Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.
I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the
Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in
interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it
myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but
considerably more interested when I learned from a
Reuters
report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John
Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative
The Hill over his coverage of the
Uranium One
controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to
implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's
collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating
Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached
in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government
documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023.
So I naturally smelled some dirt.
The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National
Intelligence Community issued its
report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber
Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:
Key Judgment 4:
We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered
but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US
Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought
stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either
election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught
meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted
economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping
US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses,
however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former
President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)
But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the
declassified version. Now
his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is
available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the
documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been
a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known
interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian
governments):
A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing
moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful
endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to
some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of
McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:
In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent)
identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7
percent as democratic socialists.”
https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via
@NYTOpinion
What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link
or preferably the
survey itself
is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :
The mistake is from typos in a report by
Thomas Edsall
of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six
counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken
over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but
Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic
socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an
organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really
have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me
look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added
together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling
himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist
members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of
"Marxists", not necessarily "communists".
Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.
On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World
Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and
Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the
year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian
player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the
rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match
against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with
the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun
hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are
sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was
that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American
standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their
best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its
miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.
Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I
believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision,
and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon
afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by
the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the
president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA,
Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an
imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.
(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before
the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who
would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud
against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now
allages, were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the
job.)
That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look
flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden
Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the
Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's
Central and Riverside Parks). Image by
Obama Foundation.
I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting
pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own,
and that's where his own pool project must have come from. That's plainly not
true, but I think it likely is true that he's been driven wild with jealousy of
Obama's monument, which he's been screaming about for
more than a year:
"I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I'd give him help
because I build on time and on budget — he's building his presidential
library in Chicago. It's a disaster," Mr. Trump said. "And he said something
to the effect, 'I only want DEI, I only want woke.' He wants woke people to
build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the
job is stopped. I don't know, it's a disaster.... millions of dollars, like
many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget," and said the
problems were because Pres. Obama "wanted to be very politically correct and
he didn't use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I
love."
There's no evidence that he builds "on time and on budget". Also, it's so cute that he loves them because he believes they're "mean",
though I don't know how he could knos that. They've surely never been mean to
him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored
him on one project and another but they wouldn't have wanted him to see them
doing it.
Anyway, the success of Obama's opening, with its entertainment by Stevie
Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend,
Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns,
and The Roots, while he couldn't even get an appearance by the surviving half
of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed
up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.
I'm obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today
on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United
States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have
been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment
in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of
Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades
of the 19th century, but didn't), but a little annoyed, along with a lot
of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the
mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship
indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th
Amendment—rather, he says it's only a violation of the omnium-gatherum
U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases
that the 14th Amendment doesn't clearly cover (e.g., a
foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory
becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim
that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that
some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright
citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with
it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Bryant,
Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.
The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica"
of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be?
Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump
has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful
lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which
had
already started to buckle
by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional.
Photo by Evy Mages via
Washingtonian.
The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless
French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while
her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might
have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest
lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.
Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.
Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote.
Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green (a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the Gilder Center), and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse.
Video of the 2003 recording, released three years after Cash's death, with
lip-synching tribute cameos by a host of mostly engagé celebrities including,
of all people, Kid Rock.
Thoughts of Johnny Cash raised by our old friend Hunter Biden, who has
recently surfaced on Twitter as a first-class shitposter, answering an insult
from some Republican fool using the Johnny Cash finger-giving photo as his
avi:
Bravo to Hunter Biden. Well done. I like this informed swagger.
Note how he's not by any means suggesting he's as cool as Johnny Cash; he's
reminding us that Cash was once as low and fucked up as Hunter Biden has ever
been, and for a pretty long while before he ended up the great songwriter and
performer we all remember with fondness and awe. Which Hunter is not,
presumably, at least not yet, but he's working on himself and getting better.
And also of what a flaming liberal Cash became too, something the Republican
fool clearly has no idea of—not mixing it up with party politics, but working
with the deprived and defeated, stressing the liberal message that, as Hunter
put it, no one is past saving. If you've done some horrible stuff in your life, you can try to be better. And God will surely cut you down either way.
Which brings us inevitably to the Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham
Platner, whose primary is tomorrow. Well, maybe not that inevitably.
I was kind of hoping to have finished
writing about Platner, but then came the new allegations, in
The New York Times, no less, that he had not only joined the Marines and served in the
abominable Afghanistan and Iraq wars, entered some kind of connection with the
horrible Blackwater company or something related to it, and at some point in a
Croatian tattoo parlor gotten himself a tattoo with the insignia of the elite
"Totenkopf" 3rd Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS (a paramilitary organization
of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei that operated
independently of the German Army, and certainly committed some really horrific
war crimes and crimes against humanity), and posted some pretty awful and
politically incorrect posts on Reddit,—but also apparently been kind of shitty
with between one and three of six women he dated between around 2013 and 2021
that The Times was able to interview, promiscuous, drinking to excess, and in
the one case possibly something akin to violence.
And then posted a bunch of "sexually explicit messages" with some other women in 2023, around the time he got married; it was his
wife Amy Gertner who revealed the last in fall 2025 to a campaign aide,
Genevieve McDonald, who thereupon resigned from the campaign (over the Totenkopf and the Reddit posts) and then months later, it seems,
passed the story to The Wall Street Journal and The Times:
In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had
been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by
“the invasion of our privacy.”
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I
considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private
chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign
was on our mind.”
“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the
man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst
days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”
What Platner has in common with Johnny Cash and Hunter Biden is that arc of a life story from horrible behavior through regret to trying to be better, in his case, as I was saying in the earlier post, through therapy, his counselor (primarily for PTSD), hers, and the one they share for marriage counseling. It's a great story of redemption. Honestly, it's a great story whether it's true or not, and the other thing, which is vitally important, is that enough Maine voters seem to have bought it, women in particular, according to polling from last week:
The survey of 650 likely Maine voters shows Platner has the support of 48% of respondents, compared to 43% for Collins, with 6% undecided and 2% supporting another candidate. A gender gap exists among polltakers who back each candidate: 54% of women and 42% of men support Platner, while Collins earns the support of 35% of women and 51% of men.
And of course they hate Trump, the Iran war, and the price of gas, And it's their decision. It's interesting he has so much less support from men, and it may have something to do with his earnest denial of the toxic masculinity he started with (I'm sure his main reason for joining hte Marines was to piss off his sensible bourgeois parents),, and use of therapeutic language, his continual admission that he used to be bad (this was the campaign tactic I was urging him to adopt in May, and he's done it—also it's completely unlike John Fetterman, who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong, and also adopted a more "popularist" list of policies compared to Platner's openly leftist one). He's working on it, and that doesn't happen in a straight line and may not happen at all, but you're not getting certainty.
Platner's done plenty of retail politicking, Maine-style, and they feel they know him. I kind of doubt the new stories have changed that significantly any more.than the earlier ones did. I'm not saying I believe his story in detail or I don't, I'm saying at this point it's none of my business, but I'm absolutely convinced it could work out just fine, OK?
