|
The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-123
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
—
Other issues:
Russia:
Long Covid:
Bidenfailure:
> Barack Obama is said to have observed that it’s impossible to overestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, and in large part that has to do with the endless, improvisational talking. But that gabbing is also the reason he was so effective at getting people to consider changing their votes when he was a senator and then the vice president. He doesn’t use verbal communication as a means of transmitting facts. He uses it to bond with someone. Talking is a kind of lubricant, easing people along to a new point of view—at the very, very least, you know that if you agree to change your vote, he might stop talking. <
Use as (not Ukraine related) open thread …
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby
AUGUST 04, 2022
~ Brittney Griner verdict: Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney. “She never should have had to endure a trial in the first place.”
[Later Kirby states Biden has personally spoken to Griner]
~ China + Taiwan…. China has chosen to overreact and use the Speaker’s visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait.
We will conduct standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait in the next few weeks, consistent, again, with our longstanding approach to defending freedom of the seas and international law.
And we will take further steps to demonstrate our commitment to the security of our allies in the region, and that includes Japan………
~…Beijing’s provocative actions are a significant escalation in its longstanding attempt to change the status quo. …
-…. We do not believe it is in our interest, Taiwan’s interest, the region’s interest to allow tensions to escalate further, which is why a long-planned Minuteman III ICBM test scheduled for this week has been rescheduled for the near future.
OLENIVKA PRISON ATTACK:
KIRBY: “So I can share, based on downgraded intelligence, that we expect that Russian officials are planning to falsify evidence in order to attribute the attack on the Olenivka prison on the 29th of July.
They’re going to try to attribute that attack to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
We anticipate that Russian officials will try to frame the Ukrainian Armed Forces in anticipation of journalists and potential investigators visiting the site of the attack.
In fact, we’ve already seen some spurious press reports to this effect, where they have planted evidence.
And we have reason to believe that the — that Russia would go so far as to make it appear that Ukrainian HIMARS – that have been in so much in the news lately — were to blame. And to do that before journalists arrived on site…..we’re beginning to even start to see some press reporting to that effect.
Monkey Pox
Press question:……we learned in the last 24 hours that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to ask that the bulk of the stocks of the vaccine _ that it already owned_ be bottled for distribution quickly enough.
And does the President feel like his administration — and the Department of Health and Human Services in particular — has acted with enough urgency to confront this monkeypox outbreak?
KIRBY: the monkeypox outbreak has evolved rapidly and uniquely from prior outbreaks. So we are in a different — it’s a different dynamic than it was the last couple of times, because monkeypox has been here in this country before.
And so, we have aggressively responded at different stages of this outbreak.
And so, just wanted to give you a little bit of that context because it’s spreading at different phases here.
So, first, within two days of the first confirmed case of monkeypox in the U.S., we began deploying vaccine to states and jurisdictions and prepositioning tens of thousands of additional doses in the Strategic National Stockpile.
The initial science led us to believe — and this, I think, will answer your question a little bit — based on recent past monkeypox outbreaks, that those doses would be sufficient to meet the needs of the country as what we knew at that time — because it’s dynamic, it’s changing.
KIRBY: ……infectious diseases are dynamic, as I just said, and unpredictable — inherently unpredictable, which is why as soon as we saw that this outbreak was different and transmitting much more rapidly, we quickly moved to order tens of thousands of more doses.
So just to give you a little bit of the numbers that we have: We have made more than 1.1 million doses available and shipped more than 600,000 doses. Those are currently out there, going into jurisdictions, to states, and with more being delivered each day.
We also have ordered 5.5 million additional doses, which are helping us get more doses out sooner, knowing that more are on the way.
KIRBY: Later, Follow up Answer:…… “is an urgent matter — monkeypox — for this administration, for this President. That’s why you have seen the announcements that we have made in the past several weeks — not even just today or yesterday or the day before.
Last week, we were announcing vaccines — 800,000 — and now we’re talking about how much have been shipped. Now, we just announced the coordinators for that rapid response team.
As we know, viruses inherently can be dynamic. And — and it is spreading rapidly. And we — we acknowledge that.
When we first — when we first heard about the first couple of cases, we met — we believe we met that moment.
And now we are …… making sure that we are meeting the moment across the country in what people need. That’s why we have 80,000 capacity in testing. How important that is. We went from 6,000 to 80,000. That’s why we now have 1.1 million vaccines.
The other thing I do want to say is that, as we accelerated delivering of 150,000 Jynneos vaccine doses to the US., those — these doses, which had been slated to arrive in November — it’s now going to be in September.
So, again, we’re taking this very seriously. We’re taking — we’re accelerating and strengthening … our comprehensive response so that we can make sure that we end this outbreak. And that is the number-one priority for the President.
Posted by: Melaleuca | Aug 7 2022 13:58 utc | 5
Paco@36 “‘Clinton was no more a traitor than Trump, but Trump did at least openly call for Russia to intervene in the campaign, something the losers like to forget.’
Whoever takes that call literally cannot be taken seriously, it negates the rivals assertion that Russia stole Clinton’s server data, so what Trump is saying is forget about the Russians stealing the server and focus on the illegality of having such a server, which is what everybody forgot about, the server and its contents.”
The email server nonsense was not treason, there was never any reason to call it treasonous, and nobody ever forgot it, because it was assiduously fluffed up by the media endlessly. The media, supposedly Trump’s enemies, endlessly fluffed this nonsense, even as it studiously starved Sanders’ primary campaign of publicity while giving away billions in free publicity to Trump. The FBI, also supposedly anti-Trump, a bastion of the Deep State if there ever was one, also directly intervened with this drivel on Trump’s behalf in the campaign, with the infamous Comey letter. That might actually have made a difference in the vote, but in Trump’s favor, contra the self-pitying mythology of the Trumper.
I thought it was pretty obvious that Trump’s asshole remarks about how Russia should hack Clinton weren’t genuinely good evidence of treason either. But the geniuses (yes, that’s sarcasm!) who thought Clinton was a traitor most certainly didn’t have evidence *that* “good” (yes, more sarcasm!) as Trump provided against himself from his own mouth! The insistence that “we” are so threatened by treason we need a lawless boss like Trump to take over in spite of the disgusting rabble who voted for Clinton/against Trump or for Biden/against Trump instead is hysteria, fear mongering and most definitely belongs in the fascist end of the capitalist/imperialist political spectrum. It’s not an accident that this crew can’t be satisfied with merely alleging corruption, it’s got to be treason, treason, treason. It’s not just because everyone who cares to know already knows Trump has been a sleazy crook his entirely life. Treason is where you get to kill your enemies. The secret blood lust to kill Democrats, women, whoever, whatever, isn’t all that secret.
David Levin@33 provides another example of how not singing in chorus with the groupthink lyrics is emotionally deranging. Screeching “troll” is one of the most powerful symptoms of being wrong you can find on the internet.
bevin@38 is actually smart enough to know that if I say neither Clinton nor Trump are traitors, then citing Trump’s public idiocy is not about somehow proving he really is. For the historically inclined, I have specifically posted before the 2020 election I don’t believe either is a traitor, i.e., I don’t believe in Russiagate and never did. bevin is just making that up. I don’t post conspiracy trash about the FISA and the Steele dossier, for example, because FISA almost always accepts testilying at face value, just like most courts do.
bevin@39 must be drunk on Trump’s dingleberry wine. This comment is written as if Trump, for four years President of the US and chieftain of the CIA and the Justice Department and the State Department and in charge of double dealing with the Ecuadorians, protectors of Assange, had nothing to do with Assange’s persecution, despite being materially concerned with the leak of the DNC emails (bevin is no referring to the email servers, though it may be meant to be deliberately ambiguous to allow a convenient mistreading?) No, a retired guy with a cheap hobby of commenting is responsible. This is the kind of lack of insight into politics that allows bevin to think (sincerely?) bevin is somehow still part of the left, as opposed to being a renegade who hobnobs with fascists and cryptofascists, because, birds of a feather…
Susan@44 I don’t remember this commenter, may be bevin’s pseudonym for all I know. But if a real person, it’s kind of sad. Curiously enough, despite the absurd pretensions of so many posters here to be true conservatives and patriots, treason is actually defined in the Constitution. (Unsurprising as it was written by the political heirs of real live traitors to their original country!) Look it up. Again, the desperate desire to find traitors is a barely concealed desire for a tyrant to kill the enemies and save the country, assuming such can distinguish the two.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 7 2022 19:38 utc | 49
Full text of the paywalled Taibbi article linked by the owner of this blog. Needed if there is to be a useful debate on the contents.
The Press is Already Working Overtime to Elect Trump Again
Negative media attention and the martyring effect of Internet censorship are the best friends Donald Trump ever had, but press antagonists are doubling down for 2024
“The 2024 Presidential Race Begins to Take Shape,” declared NPR this week, part of an early downpour of coverage. Eight hundred days from a vote, the world’s biggest analytical army is already working every angle to the election story but one: its own influence on the outcome.
The press is going to elect Donald Trump again. They did it once, tried again four years later, and now they’re on the hunt a third time. They hate him, but they keep doing him favors, the latest being an attempt to kill off his biggest primary rival.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you likely noticed a sudden avalanche of center-left news offering left-handed praise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Reigning conventional wisdom weathervane Chris Cillizza of CNN came out with a DeSantis-heavy piece called, This is the best argument for Republicans to nominate someone other than Donald Trump in 2024, Vanity Fair went with DeSantis Splinters Never Trumpers, Politico opined that Liberals Should Welcome Ron DeSantis’ Rise, and famed Alfa-Bank hoaxer and New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins called the Floridian “Trump With a Brain” in “Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the GOP’s Combatant-in-Chief?”, leading a gleeful National Review to chirp, “The New Yorker Accidentally Makes Ron DeSantis Look Awesome.”
—-SCREEN GRABS—-
DeSantis was Satan incarnate with the same crowd about ten minutes ago, hammered for lockdown-averse Covid policies and for a “Don’t Say Gay” law that, in a minor detail, didn’t actually say not to say gay. Then, toward the end of June, stories began to circulate that DeSantis’ record gubernatorial fundraising efforts could be a springboard to a national run.
That seemed to trigger the first in a series of manufactured campaign dramas of the “That Little Girl Was Me” type, beginning with apparent Democratic 2024 hopeful and California governor Gavin Newsom doing a DeSantis-aimed ad buy in Florida on the Fourth of July. Newsom, who has presidentish hair but not much else, wanted to pick a fight over who got to “own the word freedom”:
—-VIDEO OF GAVIN NEWSOM CAMPAIGN AD—-
After this series of events, Trump began disappearing from Fox News broadcasts, a phenomenon conspicuous enough that the New York Times wrote a feature about it. Key passages:
On July 22, as Mr. Trump was rallying supporters in Arizona and teasing the possibility of running for president in 2024, saying “We may have to do it again,” Fox News chose not to show the event… Instead, the network aired Laura Ingraham’s interview with a possible rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida…
It also reflects concerns that Republicans in Washington, like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have expressed to the Murdochs about the potential harm Mr. Trump could cause to the party’s chances in upcoming elections.
By the end of July, both Democratic Party mouthpieces and the traditional GOP bureaucracy were open in their desire to run DeSantis in 2024 instead of Trump. Papers across the spectrum began commissioning polls and instantly began interpreting them as news that the public was in sync with these desires. This is from a Wednesday Post piece, “Trump is losing ground in the 2024 primary. Here’s why”:
Donald Trump leads in primary polls and is well-liked by his party — but his position is worse than it was a year ago… Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is gaining ground in primary polls, emerging as a plausible challenger…
The Post logic in claiming Trump’s 50%-24% poll lead won’t stick is that unlike 2016, when Trump had an “exclusive hold” on issues like immigration, he will face stiffer competition from DeSantis, who’s no softie on immigration himself. This conveniently forgets that leading Trump challenger Ben Carson in 2016 was proposing using drones on border migrants (“You look at some of these caves… one drone strike, boom, and… gone”). Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal came out for ending automatic citizenship for immigrant children, and even Jeb Bush pledged to stop “anchor babies.” The idea that Trump was the only Republican talking tough on immigration in 2016 is delusional.
We’re watching a replay of 2015-2016, when one establishment organ after another ran laudatory stories about establishment-approved Trump rivals supposedly seizing control of the race from twenty, thirty, forty points back. Who could forget MSNBC’s “Is Ted Cruz 2016’s invisible GOP front-runner?”, or the Washington Post conferring the same “plausible nominee” moniker on John Kasich that’s now cursing DeSantis, or temporarily tumescent headlines like “Marco Rubio has surged to the front of the pack”? In 2015 a near-identical New York Times story about Rupert Murdoch’s “misgivings” about the “catastrophe” Trump ran to no effect, and the National Review published a massive “Against Trump” issue, in which editors and an all-star cast of Republican heavies railed against the “excrescences of instant-hit media culture.”
These efforts all failed, because none of these media figures — including all-powerful Fox boss Murdoch — could come to terms with the voting public’s changed attitude toward campaign press. In every previous cycle, if Mark Halperin of ABC said John Kerry was in a “strong position” to win the Democratic nomination, Kerry would win. If Sean Hannity gave a full-hour backrub to John McCain, McCain would be the Republican nominee. The campaign press really were kingmakers, once.
By 2015-2016, things switched. In a snap, establishment press approval was a death knell. Trump didn’t win because he had the most sadistic immigration policy. He won because he had the most consistent disapproval of an increasingly hated Washington political establishment. The instant Republican voters saw blue-leaning media types like Chuck Todd doing primetime town halls with Rubio in Miami before the Florida primary, or the Times running stories like “John Kasich Sees Path to Nomination Despite Low Delegate Count” in breathless tones far beyond anything they’d written about, say, Bernie Sanders, they bolted.
If pundits really wanted a Trump-free race, they would describe DeSantis as a fascist menace, a “Real Hitler, This Time” who itches to slit democracy’s throat and ravage its corpse. There would be campaigns to pressure Visa and Mastercard into refusing payments for Dreams of Our Founding Fathers, along with boycotts of Florida oranges, Dolphins highlights, Carl Hiassen novels, and anything else “Florida” that activists could think of.
DeSantis, who’s no dummy, sees how fraught this moment is, which is why he told the cast of The View to go fuck itself when they invited him on. Why, the DeSantis people asked, would the governor agree to sit with people who’d bashed him as a “homicidal sociopath,” a “fascist and a bigot,” and “anti-black,” unless they wanted to hype him as a less horrible buffer against Trump, who would never in a million years get the same invite? (That fact alone makes DeSantis look like a fake to Republicans). By trying to confer pseudo-credibility on DeSantis, these outlets are destroying the Floridian’s credibility as an outsider, leaving Trump the only choice for the burn-it-down vote.
The nihilist strain in American politics pre-dates Trump. It came in part from an establishment reflex that involved excluding “fringe” candidates and their followers. You could see it in 2000, when in an act of remarkable pettiness the Committee on Presidential Debates refused to let Green Party nominee Ralph Nader attend a Bush-Gore debate even as a ticketed spectator. In 2008, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were overheard muttering how debates should be restricted to a “serious and smaller group” (they were tired of having to debate Dennis Kucinich). On the Republican side Ron Paul supporters were regularly barred from events involving “legitimate” candidates like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (“I guess they’d rather have Huey or Dewey or Louie or whatever,” one booted Paul supporter complained to me outside a Newt event in South Carolina).
Suppressing the fringe became harder when it grew and started winning primaries. The distinguishing feature of Trump’s 2016 run was extraordinary media attention, which most analysts (including me, at one point) incorrectly assumed gave him an edge by allowing him to get his message out for free. But Trump’s candidacy only really took off when the press attention went sharply negative. The mechanism that launched him from small plurality to victory in the general was a coverage avalanche that conferred elite disapproval in massive doses. The more times outlets like fivethirtyeight.com incorrectly insisted Trump couldn’t be nominated because “voters are paying more attention,” or the Washington Post ran headlines like, “The three times Donald Trump demonstrated he was unfit for the presidency in last night’s debate,” the more he gained.
The legacy press is still in denial about these coverage strategies. They also still ignore evidence of a similarly impotent showing in the 2020 Democratic race. Efforts by outlets like Vanity Fair and New York to hype elite-approved candidates from Kamala Harris to Beto O’Rourke to Pete Buttigieg to Kamala again to Amy Klobuchar to Mike freaking Bloomberg all flatlined, as in zero-point-zero levels of voter response.
—-SEVERAL MAGAZINE COVERS—-
Meanwhile the consistent stories all season were the stubbornly high numbers of Weekend at Bernie’s act Joe Biden and hated media whipping boy Bernie Sanders. The most damning evidence of impotence that year was that Trump gained with black and Hispanic voters in 2020 after four years of relentless messaging about Trumpism as literal white supremacy. Even tiny shifts of this type in Trump’s direction would have been impossible if traditional media had anything like net positive legitimacy.
Trump and Sanders both surged in 2016 when they described a country divided into a small corrupt establishment and everyone else, and declared themselves on the side of everyone else. The journalistic priesthood that’s spent the last 6-7 years denouncing these people and their voters has done the opposite, proudly aligning itself with the hated inside, celebrating credentialism, and worst of all, cheering a censorship movement that’s now proven to be an abject failure.
That story is among the biggest taboos in media now. Trump deservedly hit an all-time low in approval after the events of January 6th, sinking to 34% according to Gallup, and the Trump era seemed over when he was removed from Twitter and Facebook shortly after. Instead, by almost every measure, Silenced Trump has only improved his electoral viability since. In his first two years in office, when Trump had the bully pulpit and the world’s most-watched Twitter account, he was under 40% approval most of the time, averaging 41% overall for his entire presidency. His lowest moments came after his own statements went viral. Now, although down from March, when he briefly hit 45.7%, he’s hovering around 42%, better than his presidential average — despite near-complete exclusion from “respectable” media.
People like Trump don’t go away when zapped by Facebook and Twitter. Blue-check journalists just don’t see them as much, a dubious reportorial advantage. This new press that forgives its own mistakes but cheers lifetime bans for others needs to realize it’s achieving negative influence in the process. Failure to stare that dynamic in the face means they’re sure to repeat the error over and over, remaining in their beloved roles as gatekeepers, only in reverse. Now they’re constant threats to praise pols like DeSantis or Buttigieg out of contention. They’re kingmakers of suck, and after two election cycles, still don’t know it. Can they really keep it up for a third?
Posted by: IranSoFarAway | Aug 7 2022 19:57 utc | 52
|
