Sometimes you just have to unburden yourself of the unpleasant truth. A few years back, I was old enough, but not too old, to have self-restraint. That’s by the boards now. So without further adieu, let me list the Seven Items of Bad News — four for the short run, one for the middle run, and two for the (sort of ) long run.
One. The emperor has no clothes. More often recently, conservatives are titling this as something like, “It’s time to say the quiet part out loud,” but one way or the other it’s the same message: The President of the United States has lost it and is incompetent to govern. Indeed, he’s incompetent to run a hardware store much less the nation. This has been evident for some time, but got put irredeemably on the front burner by the Hur report, which concluded that Joe Biden is such a sad sack of a figure that a jury would overlook clear evidence of his guilt because it would be reluctant to send an enfeebled old man to jail.
Biden routinely makes errors characteristic of encroaching senility, mistaking names and dates all the time. This is on top of his history of telling (usually but not always) harmless whoppers.
I was at one time a White House aide (as Special Counsel for Pres. George H. W. Bush). The Presidency takes an enormous amount of energy, agility, breadth, depth and savvy. And the world is a dangerous place. Joe’s not up to it and we all know it. Is this making you feel safe?
Two. This year’s choice for President is very likely to be between two men each of whom is manifestly unfit for the Office. I’ve already discussed Biden (although on top of everything else, for the most part he lacks the will or intelligence to resist the caustically anti-American extremes currently running his Party and, therefore, the executive branch).
Do I really need to say much about Trump? Yes, he did some good things for the country in his term a few years back, and no, he doesn’t hate the country like much of his opposition does, but, good grief, is that supposed to qualify him to lead the Free World? He’s a narcissistic jackass. There is no degree of self-justification unknown to him. And it’s not just that his knowledge of law is nowhere to be seen; worse, it’s that his interest in knowing anything about the law simply doesn’t exist. This is the fellow whose oath, if he takes it again, requires him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Yikes.
And this is not to mention his behavior in refusing to accept his loss in 2020. Yes, there was fraud in the election and yes, the other side falsely denied (and denies) it, but next to no sensible conservative thinks he won. Worse, when he challenged the results in numerous court suits (which he was entitled to do), and lost them all, he would not accept the results. Instead, he egged on a mob to disrupt the processes of peacefully transitioning power, a tradition that is the signature tradition of the greatness of American governance.
And he makes goo-goo eyes at Putin. And he ridiculed McCain for being a prisoner of war. And he invites Russia to invade NATO countries behind on their dues.
Enough. He’s unfit for office. And this would be true even if the Republican Party didn’t have a wealth of mainstream candidates who are both qualified and not insufferably stuck on themselves and How I Wuz Robbed.
Three. This year’s campaign, for the first time in American history, will be run with one major candidate hobbled by prosecutorial strong-arming orchestrated by the other.
The Manhattan DA, leftist Democrat Alvin Bragg, has charged Trump with abstruse campaign finance violations in a case so attenuated that even the New York Times sheepishly says that it’s the “least significant” of the four criminal cases against him. Just today, the New York judge set the trial to start next month:
A judge in Manhattan rejected Donald Trump’s bid to throw out criminal charges against him that stem from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016, clearing the way for the first prosecution of a former American president in the nation’s history.
The judge, Juan Merchan, scheduled the trial to begin on March 25, ensuring that Trump will face at least one jury before Election Day.
The New York case is generally viewed as the least significant of the four criminal cases against the former president, but it still presents a formidable threat. Trump is facing 34 felony charges and, if convicted, a sentence of up to four years in prison.
There are of course the two federal cases brought Biden’s Justice Department, and the Atlanta case brought by Democratic race-huckster Fani Willis, who was at least able to take time off from funneling money to herself through her boyfriend — oh, excuse me, make that the Assistant DA she hired at a nice salary — to indict Trump.
So the governing Democrats, not content to try to force the main opposition candidate off the ballot altogether with an argument the Justices all but ridiculed last week, aim to kneecap his campaign by using prosecutorial power to keep him tied down in court.
In any other context, the MSM would lambaste this for what it is, namely, the worst machinations of banana republic politics. But because Trump is the target — and so often cooperates by making himself the easiest target this side of Jupiter — it’s now lionized as the “rule of law.”
Rule of law my foot.
Four. The Republicans cave in to fruitcake isolationism by refusing to pass desperately needed aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. There are two components of the Republicans’ stance here, one perverted and the other merely terminally stupid. The perverted part is reluctance to help Israel, the Ukraine and Taiwan because “we need to use the money here at home” or some similar isolationist bromide.
Well, sure, we could use the money at home, but like it or not, we live in a smaller and smaller world, and the enemies of civilized life overseas (like Hamas) are our enemies as well. Malevolent forces beyond our borders proved it at Pearl Harbor and proved it again on 9-11. How many more of our people do we need to get killed to demand more proof? And while the hard-headed safeguarding of strictly American interests should be enough to persuade us to help our friends defeat our enemies, there is something else, too: Some people (I admit to being one of them) think our country has a moral as well as a self-interested obligation to help countries aligned with values of decency resist conquest and murder by forces with the opposite values.
I understand that the Republicans are trying to use the aid bill to try to force Biden into concessions that will strengthen the border and reduce the all-but unmitigated flood of illegal immigration. The goal is laudable but it’s too obvious for argument that this is not going to work.
Here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter what changes in immigration law Biden agrees to because he’s not going to keep any agreement he makes and will not enforce future law he dislikes any more than he’s enforcing present law he dislikes. It mystifies me that the Republicans don’t see this. The only way the border is going to be enforced is to defeat Biden in the election and install a President who takes national sovereignty more seriously.
Five, six and seven. This post has gone on longer than I’d planned, so I’ll just give a brief introduction to the other three things that will ruin your day, together will my promise that I’ll elaborate on them in a future post to ruin yet another day (my father was a member of the Optimist Club, but I never really fit in).
No. 5 is Iran and our failure to confront it as it needs to be confronted in order to prevent it from getting and using the atomic bomb. Half-measures and hope aren’t going to work for a lot longer, as my very smart friend Richard Vigilante spells out here.
No. 6 is our addiction to debt, both public and private. The national debt keeps growing astronomically. Not a single leader in Washington takes this seriously. I guess they think America is going to become the first civilization in history permanently to consume more than it produces. I have my doubts. We need to ask ourselves where and how this is going to end.
No. 7 is America’s disgraceful and failing system of public education. Standards have cratered. We no longer even pay lip service to excellence and now bow down to “equity,” the only poorly disguised term for achieving nothing and learning less. We need to guts and the vision to explore why this has happened and set it right. Right now, I’m not seeing either.
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Someday, we will all put our feet up, crack a cold one, and look back at those crazy years when America lost its damn mind.
That’s the view of the New York Times’ David French. Never one to sugarcoat the dire state in which modern conservatism finds itself, he nonetheless ended a recent column with a note of optimism.
“This era of American politics will end, one way or the other,” French wrote. “And when it does, historians are likely to debate whether its defining characteristic was stupidity or malice.”
While his point is submerged in a sentence full of acid, his overall outlook demonstrates promise.
But what exactly is the evidence that this era of American politics will eventually end?
Sure, someday Donald Trump is going to shuffle off this mortal coil (he’d better not have Alina Habba making his case before Saint Peter), but the incentive for politicians to behave like energy-drink-swigging gremlins isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Trump has unlocked a style of politics in which Congress is a safe home for psychotics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz but not dignified conservatives like Liz Cheney.
And the sanity in politics is continuing to trend downward. This week, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington decided, joining other fed-up Republicans such as Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Kay Granger of Texas, to wash her hands of it. Utah senator Mitt Romney, realizing that urging his colleagues to behave with dignity was like telling a Tyrannosaurus rex to go vegan, will similarly call it quits at the end of the year.
Later last week, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a future political star in the making, also ejected himself from his congressional cockpit. Gallagher tried to play ball with the MAGA wing, casting some truly head-scratching votes, but in the end it wasn’t enough, and now his political rise is over — or, one can hope, interrupted.
Perhaps clarifying the point, Gallagher is only the most recent Badger State politician to meet this fate. Wisconsin’s most robust export isn’t beer or cheese, it is dark-haired, square-jawed, traditional conservatives built in a factory for the purpose of one day inhabiting the national stage. But Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, and now Gallagher have had their bones crushed to dust by the Trump political machine.
Had there been any sign that the Republican Party was on the cusp of some return to normalcy, perhaps the onetime Washington up-and-comers would have stuck it out. But instead of voting on the floor, they are now voting with their feet and hightailing it out of public life.
Of course, the departing Republicans won’t be replaced by traditional, small-government, low-tax, personal-freedom enthusiasts (or by Republicans at all). Those people are glaring at Congress as if it were the Eye of Sauron and opting to stay away.
No, in 2025, Congress will once again see the levelheaded defectors replaced by people who won GOP primaries where the only disagreement among candidates was whether vaccines or the 2020 election results are more imaginary.
And they will have plenty of backup from the House members and senators they will be joining. They will be sitting beside people like election-denying Ohio senator J. D. Vance, who thinks sending aid to Ukraine is part of a secret plan to impeach Donald Trump in 2025. Or maybe they can cozy up with Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who believes Covid can be cured with mouthwash and who gives interviews to people like Jack Posobiec, a man who thinks Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
Of course, that is just the people who have actually been elected. In the foreseeable future, Tucker Carlson will continue to command his Army of the Uninformed, and those looking to unseat Carlson as the president of Planet MAGA will veer into even more demented territory.
Again, for both elected officials and Trump-aligned pundits, attention is the only currency that matters. Their incentives are thus to be reflexively contrarian and/or to behave like a buffoon. For as far as our eyes can see into the future, the quickest path to stardom in politics is to comport oneself like a moron.
There is currently a popular YouTube show in which the world’s most famous people try to answer questions while eating hot wings. (If you whispered that sentence to someone ten years ago, they would have had you involuntarily committed.) During their spicy-wing journey, the guests always get to an inedible sauce called “Da Bomb Beyond Insanity,” which makes them contort their face, start screaming, and in some cases, openly weep. It is as if this unholy condiment emanated from Lucifer’s armpit.
But there is no doubt that this sauce is the best-selling flavor on the show. No matter how toxic, people want to try it for themselves because it gets such a reaction. It transforms famous and powerful and beautiful people into whimpering messes. And although it tastes thoroughly wretched, it is undeniably attention-grabbing. It makes you feel alive.
So for those of you wondering how House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik is like hot sauce, you have your answer.
Sadly, this is what the people want (terrible politicians, not condiment metaphors). As H.L. Mencken said, this is the democracy people crave, and they are going to get it good and hard.
Further accelerating our acrid politics are the tools used to spread fear, distrust, and misinformation. The role of the modern politician is to scare the public into thinking America is on the brink of an existential crisis that, coincidentally, only they can solve. With artificial intelligence and deepfake videos, we are heading into an era when reality is twisted beyond recognition, and when those who practice that deceit the best will be rewarded with clicks and cash. Who is going to be the first to turn down money or political power just to stand on principle? Future historians debating the causes of the political fever of the 2020s might do so in a TikTok video while hitting each other with folding chairs.
This is even worse news for those holding out hope that a traditional conservative will one day vanquish this nationalist nonsense and return the party to its former Reaganite glory. But that is likely gone forever. By the time the 2028 election rolls around, traditional conservatism will have been absent from the Republican Party for twelve years. Twelve years ago, the biggest hit in America was Korean artist Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” When’s the last time you popped that jam onto Spotify?
Will things continue to devolve forever? They will until voters recognize a daily injection of rage serum doesn’t solve their problems. As folk crooner Sufjan Stevens sings, “Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level.”
So, may David French’s optimistic words make their way from his keyboard to the Lord’s iPhone. But until then, we will all be slathering our politics with a numbing dollop of Da GOP Beyond Insanity.
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Today in 1956, Elvis Presley performed three shows at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in Tampa, Fla. Presley closed the final show by announcing to the crowd of 14,000, “Girls, I’ll see you backstage.”
Many of them took Presley at his word. Presley barely made it into his dressing room, losing some of his clothes and his shoes in the girl gauntlet.
The number one single today in 1966 here (on the singer’s birthday) …
… and over there:
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The number one single today in 1956:
Today in 1962, the Everly Brothers, on leave from the U.S. Marine Corps, appeared on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one British single today in 1965:
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The number one one one single today-day-day in 1962-2-2:
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded the album “Girl from the North Country.”
Never heard of a Dylan–Cash collaboration? That’s because the album was never released, although the title track was on Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album.
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Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, for the first time since last week.
The number one British single today in 1967 was written by Charlie Chaplin:
Today in 1974, members of Emerson, Lake and Palmer were arrested for swimming naked in a Salt Lake City hotel pool. They were fined $75 each.
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Today in 1961, singer Jackie Wilson got a visit from a female fan who demanded to see him, enforcing said demand with a gun. Wilson was shot when he tried to disarm the fan.
The number one album today in 1964 encouraged record-buyers to “Meet the Beatles!”
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On Valentine’s Day, this song, tied to no anniversary or birthday I’m aware of, nonetheless seems appropriate …
… as does …
… and (though perhaps in a general, not romantic, sense, or if you worked at the former WLVE, “Love Stereo 95,” in the 1980s) …
… unless you have determined that …
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The number two single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
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The collapse of local news sometimes looks like a big city problem. Alarm bells rang when iconic dailies like the Denver Post and the Baltimore Sun slashed their staffs. The election of George Santos—whose many falsehoods and fabrications came to light only after he won a seat in Congress—cast a spotlight on the anemic local news in New York City.
Since Republicans are more likely to express skepticism than concern about the media, we might conclude that the fate of local news is an issue only for Democrats. In fact, more victims of this trend are probably Republican or conservative Americans, and they should care about strengthening local news.
Using 2020 election results and a dataset collected by professor Penny Abernathy of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, I took a closer look at how local news is faring across the country. The outlook isn’t encouraging for smaller communities, which tend to be more conservative: Of the 205 counties nationwide with no newspapers in the dataset, 93 percent had fewer than 50,000 residents, and 74 percent of those counties without papers voted for Donald Trump in 2020. “More than half of the communities that have lost newspapers are in suburban or rural areas, where the population is shrinking, rather than growing,” Abernathy wrote in a 2022 report on the state of local news.
Between 2004 and 2022, approximately 2,500 weekly publications closed or merged with other papers. In the papers that remain, local coverage has declined more rapidly in smaller towns. “The smallest papers experience the biggest proportional cuts to coverage of local government,” wrote professors Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless in their book News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement, which studied 121 newspapers. “Local coverage was reduced 300 percent more than other topics at the smallest papers but only 30 percent more than at the largest papers.”
This decline has hampered Americans’ ability to get crucial information about topics affecting their daily lives. Take education, for example: “One out of every three stories written about school boards in 2003 had disappeared by 2017,” add Hayes and Lawless in News Hole. The trend was again more alarming at small outlets: “Among those with less than 15,000 circulation, the average reduction in schools’ coverage was 56 percent.”
And it’s likely to get worse. Abernathy concluded that counties with only one newspaper, lower-than-average median incomes, and declining populations are vulnerable to losing that newspaper and not getting a replacement. I looked at the 1,437 vulnerable counties that she identified as having some of these factors, specifically those with only one newspaper and lower-than-average incomes. The vast majority of counties in the dataset, 83 percent, had populations with fewer than 50,000 residents—small town America where Republicans dominate. Indeed, 90 percent of those vulnerable counties voted Republican in 2020.
The conservative community of Ogdensburg, New York, which is represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, lost its newspaper, the Ogdensburg Journal, for two years. “To lose the Journal really hurt the city – hurt the city a lot,” said Laura Pearson, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, in a virtual town hall organized by Editor & Publisher. “It’s where we get our personal stories. It’s where we get our announcements for weddings and births and obituaries. It’s where we sing the praises for student of the month or for their sports activities they’re involved in.”
Local Republican leader James E. Reagan of St. Lawrence County, New York, suggested that misinformation spread more rapidly in the absence of local news. “Once the Journal closed down so many people were turning to social media, to Facebook, anonymous blogs where people could make whatever accusations and allegations they wanted to without identifying who they were,” he said. “There is no one to sort out the truth from the fiction.” As a result of the outcry, a nearby publisher recently revived the Ogdensburg Journal.
One consequence of the local news contraction is the increased concentration of reporters in what Republican voters might consider coastal elite meccas. In 2004, 1 in 8 reporters were located in Los Angeles, New York City, or Washington, D.C. By 2017, it was 1 in 5.
As a result, some Republicans feel that local voices are being overwhelmed by national sensibilities. Josh Holmes, the former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell, put it well:
“You won’t hear a conservative say this often enough but [please] support your local media … Locals are underfunded and overextended and forced to fall into the clickbait competition with national outlets that only exacerbate the problem. The result is national media misunderstanding/misinterpreting local politics.”
“If you don’t want someone on the coasts to tell the world what your life is like, what your business does, what you believe or what national policy means for your family, then subscribe to a local outlet …”
Among the types of local coverage that these voters miss out on: economic development, high school sports, obituaries, religion, and schools. In other words, they miss out on the types of information that connect them to others in their communities. As Republican Dan Newhouse, co-author of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, recently put it:
“Local journalism, no matter what form it’s in, truly does contribute to the fabric of a community — keeps people informed about what’s going on … I don’t always like to read what reporters write about me or say about me. But I think having that kind of transparency is just part of our system — it’s really an important part of keeping our communities vibrant and strong.”
What’s more, communities with less local news had lower bond ratings, higher financing costs, and higher taxes. Researchers found that with fewer watchdogs, governments became more wasteful. This also hurt economic development efforts, reinforcing an urban-rural divide. News deserts also tend to have more government corruption.
Todd Novak, a conservative assemblyman in Wisconsin, has suggested an innovative, Republican-friendly proposal: a tax credit to small businesses that advertise in local news. The primary beneficiary would be the restaurant, bar, or bank that gets the marketing credit (which is probably why the Tavern League of Wisconsin supports it), and the small business, not the government, would decide where to spend their ad dollars. But local news would be supported in the process.
Some cynics might wonder: Why would Republicans do anything to help fill the local-news void if they are already winning in these areas? The answer is because the victims of the collapse of local news are Republican (and other) voters. They get worse information to help them make decisions for their families, and their communities are less able to address their problems. Lawmakers across political parties may differ in their priorities, but not in their desire to see government function. The accountability provided by local news is essential for making sure that the government works for its constituents, so that their families, schools, and communities can thrive.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 