More Saturday Male Beauty

 

America's Pathetic Herd Immunity Failure

Among the husband and my circle of family and friends, most have either already gotten their Covid-19 vaccinations or will do so as soon as possible.  The goal of doing so is (i) self-protection, and (ii) helping our community and nation to achieve a return to total normalcy as soon as possible.  Sadly - and frighteningly - these twin motivations are lost on large percentages of Republicans and evangelicals who either believe in ridiculous conspiracy theories, cannot tolerate anyone telling them what to do or (probably the most prevalent reason) are so self-centered they care nothing about the common good. For me, there is little surprise that evangelicals are among the vaccine resisters given that they embrace ignorance and are among the most selfish, uncaring segment of the population despite Pharisee like displays of feigned religiosity.  With evangelicals now domination the GOP base, it is a natural result that a significant percentage of Republicans are anti-vaccine.  A column in the New York Times by a former Republican (and former GOP/Christian apologist) bemoans the fact that America will likely not achieve much needed herd immunity.  Here are highlights:

Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II? It hardly seems possible.

That victory required national cohesion, voluntary sacrifice for the common good and trust in institutions and each other. America’s response to Covid-19 suggests that we no longer have sufficient quantities of any of those things.

In 2020 Americans failed to socially distance and test for the coronavirus and suffered among the highest infection and death rates in the developed world. Millions decided that wearing a mask infringed their individual liberty.

This week my Times colleague Apoorva Mandavilli reported that experts now believe that America will not achieve herd immunity anytime soon. Instead of being largely beaten, this disease could linger, as a more manageable threat, for generations. A major reason is that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is reluctant to get vaccinated.

We’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima; we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS.

Americans have always been an individualistic people who don’t like being told what to do. But in times of crisis, they have historically still had the capacity to form what Alexis de Tocqueville called a “social body,” a coherent community capable of collective action. During World War I, for example, millions served at home and abroad to win a faraway war, responding to recruiting posters that read “I Want You” and “Americans All.”

That basic sense of peoplehood, of belonging to a common enterprise with a shared destiny, is exactly what’s lacking today. . . . They are reasoning mostly on a personal basis. They are thinking about what’s right for them as individuals more than what’s right for the nation and the most vulnerable people in it. It’s not that they are rebuking their responsibilities as citizens; it apparently never occurs to them that they might have any.

A lot of Americans have seceded from the cultural, political and social institutions of national life. As a result, the nation finds it hard to perform collective action. Our pathetic Covid response may not be the last or worst consequence of this condition.

Which brings us to Joe Biden. The Biden agenda would pour trillions of dollars into precisely those populations who have been left out and are most distrustful — the people who used to work in manufacturing and who might now get infrastructure jobs, or the ones who care for the elderly. This money would not only ease their financial stress, but it would also be a material display that someone sees them, that we are in this together. These measures, if passed, would be extraordinary tangible steps to reduce the sense of menace and threat that undergirds this whole psychology.

The New Deal was an act of social solidarity that created the national cohesion we needed to win World War II. I am not in the habit of supporting massive federal spending proposals. But in this specific context — in the midst of a distrust doom loop — this is our best shot of reversing the decline.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Decline and Fall of Elise Stefanik

Nazi Germany came into being because Hitler played on old bigotries, German xenophobia and sense of grievance over the Treaty of Versailles, and because far too many Germans put what they saw as an opportunity for self-advancement over decency, the truth and any shred of empathy for others.  With the rise of Donald Trump we have witnessed another malignant demagogue use Hitler's template and now as he seeks to expel anyone who doesn't swear unswerving fealty to him from the Republican Party we are seeing the majority of Republicans, especially those in Congress, likewise throw decency, honesty and allegiance to democracy on the trash heap as they jockey for self-advancement.  A case in point is Rep. Elsie Stefanik who seeks to replace Liz Cheney in the GOP leadership and has gone from a Trump critic to thoroughly prostituting herself to Der Trumpenfuhrer. A column in the Washington Post looks at her decision to discard morality and swear fealty to a thoroughly horrible, immoral individual in a quest for power (Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, is another example).  Her story parallels many others in the GOP.  Here are column excepts:

Ambition isn’t a demerit in politics — it’s a job requirement, along with its needier cousin, the instinct for self-preservation. The politician’s version of the Hippocratic oath is equally simple: “First, get elected.”

Still, the past five years — of Donald Trump’s alarming rise and regrettable persistence — have witnessed Republican lawmakers sublimating principle and decency to survival and advancement. Too many who know better have fallen meekly in line.

Meantime, as Trump has warped the Republican Party from belief system into loyalty test, the ordinary metrics of political measurement have given way. The primary axis on which to understand — and judge — party officials is no longer the spectrum of conservatism but the intensity of professed Trump devotion.

These realities offer the best frame for understanding the remarkable and depressing trajectory of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who appears poised to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as GOP House conference chair. Stefanik is far from the only Republican to sell her soul to Trump, but she has to be counted among the most disappointing. Her transformation from Trump doubter to Trump champion is another sign of the end of ideology as a defining feature of the GOP.

The Harvard graduate who worked in George W. Bush’s White House, who prepped vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan for his debate, who helped write the party’s 2012 platform, who backed John Kasich in the 2016 primary and opted out of attending the convention — that product of the GOP establishment dutifully appeared on pardoned Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast Thursday in her bid for the number three leadership post.

There she vowed to “fully support” the bogus audit of the Arizona presidential election results, and praised Trump as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution.”

Whether out of conviction, belief that it was smart politics in a purplish district, or both, Stefanik at first distanced herself from Trump. During the 2016 campaign, she criticized his convention attack on a Gold Star military family, his “inappropriate, offensive comments” on the “Access Hollywood” tape, and his statements on NATO and Vladimir Putin. . . . and said it was a “mistake” to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Co-chair of the Tuesday Group of moderate House Republicans, Stefanik voted against Trump’s signature 2017 tax cut because its limitation on deductions for state and local taxes would hurt her constituents. She described herself as “an outspoken supporter” of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and lamented Trump’s “attacks on law enforcement and the Department of Justice.”

Then came the first impeachment, and Stefanik’s overnight makeover into a Trump acolyte, lambasting the “Russia hoax” and assailing Democrats for pursuing the issue. “A new Republican star is born,” Trump tweeted — and the campaign contributions began pouring in, $13.3 million in the 2020 election cycle . . . . .

Longtime Stefanik observers suggest she understands that survival in this new GOP requires either making accommodations to the reality of Trumpism or consigning yourself to irrelevance in the party. . . . “Most people who know Elise say they don’t recognize her.”

The richest irony of Stefanik replacing Cheney is that Cheney is the real conservative of the two. Cheney’s voting record is not only more conservative than Stefanik’s, but also she has voted more often with Trump than Stefanik has.

It would be a gratifyingly Shakespearean finale if Stefanik ended up losing her soul and the House conference post. Don’t get your hopes up. He Who Must Be Obeyed has bestowed on Stefanik “my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement.”

In Trump’s GOP, that’s all that matters.

Stefanik is little better than an expensive whore.  Her betrayal of decency and the truth mirrors that of those who jumped on Hitler's bandwagon and helped unleash horrors on the world.  Nowadays, it is impossible to be a decent and moral person and be a Republican.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump's War on What's Left of the GOP Establishment

As the base of the Republican Party - white supremacists and far right "Christian" fanatics - becomes ever more like a rabid dog Donald Trump is intensifying his war on what is left of the Republican Party establishment .  In today's GOP, one must worship at the altar of Trump or leave the party and families of decades of influence within the GOP are finding themselves under assault as if they were members of the Russian aristocracy facing Bolsheviks save for the firing squads.  Seemingly, no one is safe - ask Liz Cheney - if they refuse to genuflect before Trump and throw away any shred of supporting truth and objective fact. The repulsive, morally bankrupt malignant narcissist at Mar-a-Lago simply will not stand for it.  Everything must be about him and perpetuating the Big Lie.  Republicans who prostitute themselves to Trump might do well to remember what Stalin did to many of the early Bolshevik leaders once he consolidated power. A piece in Politico looks at the ongoing assault that, if successful, will leave the GOP a growing threat to American democracy.  Here are highlights: 

In the civil war between Donald Trump and the GOP’s waning establishment, no Republican has crossed the former president and come out ahead.

Yet as Rep. Liz Cheney’s likely ouster from House leadership lays bare, Trump has reserved a special fury for the scions of the GOP’s leading families in his attempt to exercise full dominion over the Republican Party.

Whether it’s the Cheneys, the Bushes or the lesser bloodlines — such as the Romneys or the Murkowskis — Trump has been relentless in his efforts to force them to bend the knee. Even Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Sen. John McCain — who herself has never run for office — has been knocked down, censured by Trump allies who run the state Republican Party in Arizona.

It’s the clearest sign that the modern Republican Party hasn’t just broken with its traditionalist past. It’s shredding every vestige of it.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Arne Carlson, a former two-term Republican governor of Minnesota. “The problem with the revolution is they continue to get more and more extreme. Whereas Liz Cheney was on the right, she now finds herself being pushed into the middle and, ultimately, off the cliff.”

As a prominent link between the old GOP and the new party of Trump, Liz Cheney is more than just another name on Trump’s enemies list. If his supporters in the House ultimately oust the Wyoming Republican from her leadership post, as expected, it will mark the repudiation of decades of Cheney family influence on the Republican party, dating back to her father’s time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, in GOP House leadership and as vice president.

Trump’s erasure of the institutions of the pre-Trump GOP was, of course, the promise of his presidency — his anti-establishment fervor a feature of Trumpism, not a bug.

Trump’s feats of political engineering — his felling of family legacies that once defined the party — are remarkable. He has almost single-handedly managed to sever the Bush family line, brutalizing “low energy” Jeb Bush, then the Florida governor, in the 2016 primary and depriving the Bush dynasty of a third presidential nominee. Once in office, Trump even described himself as a “far greater” president than Reagan.

“He shits on everybody, even former presidents,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist in Wisconsin who oversaw George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign in the state.

Cheney, he said, just “happens to be the daughter of the [former] vice president.”

The party that was once grounded in tradition is, after four years of Trump, in the process of abandoning the modern pillars it’s built on.

Take Sen. Mitt Romney, the son of former Michigan Gov. and presidential contender George Romney, and himself the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

Prompted by Trump’s longstanding animus toward Romney, a measure by Utah Republicans to censure the senator failed over the weekend. But Republicans in his home state still booed him at their party convention.

There’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the daughter of Frank Murkowski, the former U.S. senator and governor of Alaska. After Murkowski voted with six other Republican senators to convict Trump at his impeachment trial — repeating Cheney’s sin in the House — Trump pledged to travel to Alaska ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to campaign against “a disloyal and very bad Senator.” The Alaska Republican Party censured her in March.

And then there’s George W. Bush, Bush’s former vice president, Dick Cheney, and Cheney’s daughter Liz. In his deconstruction of that lineage, Trump has not only ostracized Cheney for her impeachment vote, but repeatedly branded her as a “warmonger,” as he did again on Wednesday, revisiting the wounds of the Iraq War and capitalizing on the schism between the party’s non-interventionists and neocons.

Taking stock of the rift between Trump and the Cheneys, Richard George, a former Republican National Committee member from Wyoming said, “I think that family politics has made a mistake, and I think Liz made a mistake.”

“The undoing of political dynasties,” George said, “is a great thing.”

Trump himself, however, is not averse to dynastic politics — that is, if it involves his own family. The former president’s children are fixtures in the MAGA world and could have political futures. Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, has considered running for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, and Donald Trump Jr. is liked by activists enough that he finished a distant third in a 2024 presidential straw poll run without his father’s name on the ballot at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

The old dynasties — the ones that were rooted in an ideological or governance brand, rather than in a style or personality — have been torched.

The scions of traditional political families who have survived have largely done so by choosing Trump when it came to a dispute between the former president and their families. . . . . Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, is in Trump’s good graces. But she had to break with her uncle’s criticism of him — and jettison the family name — to stay there.

That’s a Republican landscape turned upside down from where it stood before Trump took office — so much so that some legacy Republicans who have not traded their moorings for Trump hardly recognize the party anymore.

“What [House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy] doesn’t realize is he may be the next one to go,” Carlson said. “The people who set the guillotines in motion ultimately have their necks under it, as they get into these endless battles about who’s more loyal, who’s more pure.”

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Why the GOP Is Desperate to Maintain "The Big Lie"

With no real policy proposals to counter the Biden administration/Democrat Party initiatives - which would bestow real benefits on much of the GOP's evangelical/white trash base, the morally bankrupt Republican Party has decide the only way to energize the GOP base is to pile onto Donald Trump's big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.  The GOP is hoping that whipping up support for the claims of the mentally ill, malignant narcissist at Mar -a Lago will be enough to distract the racist and gullible base from the reality that unlike the GOP's decades old reverse Robin Hood agenda the Biden proposals will make their lives better.   Hence the growing momentum to throw Liz Cheney from her current House leadership position and the doubling down in self-prostitution to Trump.  The gamble, of course, is that all of the lies will turn off even more suburban voters who find Trump loathsome.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP lie machine.  Here are highlights:

The biggest news in Washington continues to be Liz Cheney's ongoing refusal to bend the knee to the former president and formally repudiate her inexplicable fealty to the truth. It's one thing to be investigated by the FBI for paying for sex with minors or to be a blatant white supremacist — these are human foibles that can be forgiven — but to unapologetically assert that Donald Trump's insistence that the election was stolen is a Big Lie simply cannot be tolerated.

I've written before that I believe regardless of whether she is truly incapable of swallowing this election nonsense, Cheney also has a strategy. There is an open "lane" for a Republican woman, especially one with a pedigree like hers, to be the tough conservative who stood up to Trump in the event the magic veil ever falls from voters' eyes. So far that lane looks like it gets narrower every day, but kicking her out of the leadership for telling the truth in the face of massive dishonesty can only add to her heroic luster in the long haul. The worst thing that happens is she is remembered as the Margaret Chase Smith of her day, after the brave senator from Maine who denounced the Wisconsin demagogue Joseph McCarthy long before anyone else had the nerve. There are worse fates for a politician than that.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Republican establishment continues to run around in circles clucking furiously like a brood of barnyard hens, trying to keep Trump and his cultlike following happy. They appear to have decided that their voters require human sacrifices for the cause so Cheney must be thrown over the cliff. (And to think "Democrats are in disarray" used to be a perennial trope. They're amateurs compared to the GOP.)

But when I read Salon's Sophia Tesfaye's piece about former House speaker Paul Ryan, who reportedly really doesn't care for Donald Trump and his shenanigans yet remains glued to his chair in the Fox boardroom, unwilling to utter a peep about what's going on with his party, it occurred to me that it's giving them far too much credit to simply call them cowards. They are much more craven than that. It's not that they are afraid of their Trump-loving constituents who are metaphorically brandishing pitchforks and torches against anyone who dare call the Big Lie a big lie. It's that they are seeing the upside for them personally.

While Washington officials clutch their pearls about Liz Cheney's apostasy, consider all the anti-democratic activity that's taking place around the country which these people are either explicitly or tacitly endorsing.

The Republican Attorney Generals Association has been in turmoil since January 6th when some members objected to the group's sponsorship of the violent insurrection. The chairman resigned last month after being unable to handle the internal strife and is to be replaced this week by a hard-core Trump supporter who has promised to "take a blowtorch to Biden's agenda." In Florida, a state Trump won handily, they are nonetheless busily enacting voting restrictions which they belatedly realized might even suppress their own vote. They did it anyway. Ohio Republicans decided this week to censure Republican politicians who voted to impeach Donald Trump even though they are from other states. And the New York Times reports that the Texas GOP is now eating its own over "pandemic and voter-fraud conspiracy theories."

But the big story is in Arizona, where the state Senate has hired an untried company led by a man with a history of floating vote fraud conspiracy theories to "audit" last November's vote in Maricopa Country, which was won by Joe Biden. Despite the fact that the county was recounted twice by hand and found to match the machine count perfectly, Trump-supporting volunteers are laboriously examining the ballots without any proper monitoring, determined to prove that the election was stolen.

For his part, Trump is reportedly obsessed with this recount. He apparently believes it will prove the election there was stolen and that other states will follow. Here he is last week pontificating before his paying guests at Mar-a-lago:

What all these supposed successful "audits" would add up to is not immediately clear, but on Tuesday Trump did say, "I think people are going to be very, very happy when I make a certain announcement," so perhaps he believes having a bunch of his loyal fanatics falsely testify that they finally "found" the votes he wanted will somehow launch him back into the White House in 2024.

All of this may very well be why even the Republicans who obviously know this is nuts are all climbing on board that crazy train. If they can stage one of these "audit" pageants in a place like Georgia they might just juice their turnout for 2022 and take out newly-elected Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock. And there are dozens of House districts where that dynamic could play itself out as well.

It isn't new for Republicans to say that Democrats are illegitimate. They used to say that President Clinton only won with a plurality in a three-way race, so his presidency wasn't really valid. And we all know that Trump himself pushed the grotesque Birther lie which claimed that Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and was therefore not qualified to be president. But this is taking all that to a much higher level. Republicans no doubt realize that this flurry of anti-democratic activity in the states —ostensibly on behalf of Donald Trump and his Big Lie — is really going to pay off for them.

So the House GOP's leadership apparent decision to purge Liz Cheney from their ranks is their way of telling all these rabid Trumpist activists in the states to have at it, the GOP establishment is with them all the way. They aren't afraid of Trump voters. They're grateful to them.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

How the Social Media Ban is Hurting Trump

Thankfully, Facebook extended its ban of Donald Trump as other social media outlets' bans continue.  While Trump's moronic and/or morally bankrupt base continues its allegiance to Der Trumpenfuhrer, the would be autocrat is finding it difficult to directly message his base as laid out in a piece in Politico.  The irony is that Trump worked to instill mistrust of the media in his subjects and now many in the gullible base are not receiving Trump's false and baseless claims. One can only hope that Facebook's ban - and those of other outlets - becomes permanent and Trump's ability to spread his lies will continue to deteriorate.  Here are article excerpts:   

Joe Poldruhi wasn’t sure what to believe about his local congressional race. He hadn’t heard it straight from Donald Trump.

I had come to Ohio’s 16th District to report on Trump’s vengeance-fueled decision to endorse a political novice named Max Miller in his effort to primary the Republican incumbent — one of the 10 GOP House members who had voted in January to impeach him.

“The little bit that I know about him being endorsed by Trump, I’m not sure I completely understand that. I don’t know if it’s somebody in the Trump campaign that’s saying that or what,” said Poldruhi, 55, a maintenance man who told me he prefers Right Side Broadcasting on YouTube to any particular news network on TV.

Shannon Burns, the head of the Strongsville GOP, was surprised I was surprised. “The Republican base,” he told me after the group’s packed monthly meeting, “is not watching any of the traditional media.”

One reason Poldruhi hadn’t heard from Trump, of course, is that Trump has been banned from major social media for almost four months for his role in stoking the insurrection and the storming of the Capitol by his supporters.

I was struck by how many people at an event meant for energized Republicans seemed to be only vaguely aware of the endorsement Trump had made in a race smack in their area. Trump’s announcement, after all, in late February in an email blast from his Palm Beach perch, had been covered by Fox News, by POLITICO, by the local Plain Dealer newspaper, and by other outlets spanning the ideological spectrum. It was the opening salvo in an expected national campaign of retribution — Trump gunning for every member of Congress who had attempted to oust him. Evidently, though, with some local Republicans, it had hardly registered.

That gap served as a stark reminder of the power of Trump’s incredibly direct connection to his supporters — and perhaps the hidden weakness as well of a strategy that relies so heavily on social media platforms like Facebook. . . . . former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg told me. “The movement he built is omnipresent throughout social media, like a MAGA blockchain. Trump’s power throughout social media is no longer any one verified account,” fellow former adviser Taylor Budowich said. “To really cancel Trump, Facebook and other platforms would have to cancel a majority of their most engaged users.”

Others, though, from internet experts and analysts to political professionals from both parties, remain almost shocked at the extent to which Trump’s been quieted by his Silicon Valley silencing — stripped of his capacity to say exactly what he wants to say whenever he wants to say it straight to what was his aggregate more than 100 million followers on YouTube and Twitter and Facebook.

“He’ll try to spin this thing either way, but the problem is he needs the outlet,” longtime New York-based Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told me. . . . . “It’s really important that he have access to that audience,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist who led Marco Rubio’s digital efforts in his 2016 presidential campaign. “The decision on Wednesday is consequential for Trump’s political future — if you’re not there, and not able to shape that conversation, it’s catastrophic.”

“He’d certainly,” said Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble and the co-founder of Upworthy, “have to be a very different candidate without those platforms.”

He would have to reach his voters and would-be voters not on social media but through more mainstream channels. And for Trump, based on what I heard in Ohio, those channels are broken — because he broke them.

“It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Wilson said, “if you tell your supporters not to trust the media.”

I for one hope every conceivable misfortune overtakes Trump, both politically and personally. The man is a monster and the  world will be a slightly better place when he has drawn his last breath.