Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency

The founding Fathers envisioned an informed population and a free media that exposed liars, frauds and threats to constitutional government.  In America today, however, what we have is something quite different with much of the population remaining happily uninformed mired in a world of reality TV shows and Real Housewives shows depicting never ending train wrecks of spoiled and selfish individuals.  Meanwhile, much of the mainstream media is asleep at the wheel - just as it was in 2016 - and pretends that we are living in normal times and refusing to accept that one of the major political parties has become a cult worshipping a would be dictator.  And as always, working class whites and even many minority group members fall for performance politics that play on their prejudices and/or religious brainwashing even as that party pushes an agenda that is harming them economically.  It's as if the nation is full of sleepwalkers, blind to the threat at hand and wearing blinders as they worry about sports teams and children's' activities. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the very troubling phenomenon and expresses the frustration I feel.  Here are excerpts:

The United States of America is facing a threat from a sometimes violent cult while a nuclear armed power wages war on the border of our closest allies. And yet, many Americans sleepwalk as if they are living in normal times instead of in an ongoing crisis.

Americans have become accustomed to so much in public life that they would have once found shocking. But many of these events are not only shameful; they are a warning, a kind of static energy filling the air just before a lightning strike. America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it.

For example, a single [Republican] senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage. (Welcome news, no doubt, in Beijing.) Few people outside of America’s senior military leadership seem particularly concerned.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fringe figures who in better times might never have been elected, and in a sensible House would have been relegated to the backbenches so far away from the rostrum that their seats would be in a different time zone.

Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump, and so he is resorting to a deeply cynical ploy that could cost lives.

And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy.

Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a request for a gag order on Trump to stop him from making more public attacks on prosecutors, witnesses, and potential jurors. As they say on social media, let that sink in: A federal prosecutor has asked a judge to stop the former president of the United States from threatening lawyers and witnesses in his case, and intimidating potential jurors.

As I wrote recently, this is not a normal election. (We haven’t had one of those in almost a decade now.) The GOP is not a normal political organization; the party withdrew into itself years ago and has now emerged from its rotting chrysalis as a nihilistic, seditionist movement in thrall to Trump. And Trump is not a normal candidate in any way: He regularly expresses his intention to continue his attacks on the American system and has made so many threats in so many different directions that we’ve lost track of them. Yet millions of Americans simply accept such behavior as Trump being Trump, much as they did in 2016.

[W]e might at least expect the media to report on Trump not merely as a candidate but as if they were following the developments around a dangerous conspiracy or the ongoing trial of the leader of a major crime syndicate.

Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, “Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?” That wasn’t even the worst of it. . . . .

Many of my colleagues in the media have already dissected Welker’s failure, . . . . It’s about the mainstream broadcast media. All of them. In 2016 broadcast media was totally inadequate to the job of covering an aspiring authoritarian … Today—even after witnessing an insurrection—they still don’t seem to understand the situation and their complicity in it.”

Democrats and their liberal allies claim to be in full mobilization mode to stop Trump and defang his threat to the constitutional order. But are they? . . . . . How many more times will Trump’s opponents in the pro-democracy coalition internalize the right’s criticisms—about inflation, about spending, about gasoline—and respond to them as if Republicans care one whit about policy?

Yes, gas is expensive. So is food. These are real issues, and people deserve to hear how their government will assist them. The solution to these problems, however, is not to normalize an authoritarian and thus pretend that one party, dysfunctional as it can be, is the same as a reactionary, anti-constitutional, and sometimes violent movement.

We don’t have to live in panic. Americans need not walk around all day with their hair on fire, talking about nothing else but the gathering dangers. . . . But we don’t have to live this way, either, with voters and institutions—and especially the media—pretending that all is well while charlatans, aspiring theocrats, and would-be authoritarians set fire to American democracy.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

Other than holding on to power by literally any means as was demonstrated on January 6, 2021 and pandering to the most extreme elements of its base, today's Republican Party has no real agenda.  There is no plan for moving the country forward and adapting to a changing world.  Indeed, if anything, today's Republican Party wants to return the nation to the legalized discrimination of the early 1950's while bringing back the horrific labor practices of the Gilded Age and tax system that allows the very wealthy to pay little in income taxes.  The sole motivation of Republican elected officials is to retain power and to harm their political rivals and enemies. Thus, it is little surprise that as the nation barrels towards a government shutdown, congressional Republicans' focus is pushing a baseless impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden while pushing culture war bills that will never become law.  It's all about performance politics to excite the party base and avoid a primary challenge.  A column in the New York Times looks at the sad and dangerous state of today's GOP. Here are highlights: 

This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.

Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.

The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed.

[T]he Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.

The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).

Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. . . . . A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.

The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. . . . how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.

Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.

Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. . . . . But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.

By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.

As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”

The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.

Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.

Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.

This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. . . . . But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.

To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.

As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Red, White and Royal Blue

 

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The Biden Impeachment Is Benghazi All Over Again

Think back to 2014 - 2016 and one will recall all the breathless Republicans wringing their hands an saying "Benghazi," a long investigation of Hillary Clinton that ultimately found no wrongdoing and became almost a joke.  Indeed, after an eleven hour grilling, Clinton was the one in command of the situation.  The true purpose of the farcical investigative circus, of course, was never really about exposing wrongdoing but instead had as it sole aim harming Clinton in the public's view and lessen her election chances.  Seven year later we see a similar charade unfolding as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - a man who makes tawdry hookers look virtuous - launching an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden even though Republican investigations to date have turned up nothing.  Sadly, rather than tend to the nation's business, including avoiding a government shutdown in less than two weeks, all McCarthy and other amoral and spineless Republicans care about is putting on performances that thrill the ugliest elements of the GOP base and right wing extremist Republicans in the House of Representatives.  Tellingly, Republicans care nothing about the corruption and self-enrichment that were the hallmarks of the Trump regime.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the parallels between Benghazi and the current Biden witch hunt:

Once upon a time, presidential impeachment was a rare event. But with four of the five inquiries in U.S. history coming in the past 25 years, people seeking to understand and explain the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, launched Tuesday, have looked to the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump as an analogy. Both center on allegations of using elected office for personal gain, and both have been divided sharply along partisan lines.

The comparison is understandable, especially because some Republicans have explicitly framed their inquiry as a response to Trump’s impeachment, as Jonathan Chait writes. But the more useful comparison is to the House investigation into Benghazi from 2014 to 2016. Both inquiries are based far more on vibes and political machinations than they are on hard evidence. Kevin McCarthy’s longstanding ambition to be speaker of the House sit at the center of both. And the fate of the Benghazi investigation offers some indications about how this one could turn out.

Like the current impeachment inquiry, the Benghazi story began with U.S. involvement in a foreign country—in this case, Libya, where the Obama administration was reluctantly drawn into the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi. On September 11, 2012, Islamist attacks on two U.S. facilities in the city of Benghazi killed the U.S. ambassador, a Foreign Service officer, and two CIA contractors. Republicans blamed Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, for failing to prevent or respond quickly to the attack. Then-Speaker John Boehner initially resisted calls for a special committee to investigate the attack but eventually agreed.

The point of the Benghazi committee was to hurt Clinton’s chances at winning the presidency in 2016. We know this because Republicans were not subtle. As McCarthy, then the House majority leader, said in a September 2015 TV interview: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.

That frank confession that a congressional inquiry had been used as a tool of partisan warfare helped cost McCarthy the speakership. The same month, Boehner announced his retirement. McCarthy had been the clear favorite, but amid fallout from the interview, he suddenly dropped out, saying he couldn’t unite the caucus. He eventually got the gavel in January of this year, but now his speakership is once again on the line. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote Tuesday, McCarthy is a hostage of the far-right flank of his party, which forced him into announcing the impeachment inquiry. McCarthy’s ability to manage the process will in part determine whether he keeps his job.

The basis for the first Trump impeachment was clear from the start. A whistleblower alleged that Trump had tried to extort an investigation into (wait for it) Hunter and Joe Biden over dealings in Ukraine, using funds appropriated by Congress as leverage. The White House released a transcript of the call the same day that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. The rest of the inquiry turned up lots of new information about Trump’s attempt to use Ukraine as a pawn in his reelection campaign, but the basic allegation was clear from the start, and the question was not whether Trump had done it but whether it was a “perfect” call, as he insisted, or a serious breach of his oath of office.

In both Benghazi and the Biden impeachment, by contrast, it isn’t entirely clear what precisely the misconduct is. In the Benghazi investigation, everyone agreed that something bad had happened—Americans died. But Republicans had no clear theory of why that was Clinton’s fault. In the Biden case, a consensus has emerged that Hunter Biden engaged in brazenly unethical behavior (separate from his legal woes in the United States), but that doesn’t amount to wrongdoing on his father’s part. McCarthy’s stated rationales for the impeachment inquiry are flimsy, unproven, and incorrect, . . . .

Nonetheless, Republicans seem absolutely certain that Biden is wildly corrupt, and they would prove it if only they could get all the pieces of the investigation to come together, and if only they could find their witnesses, and if only those witnesses weren’t facing federal charges, and so on. This is a view propounded not just by the far right in Congress, but also by prominent voices in the supposedly sober and serious conservative press. Well, perhaps: Evidence of serious misconduct by Joe Biden might still turn up, but for the time being, the exercise looks like a transparent attempt to hurt Biden’s chances at reelection.

Much like Benghazi. For a time, the Benghazi committee looked like nothing more than a big fishing expedition. Despite more than two years of work, the committee did not find any wrongdoing by Clinton. Her own testimony before the committee, an 11-hour slog, was widely viewed as a victory for her, because she was in command of the facts and Republican committee members didn’t land any real blows on her. By the time the election rolled around, “Benghazi” was more of a punch line—against Republicans—than a live campaign issue.

One can easily imagine the Biden impeachment following that path. James Comer, the House Oversight Committee chair, who has been leading investigations into Hunter Biden, has appeared bumbling and ineffective. So far, no evidence suggests offenses that reach the historical threshold for impeachment. Moderate House Republicans show little appetite for impeachment, and getting a full House vote—much less a successful impeachment—looks very challenging for McCarthy.

But the Benghazi experience points to another possibility, too. Although the Benghazi committee couldn’t nail Clinton, one byproduct of the investigation was the revelation of Clinton’s private email server, which turned out to be a defining issue in the 2016 presidential election, and arguably cost her the presidency. Just because an investigation fails in its putative goal doesn’t mean it will fail in its actual goal.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty