Concern Trolling: A Sketch

 

What might help Republicans’ prospects? Backing individual rights over intrusive government.

(There's a connection with a previous installment)

It's looking more and more doubtful whether Republicans can pull off the traditional anti-incumbent wave in the midterm congressional elections. The FiveThirtyEight website now gives them only a 44% chance of taking the Senate, largely, they say, because of the preposterous candidates they are fielding in states they can't take for granted, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and as of last night Arizona, where they chose yet another Peter Thiel acolyte in the anti-Semitic election denier Blake Masters; Missouri GOP voters seem to have restrained themselves and gone for the lesser of the two Erics, but former moderate Eric Schmitt has promised to "take a blowtorch to the Biden agenda" and is doing his best to seem as wild as Vance or Öz (that's the correct spelling of the name, per Wikipedia, "Mehmet Cengiz Öz, known professionally as Dr. Oz").

The House, where the craziest candidates seem to be defending safe Republican seats, looks much better for them, but even there the outlook is darkening, as the generic poll is starting to show.

In your heart you know

"That is their business, not mine. I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned." Image via Haiku Deck.

I'm increasingly disturbed by the propagandistic activity on the intellectual sidelines of the Sanders campaign—not Sanders himself—as in yesterday's post by Corey Robin, of all people (given the rigor and brilliance he applies to the analysis of propaganda from the right), trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton is "still a Goldwater girl after all these years":

Here’s what Clinton said about Sanders over the weekend:

Not everything is about an economic theory, right?

Sanders, you see, wants to reduce all social and political issues to the economy. But there are other issues that matter to us in life, aren’t there? Breaking up the banks, raising the minimum wage, free higher ed, and universal health care: that won’t solve all our problems, will it?

Interestingly enough, there’s another candidate in Clinton’s lifetime who made a similar claim in his attempt to discredit the economic program of the liberal left—a program not unlike Sanders’s...

No racism here

Next time somebody's telling you about the racist Democrats of 50 years ago and how it's Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act, just close your eyes and remember what the 1964 presidential campaign was actually like.

Via Erik Loomis at LGM.

You probably thought it was Nixon that invented the Southern strategy in the 1968 campaign, and so did I, but I was forgetting. Barry Goldwater totally rejected racism, as we all know, and merely rejected the Civil Rights Act on these absolutely abstract grounds, nothing to do with black folks here, oh no not at all, but you know racism didn't reject him; it knew something about him he didn't (apparently, if you know what I mean) know himself.

Via Pari_Passu.