Cognitive Decline: In Washington, it's a contagious disease

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.

The media has been spilling a lot of pixels these days ruminating without evidence about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.  Here's just a few egregious examples from the last two weeks alone:

🚨🚨Scoop: Biden’s cheat sheets - use of note cards, pre-screened questions worries donors. https://t.co/i2XptZAAOk

— Jim VandeHei (@JimVandeHei) February 23, 2024

Do you prepare for important meetings? Court hearings?  Speeches?   Congratulations, you may be a vegetable! 

If you don't believe us (or conventional-wisdom fount Axios), just ask The New York Times:

It appears that cognitive decline is contagious.  Consider the nonstop farrago of incomprehensible demented nonsense from the Tangerine-Faced Defendant.  In just one speech he was unable to pronounce “evangelical,” claimed he was leading Nikki Haley by 91 points, complained about “swastickers” plastered on buildings in Washington, said unnamed woke types were replacing baseball fields with “knocker” fields, said everyone agreed with overturning Roe, and repeated the mainstream Republican talking point that doctors were killing babies after they were born.

Those ravings followed hard on the heels of his confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and then later claiming he intended to “interpose” the two names to make a (false) point:

"It’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."

But somehow our mainstream media's cognitive abilities short-circuit when it comes to highlighting the overwhelming evidence of Trump's dementia. You might argue that this cognitive breakdown is severe enough to warrant replacing the broken-down old hacks now covering the election with younger journalists who haven't yet lost their ability to report what's really going on.

Just this week, the failing memories of the press were displayed again in the coverage of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to outlaw IVF on the grounds that the embryos frozen in those test tubes are bouncing bundles of baby joy entitled to the same protections as real live human beings who can be seen without a microscope.

The decision was made possible by the bent Supreme Court's overruling of Roe, on the grounds that states can and should be entrusted to make decisions about matters like reproductive rights and the definition of human life.  Many states had already said that a fertilized egg was as human as the baby Jesus, but those laws had been nullified by Roe. 

As a result of Trump packing the Supreme Court with three new bent forced-birthers, 

there are fears around not only what this means for the future of IVF in Alabama, but reproductive rights across the country. Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, emphasized this didn’t just happen because of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — and it didn’t start with overturning Roe v. Wade, either.

“There has been a concerted effort in Alabama and elsewhere for years to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Extremist politicians see decisions like this as part of the building blocks to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually say that not only are states permitted to ban abortion, but if embryos and fetuses have legal rights the same way as people, then states must ban abortion.”

This was apparent to anyone who followed the issue of reproductive freedom over the past 40 years.  Some, like Ross the boy no one would have lunch with Leverett House, intended this very outcome.

Others like NPR tried to sound the alarm:

“What is happening is that for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to privacy and now that right is going away. States can pass laws banning or restricting reproductive medical procedures.” That covers abortion, but could also include IVF, as it is a process inherently focused on the creation of fertilized eggs — and what happens next with them.

And yet thanks to the cognitive decline of our media, the threat to Alabamans who want to have a child came as an utter shock:

To be fair, it's not just The New York Times that was perplexed by fetal-personhood laws and the demise of reproductive freedom.

Republicans too seem to be suffering from near-universal memory lapses and cognitive breakdown.  

Let's help them reclaim their past. Since 1996, Republican platforms have stated that fetuses are entitled to all the rights of children. Now-forgotten moderate mainstream Republican George Bush liked to emphasize the supposedly inherent humanity of embryos by trotting out in front the cameras what his flacks called “snowflake children,” which were children born from embryos (as indeed all are):

Kellyanne's ex doesn't remember much

The message was unmistakable: Within every frozen embryo were the beginnings of a[n adoptable, artificially produced] child... When Karl Zinsmeister, my domestic policy adviser, suggested inviting a group of snowflake babies to the White House, I thought the idea was perfect. Each had come from a frozen embryo that, rather than being destroyed for research, was implanted in an adoptive mother.

He was using those children as props to explain his opposition to stem cell research using frozen embryos – the same embryos that Republicans are now shocked, shocked to discover are routinely destroyed in IVF procedures.

Just this week, Republicans have piously stated their support for IVF, including the 166 House Republicans who signed onto legislation that would have granted full Constitutional rights to embryos.  These Republicans have such bad short-term memories that you have to wonder if they could pass a competency exam.

Which leads to yet another group of supposedly distinguished political savants: ex-Republicans now doing business as never-Trumper allies, who can't stop moaning about what has happened to their once beloved thoughtful moderate party.

They seem to have forgotten the last 30 years of Republican policy positions on reproductive freedom, Bush's insane spineless anti-science decision to cripple stem cell research, and, of course, the fact that three of the six bent Republican Justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Presidents named Bush.  

George Conway, prominent never-Trumper has to be reminded that he cast his ballot in 2016 for his wife's employer, Trump (who appointed three bent forced-birthers to the Supreme Court, in case you like George have forgotten).  At least when called on it he had the grace to apologize, but otherwise he seems to have forgotten his years toiling in the Republican slime factories for the Federalist Society and Clinton's impeachment.

Or former Iraq warmonger Tom Nichols, who seems to have grave difficulty recalling why his shilling for George Bush's disgraceful war of lies and torture in Iraq was so terrible, including the bit about helping to form today's Republican view that the rule of law is, shall we say, optional.

We can't even characterize the case of longtime Republican neocon bag carrier Bill Kristol as cognitive decline because he started from such a low baseline.  He's forgotten that as late as 2021 he was described by The Washington Post as a “prominent anti-abortion commentator.” 

Back in the day he was the forced-birth movement's favorite yeshiva bocher:

Billy just can't remember

A story that I love is the one where Jody Bottum met with Bill Kristol about a job at The Weekly Standard. Jody told Kristol that the day the Standard wavered on the question of abortion would be the day Jody quit. Jody says Kristol “drew his finger along the desk, tapped it for emphasis and said, “We are square on life and getting squarer.”

Back in those long-ago days, the Standard used a pro-life article written by Kristol as a copy-editing test. This to warn any pro-choicer that this magazine was pro-life.

Those were the days, my friend.  

Here's five words for Billy: woman, uterus, freedom, embryo, hypocrisy. Now let's wait five minutes and see how many he can remember.

That's why when we hear plaintive mourning over the wonderful vanished Republican party of snowflake babies and fetal personhood, we wonder if these blowhards are likewise too cognitively impaired to be taken seriously as contributors to political discourse in our time.

What to do about the epidemic of cognitive decline and memory loss in Washington, afflicting as it does the Washington punditocracy, virtually every elected Republican, and even our dear precious Republican allies?

We think that they all need to take a break from their current pursuits, which clearly strain their increasingly fogged brains, and just take the time to enjoy looking at flowers and clouds from their Chevy Chase porches.

As for us, we'll go ridin' with Biden.

Red Sox Spring Training Preview: It's Time to Load the Schmucks!

It's time for that great Red Sox tradition: the loading of the schmucks!

By Spy Baseball Correspondent Sisyphus
with Jenny Herk in Ft. Myers, Florida

It's a Boston tradition as old as flipping off drivers trying to merge ahead of you on the Pike.

In the depths of winter, thousands of Red Sox fans line up in the cold on Jersey St. to participate in the Loading of the Schmucks.

Every year, the Spy's ace baseball columnist Shill Shamelessly hitchhikes down to Sox Spring Training to bring true Sox believers his peerless insights into the Olde Towne Team gained from his decades of baseball experience and close relationships with Sox insiders.– Ed.

Sox fans, take it from ol' Shill! This is the year! Better line up for Series tickets now, because this is a team of destiny

Sure you'll hear a lot of complaining from the usual Grumpy Gusses complaining about the Red Sox failing to sign any of the top-tier free agents. It would have been the easy, popular thing to do to open up John Henry's bank vault and shell out for an impact pitcher like Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jordan Montgomery.

But the Red Sox supremo is too smart for that.  The fact that Montgomery hasn't gotten the contract he wanted proves how clever John Henry is.

Henry and his brain trust instead shrewdly invested in All-Star reliever Liam Hendriks.  No doubt he'll be ready to go by August, when the Sox are contending for a pennant, and he'll be fully recovered from both Tommy John surgery and a serious form of cancer.  Brains, not bucks – that's the Red Sox story.

And I don't want to hear a lot of whining about how the Sox let Justin Turner get away for short money. Just because Turner was the second most productive hitter in the lineup (.800 OPS, 23 home runs, and 96 RBIs) doesn't mean he was worth the $13 million those silly Blue Jays paid for him.

You've got to remember that the Red Sox are a small-market franchise.  You can't expect them to compete with New York and Los Angeles for expensive talent they way they did before 2019.

If they blow all of John Henry's hard-earned jack on overpriced players, how can you expect them to pay for that great cold cut buffet for all hungry baseball writers, including all the ice-cold 'Gansetts you can drink (or, in ol' Shill's case, stick into his backpack for later consumption at the Palmetto Bug RV Park)?

So here's a shout-out to the 2024 Red Sox and their genius front office.  If I was in the duck boat business, I'd be planning ahead for a busy November!

This winter, as past, the Red Sox are trying to stir up interest in their last-place team by celebrating the loading up of the loyal Red Sox schmucks who travel to Spring Training in Ft. Myers to celebrate the hopeful start of yet another futile Sox season.

Such cynicism, a requirement of membership in Red Sox Nation in the previous century, has returned in full force in recent years as the team that won four World Series championships in 14 years has descended back into the dull mediocrity that Sox fans enjoyed in the days of Frank Malzone and Dick Stuart.

The difference is that now the Red Sox are charging the highest prices in baseball to watch one of its worst teams.  At least when Dalton Jones played, you could watch the game from the bleachers for a buck.

Despite the crushing expense of watching the Sox either live or for a mere $30 a month on their captive TV network, Red Sox billionaire supremo John “I am the boss” Henry has decided to throw his nickels around like manhole covers while he expands his empire into crap like a bunch of tossers kicking a ball in Liverpool, wherever the f*** that is.

By the way, nobody gives two wanks about watching English soccer teams run around and do nothing for 90 minutes on Saturday morning.  Nobody, John, no f***in' body.  Am I going too fast for you?

Despite the caliber of play on the field, and the tightfisted owner's refusal to improve his outfit, the loyal schmucks are loaded up and ready for another unexciting season of Red Sox baseball.

“I look forward to going to Ft. Myers every winter and watch the team,” said schmuck Jeremiah T. Burke of Milton.  “Nothing like cashing those disability checks from the State Police and knocking back a few dozen tall cool ones,” said the former State Police Captain who was injured in the line of duty on a wet floor at Dunkin' Donuts.

His wife Kathleen Burke is another loyal schmuck: “It's so much fun to watch the players work out and run, their taut muscled bodies gleaming in the Florida sunshine.  They're so handsome all I want to do is wait outside the locker room – [I think that's enough from Mrs. Burke –Ed.]

But some schmucks believe that this is the year that the Sox can turn it around.  “This is a good young ballclub and I think that Justin Turner can really step up and be a team leader,” remarked James X. Burke of Wakefield.

Informed that the Sox had lost Turner to free agency because ownership was too cheap to pay up for him, Burke exclaimed, “F***in-A!”

The annual loading up of the schmucks has become a key part of the Red Sox marketing plan.  “Without the millions of schmucks who pay hundreds of dollars for tickets, plus another Benjamin's worth of hot dogs and beer-flavored water, we couldn't afford to give the people of Liverpool the sports team that they deserve, ” said Red Sox PR functionary Tiffany Burke.  “Not to mention $30 a month to watch a mediocre team on TV.”

“And this year we're going to have special days for all the loyal schmucks from around New England without whose support the Sox might actually have to pay for a competitive team,” she said.

“In addition to special games honoring our Maine Schmucks, Rhode Island Schmucks, and Connecticut Schmucks, we're going to target specific cities.”  She mentioned that on Pawtucket Schmuck Night, Pawtucket fans will receive a splinter from the wreckage of McCoy Stadium, abandoned by the Sox minor league affiliate when Rhode Island taxpayers refused to build them a new stadium. 

The excitement around the ceremonial loading of the schmucks was heightened this year when Sox brass announced that baseball genius Theo Epstein was coming back to recruit some deep-pocketed schmuck billionaires to buy Henry out [Surely, advise on strategic issues? – Ed.]

To long-time Red Sox Schmuck Anthony DiBurke of Attleboro, Epstein's return heralds a new age of winning baseball in Boston: “Theo's got a great eye for talent and I'm sure he'll bring in players as good as Mookie Betts.  Or better!”

It's not clear that the Red Sox will even manage to get to .500 this year with their weak staring pitching, lack of bullpen depth, and questionable offense. 

But at least we'll all be able to enjoy great Sox traditions like the season-long loading up and subsequent fleecing of the schmucks!

By the way, the equipment truck arrived in Ft. Myers.

Yard Time: Meet the hatemonger who is supposedly the best friend of 10,000 Jews of Harvard!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Poor Harvard.  The colossus of wealth, power, championship squash teams, and privilege remains besieged.  On the other hand, nothing burnishes its reputation better than the caliber of its tormentors, like long-time Republican hatemonger Rep. Virginia “Shut Up, Girl” Foxx.

We'll get to her.  But first, it sounds as if things are still pretty rough in Harvard Yard.  No less a personage than Acting President Alan Garber '77 is feeling the heat:

Maybe some Jewish students aren't
really Porcellian material

Harvard University’s interim president Alan Garber...is concerned by reports of “social shunning” of Jewish students in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, and said there “needs to be a discussion about what are the limits” of permissible speech....

Garber said that what he finds “most disturbing of all are situations or experiences students describe where they have felt they could not speak in class because there are attacks on Israel or maybe Israelis.”

“They feel unsupported in contradicting them,” he said.... 

Social shunning of Jewish students? This is news to Alan? Why does he think that after careful consideration his application to join the Porcellian Club in 1974 was, um, put on the shelf behind the S.S. Pierce Scotch?

So are we to understand that the crisis at Harvard is that students, especially Jewish students, are afraid to speak?  That would come as a refreshing change to contemporaries of Alan Garber, who remember that students, Jewish and otherwise, would never shut the f*** up, even when they had no f***in' idea of what they were talking about.  A little silence at dinner in Dunster House might even have been welcomed back in the day.

Are today's Harvard students more easily cowed than Alan and his buddies? Let's ask a real journalist who hangs around Harvard a lot these days.

They aren't, reports Jill Abramson '76, former Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Over nearly 10 years I taught 250 students. Some of my students came from privileged backgrounds, like one of my best students, Mary Julia Koch, the daughter of the late David Koch. My students also included lefties, whose doctrinaire comments sometimes annoyed me. But they were willing to respectfully engage with their classmates, like Sophia Downs, a leader of the Harvard affiliate of ...the national antiabortion group. (Aren’t those kinds of class discussions what a university education should be?)....

Alan's contemporary John Roberts '76
always shared his views and his weed freely

During the semester she was in my class, I asked Sophia to take me to one of the Students for Life campus meetings ....Sixty students attended the meeting to listen to the speaker, Kristen Hawkins, head of Students for Life. At a place supposedly infested by cancel culture, there were no disruptions.

You don't say?  

By the way, Alan has recently been informed that it's not just the Jewish students who worry about what happens if they run their mouths:

Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism,...A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views. 

Gee maybe if your views on the current Gaza war involve valorizing the suffering of your compatriots (whoever they are) and ignoring or worse yet exulting in the suffering of your adversaries, maybe you should keep quiet and study your stats problem set.  If you are a Harvard student, you can be assured that despite what your parents have told you your whole life, no one wants to hear your opinions.  And if the dining room conversation makes you uncomfortable, maybe the whole point of a college education is to have your preconceived notions challenged in ways that discomfort you.

But the hurt feelings of Harvard students, real or imagined, aren't the real crisis facing the University.  

The real crisis is that that bad-faith Republican ideologues have decided to jump on the alleged assault on free speech, not to mention former President Claudine Gay's scholarship issues, to attack the entire structure of higher education and free inquiry itself.

Exhibit A: Mean racist old hag Virginia Foxx, previously best known for telling a Black women journalist who asked a perfectly appropriate question to “shut up.”   She, like fellow bad-faith blowhard Elsie Stefanik '06, has decided that attacking Harvard and other universities is a sure path to ill-gotten fame if not fortune.

So who is she anyway?  It turns out that despite the trailer-trash demeanor, she's a canny well-educated reactionary in the mold of a Phyllis Schlafly with a doctorate in, wait for it, education.   She was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election (although not the votes for her in her district).

Virginia Foxx has always been interested in education

Before she glommed onto universities, she had sought to advance bigotry and oppression in America's public schools:

Now Foxx is championing parental rights in schools, a hot-button issue in many states, and recently shepherded a bill through a divided House. She also wants to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.

“Progressivism and the lies it espouses have devastated our public education system,” Foxx says. It’s hardly radical, she says, to declare “men are not women. Women are not men.” 

She knows full well that the path to wrecking American higher education is to attack it at what she thinks she can sell as its weak points: its refusal to take the quantification of white privilege – excuse us, “merit”–  at face value and the supposed climate of anti-Semitism on campus (a campaign immensely aided by brilliant comments like Alan Garber's above).

She knows how to generate headlines like:

As her role model Joe McCarthy proved, you can drag out an inquisition with subpoenas forever, generating additional scurrilous headlines of “coverup” should the unfortunate victim not wish to strip naked for her pleasure.  We'll bet that somewhere in the documents Harvard, no doubt advised by the crack defenders at WilmerHale, someone said something stupid.  That will generate more headlines, more sound bites, and more subpoenas.

If you think that this batsh** crazy supporter of a tangerine-faced bigot and his effort to overthrow democratic government is not really concerned about the well-being of the Jews, just ask her:

Foxx also insisted that her investigation is not being fueled by political or ideological motivations.

“What is driving us is concern for students and for faculty,” she said. “It has nothing to do with ideological beliefs. It’s all about protecting the students.”  

Would she lie to you?

Yes, she would:

Conservative Republicans have long decried higher education in the United States, describing the cultures on most college campuses as being captured by liberal elites who inculcate students with left-wing values and suppress conservative thought. And over time their disdain has deepened.

From 2015 to 2019, the share of Republicans and independents who lean Republican saying that colleges have a negative effect on the country rose from 37 percent to 59 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. By 2022, another Pew poll reported that 76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively. Meanwhile, a number of Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved to end what they consider “woke” policies and teachings on campuses.

Democrats on the committee noticed what was happening. “I also want to note that the main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal arts education, or important diversity, equity and inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore).

And the chaos agent behind this well-financed ideological attack on education under the guise of protecting the Jews, Chris Rufo, is a neo-Nazi eugenics freak.  By definition, that's not a friend of the Jews.

What's really appalling is how few are willing to speak out in defense of Harvard and other universities, either because they aren't exactly appealing victims or because their defenders don't want to fan the flames of the controversy.

That would be a serious mistake.  Letting bad-faith ideologues conduct inquisitions into Harvard and liberal education under the guise of combating anti-Semitism legitimizes these attacks.  That's how it worked in the 1950's until Joe Welch finally stood up to Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, after thousands of lives were ruined.  

It also worked in other places not that long ago:

 

 

That's something that Alan Garber should really be concerned about.