominees, and heard Trump’s plans for the future? That should alarm you.
DeleteSome of Biden's nominees turned also turned out to be really bad at their job IMO. They did a quite a bit of damage, but not enough to greatly affect the lives of most Americans.
DeleteIMO Trump's worst nominee is Kennedy. I expect him to have a bad effect on health care. Even so, our government health agencies are filled with committed people who will continue to do their jobs.
Here we see the very middle class that liberals keep telling us hate the big banks just as much as workers.
Delete@12:06 AM
DeleteYes, very competent people. At least in some fields of expertise. I particularly like the pervert responsible for the nuclear waste, who is an expert in stealing luggage in airports.
And speaking of perverts, there are quite a lot of perverts in this current administration, actually.
Good for you, Dickhead. It is nice that you are so sanguine about the end of our Constitutional democratic republic. I learned in 2024 that half this country is happy to make a convicted felon and insane liar, under indictment in 3 additional jurisdictions, president of this country as long as he scratched their racism itch. We will not survive four more years of this madness. Meanwhile Queen Muskaswarmy is busy hacking away at our social safety net programs. Trump has taught you one thing; you can lie with impunity as long as you're a megalomaniac good for ratings. I am not interested any longer in your bullshit. You are a total hypocrite and liar.
DeleteDavid in Cal is not a hypocrite. He is a Republican voter. He only really cares about bigotry and white supremacy. EVERYTHING ELSE is negotiable.
DeleteIt's not hypocrisy, if you never really believed it in the first place.
Now, if you have a case where he is supporting the dismantling of systemic bigotry, THAT would make him a hypocrite.
Reminds me of the time a bunch of Right-wing snowflakes threw a childish temper tantrum at the United States Capitol, just because black people's votes were counted in the 2020 Presidential election.
ReplyDeleteIt' so easy to make the Right cry. All you have to do is treat blacks as people.
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