Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This really is a full service blog.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

It might be fine, or it might be a clusterfuck.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

What fresh hell is this?

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

People are complicated. Love is not.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Senator McConnell and the Debt Ceiling

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Last Wednesday night one of you fine readers and commenters emailed me asking what I thought was going on with the fun times we’ve been watching take place in Congress. This was the first part of my initial response:

Shit is definitely fucked up right now. Sinema has basically decided to be Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker from the 2nd Christian Bale Batman movie. Manchin is just Manchin. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer know their business. And Clyburn is the House whip and he’s not a fool, which is why he’s not whipping votes. I expect that Manchin, Sinema, and their catspaw in the House Gottheimer are going to get their pee pees smacked good and hard tomorrow. I expect that an abject lesson is being prepared for them. And, frankly, they deserve one. They made a deal. They are now reneging on that deal. They claim to have issues, but refuse to delineate them so they can be negotiated. They deserve what is coming to them tomorrow. If, indeed, an abject lesson is going to be taught.

And an object lesson was had by those who needed it. From all the reporting Manchin and Sinema are both now engaged and negotiating. And Gottheimer’s power move was so impotent that his statement, which BettyC brought to all of our attention, had to be issued unilaterally because none of the nine other Democratic representatives he was supposedly leading on this were willing to put their names on it!

If there’s one Democratic member of the House and Senate that comes out of this with improved political capital and stature, or who should, it is Congresswoman Jayapal. She knows her caucus, she knows the entire Democratic caucus in the House, and she knows her business.

The real, ongoing crisis in Congress is actually playing out in the Senate. And it, as every crisis that has originated in the Senate for the past twelve years, will be because of Senate Minority Leader McConnell. Part of McConnell’s strategy was counting on his pet parliamentarian, who he’s cultivated for years, continuing to make rulings adverse to the Democrats and the Democrats not having the political will to either override her rulings or do what Trent Lott did in 2002: fire the parliamentarian the GOP majority inherited from the previous Democratic majority and replace the parliamentarian with someone of their own choosing. He was specifically counting on her disallowing a debt ceiling raise through the reconciliation process. While I’ve seen one reference to her ruling that using reconciliation to deal with the debt limit would be acceptable, I can’t actually find any reporting that confirms this. Senator Schumer is left with a dilemma: an unelected official that he inherited from his predecessor who hired her, whose power exists solely because of a 100 plus year old Senate rule, and is currently out for two weeks for treatment of her stage 3 breast cancer, so he can’t fire her because it would make him look like an asshole. 

It won’t make much difference, however, because the Senate Democratic leadership recognize that Senator McConnell’s attempts to force the Democrats to use reconciliation to deal with the debt ceiling is an attempt to prevent them from using reconciliation to pass all the infrastructure programs that are not in the regular order infrastructure bill. The intent is to force the Democrats to rush the process so as to prevent a debt default and by doing so make it impossible for them to actually negotiate the infrastructure that is supposed to be the focus of the reconciliation bill. By doing so, McConnell seeks to force the Democrats to either prevent a global financial meltdown caused by the US defaulting on its debt or pass their larger infrastructure package through reconciliation and in doing so prevent them from doing either. McConnell is counting on this because he doesn’t want either of them to pass and this is his best tactic to achieve that strategic goal. Which is why he taunted President Biden and the Senate Democrats this  morning in the form of a formal statement.

The Democratic leadership also recognize that even though it would technically only take two weeks to push a debt ceiling waiver through reconciliation, that would be under ideal and optimal conditions. The reality, however, is that McConnell will use every possible procedure to drag out the process, grinding every other bit of possible business the Senate could conduct over the next two weeks to a standstill.

Given it would eat up at least two weeks of floor time to amend the reconciliation bill to include the debt ceiling, and that the current parliamentarian would be unlikely to allow anything but a direct, specific number increase – so no just tying it to the total debt or permanently suspending it – that’s not happening. Especially because the Democratic Senate leadership has stated they’re not going to go that route anyway.

Right now the Democrats have no leverage until or unless Manchin and Sinema are willing to at least reform the filibuster, because Manchin and Sinema are giving McConnell leverage, and what appears to be no actual strategy other than trying to shame Manchin, Sinema, and 10 Republicans into doing the right thing. You can’t shame the shameless.

McConnell’s strategy, as it’s been since JAN 2009, is to allow nothing of consequence be done when there’s a Democratic president because he’s learned that the Democratic president in specific and the Democrats in general will be blamed. The looming debt default is his current 3 meter target. McConnell knows that a debt default is going to cause serious significant economic disruption right now. In fact he’s counting on it. McConnell doesn’t care if it destroys the US economy or the global economy or how much real damage it will do. His donors have all protected their assets. I expect that they’ve all shorted the US and are actually betting on and planning on US default in the markets right now. I expect most of the Republican senators are also making that same bet with their own investments. And McConnell fervently believes, based on the past 12 years of actual events, that if he burns the American economy to ashes that he’ll be rewarded with being put in charge of those ashes.

If he can, he is going to kill the hostage this time. He has decided that this time, it is not in his interest to even try to ransom the debt ceiling. He’s gone from being an insurrectionist to a senatorial IED emplacer to being a senatorial suitcase nuke. McConnell has seen how the news media, especially the political reporters and the pundits have been on a feeding frenzy of misrepresentation and bad faith framing since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The reporting on the Democratic negotiations and the process for getting the two infrastructure bills passed has been just as bad if not worse. All of this just reinforces McConnell’s view of whether his strategy will work once again. To be perfectly honest, I do not see anything that would indicate that his assumptions are wrong; that the strategy he is continuing to pursue and the tactics that he is using to achieve his strategic objectives is going to fail. It has never brought him anything but success since he first implemented it in JAN 2009.

Open thread!

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Today In Productive Counter-Political Action

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The Oregon Democratic legislative majority is doing the most productive counter-political action that can be undertaken right now at the state level. They’re going to extreme gerrymander Oregon’s congressional delegation!

There’s a lot of legislative shenanigans that the Oregon Republican legislative minority can still take to try to stymie this, but this is the counter-political action that needs to happen in every state where the Democrats have a a trifecta and control of the redistricting process this year.

As it stands now, just through redistricting in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, the Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives in January 2023 before a single vote is cast. The only way to neutralize this is that every place the Democrats have control over redistricting, like Oregon and New York, they have to redistrict an extreme gerrymander. If New York would do that, they take Florida’s redistricting plan to create five new safe Republican congressional seats right off the table making it a wash. These five planned safe Republican congressional seats in Florida is all it takes right now to flip the House! If the other states where Democrats control redistricting also do this it would negate the redistricting gains that are also planned for Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Last year’s Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering, which effectively and essentially removed the issue from being within the purview of the Federal courts, means that there are only two ways to overcome the extreme malapportionment that will be created as a result of redistricting. The first is to fight it in state court, but in a lot of these Republican controlled states, the state judiciary has been captured by the same Leonard Leo financed conservative and Republican interests that are now causing problems in the Federal judiciary. The second is to negate the effects of these extreme gerrymanders by putting equally extreme gerrymanders in place where Democrats have control to negate this as a way of taking control of the House of Representatives by picking the voters for the Republican candidates rather than having the voters pick the candidate they want to represent them.

Since we’re on effective counter-political action, let me skip over to effective civic action. It’s great that we’re going to have another women’s march. You want to really make it effective as civic action, here’s how. The march route needs to begin and end in front of Leonard Leo’s house. It needs to go past his office. From there it needs to go past his church. Then past his country club. And then culminate back at his house. You want to put fear into the conservative majority he has created on the Supreme Court? You don’t do it by demonstrating in front of Brett Kavanaugh’s house, you do that by demonstrating in front of Leo’s. You do that by making him afraid that his ability to manipulate the Federal courts and elections and redistricting from the shadows will be taken away from him. And you do that by taking it away from him.

You do not threaten his well being or his life or that of his family. Rather you make it clear that his days in the shadows are over. That no matter where he goes he will be politely and civilly protested. He doesn’t believe women have a right to privacy that allows them to make their own reproductive health care decisions. Nor does he believe people have a right to privacy that allows them to choose to use artificial methods of birth control. And he does not believe there is a right to privacy that would allow LGBTQ people the same rights to live, love, marry, live with, and/or have sex with anyone they want who consents to it. He thinks these decisions should all be subject to public scrutiny. If that’s the case, then his life should be subject to public scrutiny too. If you want to make sure that a message is heard loud in clear in the Supreme Court’s chambers that what the conservative majority is planning on doing, what they were hand picked by Leo to do, is not going to be acceptable, then the way you do that is you take Leo’s privacy away from him. If he steps outside, he needs to be in the spotlight. He shouldn’t be doxxed! He shouldn’t be SWATTed! He shouldn’t be touched! He shouldn’t be screamed at! His family members shouldn’t be bothered in any way!  No one should trespass on his actual property! No one should be offensive or obscene! But he should not be able to go get a cup of coffee without demonstrators following him with signs, filming him and his response, and broadcasting it all over social media. He doesn’t believe you have any rights that are not subject to his theocratic fascist delusions of grandeur. He needs to learn that he doesn’t have the right to make that determination and that his attempts to do so have consequences.

Again: protesting Leo should be, needs to be, and must be peaceful, civil, polite, and in line with all applicable laws. The point is to make him uncomfortable by peaceably assembling and demonstrating, not by violent intimidation or threats.

This is all contingent, of course, on us getting through the next two weeks or so without both breaching the debt ceiling, which will crash both the US and the global economy, and having the government shut down. McConnell has learned that his strategy of complete and total obstruction and opposition when a Democrat is president provides him with great rewards. He will not change that strategy now because if either, let alone both of these things happens, he knows that President Biden and the Democrats will be blamed, not him or his Republican majority in the Senate.

Time is running out…

Edited to Add at 11:15 PM:

Since people keep asking if this strategy of peacefully protesting Leo will make any difference, the simple answer is no.

That’s the point I keep trying to make to get people to understand whenever someone says we’re going to have a demonstration. Or Group X is going to do action Y.

It won’t achieve anything. Just like a Women’s March in October won’t achieve anything.

I keep explaining it and you refuse to accept it, but here goes one more time…

The only thing that matters is the exercise of raw political power. What Oregon Democrats are doing, what I advised the Democrats do in the states where they control redistricting, that will achieve something.

Marches, demonstrations, bringing stuff in the Senate up for a vote without a snowball’s chance in hell that it will pass, including a stand alone debt ceiling increase bill to make the Republicans “own voting no”when it will clearly fail and the US will still crash through the debt limit and default, none of it makes a damn bit of difference.

There are only two things that will make a bit of difference. The first, and the only one that should be under consideration, is the unilateral employment of raw political power. The second is the use of counter-revolutionary violence. The latter is off the table. So that just leaves employing raw political power.

Other than what the Democrats in Oregon’s legislature are doing regarding redistricting, do you see any Democrats in any elected or appointed office at any level of government employing raw political power? Do you see any outside groups supporting them calling for it, generating support for it, making sure that Democrats will be rewarded for it electorally and in terms of fundraising and punished for failing to employ raw political power? No, no you don’t.

Thus, at least for this night because I’m sure I’ll be back here having to provide it again and again and again, here endeth the lesson.

Open thread!

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Everyone Needs To Stop the Hysterics Regarding General Milley and Read What Is Actually Being Reported

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For the better part of the past two days I’ve been watching people – some smart, some earnest, and a lot who are disingenuous – freak out that GEN Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has somehow single handedly destroyed over 240 years of civilian control of the US military. He hasn’t. The feeding frenzy, however, will continue because it provides the political reporters, the pundits and commenters, Republican elected officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media elites what they want the most: the opportunity to make Woodward and Costa’s reporting about anything that is not how deranged Trump might have actually been between October 2020 and January 2021; just how badly he and his political appointees had degraded, warped, and twisted the Federal government over their four years in office; and just how craven, anti-American, anti-republican, and anti-democratic the Republican Party and the conservative movement and news and media systems that sustain the party have become to allow this to happen. And before we jump to the next paragraph, the word reporting in regard to Woodward and Costa’s new book is doing a lot of work. Because while it is being reported that Woodward claims to have a transcript of Milley’s call with Speaker Pelosi, the reality is, as is the case with every one of these books Woodward has done for decades, there is NO WAY TO CHECK THE SOURCING because ALL OF HIS SOURCES ARE ANONYMOUS!

The two items regarding GEN Milley that have everyone up in arms are in regard to conversations that Woodward and Costa report that he had with his Chinese counterpart and his guidance regarding orders to launch a nuclear strike. In both cases the people now in hysterics are not actually paying attention to what was either published in the excerpts or what has been subsequently reported today.

Let’s start with the nuclear strike stuff. The argument being made is that GEN Milley, who has no command authority and is the senior uniformed administrator and military advisor to the president, proactively inserted himself into the chain of command for ordering a nuclear strike to block any potential order to conduct one. And, by doing so, he broke civilian control of the military. But here’s what, according to the excerpt published at CNN, Woodward and Costa are actually reporting that GEN Milley said:

In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.
“Got it?” Milley asked, according to the book.
“Yes, sir.”
‘Milley considered it an oath,’ the authors write.
Notice what GEN Milley told the senior military officials he wanted them to do: “No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book.” Here’s what the actual book, Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-72: Nuclear Operations say is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s role in the procedure and the process:

To maintain credibility, Airmen must be ready at all times to respond to requests from the President and his or her advisors via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to employ nuclear weapons. The inability of nuclear forces to respond quickly could undermine the value of deterrence and assurance. (p. 3)

The President may direct the use of nuclear weapons through an execute order via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the combatant commanders and, ultimately, to the forces in the field exercising direct control of the weapons.

Execution of these orders through emergency action procedures allow for a timely response to an emergency action message and ensure the directive is valid and authentic. Air Force personnel involved in the actual employment of nuclear weapons are intensively and continuously trained and certified in these procedures so they can quickly and accurately respond to the order. (p. 9)

The US Air Force’s own doctrine places the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the process, not to countermand orders, not to contradict them, but to transmit them from the president and/or the president’s advisors (Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense) to the appropriate combatant commanders. Provided Woodward and Costa’s reporting is correct, what GEN Milley appears to have done was to clarify the doctrinal process and procedure. And there’s a very good reason he did that. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Secretary of Defense. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. In the White House, Mark Meadows was the Acting Chief of Staff, whatever acting really means in regard to a position that does not require Senate confirmation and in which the person holding the job serves at the pleasure of the president. Additionally, the Acing Chief of Staff, to the acting Secretary of Defense, was Kash Patel, who is one of Devin Nunes’ stooges.

I think a good argument could be made that the civilian portion of civilian control of the military had broken down. The only people in the chain of command at that point who were lawfully in their positions were Trump who was president and the senior uniformed leadership. The only Senate confirmed civilian leadership at the Pentagon at that point was Secretary of the Army McCarthy. As a result, GEN Milley wanted the appropriate senior commanders in the chain to follow the doctrinal process and procedure regarding command and control over the use of nuclear weapons. He didn’t want them to take such an order if it was passed on by unlawfully serving Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, unlawfully serving Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick, or unlawfully serving Acting Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel. The orders either came through the doctrinally prescribed channel, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is part of that doctrinally prescribed channel, or they weren’t orders. Between the language in the excerpt, which is the language from Woodward and Costa’s book, and the language in the doctrine for how nuclear launch orders are transmitted, it is very clear what the process and procedure are. What GEN Milley did was to reinforce that to the senior uniformed leadership. That isn’t undermining civilian control of the military. It is insisting that the civilian control be followed precisely as defined in doctrine.

The hysterics over GEN Milley’s reported conversations with his counterpart in the People’s Republic of China is also overwrought and silly. Leaving aside that GEN Milley speaks to his counterparts in a number of nation-states – from allied and partnered to peer competitors to hostile foreign powers – on a variety of matters all the time, We now know, because it was reported today, that GEN Milley was working under instructions from Mark Esper, who was the last actual lawfully serving, Senate confirmed Secretary of Defense.

In mid-October 2020, top Pentagon officials grew concerned about intelligence they’d seen. It showed the Chinese were consuming their own intelligence that had made them concerned about the possibility of a surprise U.S. strike against China, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios.

  • One of the sources said: “I think they [the Chinese] were getting bad intelligence… a combination of ‘wag the dog’ conspiracy thinking and bad intel from bad sources.”

Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper worried the Chinese were misreading the situation and that their misperception could lead to a conflict nobody wanted.

  • Esper directed his policy office to issue a backchannel message to the Chinese to reassure them the U.S. had no intention of seeking a military confrontation. The message: Don’t over-read what you’re seeing in Washington; we have no intention to attack; and let’s keep lines of communication open.
  • These backchannel communications were handled a couple of levels below Esper, one of the sources said. U.S. officials involved thought the Chinese received the initial message well. Milley followed up later in the month with a call to his Chinese counterpart to reiterate the message, two of the sources confirmed.
  • It’s unclear whether anyone at the Pentagon told President Trump or the White House what they were doing.

Around the same time Esper learned of the Chinese concerns, he also learned that a long-planned deployment to Asia had been moved up a couple of weeks earlier than previously planned, to accommodate COVID quarantine protocols.

  • Esper told colleagues the last thing the Chinese needed to see at that moment — when they were already misreading Washington’s intentions — was more planes, according to one of the sources.
  • Esper went so far as to delay this long planned exercise in Asia until after the election, to lower the temperature.

Axios has not independently confirmed that Milley told his Chinese counterpart he would give him a heads up if the U.S. planned to attack China.

  • One source familiar with Milley’s conversations with his Chinese counterpart would only broadly characterize them as Milley saying something to the effect of: “We’ll both know if we’re going to war… there’s not gonna be some surprise attack and there’s no reason for you to do a pre-emptive strike.”

Finally, given that the excerpt published at CNN reports that GEN Milley was in regular contact about these concerns with not just Speaker Pelosi, but also former Secretary of State Pompeo and former Director of Central Intelligence Haspel, there was no breakdown in civil military relations. Speaker Pelosi, former Secretary Pompeo, and former DCI Haspel were all legally and constitutionally in their respective offices. Yes, they are not in GEN Milley’s chain of command as he reports to the president as his senior uniformed military advisor, but this makes it clear that GEN Milley was not off the reservation free lancing. Rather, faced with a complete breakdown in legitimate, constitutional civilian control of the Department of Defense at the most senior levels other than the Secretary of the Army, GEN Milley consulted and coordinated with other legitimate, constitutional officers within both the executive and legislative branches, reviewed and reinforced the doctrinal process and procedure regarding nuclear strike authorization with the senior uniformed leadership in that chain of command, and in regard to the PRC, carried out the orders he had been given by the last legitimately appointed and serving Secretary of Defense.

This is what the excerpts from Woodward and Costa’s new book are actually telling us. Was this the high water mark of civil military relations in the US? No. Should there be legitimate inquiry into this by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees? Yes. Should this include GEN Milley having to answer some tough questions in front of those committees? Definitely.

This wasn’t a mutiny. It was not an attempt to break the chain of command or get other senior uniformed leaders to do so. It is, however, right now an opportunity for political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures to change the subject to cover their own hugely exposed tuchases. We’re going on seven years now where almost every member of each of these groups has managed to completely misrepresent, misreport, excuse, explain away, and/or divert attention from their failures to report or act on the fact that Donald Trump was not just grossly unqualified to be president, but that he presented and still presents, a clear and present danger to the United States as a self governing democratic-republic. Focusing on what GEN Milley did, and misrepresenting it, allows them to not focus on all the terrible things Woodward and Costa are reporting about Trump and the sycophantic enablers he surrounded himself with. It allows them to slide right on by the fact that Mike Pence was actively looking for a way to make Trump’s coup attempt actually happen because Trump was mean to Pence. It allows them to ignore or hand wave away their own culpability in failing to use the simple terms in their reporting that actually describe Trump, his behavior, his actions and the behavior and actions of his senior appointees, advisors, surrogates, benefactors/funders, enablers, and his supporters. A failure which continues to this day!

A scapegoat must be found. Phoney baloney jobs must be protected. Access to sources and funding and sinecures must be preserved. And the role of Azazel, the scape goat for this community’s sins on this Yom Kippur, will be played by GEN Milley. Because the political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures are unable to and incapable of atoning their political sins of commission and omission.

Open thread!

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Oh Mah Gawd! Is That Floriduh! Man’s Music?!?!

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Floriduh says hold mah beer!

As a native Floriduhian, I guarantee someone in Miami actually owns one of these. I can also guarantee that either he or someone he knows will use it to try to self medicate against Covid.

And a whole bunch of people who live in the parts of the state we call BettyCracker land are right now trying to figure out how to illegally import them so they can self medicate with them against Covid.

This will all be followed by them being dumped, en masse, into the scrub in different parts of Floriduh creating a new non-native and invasive menace to go along with the monkeys that have herpes, the anacondas, the retirees from the rust belt living in the Villages who also all have STDs, and people from Long Island living in Broward and Palm Beach Counties!

Obligatory!

Looney Tunes Florida GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Open thread!

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Bring On The Meteor

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In our afternoon open thread, valued and highly technically competent commenter dmsilev pointed to this piece by Beth Mole, writing in Ars Technica.

There is, it seems, an even dumber crowd than the flat earthers:

Listen up, sheeple: COVID-19 doesn’t exist. Viruses don’t cause disease, and they aren’t contagious. Those doctors and health experts who say otherwise don’t know what they’re talking about; the real experts are on Facebook. And they’re saying it loud and clear: The pandemic is caused by your own deplorable life choices, like eating meat or pasta. Any “COVID” symptoms you might experience are actually the result of toxic lifestyle exposures—and you have only yourself to blame.

As utterly idiotic and abhorrent as all of the above is, it’s not an exaggeration of the messages being spread by a growing group of Darwin-award finalists on the Internet—that is, germ theory denialists. Yes, you read that correctly: Germ theory denialists—also known as people who don’t believe that pathogenic viruses and bacteria can cause disease.

As an extension of their rejection of basic scientific and clinical data collected over centuries, they deny the existence of the devastating pandemic that has sickened upwards of 200 million people worldwide, killing more than 4 million.

As it happens, I’m working on a book right now, tentatively titled So Very Small* about the origins of germ theory and the perplexing difficulty humans have had in fully coming to grips with the discovery that we share the world with a whole universe of creatures that seem, but are not, so very distant from our daily experience.

Mole notes, entirely correctly, that doubters of germ theory were present from very early in its modern history–the period in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s when Pasteur and Koch and others established that microbes do indeed cause human (and animal) diseases, and that t his knowledge could be used to erect defenses against such scourges. I take the story a bit further back in time, but I see the same thing she does: the idea that humans could be brought low by something as insignificant as a bacterium or (even more diminutive) a virus so offends a certain kind of sensibility that no amount of evidence to the contrary penetrates.

Bring On The Meteor 1

That said, there are a lot of reasons why it took a long time to get from Leeuenhoek’s discovery of microbes (in the 1670s) to Pasteur. None of those obtain since he figured out how to prevent “diseases” of wine and to cure chicken cholera, and since his rival Koch demonstrated the mechanism of infection with anthrax. We really knew this stuff then, with a stunningly complete set of empirical observations and demonstrations to confirm the basic mechanism of infection in hand by sometime in the 1880s. There just hasn’t been any reason to doubt germ theory for a century and a half.

Except these bozos are sure that all such knowledge is just Big Science running it’s usual con:

If you are not convinced by the group’s ideas and point to medical experts who say wild things like “viruses can make you sick” and “protein is necessary for a healthy diet,” you are embarrassingly mistaken…”The germ theory is nothing but a massive profit driver for the disease industry,” germ theory denialist Nora Lenz said in a video hosted on the site. The group members know better, of course, because, you know, they’ve read a lot of stuff on the Internet—like a lot!

“There are people with masters [sic] degrees that fell for this pandemic charade,” one group member posted. “And there are high school dropouts that can see through all the deception of the media. That’s why being smart isn’t measured solely on being educated by colleges.”

Inevitable:

You can’t fix this. Some germ theory truthers will get sick and discover that no, it’s not what they ate (unless they chowed down on a great big whack of E. coli, of course), pasta doesn’t cause cancer and the rest of it. Or someone they love gets ill and in extremis they try an antibiotic, which (for a while yet) actually works and so on. Those may have near death (or deathbed) conversions.

But they’re going to have to come to it on their own. There’s no way to penetrate such a hermetically sealed worldview, or such utterly unmerited confidence in one’s own judgment, nor such disdain for just how amazing it is that humans have managed to wrest so much knowledge of nature from the terrifying ground of experience. The tragedy is that some of exactly these kinds of folk have seats in Congress.

All I’m going to add is that it has never mattered whether you believe in Darwin (or any of the rest of modern biology). The question has always been, does natural selection believe in you.

FAFO.

*From this Hillaire Belloc poem. Do click–it’s a hoot.

Image: Jan Vermeer, The Geographer, 1669. It has been suggested that Leeuenhoek was the sitter for Vermeer’s natural philosopher in this painting and his The Astronomer. Most biographers of either man question that, though it is true that they may have known each other.  They did live in the same neighborhood, and Leeuenhoek was the executor of the painter’s will.  That does not in itself imply a close relationship, as by that time, he was a Delft city official, and may have been charged with settling Vermeer’s estate as an official obligation, not a personal one.

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It Can Happen Here

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I, like many here, have said that we’re in an existential moment for the Republic. But I’ll confess that for all the cynicism and world-weariness I’ve accumulated over the years of Trump and the GOP’s steady turn towards authoritarianism, I still held on to the delusion that the US really had a robust immune system when it comes to explicit, overt fascism.

Adam Silverman has, of course, been trying to warn us all, me included, that this is in fact a delusion. That we’re in a low-intensity but real war for the direction and soul of the United States, and that by many measures, we’re in a bad position to fight that war.

The last few days have finally tipped me over.

Adam’s right.

One of America’s two political parties is not just cheating to try to win elections, but has accepted/adopted the basic tropes that have driven European fascism since the 20s, and we need to be prepared not just for electoral battle but, perhaps, for much worse.

It Can Happen Here 1

What tipped me over? A few things. But the catalyst was an email from former Boston Globe columnist turned Substacker (Truth and Consequences) which pointed me to this week’s public post. on the experience of wading into the cess pool of a website calling itself American Greatness. It was, as ever, more persuasive in the original German:

The crux of the argument made by Christopher Roach, an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness, is that the right can no longer acquiesce to liberal indoctrination. “The forces of the aggressive, secular Left are not going to let any of us retreat into our own enclaves,” says Roach. “They will hunt down every last private club, pizza shop, and bakery out of mere spite. They will steal your kids and destroy your life.”

Cohen emphasizes that this isn’t just a matter of a handful of wackaloons on some web backwater.

For months now, political observers have noted the conservative movement’s increasingly authoritarian bent, so I suppose it’s not surprising that a publication devoted to promoting Donald Trump would unabashedly embrace such a message. But after reading a number of posts at American Greatness, I was struck by something even more disturbing — the increasingly existential, even eliminationist rhetoric emanating from the far right. Liberalism is presented not as an ordinary political or cultural movement. Instead, it is a clear and present threat to America’s future and the American people. To read American Greatness is to believe that America is in the last throes of liberal indoctrination, and the time is now to confront it with force, if necessary.

The crux, as Cohen points out is that this is exactly the same line that the right’s leading “intellectuals” are pushing:

It would be easy to dismiss the writings at American Greatness or any publication that attempted to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpism. This kind of language has long found a home on the fringe right. But the site includes a roster of what Sykes calls “right-wing luminaries as Victor David Hanson, Seb Gorka, David Harsanyi, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Mark Bauerlein, Josh Hammer, Ned Ryun, Dennis Prager, and Salena Zito.” These are writers who have some level of intellectual currency and influence in the conservative movement.]

I know, I know, an intellectual murderer’s row there and all that. But this kind of violent eliminationism is both terrifying to anyone with a historical memory that reaches further back than last week and hardly confined to the bay-at-the-moon end of the GOP spectrum.  Tucker Carlson is in Hungary praising an real-life fascist dictator, Orban, with Rod Dreher, the noted Christianist authoritarian, cheering him on.

It Can Happen Here

Mike Flynn has just gone full-on Triumph of the Will at a widely web-cast mega-Church event.  Newt Gingrich is openly touting “replacement theory” on Fox News, explicitly channelling a Nazi framework on mass media to justify the radical right’s ascent/return to power.  And there’s more besides.

I’m not posting this out of a sense of fatalism or despair. These people are clearly a minority. There are as many grifters as true believers, probably more, making bank off of gullible, timid Trumpoids, with no  intention of risking a good thing by actually taking up arms. There are a handful who we know have some tactical and political skill working this crowd; Mike Flynn may have drunk waaaaay too much mercury on his way to the haberdasher, but you don’t get three stars for being wholly incompetent in the military arts, and there are others who truly seek power (not just cash) and have skills to pursue it. And yet it’s pretty clear that if allowed to express their views peaceably and the ballot box, a significant majority of Americans reject the poison these anti-patriots are peddling.

That’s the crux, of course; if allowed…

I’m not going to pretend to know how to make that our reality.  But I’m actually hopeful, in the sense that I think much of the elected Democratic leadership and an increasing number of both elite and ordinary citizens have become aware of the gathering threat. Certainly readers of this blog have. That’s the start from which all further action will flow.

We’re back to where we’ve often been: the preservation of liberty requires eternal vigilance.

To that end, I don’t have a broad based prescription. But I can say this: any Jackals that live in AZ or WV: call your senators and (politely) express your strong support for voting rights legislation. Do it often. Get to the point where the staff (and/or the answering machine) know your voice and ask after your kids.

I have some thoughts about what more to do, but they’re worth what you pay for them, and I’ll mull a bit more (as in, try to get some actual expert insight). Further suggestions welcomed below, including, especially, how to confront the increasingly armed and dangerous attempts to intimidate democracy and seize power by force.

When and as we triumph, we can gather for a Balloon Juice chorus reading of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Deal?

 

 

Open thread, friends.

Image: Eugène Delacroix, Liberty guiding the people, 1830

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Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Kevin McCarthy “Jokes” About Hitting Nancy Pelosi

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In May I wrote about the ongoing revolutionary warfare being conducted in the US by elected and appointed Republican officials at all levels of government in America in general, and how Senator McConnell’s blocking a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on 6 January as a specific example of it.

Last night, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Minority Leader, decided it was time for him to up his game.

Before go forward, here’s what I wrote in terms of defining revolutionary warfare back in May:

In Fall’s The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency he delineates two equations that explain his theory of what he calls Revolutionary Warfare. The first is for Revolutionary Warfare the second for countering it. From page 2 of his essay, which was adapted from a lecture (emphasis mine):

Let me state this definition: RW=GW+P, or revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action. This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system. This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else. Guerrilla simply means ‘small war’ to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies to all Western armies) that everybody knows how to fight small wars; no second lieutenant of the infantry ever learns anything else but how to fight small wars. Political action, however, is the difference. The Communists, or shall we say, any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other European anti-NAZI underground) most of the time used small-war tactics, not to destroy the German Army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

But the ‘kill’ aspect, the military aspect, definitely always remained the minor aspect. The political, administrative, ideological aspect is the primary aspect. Everybody, of course, by definition, will seek a military solution to the insurgency problem, whereas, by its very nature, the insurgency problem is military only in a secondary sense, and politically, ideologically, and administratively in a primary sense. Once we understand this, we will understand more of what is actually going on in Viet-nam or in some other places affected by RW.

What McCarthy’s “joke” demonstrates is that the revolutionary warfare being waged by Republicans and conservatives against the United States and their fellow citizens is that the small war that Fall writes about – the violent guerrilla portion of revolutionary war – has merged with the political action that he also writes about. Just as we’ve seen the lines blur between kinetic and non-kinetic, or lethal and non to less than lethal actions in the low intensity wars that the US and its coalition allies have been fighting over the past twenty years in Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, so to are we seeing the same dynamic here. Just as al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, al Shabab, and other similar groups have learned to be just as effective using information and psychological warfare, as well as economic and cyber warfare, so to have the Republicans and conservatives waging their revolutionary war against the US and their fellow Americans. This is, in itself, not a new innovation. Guerilla warfare, or small wars/warfare, have always included using information and psychological and economic warfare. What has changed is our technology. Now the cyber domain is both a domain of warfare and a weapon system unto itself at the same time.

McCarthy’s remarks are a great example of how the political action that he, the members of his caucus in the House, the members of the Senate Republican caucus, Republican elected and appointed officials at the state and municipal levels of government, and both conservative movement leaders and conservative media personalities – news, social, and/or digital – have made a significant portion of their political action are also guerrilla warfare. In some cases, like McCarthy’s remarks last night, this is to reference violence against their opponents as something that is casual and no big deal, which simply sets the conditions for stochastic terrorism and revolutionary violence in the future. In other cases, like Trump’s debate call for the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by, which the Proud Boys interpreted as being an order by Trump for them to prepare for imminent political violent action, the calls are anything but casual.

On Friday it was reported that Congressman Cawthorn, got himself crosswise with another member of the House Republican caucus, then made threats against him because Cawthorn was “in the mood for a fight.” This was just a couple of days after Cawthorne threatened Adam Kinzinger, not just with a primary opponent, but with action so terrifying that Kinzinger would have to abandon his reelection campaign and flee his district with his family. Between these two incidents it was reported that Cawthorne forgot where his GLOCK was and had to leave it with the TSA back in Asheville because he had it in his carry on bag. Cawthorn is a great example of the fusion of the non-kinetic forms of guerrilla or small warfare and political action in the revolutionary warfare that is being waged by Republicans and conservatives against the US and their fellow citizens. And in Cawthorn’s case, against his fellow Republican members of Congress.

This elision, this blending of the two parts of revolutionary warfare into a more unitary activity, into political violent action, is a problematic development given that far too few elected or appointed Democratic officials and members of the center, center left, left, and left of center movements and demographics that form the Democratic Party’s base even recognize that this revolutionary war is here and that it has been here for a very, very long time.

Fall also explains how to counter revolutionary war. Specifically:

And this leads to the second of Fall’s equations, which he does not make explicit, but does describe on pages 15 and 16 of the essay. Counter-Revolutionary War=Counter-Guerilla Warfare+Counter-Political Action+Civic Action (CRW=CGW+CP+CA). Fall defines Civic Action as:

Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of antimalaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says “Land reform,” and the other side says “better culverts.” One side says “we’re going to kill all those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says “Yes, but we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.

Unfortunately, as I also wrote back in May, there are simply things that political action taken by Democrats, Democratic leaning Independents, and apostate Republicans and conservatives who are now in opposition to the Republican Party and the conservative movement can not counter or even reverse. Foremost among them is an extreme gerrymander. As Berman explains in his reporting, unless something is done very soon to make gerrymandering illegal, the Republicans are going to retake the House of Representatives in 2022 just based on gerrymandering in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas in the redistricting that will begin this autumn. In fact they may be able to do it just based on redistricting in Florida alone! So for those joking that McCarthy will never be Speaker of the House, while that may be true because his caucus is almost so far gone that even if they don’t do something completely crazy, like install Trump as Speaker if they retake the majority, he may once again get passed over for someone more performativfly extreme than he is.

Another thing you can’t overcome by political action is the Republican majority in the Georgia state legislature taking control over the administration of elections in Fulton County ahead of the 2022 elections. They are not doing this just to get ahead of things for 2024, they are also doing this now because Senator Warnock has to stand for reelection in 2022 as he’s finishing out the term of Republican Senator Isakson who resigned because of health concerns. Senator Warnock will need to hold his Fulton County, GA base to stand a chance of reelection. The state’s Republican legislature taking control of Fulton County election administration, combined with their other efforts to suppress Black and other minority votes in Georgia, will go a long way to making Senator Warnock’s reelection that much harder. Which, in turn, makes it that much harder for the Democrats to maintain their slim majority in the Senate, let alone expand it.

As I wrote back in May:

I cannot express just how dangerous a place we are in right now. No matter how much work Stacey Abrams does, no matter how many other places Democrats or liberals and/or progressives seek to emulate her work, as David Schor correctly states: “the idea that you can organize your way out of a 3% bias in the median seat is pretty wild.” Translated into non election jargon, if the gerrymanders that are going to be put in place during the next round of redistricting are audaciously large enough, combined with the inherent disparities that already exist in how the Senate is comprised and, as a result, how the Electoral College functions are large enough, no amount of political work at election time to turn out the vote is going to be enough to overcome artificially created electoral roadblocks of that size! And no amount of Marc Elias’s yeoman’s legal work will be enough to prevent it!

So what is to be done? Democrats, especially elected officials at the state and Federal levels, need to actually clearly recognize what is going on and actually call it out and describe it in plain terms. It needs to be hammered until the media is unable to both sides the coverage of it even as Republican elected officials and conservative movement leaders and commenters squeal like stuck pigs. And those same Democratic elected officials, where they have any leverage and power have to use it and fast to either stop what is happening or prevent it from happening. They have to engage in counter-political warfare and civic action! Because the bottom line of this lesson is if they do not use the power they have right now, if they do not develop an effective counter-political warfare and civic action strategy and execute it, it will not matter if the policies they are proposing are better for Americans because the Republicans opposing them DO NOT CARE ABOUT POLICY! They care about obtaining power and doing so in order to never have to relinquish it again!

If action is not taking by this Autumn, especially at the Federal level, it will be too late. Once Congress goes into its Autumn recess, which is when the 2022 midterm campaigns will begin in earnest, Congress’s work for this term will effectively be over. It is all well and good that Senate Majority Leader Schumer has scheduled Senate Bill 1, the Senate equivalent to House Resolution 1: The For the People Act, for a vote during the June work period. That is a great start. Unfortunately, Senate Majority Leader does not have the votes to even bring the bill to the floor for debate as long as the silent filibuster remains in place.

We find ourselves in the midst of a revolutionary war. Our leaders need to recognize that fact and begin to act like it. This is not business as usual. The next seventeen months, but especially the next six months, will determine if we remain a small “l” small “d” liberal democratic self governing republic or if we become a managed, illiberal democracy. It can not only happen here, it is happening as I type this!

These challenges cannot be defeated with better policies. They cannot even really be met with political actions that meet the need of Americans. They can only be defeated by effective counter-political action combined with effective civil action. As Fall teaches us: Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.

Open thread!

Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Kevin McCarthy “Jokes” About Hitting Nancy PelosiPost + Comments (80)