Tucker Carlson - Modern Day Tokyo Rose

One of the ironies in America today is that much of the far right and their mouthpieces in the "conservative" media claim to be the real American patriots and to speak for "real Americans" yet in fact they constantly denigrate the country and engage in stunts and embrace policies that aid America's enemies. On top of this, many in the right wing media promote the talking points of America's foes and enemies of democracy.  Among the worse is former Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson who stokes the culture wars and the myth that there is a liberal war on Christianity both at home and overseas.  Never mind that the defections from religion are due to the corruption, hypocrisy and cruelty of "conservative Christians."  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Carlson's ongoing aid to despots and his continual spinning of false narratives - all much to the delight of Vladimir Putin and other ant-West dictators - which the piece parallels with "Tokyo Rose" and "Axis Sally" of the WWII era.  Carlson's attacks on the U.S. ambassador to  Hungary suggests that not only is Carlson racist and anti-black but also a raging homophobe.  Here are article highlights:

“Axis Sally” was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II. Like the Japanese women who became collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” they were trying to reach American soldiers, hoping to demoralize them by telling them their casualties were high, their commanders were bad, and their cause was lost. “A lousy night it sure is,” Axis Sally said on one 1944 broadcast: “You poor, silly, dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered.”

Tucker Carlson, who also repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators while speaking English, doesn’t have anything like the historical significance of Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, though his level of credibility is similar. This is a man who famously wrote texts about his loathing of Donald Trump, even while praising the then-president in public; recently, the former Fox News host kept a straight face while interviewing a convicted fraudster who claimed to have smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. But when Carlson speaks on behalf of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, his words are repeated in Hungary and Russia, where they do have resonance: Look, a prominent American journalist supports us. I don’t know what Carlson’s motivation is—he did not respond to a request for comment—but his words also circulate in the far-right American echo chamber, where they are sometimes repeated by Republican presidential candidates, so unfortunately they require some explanation.

Carlson’s hatred of American institutions, and of many Americans, is the starting point for many of his diatribes. Recently, for instance, he appeared at an event in Budapest, organized by a Hungarian-government-funded organization, where he called the U.S. ambassador to that nation a “creep,” said he was “embarrassed that I share a country of birth with a villain like this,” and apologized for American foreign policy in Hungary.

But what is American foreign policy in Hungary? I asked the ambassador, David Pressman, to describe it to me. Pressman, who is gay, told me that when he first arrived in Budapest, his counterparts smirked at him during their meetings and asked if he wanted to talk about gay rights or other progressive causes. No, he told them. He wanted to talk about Russian and Chinese espionage and influence operations in Hungary, which are considerable.

Some examples: The most important Russian investment in Hungary is a nuclear-power plant whose financing is kept secret by law, presumably because the ruling party doesn’t want to reveal who is benefiting. Chinese interests are also financing a distinctly untransparent railway project in Hungary, have made an opaque investment in an environmentally unfriendly battery-manufacturing plant, and, a couple of years ago, with the help of the Hungarian government, tried to open a university in Budapest too. In 2019, Hungarian government officials also arranged for the Russian-controlled International Investment Bank, an institution set up in 1970 by the Soviet Union and its satellite states, to move its headquarters to Budapest, even throwing in a 10-million-euro subsidy as encouragement.

[T]he Hungarian deal with the “Russian spy bank,” as it is known in Budapest (it was once described by a group of U.S. senators as “an arm of the Russian secret service”), also freed the bank from Hungarian financial supervision, exempted it from taxes, and allowed bank employees to have diplomatic status and immunity in Hungary, an arrangement that could in theory help Russian spies enter the country and from there the rest of the European Union.

Orbán likes to portray himself as a leader who cannot be influenced, a man tough and immovable, in fact he often gives in at the last minute—he is famous in the European Union for doing so. But he needs to tell a different story to his voters about what happened. The invitation to the disgraced former Fox News pundit does that: While in Budapest, Carlson channeled Orbán’s anger and dislike of the United States and its ambassador, while studiously avoiding the real reasons for what is indeed an extremely poor moment for American-Hungarian relations.

During his comments, and during his interview with Orbán, both broadcast on his social media, Carlson stayed well away from banks and Russian spies. He didn’t mention Hungary’s refusal to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, or Hungary’s repeated vetoes of European sanctions against Russia. Instead, he denounced the United States for “the imposition of boutique sexual politics” on Hungary. Officials in the Biden administration, Carlson claimed, “hate Hungary not because of what it’s done but because of what it is. It’s a Christian country, and they hate that.”

This rant was based on a false premise, for there is no U.S. war on Christianity in Hungary. If American officials are angry at Hungary, that’s not because of what it is, but because of what it’s done. Once again: The conflict between Washington and Budapest over the past several years is about Hungarian corruption, especially corruption in the ruling Fidesz party, and Hungary’s deep ties to other autocracies.

Carlson is useful to Orbán because his words can help hide Orbán’s agenda at home—look, a prominent American journalist supports us—and abroad. By pretending that this is a culture war rather than a conflict over money and espionage, Carlson helps Orbán escape the consequences of his actions.

Vladimir Putin has been directing his citizens away from reality and toward imaginary culture wars for more than a decade. In September 2022, when the Russian president held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he did not speak of the people he is torturing or holding in concentration camps, the children he has kidnapped and deported to Russia, or even the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in his unnecessary war. Instead, he used the occasion to talk about the “satanic” West, claim he was defending Russia from “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction,” and again replace the real war, in which real people are killing and being killed, with a fictional culture war that exists in his head.

Carlson frequently uses Russian propaganda lines too, promoting fake stories . . . . You can see why. The real world is full of difficult, hard-to-explain problems; even the best solutions might require difficult trade-offs. Once, Americans did have at least a few politicians who nevertheless sought to find these solutions, and our political system seemed to allow us to have arguments about them. Authoritarians, by contrast, seek power in order to hide the problems, steal money, arrange favors for their friends, and manipulate the political system so that they can’t ever lose power. That’s what Putin did, and that’s what Orbán does too. Carlson is simply the American face, and the English-speaking voice, of that confidence trick.

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Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Do His Job

A week from now and the U.S. government will shut down unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - an utterly spineless individual in my view - either (i) reins in the fractious Republican caucus in the House of Representatives or (ii) strakes a deal with House Democrats.  As on display yesterday, the House Republicans cannot even manage to pass a bill to fund the U.S. military - supposedly an institution Republicans love - so the likelihood of avoiding a shutdown appear grim. Between McCarthy's poor leadership skills and the reality that all he really cares about is remaining House Speaker at any cost, he has enabled a band of Republican extremists who seeming want to "burn the house down" to hold the nation hostage while performing to thrill the most hideous and extreme elements of the antigovernmental Christofascist/white supremacist part base.  Nowhere on the GOP radar is the harm such a shutdown will do to the economy, federal workers, retirees and America's image in the world.  The ongoing circus has writ large the simple truth that McCarty is unfit to lead and the Republicans are unfit to govern.  A column in the New York Times looks at both McCarthy's failures and the fact that the GOP is no longer a sane and responsible political party (as if the GOP allegiance to Donald Trump wasn't already proof of this reality).  Here are column highlights:

The speaker of the House is the only congressional officer mentioned in the Constitution, other than a temporary Senate officer to preside when the vice president can’t. The speaker’s job isn’t defined, but surely it includes passing legislation that keeps the federal government running.

But Kevin McCarthy, the current speaker, isn’t doing that job. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to see how he can pass any bill maintaining federal funding, let alone one the Senate, controlled by Democrats, will agree to. So we seem to be headed for a federal shutdown at the end of this month, with many important government activities suspended until further notice.

Why? McCarthy is a weak leader, especially compared with Nancy Pelosi, his formidable predecessor. But even a superb leader would probably be unable to transcend the dynamics of a party that has been extremist for a generation but has now gone beyond extremism to nihilism.

And yes, this is a Republican problem. Any talk about dysfunction in “Congress,” or “partisanship,” simply misinforms the public. Crises like the one McCarthy now faces didn’t happen under Pelosi, even though she also had a very narrow majority. I’ll come back to that contrast. First, let me make a different comparison — between the looming shutdown of 2023 and the shutdowns of 1995-96, when Newt Gingrich was speaker.

Back in 1995, while Gingrich’s tactics — his willingness to employ blackmail as a political strategy — were new and dangerous, he had an actual policy goal: He wanted to force major cuts in federal spending.

Furthermore, Gingrich tried to go where the money was. The federal government is an insurance company with an army: The great bulk of nonmilitary spending is on the big safety-net programs, that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And Gingrich in fact sought deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

He didn’t get them, and the government’s role in promoting health insurance coverage eventually expanded greatly — although Medicare has been surprisingly successful at containing costs. Still, Gingrich’s goals were at least coherent.

McCarthy, in his desperate efforts to appease his party’s hard-liners, has acted as if their refusal to approve federal funding is a Gingrich-like demand for reduced federal spending. He tried to pass a continuing resolution — a bill that would temporarily keep the money flowing — that involved deep cuts to certain parts of the federal government.

But there are three notable aspects to this attempt. First, even if he had managed to pass that resolution, it would have been dead on arrival in the Senate.

Second, unlike Gingrich back then, McCarthy tried to go where the money isn’t, slashing nonmilitary discretionary spending. That’s a fairly small part of the federal budget. It’s also a spending category that has already been subject to more than a decade of austerity . . . There just isn’t any significant blood to be gotten out of this stone.

Finally, even this extreme proposal wasn’t extreme enough for Republican hard-liners. I liked what one representative told Politico: “Some of these folks would vote against the Bible because there’s not enough Jesus in it.” The point is that the party’s right wing isn’t actually interested in governing; it’s all about posturing, and the budget fight is a temper tantrum rather than a policy dispute.

If the G.O.P. were anything like a normal party, McCarthy would give up on the right-wingers, gather up the saner Republican representatives — it would be misleading to call them “moderates” — and make a deal with Democrats. But that would almost surely cost him the speakership, and in general more or less the whole G.O.P. is terrified of the hard-liners, so the party’s positions end up being dictated by its most extreme faction.

As I said, all of this is very different from what happens on the other side of the aisle. You still sometimes see analyses that treat Democrats on the left and Republicans on the right as equivalent, but they’re nothing alike. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, in fact, interested in policy; it tries to push the party’s leadership in its direction, but it’s willing to take what it can get. That’s why Pelosi, with only a narrow majority during Biden’s first two years, was nonetheless able to get enacted landmark bills on infrastructure, climate and technology, while McCarthy can’t even keep the government running.

Now, a protracted shutdown would be highly disruptive, and if past confrontations are a guide, the public would blame Republicans — which is what led Gingrich to back down in the 1990s. But it’s not clear that McCarthy, or whoever replaces him if he’s overthrown, would be willing or even able to make a deal that reopens the government. How does this end?

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GOP Fights Renewal of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief

 

As long time readers know, I am no fan of George W. Bush - this blog is full of less than flattering posts about Bush's idiocy and failed policies - yet Bush largely was not motivated by the cruelty that today defines both Donald Trump, his would be imitators, and the larger Republican Party where hatred and grievance against others, especially racial and sexual minorities are a part of the GOP platform.   One positive thing that George W. Bush did was push through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ("PEPFAR") that has saved up to 25 million lives, especially in Africa, and proven to be a highly effective program.  Now, with the deadline for reauthorization of the program fast approaching, Christofascist and far right groups, together with their lap dog congressional Republicans are threatening to end the program ostensibly because some aid organizations involved in the program provide abortion counseling although no PEPFAR funds are used for this purpose.  It's yet further proof that the supposed "pro-life" elements are actually anything but truly pro-life and I suspect another motivation is that Christofascist believe AIDS victims are mostly gays who they would happily see die and disappear.   That many of the beneficiaries are black also, in my view, also likely moves false "Christians" to oppose the program.   A column in the New York Times looks at PEPFAR and the Republican effort to kill the program.  Here are excerpts:

Twenty years ago, the Republican Party started what may have been the most lifesaving government initiative in modern history. It turned the tide of AIDS around the world and has saved 25 million lives so far — equivalent to the entire population of Australia.

So it’s a reflection of the madness that has infected the Republican Party that today some conservatives are repudiating perhaps the best thing they ever did, battling the reauthorization of this program.

PEPFAR, which stands for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has a legislative authorization that expires at the end of this month. And Republicans are now fighting that reauthorization.

Republicans should be extraordinarily proud of their boldness in crafting PEPFAR, which provides antiretroviral medicines to AIDS patients and operates in more than 50 countries.

The devastation of AIDS in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in southern Africa, may be difficult for people today to understand. Intimacy became lethal. Estimates circulated that AIDS would kill 100 million people over the next 20 years. PEPFAR changed all that. It brought AIDS under control and gave countries their futures back.

The assault on PEPFAR accelerated in May with a report by the conservative Heritage Foundation warning without evidence that the Biden administration was using the program to promote a “radical social agenda” — including liberalized abortions.

Conservative critics, seeing a crusade forming, rushed to join. They noted that some PEPFAR dollars have gone to nonprofits that also, using separate resources, support abortions. That’s true. But longstanding American policy ensures that the accounts are separate and the U.S. dollars don’t pay for abortions. There’s nothing new here, and it’s particularly galling that Republicans preen as “pro-life” for attacking a program that saves lives on a scale like nothing before or since.

Unfortunately, some conservative organizations have said that in their political scorecards rating members of Congress they will count a vote to reauthorize PEPFAR in its present form as a vote for abortion rights. That makes it toxic for many Republican members of Congress who fear that they might no longer have a perfect “pro-life” record.

The Heritage Foundation critique also argued that AIDS is primarily a “lifestyle disease” and so “should be suppressed through education, moral suasion and legal sanctions” rather than medication. That phrase reeks of sanctimony. During the worst of the epidemic, I met Zambian women whose husbands were away working as miners; the women were terrified that when their husbands, whom they loved, came home on vacations, they would have to sleep with them — and risk death if their husbands had strayed.

The most dangerous thing a woman there could do, it was said then, was to get married. If American conservatives want to fight AIDS with finger wagging instead of antiretrovirals, those women will again be at great risk.

This crisis over reauthorization has to do with the fever that has beset elements of the G.O.P., leaving some senators and House members inhabiting what seems to be delirium. A P.R.R.I. poll in 2021 found that 23 percent of Republicans agree that “The government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.” Even now, some two-thirds of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected. Only 40 percent of Republicans say that the benefits of Covid vaccines outweigh the risks (which is why research suggests that Covid may have disproportionately killed Republicans).

The denunciations of PEPFAR horrify the Republican Party’s grown-ups, who recognize how important the program has been. “This is America at its best,” Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and secretary of state, told me.

“Let’s not throw away one of the really great moments when the United States took on this extraordinary challenge of people who were dying from this pandemic and intervened and started to save lives,” Rice said. “I just don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to continue to do that.”

PEPFAR is one reason polls show that Africa is one of the most pro-American parts of the globe. China is competing for hearts and minds there, and America’s struggle to reauthorize PEPFAR amounts to a gift to Xi Jinping.

PEPFAR reminds us of the complicated truth, which is that in 2003, Bush both began a catastrophic war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and also started a program that saved 25 million lives.  Does that mess with our heads? Of course. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The ability to navigate a messy, contradictory world is a mark of maturity — and of governing.

Now it’s Republicans who need to muster the maturity to govern. And in that sense PEPFAR’s reauthorization is a test for a once great political party that now sometimes seems to be fighting psychosis.

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"Meet the Press" - and the Media's - Huge Failure

Though its false equivalency and omissions and reluctance to call out lies for what they are, the mainstream media, in my view, played a significant role in Donald Trump's election to the White House.  Despite all Trump has done since, including an attempted coup to overthrow the 2020 election, much of the media seemingly has learned nothing at all and continues to embrace the falsehood that Trump is an ordinary candidate and that the Republican Party remains the same political party that it was decades ago when facts, science, and the truth meant something to the vast majority of Republicans.  Today, the media's continued failure to do its job and expose lies and extremism puts America's democracy at severe risk. By failing to openly and consistently confront lies, the media has enabled the GOP and political right to disseminate "alternate facts" and lies.   This continuing failure of the media was on open display in Kristen Welker's "Meet the Press" interview with Trump that allowed Trump to trumpet lies and rarely suffer any push back.  Indeed, the media is so bad at doing its job, that it would be far better if it simply ceased interviewing Trump and  refused to provide a platform for his lies and untruths.   A piece at CNN - which had its own Trump disaster - looks at the :Meet the Press" debacle,:

The Kristen Welker era of “Meet the Press” is off to a bleak start.

The high-stakes sit down with disgraced former president Donald Trump was all risk and little reward for Welker as she assumed the esteemed moderator chair of “Meet the Press” for the first time Sunday. Television executives I surveyed before and after the interview were baffled that NBC News and Welker willfully chose to take on such a fraught assignment, given Trump’s notorious propensity to lie. As one television executive put it to me, “It was a crazy way to set the tone of what ‘Meet the Press’ would be under her.”

But the Peacock network opted to do it — and NBC News spent the entire week hyping Welker as someone who “met the moment” as a White House correspondent when “power was held to account” during Trump’s tumultuous presidency. Unfortunately, Welker failed spectacularly to meet the moment during her interview with Trump.

Welker allowed Trump to make a number of statements wholly untethered to reality on a range of critical issues without tenacious, resolute, or meaningful pushback. Trump, a rapid-fire lie machine, did his usual song and dance. He lied about the election. He lied about the insurrection that his lies had spawned. And he lied about pretty much every topic that Welker broached.

Throughout it all, Welker seemed ill-equipped to handle Trump’s trademark bravado. Lacking any noticeable fire in her belly, she at times timidly tried to set the facts straight. But Welker lacked the necessary fervor and apparent grasp of the subject material the massive platform requires to effectively counter Trump

It was a low moment in Welker’s otherwise pristine career. And it’s sure to have consequences for the storied Sunday public affairs show, given that Welker’s debut was NBC News’ chance to refresh the program, define what role it will serve in the 2024 election, and win over the hearts and minds of viewers.

While the episode will likely see better-than-usual ratings because of the debut of Welker and anticipated interview with Trump, it is a fair bet that the manner in which she executed the Trump sit-down will have alienated a not insignificant swath of the audience. CNN, for instance, saw a tsunami of criticism wash over the network in the wake of its (also disastrous) town hall with Trump this spring — and the network is still trying to win back viewers.

But the interview also speaks to a larger problem that — somehow in 2023 — continues to confound the news media and the well-compensated television anchors tasked with effectively holding power to account. Even after Trump subverted democracy during the 2020 election, inspiring an actual insurrection on the US Capitol, newsrooms continue to struggle with how to cover him.

It’s arguable that, at this juncture, there is really no need to interview Trump. After years and years of seeing how he dishonestly operates, what exactly is there to glean from a sit-down? The near-certain result is that the outlet will record a stream of lies rushing out of his mouth, mixed in with absurd grievances about how supposedly unfair the system treats him. Does any of that really serve the public?

Some news executives seem to believe that Trump can make “news” during interviews, but pressing him on policy issues rarely yields consequential results. The public is well familiar with Trump and already knows that he is a man estranged with the truth.

If it is necessary to interview Trump, newsrooms need to approach the task differently than they would any other interview. While there is a temptation among the D.C. class to pretend that newsrooms still operate in a 1990s-like era in which Republicans and Democrats are treated as opposite sides of the same coin, doing so is a grave error. The Republican Party of 2023 is very different than the Republican Party of yesteryear. And its leader, the twice impeached and four-times indicted Trump, is no normal politician.

When interviewing Trump, the goal cannot be to make “news” like one might attempt with a typical politician. The purpose of the interview must be to hold power to account. It must be about asserting the facts in a meaningful way and forcing Trump to confront them. He will still, of course, lie — but at least the audience might be able to see through the showmanship if the interviewer displays a firm grip on the subject matter and exerts command.

Unfortunately, few in the press who have taken on the assignment have proven capable of executing the difficult task in a compelling way. That doesn’t bode well for the news industry or, more importantly, democracy at large.