A Heart-Chilling Republican Christmas Story

At least baby Jesus was warm and dry, unlike homeless refugees at the US border.

 

By Emma Goldman
Immigration Correspondent

EL PASO, Texas – It's Christmas in America and around the world.  If you don't remember what is being celebrated, here's a report from this Luke guy, who claims to have inside knowledge:

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 

Luke 2:4-7.

It's damn cold in the hills of Judea in December and the family was fortunate to have a warm place to give birth to their son, Jesus.  From this story Christians derive the mitzvah (perhaps they have another word for it) of caring for those in need, especially those traveling in cold or slowed by pregnancy or infants.

Speaking of poor families trapped in the cold and seeking shelter, the Border Report tells us:

Churches and nonprofits that help asylum-seekers in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas are rallying to assist thousands of migrants before temperatures plunge below freezing.

Officials in South Texas also are opening up warming centers to help asylum-seekers who have been released from the Department of Homeland Security but have nowhere safe to go as a frigid blast of Arctic air is expected to move into the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday.

By the way, here's the weather in El Paso: 

So it's no wonder that Catholic organizations, aided by local governments and other institutions of good will, are mobilizing to shelter homeless refugees who have crossed the border into the U.S.:

Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez told Border Report that officials are working to convert the Mercedes Civic Center into a warming center.

“There’s been a coordination between all the different partners dealing with this matter,” Cortez said. “I’m concerned but the good thing is we have Catholic Charities and a large group of Catholic churches and centers and we’re trying to prepare.”

At the same time, other Catholic relief agencies, such as the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), inspired by what they believe are Catholic values, are providing legal counsel to penniless refugees seeking to establish their legal right to asylum:

CLINIC’s Catholic identity infuses every aspect of its work—how it is governed, who it serves, how it treats its clients, the way it works, and why it does the work that it does.

CLINIC was founded by the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and is governed by a board comprised of a majority of bishops, along with women and men whose professional backgrounds provide helpful context for our work. CLINIC serves as a legal support agency for diocesan immigration programs.

Second, the kinds of cases and advocacy positions taken by the network—involving family reunification, protection of the persecuted, empowerment through work, authorization, legal status and citizenship—have their roots in Catholic social teaching.

Third, CLINIC views newcomers in their full human dignity, not solely from a legal service perspective....

Fourth, CLINIC takes the Catholic view that advocacy draws its legitimacy from service. Service allows advocates to give voice to newcomers, not to speak “for” them.

Fifth, CLINIC has adopted a principle of Catholic social teaching—subsidiarity....This allows CLINIC to focus its limited resources on needs that local programs cannot meet. In this way, CLINIC seeks to leverage maximum legal representation for low-income newcomers.

Sixth, the CLINIC safeguards the rights and promotes the dignity of all newcomers. The network does not distinguish among prospective clients based on race, religion or ethnic background. 

These gratifying humanitarian efforts are surely worthy of praise from anyone with an ounce of human decency or empathy, and certainly from anyone who proclaims themselves a Christian, right?

As others have pointed out, though, there's a world of difference between Jesus and Republican Jesus.   Following the teachings of Republican Jesus, the supposedly Christian Governor and Attorney General of Texas (the latter under criminal indictment) have threatened Catholic relief organizations and anyone else with the temerity to provide aid and succor to sojourners at our doorstep:

Faith-based groups in El Paso rejected claims by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that they may be aiding unauthorized border crossings. Hope Border Institute and Jesuit Refugee Services defended their work, calling the accusations a threat and danger to their work.https://t.co/K4LfplqzpY

— CLINIC (@cliniclegal) December 20, 2022

Threatening Catholic volunteers who have chosen to spend their holidays feeding, sheltering, and representing freezing refugees with criminal prosecution – it's Christmastime in Texas:

In announcing his call for an investigation, [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott cited reports that NGOs assisted in illegal border crossings near El Paso, and that those same NGOs and some in other border sectors also orchestrated other border crossings “through activities on both sides of the border.”

“In light of these reports, I am calling on the Texas Attorney General’s Office to initiate an investigation into the role of NGOs in planning and facilitating the illegal transportation of illegal immigrants across our borders,” Abbott said, adding that he is ready to craft legislative solutions aimed at solving the border crisis and the role of NGOs that Paxton’s office proposes.

[Texas AG Ken] Paxton swiftly replied to Abbott’s call saying he will launch the investigation, and pledging to take action against organizations found violating the law.

Rupert's yellow press sez it's a crisis

Now maybe crooked Attorney General Ken Paxton thinks that indicting Catholic relief workers is no big deal.  After all, he's been under indictment for five years and he's nowhere near facing a jury. 

The organizations aiding refugees, perhaps having read about other Catholics who suffered even worse fates for acting on their religious principles, were undaunted:

El Paso faith-based immigration organizations were quick to rebuke the claims, and the investigation.

Dylan Corbett, executive director of the HOPE Border Institute, said...that Abbott’s call for an investigation “is a vile threat to all of us on the border working to pick up the pieces of a broken immigration system, to create legal pathways for vulnerable migrants and to offer a dignified welcome.”

Fair and balanced CNN says so too.

“This intimidation is beneath the dignity of public service,” he said.

Not in Texas.

Of course, state interference with the lawful practice of providing representation to asylum seekers, a right guaranteed by federal law, violates the Supremacy Clause as well the civil rights of refugees. If only the United States Department of Justice had a division devoted to protecting civil rights, something might be done about this obviously illegal intimidation.

You won't hear much about this outrage in media coverage of the looming “crisis” at the border, which crisis consists of the specter of harmless refugees crossing into El Paso without safe temporary accommodation until they can arrange transport to their intended destinations.  The crisis is supposedly that they are sleeping on the streets, within eye-shot of white Texans.

Axios for the crisis hat trick!

Since the illegal and patently fraudulent invocation in 2020 of spurious public health grounds to bar asylum seekers by the bigots and plug-uglies of the Trump Administration, there has been an ongoing crisis at the border.

The Mexican side of the border, that is.

That's where desperate refugees, unable to cross, are living out in the cold on the streets of cities like Tiajuana and Ciudad Juarez.  Their suffering over the past two years does not constitute a “crisis”because white Americans don't see it.

Suffering south of the border: not a crisis!

And the suffering on the Mexican (non-crisis) side of the border is by no means limited to mothers and babies camping out in the freezing cold.  It's so much worse, according to Human Rights Watch:

Last week, I spoke to Amelia H. (not her real name) in Juárez, Mexico. She told me that after she entered the United States in September, US border agents stopped her and sent her back to Mexico just before midnight, even though US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) claims it doesn’t expel people after dark. They ordered Amelia to cross despite her pleas to make the trip in the morning. A group of men raped her on her way to a shelter in Mexico that night.

This horror was foreseeable and all too common. I’ve interviewed others who endured rape, abduction, or other violence after US border agents expelled them. Human Rights First has documented nearly 10,000 attacks on people summarily expelled. 

Republican Jesus must be so proud.

This Christmas Eve, it's freezing outside across the country, with a few annoying exceptions (like California).  But no matter how blustery it is outside, it's nowhere near as cold as the hearts of Republican anti-immigrant bigots.

Feliz Navidad. 

 UPDATE, December 25:

Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him (cf. Jn 1:11), that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) December 25, 2022

 

Dispatches from the COVID wars. Dateline: Compiegne.

By Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.
Medical Editor

The war on COVID is over.

And, with apologies to The Onion, COVID won.

That's right, the pandemic that has claimed more than 1,100,000 American lives and continues to kill over 400 of us every day has vanquished all opposition in America, causing all parts of government to surrender unconditionally to the virulent menace.

Despite the fact that deaths from COVID have soared 65% in the last two weeks (see below)

America has thrown down all mandatory measures to save lives and left the battlefield.

Among the likeliest near term victims: our brave men and women in uniform. Just this week, the Congress and the President accepted a bloated defense spending act that specifically allowed recruits to opt out of receiving the COVID vaccine.  Although the idiotic idea came from pro-insurrection Republicans, Democrats caved like the French Army in 1940:

Democrats were forced to capitulate to GOP demands to curtail the vaccine mandate after a large segment of the party threatened to withhold their support for the legislation otherwise. Republican leaders who cheered the deal to strike the mandate have since pledged to seek retribution for its existence, demanding reinstatement for service members discharged for refusing to take the vaccine, and warning they will investigate President Biden and his advisers for having ever instituted the requirement. 

That's nice. So a proven tool said by the CDC to be vital for all of us will no longer protect either U.S. armed forces or anyone they come in contact with.

In repealing the mandate, Congress also overrode the views of military professionals, who viewed the requirement as an important part of readiness and force protection: 

During a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said vaccination is still a military readiness issue, and said a repeal could be harmful to the health of the armed forces.

“What is important to the readiness of the force is getting the vaccine,” she said.

“So, yes, it would impact the readiness of the force. You’re more prone to getting COVID-19 … and we certainly know that the vaccine will save your life.”

By the way, the intolerable intrusion on liberty (or what the f***ever represented by mandatory COVID vaccination) doesn't apply to the other 12 vaccinations the military requires.

Why?  No one knows.  

Check that – the Washington Post's bats**t crazy consulting doctor Leana Wen knows: “ while protection against severe illness appears strong, effectiveness against infection is not.”  So it's OK in her mind to let soldiers and sailors get severely ill with COVID? 

It kinda depends on which piece you read in the Post, whose COVID home page splashed directly contradictory guidance:

 

So reducing military hospitalization rates by 50% isn't worth anything, according to her?  After all the downside to getting the vaccine is – what, Dr. Wen?

Proponents of continuing the vaccine mandates argue that, for the military and schoolchildren, many other vaccines are already required. But other vaccines are nowhere near as polarizing as the coronavirus vaccine. Equating this to others could have an unintended consequence of extending the backlash from covid-19 to other inoculations. 

Or it could be that surrendering to anti-vax extremists re COVID will only encourage these dangerous nuts to extend their campaign from opposition to mandatory vaccination to trying to undercut COVID vaccination efforts among their credulous base.

That couldn't happen, you say.  If you believe that we've a got a pair of white go-go boots for you:

Which has led that well-known wild-eyed radical formerly employed by the American Enterprise Institute to conclude that a slew of Republican vaccine deniers are – let's let him do the honors:

It makes it clear that a slew of Republican governors, from DeSantis to Abbott to Reeves to Stitt, are accessories to mass murder. https://t.co/DPyJj0jK8C

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) December 17, 2022

Whoa, tiger.

The real question is why Republicans so cavalierly disregard the recommendations of the military and civilian professionals tasked with keeping our men and women in uniform fit to fight. To repurpose an old-timey Republican slur, why do Republicans hate our troops?  And why won't they support efforts to keep them safe and healthy?

Republicans: you can't trust them to protect our military.  Of course, that clear and potent political message was obscured by Democratic acquiescence, another in a long series of politically savvy moves by Democrats dating back at least to 2002. It's the old Democratic appeasement two-step: (1) throw away a position that's both correct and politically advantageous in exchange for (2) nothing. And it never, ever works.

But the bipartisan push to endanger our troops is of a piece with a similar effort to sicken all of us, by refusing to consider mask mandates in a time of rising pandemic COVID, flu, and RSV.  

Even Dr. Wen admits that masking in crowded public places, like those buses in the sky, makes good sense:

To Republicans, it's the face mask of tyranny

Instead, consider which situations are highest-risk for virus transmission. I’ve been traveling a lot for work recently, and I’ve been surprised by how few people are wearing masks in the middle of crowded airports and train stations where they’re standing shoulder to shoulder with many other people. Even if you have returned to all pre-pandemic activities and normally don’t wear a mask, consider keeping one in your purse or pocket and deciding, moment to moment, about whether to mask.

You might decide, for example, not to wear a mask in an airport’s empty security lines or while walking through spaces where people are spread out, but then slip one on during boarding, when dozens of people are packed together in an unventilated jet bridge. And you might keep the mask on before takeoff and after landing, when airplane ventilation often hasn’t kicked in, but then take it off during the flight, when ventilation is running.

Maybe you put one on if the people around you are symptomatic. On my last flight, I sat behind a parent with two young kids who both had runny noses and were coughing. This family probably shouldn’t have been traveling, but since they were, and I had no choice but to sit near them, I made sure to mask during the entire flight.

But measures like masks work best when everyone wears one, according to The New York Times:

while masks are most effective at stopping the spread of these viruses when the infected person is wearing one, masking to protect yourself from disease is still beneficial,  

This indisputable scientific fact is known even to Dr. Wen, but she can't bring herself to state the obvious conclusion: for the duration of the pandemic, the best protection is universal masking in crowded indoor spaces. And the only way to get that is to require it, like stopping at red lights.

So why not require masks?  Is it the terrible downsides of masking in indoor public places like – having to wear a mask? Let's ask the mad Dr. Wen:

Masking has become a major source of controversy during covid, but it shouldn’t be. A better approach would be to take mandatory masking out of the equation and empower people to make reasonable decisions based on individual circumstances.  

“No masks.  No vaccines.  D'Accord!”

Now Dr. Wen knows full well that an effective mask strategy depends on everyone wearing them whether they want to or not.  She only claims now that masks are bad because they are controversial. 

And why are they controversial, the worried well may ask.

The answer is short but tragic: because the immediate past President was a corrupt narcissistic heartless grifter who didn't want a mask to smear his greasy orange makeup.  So he invented a story about how Mexico was shipping us their rapists and masks.  (His actual claim was less plausible.)  Next thing you knew, there were fistfights on planes because the freedom of his enraged white base was being assaulted.

And it doesn't end with Trump.  Science denial and the supposed right to refuse low-risk low-downside public health measures like vaccines and masks have become, like needless COVID deaths and moppets mowed down by gunfire as they learned to tell clock time, a central part of American life.

So America has decide to unilaterally disarm against its most lethal adversary, and its allies in the Axis of Respiratory Evil, flu and RSW.  The result will be endless preventable agony and tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

And in exchange we will get nothing.  

Such a deal.  Marechal Petain couldn't have done better.

Latest Brainwave from the Problem-Solvers: Screwing Desperate Refugees!

By Immigration Reporter Emma Goldman
with Izzy Stone in Washington

Perpetually annoying and shape-shifting Senator Kyrsten Sinema is back, like a speck of dust, in the public eye with her announcement that she is now Independent.  Not of integrity or shame (we knew that already) but of political affiliation.

Billions of pixels have been excited with speculation about what this means.  The answer to any casual observer is clear: she is desperately trying to cling to her Senate seat by extorting the Democratic Party.  Facing certain defeat in the Arizona Democratic primary at the hands of any real Democrat, she now will run as an independent in a three-way race.  If the Democrats run someone plausible against her (hi, Arizona congressman Rubin Gallego!), the threat is that she will split the non-lunatic vote and allow Kari Lake to take the Senate seat with maybe 40% of the vote.  

The gun-at-the-head-threat to Democrats is clear: if you don't support me, you get a lunatic and possibly lose the Senate.

It's obvious enough to Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent:

Sinema’s gamble appears to be that Arizona Democrats would be loath to run a candidate against her. Under this thinking, with Sinema running in a three-way race, the Democratic vote would split and a MAGA Republican (such as Lake) would more likely prevail.

But Arizona Democrats are signaling that they won’t let that pressure dictate their actions, making a three-person race more likely....With our politics growing ever more polarized, a Kari Lake-type Republican could hold most of the MAGA and GOP base and a Gallego could get most Democrats. Independents (most of whom lean one way or the other, despite their fabled image, especially these days) could mostly split between those two, leaving Sinema with little support, even as an incumbent. 

The Arizona polling data seem to bear out the emptiness of Sinema's threat:

Kyrsten Sinema has an 18% favorable rating in Arizona right now.

Democrats: 5% fav, 82% unfav
Independents: 25% fav, 56% unfav
Republicans: 25% fav, 45% unfav

(Normally this is paywalled here so just screenshots) pic.twitter.com/kC54Iy6hwL

— Drew Linzer (@DrewLinzer) December 9, 2022

18%.  That's a favorability rating somewhere between those twin Arizona plagues: scorpions and STD's.

But we're not primarily interested in how soon Kyrsten can pursue her true calling of selling homemade ben-wa balls at the Scottsdale Crafts Faire.  The matter before us is her efforts to pursue her supposed vocation as a non-partisan “Problem Solver.”  If you can't wait to get back to a bunch of skinny guys running around Arabia in their footer bags, we'll give you the spoiler: they suck.

Greg Sargent has re-entered the chat, this time not to his advantage:

A big question is whether 10 GOP senators will support reforms being negotiated by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). The compromise would create a path to citizenship for 2 million “dreamers” brought here as children and invest a lot of money to speed the processing of the asylum seekers overwhelming infrastructure at the southern border.

Right now, negotiators are discussing including $25 billion to $40 billion in funds for border security and other border-related reforms, sources familiar with the talks tell me. Will Republican senators really forgo this opportunity? 

Now that we've learned what's really in the bill, we sure hope so.

The “Dreamers” are of course the people brought here as children by their desperate parents fleeing poverty, violence, and oppression in any number of mostly Western Hemisphere hellholes like El Salvador or Haiti.  They're adults now with a tenuous immigration status: able to work and live without fear of being rousted by the ICE body-snatchers, but without any path to citizenship or long-term protection from future depredations by white bigots like Stephen Miller. Our failure to resolve their uncertain status by letting them become citizens is undoubtedly on the top-ten list of national shames.

In 2018, Democrats offered a compromise: citizenship for the Dreamers in exchange for big bucks to build Trumpy's idiotic vanity wall.  The wall was a waste of money and resources and an environmental disaster in the making, but maybe worth it to protect the futures of these Dreamers.

Now “Problem Solvers” like Sinema and garden-variety white plutocrat Thom Tillis have a new compromise.  Instead of a wall, they want “other border-related reforms” to use Greg's innocuous vague description.

There's no bill text to analyze yet, but it appears that Sinema et al. are trying to gut the already-collapsing asylum system in exchange for protecting Dreamers whom everyone knows are never leaving the country anyway.

Tell us more Greg:

One of the Tillis-Sinema framework’s most fundamental goals is to reduce the incentives for the very type of migration that Republicans rail about. Conservatives often claim that many migrants seek asylum mainly to be released into the interior while awaiting hearings, and then disappear. 

Bar asylum seekers from entering? What could go wrong?

Conservatives also often claim that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of a Connecticut Avenue pizzeria, but that didn't persuade Greg to outlaw pizza.

In fact, asylum seekers released into the country with future hearing dates show up for their hearing (when they are properly notified of their time and place, which happens sometimes) 83% of the time, and 96% of the time when represented by counsel.  If they don't show up, they are ordered removed anyway and their names given to the body-snatchers.

So there's no problem to solve here.  Not that that would deter the Problem Solvers.  Their plan involves locking up asylum seekers (including women and children) because of what conservatives “claim.”  Or, in Greg's sunny summary, “Asylum seekers would be detained at the outset while benefiting from increased legal representation and being subject to quicker processing.”

Asylum cases are like other cases: they are complex, fact-intensive, and involve extensive efforts to marshal evidence They also provide no right to counsel so for example an unaccompanied five-year-old can be and is represented by her blankie.  The current system isn't doing a good job adjudicating asylum claims, to put in mildly, and the experiments with quickie hearings have proven disastrous. 

But wait – as with anything entrusted to the Problem Solvers, it gets worse:

While this system is built out, the government would retain for at least a year the power to expel migrants — similar to the authority regarding covid under the federal Title 42 health rule — without letting them apply for asylum at all. 

At least a year?  That sounds ominous, given that after 100 years, the immigration system has yet to be satisfactorily “built out.”

What was Title 42?  Besides a flagrant violation of international law, that is.  Let's ask the American Immigration Council:

The United States has long guaranteed the right to seek asylum to individuals who arrive at our southern border and ask for protection. But since March 20, 2020, that fundamental right has been largely suspended. Beginning on that date, both migrants seeking a better life in the United States and those wanting to apply for asylum have been turned away and “expelled” back to Mexico or their home countries. These border expulsions are carried out under...section 265 of Title 42—which the former Trump administration invoked to achieve its long-desired goal of shutting the border to asylum seekers. Over 1.8 million expulsions under Title 42 have been carried out since the pandemic began....Despite the claim made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that this order was necessary from a public health perspective to protect the United States,..[r]eports indicate that CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was no public health rationale to support it.

So repeal in fact of the right of asylum is the price the Problem Solvers want us to pay to protect Dreamers (who aren't going anywhere anyway)?

We think not (even if Greg seems intrigued by the deal).

We think that true compromise can't be based on tormenting desperate asylum seekers and violating international law.  Fortunately at least a few Democrats are wise to the scam:

Chuck Schumer has at least indicated he is open to the Problem-Solvers' immigration reform travesty.  Maybe he should think about what would have happened to Anne Frank had it been in effect in 1938, which is exactly what did happen to her: she was barred from refuge in the United States.  

We'd like to think we're better than that now, but if the Problem Solvers have their way, they will have proven we are not.

Broken News: Peter Baker Discovers that Trump is a White Supremacist

 

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

Nothing gets past the ace political correspondent/pundit/bloviator/expert for The New York Times, Peter Baker.  Just this week he breathlessly revealed the shocking truth about the corrupt depraved bigot and leader of the Republican Party, this Donald Trump guy:

Former President Donald J. Trump once again made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.

He stands with the mob. 

You don't say.

Huge Times scoop: Trump sides with mob

The “once again” is doing a lot of work because if you have been a faithful reader of the Times since Trump stuck his finger in the nation's political eye in 2015, you might not have heard the truth about his extremism and his embrace of white supremacy and fascism before. 

The untutored reader might have reached this conclusion when Trump announced his candidacy by claiming that Mexico was sending over rapists and assassins.  But to the Times, this was NBD. Their announcement story treated Trump's candidacy as a source of hilarity:

Donald J. Trump, the garrulous real estate developer whose name has adorned apartment buildings, hotels, Trump-brand neckties and Trump-brand steaks, announced on Tuesday his entry into the 2016 presidential race, brandishing his wealth and fame as chief qualifications in an improbable quest for the Republican nomination.

Improbable.  Trump's racist attack on Mexican immigrants made it into paragraph never of the story.

Peter Baker wasn't available in the summer of 2015 to weigh in Trump because he was traipsing around with Barack Obama as the Times's Chief White House Correspondent.

But the Times reached into its endless bench of hacks to declare that Trump was no threat, no problem, and just comic relief from true Republican statesmen like ... Jeb Bush.

Here's Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman handicapping his chances in June 2015:

Good one, Maggie.

A couple of months later, Times pundit Joe Nocera, having rigorously reviewed Trump's views, including his racist anti-immigration lies, concluded:

I wonder, in fact, whether even now Trump is a serious candidate, or whether this is all a giant publicity ploy....

I’m not alone in wondering this, of course. Several Republican consultants I spoke to openly questioned whether Trump is in it for the long haul. “You would see him spending a lot more money if he were putting together a true national infrastructure,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist [Whatever happened to that guy? – Ed.]. ...

He’ll be out before Iowa. You read it here first. 

We sure did, Joe. 

Let's fast forward two years, after pantloads of lies and sexist and racists smears that led him to an Electoral College victory, to Trump's open embrace of neo-Nazi racists after their rampage in Charlottesville. Here's Maggie Haberman again:

President Trump reverted Tuesday to blaming both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down Confederate statues would lead to the desecration of memorials to George Washington.

Abandoning his precisely chosen and carefully delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis from a day earlier, the president furiously stuck by his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. He drew the very moral equivalency for which a bipartisan chorus, and his own advisers, had already criticized him.

“I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said in a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” 

The story treated Trump's embrace of violent white extremism as yet another of his famous “controversies.”

Fortunately, Peter Baker was now available to weigh in:

Intentional or not, many of his most divisive comments charge directly into one of the most delicate issues in American life, race, whether it be his attacks on illegal immigrants, his “both sides” equivocation after the racial violence in Charlottesville or now his blasts at African-American football and basketball stars like Mr. Curry, the Golden State Warriors player who said he did not want to visit the White House for a traditional champions ceremony.

Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted race was not the issue. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s approach does not necessarily seem polarizing so much as animating. In an us-and-them world, he is speaking to a part of the country that has long felt ostracized by those who seem to have everything, whether it be Washington politicians or high-paid sports stars.

“Polarizing” and “divisive,” like cheering for the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium.

The obvious defect of this characterization is the equation of the two sides: the pro-Nazi side and the anti-Nazi side.  If the problem is polarization and not Nazis, then the solution advocated by clowns like Soprassata Dave Brooks and Andrew Yang – reducing divisiveness – make sense.  If the problem is Nazis (spoiler alert: it is!) then the Brooks/Yang line is dangerous gibberish which only distracts from the crisis at hand.

We perseverate on the Times's years-long failure to recognize the true nature of Trump not because it is great fun to rubbish pompous thin-skinned hacks like Baker and Haberman (although to be honest, it is), but because the failure to call out extremist white-supremacist fascist-adjacent subverters of democracy is a continuing threat.

The Times, seven years late, has finally understood the menace of Trump and Trumpism.  But what about the party he leads and the base who remain faithful to him?  And what about the equally odious Republicans who are setting themselves up as the safe non-addictive alternative to the Tiny Toadstool?

Is the Times recognizing the threat they pose to our constitutional order and our remaining liberties?

What do you think?

Please give a warm welcome to the loathsome and just re-elected Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.  Ron works harder than anyone (and certainly harder than the low-energy Tangerine-Faced Grifter) to undermine democracy and free speech and promote hatred and bigotry.  He hasn't said boo about his rival's Turkey Day dinner with Nazis and Jew haters.  He hasn't condemned them or their views.

Just before that debacle but after DeSantis's fascist and bigoted politics were known to the meanest intelligence, the Times offered up this breathless analysis:

Polarization and divisiveness can lead to bad things

Fears of a divided field are why some have embraced Mr. DeSantis as the Republican who appears, in extremely early polling, to be the most formidable potential challenger to Mr. Trump, though political history is littered with early front-runners who fizzle.

“One of the reasons why Florida has done well is because over the last few years, we stood out as the free state of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. He never mentioned Mr. Trump by name but contrasted his approach to the pandemic with that taken by the Trump administration and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist. “We refused to let the state of Florida descend into some type of Fauci-ian dystopia.”

The Times saw no reason to note that Florida's COVID death and disease rates were terrible or that Dr. Fauci's advice has always been rooted in the best available science. 

To be fair one opinion columnist (Frank Bruni) has been willing to tell it somewhat like it is:

It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.” 

But the 76 trombones of drivel blaring in the Times's Opinion section tend to drown the occasionally sensible comment. So far the hard-boiled savvy journalists on the news side haven't let the readers know just how dangerous and crazy ol' Go-Go Boots DeSantis is. (Hint: Worse than Trump.)

We hope that they catch on faster than was the case with the Tangerine-Faced Fascist. But we're not optimistic that we'll get the real story anytime soon.

Based on his past performance, we expect Peter Baker to let us know what a menace DeSantis is by . . . 2029.

Hot Off the Trail: Politically Savvy Republicans Party Like It's 1932 - in Germany

By Political Editor David Bloviator
with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

Politically savvy Republicans, angry and disappointed over their lackluster midterm performance, have hit upon a sure-fire strategy for electoral success in 2024:

Nazis.

The leader of the Republican Party, and the overwhelming favorite of Republican voters, formally embraced Nazi leader Nick Fuentes over, wait for it, Thanksgiving Dinner at his pisspoor Palm Beach “club,” a club so exclusive that it will admit anyone who forks over 200 large for membership. 

Who's Nick Fuentes?

According to the Trevi Fountain of conventional wisdom Axios, he's “a man labeled a "white supremacist" by the Justice Department, [and] frequently promotes racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.” As Nazis are wont to do.

The less tactful Media Matters stated flatly that Fuentes is a “[w]hite nationalist and Holocaust denier.”

Media Matters went on to report that 

Fuentes?  A Nazi? Who knew?

Nick Fuentes posted on Telegram, “​​Kanye [West] is going to be cancelled by the Jews for saying that the Jews invented cancel culture” and shared multiple memes celebrating the rapper. Fuentes also streamed West’s music on his Cozy.TV platform while wearing a West-inspired face covering. The title of the stream was “DEFCON 3.”

Say what you will about demented Jew-hater Kanye West, but he knows who his friends are.  As a reward for standing loyally by his side, Kanye brought Nazi Nick to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate the true spirit of Thanksgiving – white supremacy – with well-known foe of democracy Donald Trump.

According to the always-lying Tangerine-Faced Grifter, Kanye was invited by Trump to add some celebrity glitter to the usual Mar-a-Lago crowd of used car dealers and their high mileage surgically-improved escorts.  Mr. Kardashian supposedly brought Fuentes along as an uninvited guest and Trump and his ace political team waved him over to Trump's table, although the Tiny Toadstool claimed that he had no idea who Fuentes was.

Of course, Trump's hapless stooges tried to lie about Fuentes:

Citing people close to Mr. Trump, some earlier news coverage of Mr. West’s visit to Mar-a-Lago had falsely reported that Mr. Fuentes did not attend the dinner. 

When that lie blew up, they trotted out a new series of whoppers, stating that Trump had no idea who Fuentes was and just let him in because he seemed hungry.

Sure.  That makes sense.

If a deranged anti-Semite shows up on your doorstep with a friend, would you think that this guy had graduated from Reb Solovetchik's yeshivah?  Don't tell us that Trump was accompanied by an aide who who knew exactly who Fuentes was:

The fourth attendee at the four-person dinner, Karen Giorno — a veteran political operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida — also confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there.

Trump, desperately eager to flaunt any celebrity, no matter how loathsome, who will appear in public with him for free, planted his two Jew-hating guests on the patio.  The dinner started out cordially enough:

A source familiar with the dinner conversation told Axios that Trump "seemed very taken" with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign....Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, "I really like this guy. He gets me," according to the source.

He sure does, Donald, he sure does.

As with any other interaction with Trump, the dinner soon derailed:

"Kanye brought a couple friends to dinner"

Ye, who has lost major sponsorships over his anti-Semitism and recent far-right associations, has said he wants to run for president in 2024. The rapper claims Trump started "screaming" at him at the dinner and told him he would lose — "most perturbed" by Ye asking Trump to be his running mate. 

But that was just the comic relief.

The unfunny part happened next, when Trump's embrace of Nazi Fuentes could no longer be denied. The now-frightened Tiny Toadstool fired off a series of incoherent messages claiming that he didn't know who Fuentes was and that anti-Semitism didn't come up at the dinner (how nice!).

His handlers, meanwhile, spun credulous reporters like Maggie Haberman, claiming that the entire incident reflected nothing more than the usual chaos of Camp Trump:

Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.

Sure, Maggie, that's got to be the reason.  The reason couldn't be that Trump agrees with Fuentes on core neo-Nazi principles like white supremacy and Jew hatred, could it?

After all, didn't Trump move quickly and decisively to disassociate himself from Fuentes's Nazi ideology?

Um, no, he didn't.

He hasn't said one f***in' thing that would lead even the most naive observer (like Ms. Haberman) to conclude that he had any problem with the substance of Fuentes's loathsome Nazi views.

Two likely reasons why:  (1) Trump is a white racist and anti-Semite, as he has repeatedly proven, and (2) Trump believes that racism and anti-Semitism are winning issues with the Republican base.

It's explanation number 2 that intrigues us the most.  If it is incorrect, one would expect that Trump's political rivals would be falling all over themselves to condemn Fuentes and all the awful things he stands for.

Thus far, the number of Republican politicians doing so remains at, let's check here, running one more data batch, 0.0.

In fairness Sen. Wilfred M. “Profiles in Courage” Romney was too busy overseeing the illegal aliens he hired to lubricate his car elevator and install a new luggage rack dog crate, but he'll get around to weighing in, we're sure.

Surely the Republican Jewish Coalition would fearlessly call out Trump for happily consorting with open and notorious Jew haters? 

Guess again:

 Oy vey.

And what about Trump's leading rival and God's gift to Florida, Ron DeathSantis?  He certainly isn't going to base his campaign on the same hateful white supremacist garbage that Fuentes is peddling, is he? Let's ask the reporters who know him best at the Florida Phoenix:

DeSantis has one goal: become our first full-bore White Nationalist president. To achieve it, he’ll borrow Donald Trump’s playbook, whipping up white folks’ fear that their America — the one in which they were unambiguously in charge — is being taken over by feminists, gays, Marxists, Muslims, secular humanists, climate change activists, the “woke,” the over-educated elites, and migrants. 

Oh.  That sounds a lot like – Nick Fuentes.

Wait until the national media figures out that all leading Republicans espouse an ideology not meaningfully different from the Nazi revival swill of Nick Fuentes and his fellow insurrectionists.

Keep waiting.

Wait some more.

Right now, though, the wise white political hotshots are running with two stories: Trump is a laughable buffoon who is tripping all over himself (the same narrative that they embraced to disastrous effect before the 2016 election) and DeSantis is a master politician with broad national appeal.  Here's how the creepy white supremacist, hate-monger, and Christian dominionist is treated by The New York Times:

One of the most anticipated, Gov. Ron DeSantis, received a raucous reception for a keynote address that outlined how his success in Florida could be a nationwide formula for Republicans. “The state of Florida is where woke goes to die,” Mr. DeSantis declared.

Raucous?  Like Nuremberg Rally raucous?

If woke means supporting democracy, diversity, and tolerance, then you would think this would not be a good thing for our Republic and our media would want to point this out while there's still time.

Alas they are too busy putting out a different message: even if the entire Republican Party has become a bastion of white supremacy and fascism, the Democrats aren't without sin either:

I spent four years covering the Trump WH and two years covering the Biden WH. What’s fascinating is that they both lie, albeit in v different ways. Trump team was shameless, whereas Biden team is too cute by half. https://t.co/AphB967gHE

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) November 22, 2022

On the one hand, the entire Republican Party is mouthing Nazi ideology.  On the other, Joe Biden wouldn't let reporters bother his son Hunter during the wedding of Hunter's daughter. 

Both Sides. 

When they make the documentary about the media's failure to cover the Republican infatuation with white supremacy and fascism, we've got the title: Triumph of the Willfully Ignorant.

It's a Wonderful Lie: The Story of FTX

By Financial Editor Samuel Insull
with Legal Correspondent Saori Shirosaki

It's almost Christmas time and that means we'll all gather 'round the old tube and watch It's a Wonderful Life, which tells the story of George Bailey, who always wanted to see the world but never left Bedford Falls, N.Y.

You'll remember that George, ready to leave on his around-the-world honeymoon, had to change his plans to quell a run on his family's two-bit bank.  The problem was panic: his bank had properly used its depositors' assets to underwrite mortgages to the locals.  But when the depositors wanted all their money at once, he couldn't satisfy their demands because he didn't have the cash on hand.

Now George Bailey was a honest man and – spoiler alert – his story has a happy ending.

But the same cannot be said of the 2022 remake starring Sam Bankman-Fried, the disheveled boy-man who sent $10,000,000,000 of his depositors' money up the chimney.  Somehow when Sam jumped onto the Foosball table in his Bahamas penthouse/office/sin bin and explained, “the money's not here, it's in my worthless crypto currency,” the customers were not comforted.

Cue flashback:

 Out of control, according to the normally-staid New York Times.  Tell us more:

In 2019, Mr. Bankman-Fried hit upon an idea: Why not build a cryptocurrency exchange that could bring in revenue to help fund Alameda’s activities?

FTX was born. It moved from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, where Mr. Bankman-Fried built his base of operations, and the exchange took off. In financial presentations to investors, the company claimed in 2021 that it was raking in $1 billion in annual revenue by charging fees to customers who wanted to trade cryptocurrencies on its platform. It marketed itself aggressively to ordinary investors eager to trade the hot new thing.

Both FTX and Alameda benefited from [Sam's FTT] token’s rising value. The exchange began using FTT to make dozens of investments worth billions of dollars in other crypto companies. A 2019 investor presentation for the new exchange said, “FTT will be the backbone of the growing FTX ecosystem,” and promised investors and customers “guaranteed liquidity,” or the ability to always get back their money.

FTX investors want their money back

In the presentation, a cartoon avatar of mop-topped Mr. Bankman-Fried gave a thumbs up and simply said: “So easy!”

At the same time, Alameda, which held a large stake in the token, began using its FTT holdings as collateral for more loans to facilitate its trading activities. As of Sept. 30, Alameda had roughly $13 billion in assets, according to Thursday’s bankruptcy filings, although Mr. Ray, the restructuring lawyer and newly appointed chief executive, said he had no confidence in the numbers.

The intertwined business model, with FTT propping up the two entities, turned Mr. Bankman-Fried into a crypto hero. Even if many backers and supporters of the exchange didn’t quite understand how it all worked, they were taken in by his compelling pitch. He styled himself as an idiosyncratic genius willing to engage with regulators and call out the scams plaguing the crypto industry. He also expressed a commitment to give away much of his wealth to charity. 

Charity?  He's like the Paul Newman of crypto, if there was nothing in the Newman's Own salad dressing bottles.

Before we even wade into the crypto nonsense, let's spend a minute on these two entities, Alameda and FTX.   

FTX claimed it was an “exchange.”  If only anyone could help us define what an exchange is.  We found this thing called the “Securities Exchange Act of 1934.” Let's see what it has to say!

The term “exchange” means any organization, association, or group of persons, whether incorporated or unincorporated, which constitutes, maintains, or provides a market place or facilities for bringing together purchasers and sellers of securities.

15 U.S.C. § 78c(a)(1). (This means it's actually the law of the land as enacted by the Congress.)

So an exchange is a place, perhaps an online space, or perhaps a street corner in Lower Manhattan where buyers and sellers can meet and, um, exchange stuff. Central to this definition is the idea that the exchange never owns the objects it's trading, so if it goes toes up, the buyers and sellers can take their marbles and trades elsewhere. 

Can any Tom, Dick or Sammy run their own exchanges? Well,

An exchange may be registered as a national securities exchange...by filing with the Commission an application for registration in such form as the Commission, by rule, may prescribe containing the rules of the exchange and such other information and documents as the Commission, by rule, may prescribe as necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors 

15 U.S.C. § 78f. Regulated to protect investors? What a ridiculous idea!  Sam would never allow anyone to protect his investors, you'll be shocked to learn, even as he swanned around Washington distributing campaign cash and acres of sincere b.s. on a bipartisan basis.

And how was he supposed to know about the arcane provisions of the fundamental securities law of the United States?  Was he just supposed to ask his dad?  What would he know about it?

Just because your dad holds a chair in law and business at Stanford Law School doesn't mean he knows anything about the basics of financial markets, apparently.

A course on anxiety psychoeducation at Stanford Law School?  Probably something all those Silicon Valley geniuses who lost hundreds of millions of their investors' money in his son's scam might be interested in about now.

And mom wouldn't be much help either, would she?

Distributive justice?  That's the branch of philosophy where you learn the ethical basis for redistributing wealth from investors into your own pocket.  As a member of the Class of 1976, she would have been able to hear about distributive justice from John Rawls himself, and pass along his wisdom to her boy Sam.

But we digress. As we said earlier, FTX was not an exchange because it took control of assets and then invested them for its own purposes, mostly in its affiliated unregulated hedge fund, Alameda.

When an institution does that with your cash, we call it a “bank.”  Like George Bailey's Building & Loan.  Let's go back to the Securities Exchange Act:

The term “bank” means any...banking institution or savings association, .. a substantial portion of the business of which consists of receiving deposits or exercising fiduciary powers similar to those permitted to national banks...and which is supervised and examined by State or Federal authority having supervision over banks or savings associations.

So when an institution reduces you to the status of an unsecured creditor, and then invests your assets someplace, it's acting like a bank.  And it has to be regulated because that's a dangerous business.  There are thousands of pages of bank regulation and multiple agencies all sticking their noses in bank business exactly to prevent your bank from doing what FTX did.

To be fair, sometimes the regulation is so nobbled that the financial institution invests in crap deals for the benefit of bank management and the bank fails.  Generally, however, the small depositors are protected by insurance and the big investors bribe Congress for a bailout.  Just ask the “Keating Five.”

We could quote even more fascinating provisions of federal law, but let's cut to the truth about regulation of crypto crap.  As our old friend Dennis Kelleher explained, 

Too many (again, who should know better) are still repeating industry talking points that the FTX collapse shows that new legislation and regulation is needed. That is not true. The current laws and rules are fully adequate to address the lawlessness going on in crypto. It has been estimated that around 80% of the crypto tokens comfortably fall within the longstanding, clear, black letter law definition of a security (around since 1933) and the remaining fall within the equally longstanding definition of commodity (around since 1936). The problem is that the crypto industry refuses to comply with the securities and commodities laws (that exist to protect investors, customers and financial stability) and, therefore, the vast majority of crypto products are unregistered securities and commodities being traded on unregistered exchanges

Last meeting of FTX Compliance Committee

All of these made up tokens, including Sam's own FTT, are securities. It's illegal to sell unregulated securities to the general public. If you sell them by fraudulently failing to disclose material information, like you put a supposed $10 billion worth in an affiliated hedge fund for your own benefit, you can go to jail. 

Why haven't our vast armies of financial regulators done anything up to now?  One sad truth is that financial regulators don't step in until it's too late, as was the case with the S&L crisis and the 2008 market meltdown.  Another less charitable view belongs to the aforementioned Mr. Kelleher, who has spent his entire professional life working in the financial-services sector:

Sure, some in the industry said they wanted to “engage” with regulators (on terms they dictate) and even wanted to be regulated (albeit as little as possible), but the clear strategy has always been to just break the law and at the same time buy as many politicians as possible to get special interest legislation that would give it the weakest, most friendly possible regulator and regulation. They wanted the form and appearance of regulation without the substance of real regulation. That’s why the industry keeps pushing for the CFTC to be its regulator: the CFTC is the smallest and least funded financial regulator. Crypto believed it would be the easiest to capture, dominate, manipulate, and keep defanged.

Stop beating around the bush, Dennis, and just tell us what's on your mind.

We suspect that the brazenness of Jughead Bankman-Fried's thievery will bring down the regulatory hammer, but we also suspect that those who entrusted their life savings to him are, to use one final term of art in the field of securities regulation, s*** out of luck.

We suggest that the poor sods whose lives have been ruined by this finagle enroll as quickly as possible in a course of “anxiety psychoeducation.” And if you live in Palo Alto, you're in luck, because you can walk across the Camino Real and sign up today!

Broken News: The Red Puddle

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

What happened to that Red Wave?  We know the answer: it crashed against the rocks of real voters.  Our topic today is: what happened to the pundits and gasbags who for months predicted that Red Wave?

The short answer is of course nothing.  They will continue to dispense conventional wisdom and memory-hole their farcically-wrong pre-election prognostications.

The pundits were spot on as always

But there's a longer answer provided by long-time media critic Dan Froomkin:

Ever since they started handicapping the 2022 election...leading political reporters and pundits consistently predicted a midterm shellacking for Joe Biden and Democrats. It’s almost like they were looking forward to it.

They never even considered that voters might reject extremism.

No wonder they didn’t see it coming.

They wrote about the inevitably devastating impact of Biden’s low approval ratings. They wrote about the undeniable historical trends. And more recently, they wrote relentlessly, about inflation as a Democratic albatross, even though it was a global phenomenon being exploited by fossil-fuel and grocery-store giants.

After the Dobbs decision, they briefly entertained the notion that things might go another way. But then they dismissed it entirely.

By contrast, what any responsible, halfway-intelligent and not coopted political reporter should have been asking, over and over again, is: After all this — after Trump’s attempt to steal the election, after a violent right-wing assault on the Capitol, and with the GOP swearing fealty to MAGA, spreading vile conspiracy theories about white replacement, and accusing teachers of grooming — how could America possibly vote for Republicans ever again?

That's a harder question, especially in Texas and Florida, which we'll have to leave for another day.  Today we seek only to turn the hot lights on some of the supposed experts who were left with their junk flopping in the breeze when the Red Tide receded.

Here's that Niagara of conventional wisdom, Politico, getting it wrong to the very end (November 7):

The story went to cherry pick a poll that asked voters what would play a major role in deciding how they would vote.  Lots said the economy.  Can you name a single year in the history of polling when voters didn't say the economy was a major issue?  Our lines are open!  Politico also cited a finding that 70% of voters thought the country was on the wrong track.  By a marvel of meta-incomprehension, Politico itself took the wrong track and concluded that this was bad for Democrats.  Have you met any Democrat after Dobbs, Trump, DeathSantis, election denial, endless hate speech and acts, and an attempted and continuing insurrection led by Trump and supported by 90% of Republicans who thinks the country on the right track?  

Speaking of the Usual Suspects, let's go back to October 28:

That voters might have other things on their minds than Joe Biden (whose performance since inauguration given his razor-thin majorities has been nothing short of astonishing) never seemed to find purchase in the great empty spaces of Cillizza's brainpan.   Women worried about losing their half-century right to control their own bodies thanks to a Republican-bent Supreme Court?  Not an issue...for white men like him.

Not to be outdone in quoting some poll data and then free associating it to nonsense, reliably wrong Chuck Todd opened Meet the Press on October 23 thusly:

Overall, the battle for congressional control, it's a dead even 47-46. But if you go under the hood of our poll, this brand new poll, you will see that among likely voters, Republicans have an advantage, and among the final group of persuadable voters, Republicans have the advantage. That is why it feels as if the wind has shifted a little bit here.

Dead even?  That must be good news for Democrats because, as pundits never tire of telling us, the party controlling the White House usually loses a bunch of seats at the midterms.  There was indeed a mighty wind brewing but poor old Chuck needed a weatherman, or perhaps a 25-year-old woman, to tell him which way it was blowing.

Sadly the results were not much better at the summits of the journalism food chain.  Here's The Washington Post's Michael Scherer on October 23:

You would think that it's always the case that Democrats express pre-election shpilkes, in part because they're Democrats and in part because it's tactically wise to strike fear into the heart of your base by claiming that even a single vote could change the outcome (as indeed appears to be the case).  And Republicans always express steely confidence, in part because they're Republicans and in part because everyone they talk to at the Bushwood Country Club bar thinks like them.  That's why if you just rely on party hacks, you will, like Scherer, f*** up.

By the way, what's he saying now?

We're seeing a lot of passive voice in the post-election coverage.  The midterms looked like a GOP lock?  To whom?  And with the keen hindsight now being deployed by Mr. Scherer, how could any f***in' idiot have missed the signs?

Here's his post-mortem:

They [Republicans] were hobbled by unprepared first-time candidates, fundraising shortfalls and Trump, whose self-concern required constant attention — right up to the eve of the election, when he forced party bosses to beg him once again to delay a presidential campaign announcement.

Interestingly, each of these phenomena were in public view before Election Day. Anyone could have observed them if they weren't too busy jabbering to consultants and their fellow hacks.

But don't worry, Scherer based his coverage not on what real voters think but on the same disingenuous clowns who misled him all along:

This story of how the Republican Party red wave became a ripple — with Republicans on track to narrowly win control in the House and still at risk of falling short in the Senate — is based on interviews with 47 strategists, donors, advisers and candidates from both parties...

Which is why he focuses on insider baseball and not on the views of his fellow citizens worried as much about the future of democracy as reporters are about the soaring price of Cheetos in the Post's vending machines.  It also means that he regurgitates the Republican talking point that their problem is not their sucky white supremacist pro-rich anti-women anti-Earth views; it's that they can't find anyone to put them across as smoothly at St. Ronald of Bitburg did 40 years ago. Just because the Republicans pour this into the ears of credulous reporters doesn't make it true.

We've saved the apex of the journalism food pyramid for last.  How did The New York Times do?

Not so good:

lot of egg on plenty of faces but it does seem like the Times was particularly strident predicting a Republican wave long before votes were counted. pic.twitter.com/8tq0HsAnsP

— Eric Schultz (@EricSchultz) November 12, 2022

But surely The Times in its post-election analysis would not step on the same cowpie as the Post by relying on self-serving spin from Republican hacks, right?

Sorry, Scotty:

So how many interviews does it take to f**k up a story like this?  Seventy!  And it's yet another triumph of the passive voice:

All the conditions appeared to have been set for a Democratic wipeout: inflation at 40-year highs, concerns about crime, elevated gas prices, the typical thrust for change.

Appeared to whom, we ask.

Did the Times piece delve deeply on the vital issues that caused millions of voters to gag at the thought of voting Republican?

Our careful review of the piece reveals:

 Phrase not found.  

In fairness, the word is found in a subhead several thousand words into the piece, in connection with a brief, stupid discussion of how the loss of reproductive rights protected for a half-century helped the Democrats, wait for it, raise money.

How about one more fun word search?

 Yeah, we knew that.

So like the Bourbon Restoration, the political punditocracy has risen from their debacle having learned nothing.  Unlike the Bourbons, though, they've forgotten everything and appear ready to commit the same elementary mistakes beginning today:

Sure, that sounds right.  If Republicans are able to shut down the government, default on the national debt, disarm Ukraine, and spend the next two years yelling about Hunter Biden, you can be sure that our reliably wrong pundits will faithfully pass along the talking points they get from their red-hot Republican “sources” who will term the ongoing Republican subversion of democratic government a “midterm stalemate.”  

UPDATE, November 13:  Remember Dan Froomkin?  Here's his latest: