the new political tweets thread (4/4 2022)

[zn]

And your quote doesn’t do anything for me. It doesn’t line up with anything I  have been learning from all the medical reading……And with me it’s starting to reach the point where Biden himself is less the issue than the cultural politics of agism generally, which to me is getting so it has less to do with elections and more to with how mistaken election year rhetoric is causing all sorts of people to leap to all sorts of  loaded conclusions in daily life.

[zn]

Sorry about the piled up posts but I’m on my phone travelling and longer posts will  just disappear. I have to stick to mounted up short ones.

[wv]

Steve Cutts has several vids on youtube, i like.   One example.

[Zooey]

Well, I only brought your wife up because you did on both of the occasions that you chimed in to say Biden doesn’t have dementia. I don’t know anything about dementia, really, and don’t feel an urge to learn about it at this point in my life. And I think that most people are probably throwing the term around loosely.

I didn’t watch the debate, and none of the clips of Biden makes me think he has Alzheimer’s or something, and I haven’t seen anybody make the claim that he does. What people are seeing is a guy who fumbles his words and often loses the plot of what he is talking about. Well…that doesn’t mean he can’t effectively serve as president, but this kind of obvious loss of acuity often precedes more serious mental decline, so I think it’s fair to wonder if he will still be sharp enough to govern a few years from now.

My point is that – while I don’t think he is in serious decline – I don’t think it matters all that much. Lord knows several US presidents have been somewhat duller than a tack. So we are just responding to different aspects of that tweet.

[zn]

Zooey wrote:

What people are seeing is a guy who fumbles his words and often loses the plot of what he is talking about. .

And what I have learned is, people mistake that very particular kind of geriatric issue (word searching), which is very commonplace, for a full-blown complete and total, all-at-once simultaneous cognitive decline. It isn’t. Geriatric studies can show how that one issue (word-searching) can be overbalanced by cognitive advantages that only older people have (like deeply engrained, experience-trained general judgment).

I mentioned Margo because long before the word “dementia” became a loaded and misused political buzz term in the 2020s, I was hearing about dementia on basically an every day basis, and with that, some info about how it differs from more ordinary and common issues in geriatric psychology. A lot of those stories had to do with just not knowing–so you have adult children having to deal with older parents in a nursing home, and either they don’t know what dementia is and have to be educated, or they have poorly informed assumptions about it, or they think their parents have it when they don’t, or they insist they don’t have it when they do.

Okay there’s that in the background. But once it became a political buzz term, I read around about it too.

So we just differ on this issue, which as we know is cool. I don’t think the comment that set off this discussion “hit the nail on the head,” on the contrary it just sounds like someone beating a particular political drum. One of the things that drives that, IMO, is that “diagnosing” leadership with dementia plays on fear. IMO that’s why it’s so powerful.

And again, all of this — to me — is unrelated to whether or not someone should vote for Biden. In this discussion, I’m not advocating anything having to do with that, either way.

[Zooey]

zn wrote:

So we just differ on this issue

I’m not sure what we are differing on, apart from the fact we are emphasizing different aspects of Johnstone’s tweet. I agree that people misuse the term “dementia,” and I don’t think Biden has it.

I think there are signals that he is headed in that direction, and maybe that’s where we disagree, but that still is only a side note to what I think she “nailed” in her tweet.

[zn]

Zooey wrote:

I think there are signals that he is headed in that direction, and maybe that’s where we disagree

Yeah that is where we disagree.

For example about 40% of people will have some memory loss after they are 65, but only a minority of those are quickly moving toward severe impairment, let alone dementia. (And there are other sign of the severe stuff.) And that kind of memory loss does not mean that the person in question is suffering from an overall, general, simultaneous severe decline.

However, again, that isn’t in itself an argument to “vote for Biden.” Even if I wanted it to be. Someone can decide that their idea of a president is someone younger who does not have those kinds of ordinary geriatric psycholgy issues and therefore has a more compelling preseence.

I agree with the  “imperial murder machine” stuff. That’s been true for a couple of centuries. Though I have to admit, that kind of bumper sticker diction never works with me. It just sounds like the extreme right turned upside down. I prefer lucid analysis. And of course people know the president doesn’t really run the country, but then…everything the Supreme Court is doing illustrates the fact that presidents actually can actually can have profound effects on our own lives and history. It’s not a simple thing. Johnson did a lot of awful stuff but then Thurgood Marshall was a blessing. There was nothing fake about that and the results have often mattered…even if they are always very mixed results.

I was just arguing though with her statement that the current president has dementia–which she did flat say. In fact her whole statement depends on that. See the president really does have dementia and that just proves that the homogenous oligarchy runs it all. To me that (again) just sounds like a Maga argument, but upside down. (As Chomsky points out, the oligarchy is frequently divided against itself.) To me it’s just bumper sticker talk and again, I tend to avoid people who talk like that, it just just feels creepy as opposed to enlightening or useful. And that admittedly let alone obviously, is not an argument either–it’s just personal taste.

I prefer it when the left acts like a big alliance. And in the present they all to different degrees really do recognize that the post-war empire was not a gift to the world. She strikes me as being a purist type who is always deliberately and judgmentally driving people away for not being “party oriented” enough. What I’ve never seen from her is dialogue. That’s just personal taste too so I will hereafter just drop it. 😎 Let a thousand flowers bloom.

 

[Zooey]

Well, alright. I see that, and I agree with it. She is not an academic voice. It’s armchair op-ed kind of stuff, and a careful, responsible voice wouldn’t use the term “dementia” without meaning dementia. You know, I think that if I was reading that with my teacher hat on, I would stop a student in their tracks right there, too.

[zn]

Zooey wrote:

Well, alright. I see that, and I agree with it. She is not an academic voice. It’s armchair op-ed kind of stuff, and a careful, responsible voice wouldn’t use the term “dementia” without meaning dementia. You know, I think that if I was reading that with my teacher hat on, I would stop a student in their tracks right there, too.

Well that’s a good reply. And I think implicitly you’re suggesting you like that genre of political writing more than I do. Which is fair. I think in this discussion I got set off. Thinking about it, I sort of realized I got set off because of the stories from my wife’s work. Mixed in with all the normal “X patient did this or that” stories are the stories of uncomprehending kids of elderly patients who are awful to parents with dementia. They do awful things either because they are inconvenienced by it, or insist the parent has it when they don’t, or deny they have it when they do (there are also many stories that contain those 3 listed elements that are also not horrible at all).

And speaking of genres I don’t respond to that well, to be honest, when I read my own “got set off” writing, I kind of cringe a bit. It’s not that I need to be rational all the time…it’s that my more irrational moments, aren’t good ones in my own eyes. I read people all the time who are really good when they’re set off. My being set-off makes me think I crossed lines I actually respect.

 

[wv]

[zn]

[wv]

“confusion WITH confidence is even more troubling”

[zn]

[wv]

Corbyn got more votes for Labor Party than centrist Starmer did this time around.   Greenwald thinks evidence shows most Brit voters are disgusted with both mainstream parties.

[joemad]

URL  = Letters from an American | Heather Cox Richardson | Substack

Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.

 

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity.

 

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

 

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

 

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

 

This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnick wrote that “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process. The email went on to say that once then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko understood this “message” from the United States, the process “will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”

 

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia.

 

Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day.

 

Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there).

 

Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party.

 

Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.

 

Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.”

 

This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”

 

The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban.

 

Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters.

 

Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention.

 

The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.

 

In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.”

 

Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

 

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”

[wv]

Are there no ‘swing voters’ anymore?

 

[Zooey]

https://x.com/equalityAlec/status/1816456868320927971

Alec Karakatsanis@equalityAlec

I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more depraved and dishonest in my tracking of the New York Times. In its article about Netanyahu’s speech, it not only fails to report that Netanyahu flagrantly lied, but it repeats the lie with no acknowledgment Israeli media has proven it false.

You can read more about some of the most astonishing lies, and the grotesque applause for them here. 

But how is the reaction of a *newspaper* simply repeat the lie. It’s some of the most shameful complicity in genocide imaginable, and yet normal.

Netanyahu said that two babies in an attic were killed by Hamas on October 7. These babies do not exist, as confirmed by Haaretz and Israeli police records. This entire story is fabricated. And the Congress applauded him for it

.

In his masterpiece 1984, George Orwell warned of the moment when 2+2=5, and the New York Times has, perhaps more than any other entity, given its standing, stature, and persistent dishonesty, brought us to the cliff.

[wv]

[zn]

Jess Piper@piper4missouri

Walz is the guy who asks if you need help with a creepy dude at the bar. Vance is the creepy dude at the bar.

[wv]

I saw, Phil Donahue died this month.   I learned a lot from his old show, long ago.

[Zooey]

wv wrote:

I saw, Phil Donahue died this month.   I learned a lot from his old show, long ago.

I didn’t see a lot of his show(s), but he seems to me to be around the “end-of-the-line” of independent journalists, or the end of “honest” journalism. Seems to me that there is nobody in journalism in the past 20+ years who isn’t very clear that they play a role, and they know which side of the bread is buttered.

[wv]

Zooey wrote:

I didn’t see a lot of his show(s), but he seems to me to be around the “end-of-the-line” of independent journalists, or the end of “honest” journalism. Seems to me that there is nobody in journalism in the past 20+ years who isn’t very clear that they play a role, and they know which side of the bread is buttered.

I have never heard Nader speak this glowingly about anyone.  He just goes on and on and on about Phil

[wv]

btw, the second half of that Nader vid is worth visiting.   I know everyone has heard of how the anti-war donahue show got cancelled by MSNBC, but they have the producer of the show on and he gives some details I hadnt heard.   He compares what happened to the McCarthy era.

 

w

v

[wv]

Short Noam vid from six years ago.   In the last couple minutes he talks about the ‘real threat’ of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.   The real threat (in the eyes of many Israelis) is — Emigration.   If the region feels too dangerous, wealthy zionists will simply leave Israel.

Now, i just saw a vid that said half a million Jewish people have already left Israel and a million more are expected to leave.

[wv]

Never heard of this guy.  But i watched a short vid of him talkin about Palestine.  It was good.  So is this.   It gets better as it goes.

[wv]

[wv]

[wv]

Not a fan of the liberal-comedy-sphere, but I didnt watch the debate, so I wondered how it went.   Watched some of this vid and got a libs’ sense of it.

[Author]

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