Broken News: We Bombed in New Haven, by Isaac Chotiner

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Edward Whalley in New Haven

Isaac Chotiner on insufferable New York Times and former Harvard Salient columnist Ross Douthat?

The guy who eviscerated intellectual frauds like Richard Epstein and Counselor Underpants himself, Alan Dershowitz?  This was going to be good!

Reader, it wasn't.  It was very bad.

The trouble began on the very first line:

This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, ...

Ever met anyone in liberal America who thinks that, other than his supposed friends and colleagues on the Times Editorial Page, who have to say something, anything, not horrible about this guy?  Thank you, Michelle Goldberg.

But in case you thought your friend Isaac was just applying a little soft-soap before getting down to cases, read on:

Douthat, who joined the Times in 2009, occupies an all but vanished position: he is a Christian conservative who lives among liberals, writes for them, and—even when he is arguing against abortion, or against “woke progressivism”—has their respectful attention.

Again, who on the left respects Douthat's ceaseless efforts to control the bodies of half the American population?  He may have our attention, like the various cast members of The Aristocrats, but it's hardly respectful.

Let's start with the bloody coathanger in the room: his unrelenting campaign to justify taking away a woman's right to an abortion and to force her to give birth to any unwanted pregnancy, even those arising out of incest or rape:

 

Although he attempts to base his views on “science,” in fact it's based solely on Catholic metaphysics which concludes, not based on anything that Jesus Christ fella was known to have said, that a 64-cell zygote is a unique human being.  It follows by Jesuit logic that aborting it is just the same as firing high-powered machine gun bullets into a classroom of children (which Ross doesn't seem to be too bothered by).

If his claim that “science,” was on his side, you'd expect his views to be shared by all reputable biologists and medical professionals.  Of course it isn't, which means that either those scientists don't understand life science as well as liberal America's favorite conservative commentator, or, more likely, his whole science-based argument is utter bollocks.

By the way, if what Mr. Respectful Attention has to say is true, that means that between 800,000 and 1,400,000 American women commit murder every year, joined by hundreds of thousands of medical accomplices.  That's a lot of murderers walking among us.   

You don't have to be St. Thomas Aquinas to understand that if your conclusion is bats*** crazy, maybe your premises are off, even if you can get Michelle Goldberg to paint some lip gloss on your extremist religious views.

(The paragraph in which Goldberg, who does not believe that that abortion is murder, tries to defend her favorite conservative constitutes the entirety of Chotiner's discussion of Douthat's extreme views on abortion.)

Do pro-choice progressives actually admire Douthat, as Chotiner insists?  Let's ask Rewire News Group, a reliable source of news and opinion on matters of interest to women, like their reproductive freedom:

 You can feel the respect.

Here's another respectful admiring comment by a former Rewire columnist:

Ross Douthat...has sketched an utterly fantastical vision of what he sees a post-Roe America looking like in Imagining A Prolife America. It's maddening for all kinds of reasons, but mostly for its utter ignorance of what's happening in countries where abortion is illegal. (Hint: the truth doesn't bear out his "assumption" that "a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it.").

The columnist was Michelle Goldberg.

Chotiner never bothers to examine the substance of Douthat's cruel and nutty positions on abortion and birth control although he does mention in passing that Douthat advocates denying legal protection to same-sex couples who wish to marry and parent children and get on with their lives with the same legal respect and dignity accorded to different-sex couples.  Chotiner does let the subject of his story offer up countless windy generalizations, e.g., “he is also fascinated by other forms of spirituality and by the supernatural, as well as, in the case of U.F.O.s, by the simply unexplainable.”[Like why the New York Times prints his crap? – Ed.]

Instead The New Yorker's once-fearless correspondent holds forth at great length about Douthat's family background (his mother was a whackjob too, so he comes by it honestly), and his blissful home life in bucolic New Haven, Conn., with his wife and four children.  What this has to do with anything relevant to Douthat's faux-intellectual extremist views is not apparent to the reader, but it does serve to both humanize and legitimize an otherwise creepy guy whom no one would have lunch with in Leverett House.

Which was probably Douthat's pitch all along.  Instead of relegating Chotiner to an icy telephone interview, Douthat love-bombed Chotiner by inviting him into his beautiful home and meeting his beautiful wife.

But Douthat is not your beautiful automobile.  Instead, he's a hack who has bought into reactionary Catholic metaphysics and sees his God-given duty as imposing it on the rest of us.

Is that admirable?  Listen to the story of Hadley Duvall, raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was 12:

#KYGov: The Andy Beshear campaign is up on TV with this spot --

Hadley to camera:

"This is to you, Daniel Cameron. To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable" pic.twitter.com/2tW09U4ZUO

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 20, 2023

No word on whether Ross Douthat is Hadley Duvall's favorite conservative philosopher.  

That's probably because Chotiner decided not to interview any victims of Douthat's forced-birth Crusade.  They might have cast a pall over Chotiner's piece about a lovable deep-thinking family man.  

It also might have been what some of us call “journalism.”  It's a pity that Isaac Chotiner decided to give up on that honorable profession.

Our Great Pundits solve the problem of indigestible refugees. Their solution will make you vomit.

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

The influx of desperate refugees continues to bewitch, bollix, and bewilder our great public intellectual poo-bahs.  

We'll get to their miserable lucubrations shortly, but first we do have to point out that we offered up our humble views on how to solve the supposed refugee “crisis” just last week.

If the problem is that these refugees cannot legally work to support themselves for 180 days due to racist US law, we suggested that states could employ these refugees to do useful work and provide cash grants to those who do so.  

Amazingly enough, this idea appears to be getting some traction, according to a September 12, 2023 story in The New York Times:

Mr. Yale-Loehr and other immigration law experts have called for a different approach that they argue is allowed under federal law: having state governments hire asylum seekers directly. The University of California regents, for example, announced earlier this year that the university system would explore a way to hire students who lack legal status and work permits.

Just remember you read it first in the Spy.

So that's a solution that would lessen the financial burden on cities while giving refugees useful work experience and actually get stuff done that they might benefit from.  Sounds like a win-win-win.

Anybody got any worse ideas?

When we need useless (or worse) conventional wisdom on any topic of great public interest, we turn second to the The Washington Post editorial page (you already know what our first stop is for drivel).

Fareed Zakaria, come on down!

As Jon Stewart used to say, go on.

Actually, before we do, notice the classic Both Siders bloviator setup.  It's not just that your gasbag knows what's best for the country.  The problem is that Democrats need to confess their error and repent.  You could count on the hairs on Jeff Bezos's head the number of columns that are teased with “Republicans need to admit they're wrong on ....”  Only Democrats need to repent.  Republicans are permanently engraved for a blessing in the Book of Bloviating Bull****.

Why is that?  Is it in their manual?

But back to the, um, substance of Fareed the Magnificent's argument:

There is only one solution to this crisis....The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

How does one pundit pack so much wrong into one little sentence?

First the President does not have the power to suspend the admission of asylum seekers, which is a right guaranteed by statute and our international treaty obligations.  The Tangerine-Faced Defendant tried to assert such a right by falsely smearing refugees as public health risks.  After a series of court reverses, the Biden Administration dropped that patently fraudulent pretext.

(Zakaria supports his claim by linking to a piece arguing that the President could lock up all asylum seekers, a non-frivolous but unspeakably cruel and ridiculously expensive “solution.”).

Since Zakaria seems to have trouble doing any of his own fact-checking we'll give him the statute:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section.

8 U.S.C. §1158.

There's a lot more but nowhere does the law give the President the power to do what Zakaria suggests.

So Zakaria wants either to turn back desperate refugees at the border or lock them up indefinitely as a tonic to morale.  Seems like a pretty dire solution to a problem that Zakaria characterizes as “indigestion.”  That a supposedly respectable intellectual wrote this swill and that an allegedly great newspaper thought it was worthy of publication is making us nauseous.

To make us feel better, we took a slug of the Pepto-Bismol for sickening ideas: history.

Zakaria's claim that refugees and more generally immigrants cause an intestinal blockage of the body politic is hardly a new diagnosis.

In 1939, with hundreds of thousands of German Jews trapped in Hitler's Germany, Sen. Robert Wagner proposed admitting an additional 10,000 refugee children.  The law was sunk by anti-immigration forces who believed that the nation's vitals were already clogged by immigrants:

Source: U.S. Holocaust Museum

Until the nation solved its immigration problems. To opponents of immigration, that means never.

It turns out that anti-immigration advocates have been troubled by digestive issues for generations:

 

C. Jaret, Troubled by Newcomers: Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Action during Two Eras of Mass Immigration to the United States 18 Journal of American Ethnic History at 11 (1999).

Since that article was published in 1999, we have all seen how the influx of new immigrants to places like New York City have destroyed its art centers, museums and symphony orchestras, right?

Let's see what's in today's New York Times:

Well, give 'em time. 

Another through line of anti-immigrant bigotry is that it's not immigration that causes the intestines to knot, it's the wrong kind of immigrants, as the passage from Professor Jaret states.  In 1939 it was alien Jews like this obvious threat to American values:

whose father tried desperately to obtain U.S. visas for their family, but was frustrated at every turn by anti-immigrant Jew haters in the prewar State Department.

Now, it's scary brown people like this guy:

Wait just a hot minute here?  Are you telling us that the same guy who recycles anti-immigrant tropes from generations of bigots is in fact – an immigrant?

 

Given his delicate anti-immigrant tum-tum, we had assumed he was a descendant of Squanto.

Wrong-o!

He's in fact a member of an elite intellectual family in India, attended the finest schools (like Ron DeSantis!), and now warns of the dangers of allowing in any more desperate women and children from the slums of El Salvador or the small towns of Honduras.

It's bad enough when the grandchildren of German immigrant pimps like Donald Trump tell us about the horrors of immigrants; it's even worse when it's an immigrant who apparently believes that the United States should welcome well-born intellectuals like him, while leaving the poor and persecuted refugee to her fate.

We have a hard time digesting that.  In fact, it makes us want to vomit.

We Solve the Latest Bad News for Biden. Don't Thank Us.

Downtown Syracuse, shown here overrun with refugees

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with
Maria Boroaroma on Staten Island

How much more bad news can one President take?

Already reeling from galloping egg price inflation (down back to around $2/dozen), economic stagnation (with unemployment at a 40-year low), his craven withdrawal from Afghanistan (after 20 years of useless war and destruction), his midterm wipeout (which also didn't happen), and the collapse of the stock market (near its all-time highs), our doddering Commander-in-Chief (who has deftly pulled together a worldwide alliance to beat back Russian aggression) now faces his most ominous challenge, according to All Media:

The unconstitutional use of razor sharp floating killer barriers in the Rio Grande by Texas and the equally unconstitutional effort to criminalize giving an undocumented mother a ride to CVS to pick up her prescription by Florida are not the border crises that the Newspaper of Record is worried about.  

Instead, it's a supposed crisis caused by the fact that refugees are coming to cities to New York without the legal ability to work for six months, thanks to anti-immigrant legislation passed by Congress.

We'll get to the solution to this calamity after we let The New York Times outline its full horrors:

Eric Adams, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, declared this week that without a federal bailout and clampdown at the border, swelling migration “will destroy New York City.” The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, has promised to sue Mr. Abbott. And the liberal mayor of the third-largest city, Chicago, began pleading last month for the White House to step in.

“Let me state this clearly: The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.

It was nice of Eric to drive in from his home in Jersey City to warn that New York City, although it survived a mass terrorist attack and a devastating superstorm, is about to collapse under the strain of refugees who have moved there to live and work.

The Mayor of Chicago was able to put the problem in non-hysterical fashion, which is that cities need further support, mostly financial, to accommodate the new arrivals until they can become self-supporting.

It's not the economic issue that has GOP bigot-fluffers salivating; it's the possibility of using the specter of an “alien invasion” to animate white racists in the North and preserve its narrow House majority, which is regarded as otherwise unsalvageable due to the current shambolic dumpster fire that is the Republican-run House:

A year later, the migrant waves he helped set in motion have put northern “sanctuary” cities increasingly on edge, their budgets stretched, their communities strained. And a border crisis that has animated Republican politics for years is now dividing the Democratic Party. Humanitarian impulses are crashing into desperate resource constraints and once-loyal Democratic allies have reluctantly joined Republicans to train their fire on President Biden.

Let's put to one side for the moment the inconvenient facts that refugees are not coming to places like New York because they are supposed “sanctuary” cities and that Biden did not set in motion any “waves” (unless by that the Times means that he has refused to illegally bar all asylum admissions unlike his crooked depraved predecessor who opened his campaign with a lie-filled rant about Mexican rapists and assassins). We just note that the Times, in its imitable fashion, tries desperately to euphemize the white racism and hysteria that accompanies most of the opposition to refugee resettlement.  

The bucolic charm of Staten Island is threatened by refugees

Let's go to Staten Island, where opposition to sheltering a handful of refugees is undoubtedly based on economic anxiety, or condescending elites, or whatever the f*** else apologists for white racism like to trot out:

STATEN ISLAND - Protests continued Tuesday night on Staten Island, where hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets with megaphones, signs and American flags.

"I realize it’s a sanctuary city, but there has to be a limit to our compassion," said protester, Michele Rubin. "We don’t have the infrastructure, we are not vetting anybody, we don’t know if anybody has a criminal background or what they did in their country of origin."

The borough has been at the center [Surely, far edge? – Ed.] of New York City's migrant crisis since the end of last month, when the Adams administration started to house asylum-seekers at St. John Villa Academy. 

Fun fact: refugees are vetted by CBP and ICE before being released.  Adults with criminal records are detained.  But you wouldn't know that by watching Rupert Murdoch's Fox New York bulls*** volcano, WNYW-TV.

In fact, cities and towns across New York State are in desperate need of workers, as even the Times had to admit:

“I’d hire probably 20 people tomorrow,” said Mr. Buicko, the president of the Galesi Group, a Schenectady-based developer, who said prospective workers are still waiting for legal authorization. “It’s crazy that we can’t fill a void, we don’t have population growth, and we’ve got people that we’re just bringing in, sitting around doing nothing.”

Mr. Buicko is not alone. Across the state, many large and small employers have expressed an overwhelming willingness to hire recent asylum seekers; migrants are even more eager to work.

The only bar to refugees becoming productive workers is the legal requirement that asylum seekers wait 180 days before they can receive work authorization.  Until then they must be supported by family, friends, or whatever aid cities like New York (pre-utter collapse) can provide.

Joe Biden can't waive that requirement because it's in the statute.  He could provide a type of temporary status for certain refugees based on state of origin, thus creating a two-tier system separating favored refugees from the rest.

There's actually another solution.  Instead of flushing $432,000,000 down the toilet of Jersey Eric's useless friends, that kind of money could be turned to good use.

States with rational Democratic governors like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, all favored destinations for refugees, could provide cash grants to refugees willing to work on state-sponsored projects, many of which could involved caring for the newly-arrived.  Shelters need to be built out, children need tutoring, the sick need health care aides.  All these tasks could be provided by refugees themselves in exchange for the grants, which would also permit them to become self-sufficient and move out of the strained shelter system.

I hear you asking how states can pay refugees who are legally barred from working.  Fortunately, thanks to dead bent Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia, now holding court in a much hotter place with his friend Torquemada, state sovereignty cannot be questioned.

Thank you, Nino Scalia!

At least that's what he said when evil Kenyan-born Socialist Barack Obama tried to restructure Medicaid to compel states to cover lots of folks who needed health care but couldn't afford it.  

That is forbidden, according to Scalia and his fellow Defenders of the Faith:

Coercing States to accept conditions risks the destruction of the “unique role of the States in our system.” ....“[T]he Constitution has never been understood to confer upon Congress the ability to require the States to govern according to Congress’ instructions.” New York, 505 U. S., at 162. Congress may not “simply commandeer the legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” 

NFIB v. Sibelius, 567 U.S. 519, 677 (2012) (dissent)(although on this point this was the majority opinion)

What could be closer to the core of state sovereignty than its decision to spend its money as it sees fit, in the absence of a Fourteenth Amendment violation? And who could bring such a challenge? A bunch of goons on Staten Island?

Seems like a small legal risk to us, and well worth running if the alternative is to subject President Biden and every Democrat running for Congress to 16 months of GOP smears about the invasion of Mexican rapists and all of us to Jersey Eric's thirsty rants about the imminent collapse of the city he likes to hang out in from time to time.

"Mitch McConnell" and compassion: no results found

By Ida Tarbell
Washington Bureau with Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling

The spectacle of decrepit Republican Senator and long-time reactionary powerhouse Mitch McConnell falling to pieces on live television has engendered a number of half-assed reactions from the usual suspects unwilling to state the obvious truth: this decompensating old tosser is unfit for office, or anything else other than serving as Elaine Chao's love machine.  

Mitch is not looking so spry these days

Our personal favorite came from former Republican plug-ugly and rabble-rouser, now doing business as one of our Wonderful Republican Allies, Charlie Sykes:

And I – I mean, I hope people react with nuance. I hope they react with compassion. But this is kind of a warning shot that that when you have people, you know, who have health problems and who have decided not to step aside, there can be these kinds of difficulties. And and so I, I hope that people will react with restraint to this. But we don’t live in an age of either nuance, restraint, or compassion, do we?

We sure don't, Charlie. For those of you who are unable or unwilling to recall the sordid pasts of our newly-minted allies (pretty much all of you), here's a handy reminder from the chronicler of their misdeeds, Mr. D. Glass:

In 2016 Sykes provided nearly unlimited airtime to conservative court candidate Rebecca Bradley after writings in which she revealed her virulent homophobia, compared birth control to murder and suggested women could be blamed for their date rape were publicized.

The broadcast behavior of Sykes was particularly despicable on issues of race and poverty. He used his show to broadcast a blatantly racist video mocking food stamp recipients and has referred to the First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama, as “mooch.”... 

Not hearing a f***ton of compassion from Old Charlie. But what the hell this is America and anyone no matter how slimy or vicious should be able to reinvent themselves, as least as a useless taking head on MSNBC.  (This is the Nicolle Wallace rule, named after the former shill for Iraq warmonger and torture-lovin' President George W. Bush.)

We'd rather look at whether the intended object of our compassion ever showed even a flicker of that worthy emotion for any other human being. Ever.

You'll be shocked to know that our search engines weren't a lot of help:

It turns out that's an understatement.  

Let's go a million years back in American history when 26 little kids and their teachers were massacred at Sandy Hook by someone who borrowed a high-powered assault weapon from his mother.  Who could fail to be moved by the anguish of the survivors who had to identify their children and loved ones from their backpacks, because the victims had been torn to shreds by the military-grade weaponry?  Hint: the answer rhymes with “Snitch Shmeconnell:”

in January 2013 — less than month after Sandy Hook —... after Obama signed 23 executive orders on guns in response to the tragedy that left 20 kindergartners dead — McConnell recorded a robocall and sent it out to gun owners in his state.

“President Obama and his team are doing everything in their power to restrict your constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” McConnell said in the recording. “Their efforts to restrict your rights, invading your personal privacy and overstepping their bounds with executive orders, is just plain wrong.”

The Republicans boasted of his post Sandy Hook compassion

McConnell also refused a meeting with the Sandy Hook families, according to someone familiar with the request, ...But eventually, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated a modest bipartisan background checks bill, known as Manchin-Toomey. ...

When Manchin-Toomey finally came to the Senate floor for a vote in April 2013, McConnell pushed his conference to oppose the bill, which ultimately failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60 votes needed for passage. ...

Jesse Benton — a conservative activist who managed Paul’s 2010 Senate campaign and who McConnell enlisted to manage his 2014 one — said that McConnell at the time “said something to me like, ‘I hope you know I’m not planning on supporting any of this crap.' ”

Protecting future generations of schoolchildren – like those in Uvalde, Texas and Parkland, Florida – from being slaughtered in their schools?  To Sen. Compassion, it's all “crap.”

What about compassion for the millions of Americans who had to face illness, possibly mortal, without health insurance, or the tens of thousands who died unnecessarily every year because they couldn't afford to pay for lifesaving care?  What did Sen. Compassion say about universal health care, after it had been in effect for seven years and its life-saving benefits were apparent to even the meanest intelligence?  Let's ask CBS News:

That would have worked out great for the at least 18,000,000 who relied on Obamacare to protect their health.

Just to complete the compassion hat trick, what about the millions of women who want to terminate their pregnancies, including those who conceived as a result of rape or incest?  How much compassion did Mitch have for them?

Thanks to Mitch's tireless efforts to pack the Supreme Court with extremist forced-birthers, that bent Court took away a woman's right to control her own body last year, leaving women in red states the choice of bearing an unwanted child or returning to the bad old days of coathangers.  Was he sensitive to their pain?  According to NPR he was concerned about basically anything else:

The desperate women, the unwanted babies born into poverty, the septic abortions, the lives ruined – to Compassionate Mitch, it would all come out in the political wash.

So what's the point?  It's not to suggest that we publicly mock Mitch for his disability (the way the most recent Republican president did to a reporter with a serious neurological disorder).  It's to turn the spotlight on who is entitled to compassion in Republican America and who isn't.

To Republicans and their apologists, like former insult comic Charlie Sykes, compassion is reserved for white men.  He's not alone in that view.  Salami-lovin' David Brooks recently condemned us coastal elites for showing insufficient compassion to white bigots.  And never Oregon Governor Nick Kristof recycled the same tiresome nonsense just last week.

Maybe we'd be better off if we directed our compassion to the desperate and hopeless who dwell in our midst.

Except for Ron DeSantis.