The Emperor's New Foreign Policy

Sorry about this piece of AI dreck, I saw it and couldn't resist it. I think the source has something to do with crypto, I won't link it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Democratic President Harry S Truman attempted to buy Greenland in 1867? (Hint: Truman was born in 1884, and his presidency was between 1945 and 1952.)

The Fox Friend in the video—I believe it's Katie Pavlich, who used to blog at the truly demented Heritage website Townhall, and now hosts Fox Nation's "Luxury Hunting Lodges of America", is that a real thing? where they burnish their anti-elitist cred by worshiping people like Harlan Crow?—really says those words. Click the link and watch if you don't believe me. I think I know what happened: there's a moment, around 30 seconds in, where she casts her eyes down at the table, as if checking her notes, and my idea is that's what the notes say, just "1867" and "Harry Truman", maybe drawn from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on "Proposals for the United States to Purchase Greenland". A brief look of panic crosses her face as she realizes what she's saying can't be right, but she soldiers on with a smile.

It's part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump Republican party, of course, to pretend there's nothing outlandish about Trump's suggestions, re-aired in his Tuesday press event, that the U.S ought to purchase Greenland, acquire Canada as a 51st state, reconquer the Canal Zone, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know what all else. Look, folks, your Democrat Harry Truman did the same stuff, or some of it! It's not abnormal at all!

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Teh Stupid

It's now possible to embed Bluesky posts! I guess it has been for a while, but I haven't given much thought to posting threads here the way I used to do with Twitter threads. Then yesterday everybody was talking about that Trump interview in Time, and I thought I might use some of mine. At least these, which have a more threadish form:

I think Josh is literally incapable of understanding how stupid Trump is. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/decod... He's probably never met anybody that stupid. On the NATO issue, Trump is unable to comprehend what the issue is. It's like his inability to comprehend that a tariff is an import tax...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:36 PM

Trump doesn't know that the 2% rule is about the countries' individual defense budgets. He has made up a story for himself that makes sense to him--that all the NATO countries are supposed to pay some kind of fee to the US and they're all deadbeats. And it makes him really mad!

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:41 PM

It's the only way to make sense out of things like this latest version. "You got to pay your bills." www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/p...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:44 PM

I'm sure aides like Kelly have tried to explain it to him over and over again, and he just can't get it. Kudlow explained tariffs to him too, but he's still talking like this in the Time interview:

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:49 PM

As Philip Bump has said, what he's doing in the interview is largely refusing to say what he might do in a second term because he hasn't thought about it and doesn't want to, and trying to interpret it as representing Trump's plans, as Eric Cortellessa does in his report of it, is a mug's game: 

a lot of what Trump is reported as planning to do is constructed from murky, noncommittal answers Trump offered to specific questions. The interview is very revealing about Trump’s approach to the position in that it strongly suggests he hasn’t thought much about important issues, and makes clear how relentlessly he relies on rhetoric to derail questions

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Two kinds of stupid

 

I

Apparently President Putin has spent the last four days raining death and destruction on Ukrainian civilians not because it's some kind of military strategy—wrong, it's of no strategic value at all—and also not because he just has too much weaponry and is trying to use it up, like trad Catholics using up all the animal fat in the house on Pancake Tuesday, but out of fear of people in his orbit who are even more rabid than he is. It's the "more serious" response he was promising last month if Ukraine continued refusing to be conquered:

“Recently, the Russian armed forces have inflicted a couple of sensitive blows. Let’s assume they’re a warning. If the situation continues to develop like this, then the response will be more serious,” he said.

Though there's nothing serious about it, other than that he seems to be seriously afraid of his own puppets:

Some Stupid

 

Border prospect, McAllen, Texas, via Rio Grande Guardian.

Former Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn (that was my favorite thing about her, that she refused to call herself a congresswoman, like she was afraid that might not be constitutional), now Senator Blackburn,  weighs in on the lessons we can learn from the Ukraine invasion:

Has Mexico captured pieces of Texas and Arizona and set up armed encampments that have been fighting the US army in a civil war for the last eight years? Has Mexico's president been saying for 20 years that the US isn't a real country and we're all really Mexicans?

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Our border is secure, Marsha, and not just we already have the best equipped military in the world, which Ukraine doesn't, but because Mexico is a REALLY GOOD NEIGHBOR. Which Russia is notably not.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

I mean, when you think about it, incredibly good, when you consider that Mexico has a history of being chopped up the way Ukraine has been, by the United States, carved and served in the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848 when US forces showed up to defend the right of white men in Tejas to hold and trade slaves, and ended up seizing a third of Mexico's sovereign territory and annexing it to the US, through the "punitive expedition" of 1916-17  which successfully decided the outcome of a revolution inside the country, to the Immigration Act of 1924 making it impossible, for the first time in North American history, for normal people to live in the normal way, traveling between Tijuana and San Diego or El Paso and Ciudad Juarez without let or hindrance, that they had been following since the 16th century. Mexico forgives and forgets.

While Russia is playing with the idea of demanding we give Alaska back. Although we paid for it. That's the only insecure border we have, the maritime boundary in the Bering Sea. Is that clear?

For the Record: Stupid Senator Tricks

 

Thomas Nast, 1872, "A Few Washington Sketches—In the Senate", via Senate Collection (where you can embiggen the image more effectively than here).

This thread has achieved something like virality, even as the issue seems to have been put aside for the next couple of months.

Actually the debt limit was exceeded in August 2019, when it was $16.6 trillion, the last time YOU VOTED TO SUSPEND IT, under McConnell's instructions. About $10 trillion has been added to the national debt WITH YOUR VOTE since then, plus $2 trillion without it last spring.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

This is 100% on Republicans, McConnell in particular, who has been insisting ten years on suspending the debt ceiling instead of raising it, your crazy tax cuts, your mishandling of pandemic and economic crisis, your phony accounting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

Another day, another stupid Republican senator:

Strudel Poodle

 

Not much information, perhaps, but plenty of kürtőskalács. Via Taste Atlas.

I don't know if Roy, Left Blogistan's preeminent Rod Dreher scholar, has seen this testimony of what Dreher did on his three-month Hungarian junket, so I want to make sure it gets posted somewhere:

Dreher, who we caught in  early August complaining about how the Western press smears Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as a fascist when they don't bother to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done—

this write-by-numbers Atlantic piece on how the 2022 election might be the last time to stop Hungary from turning into an Orban autocracy. It’s typical of the coverage you see in the Western media: no interest at all in trying to understand the nuances of the issues in play. It’s all Magyar Man Bad. As I have said repeatedly, if you come to Hungary with an open mind, and spend any time, you may not come away thinking pro-Orban thoughts, but you will come away realizing that the situation here is far, far different from the picture you see in the Western media.

—hasn't bothered to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done.

I mean literally: Rodsplaining Hungarian freedom of expression to Hungary's only remaining independent media outlet:

First Amendment Follies

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte, New York Times, February 2017.

If you're confused about the First Amendment argument, that poor Donald can't be punished for exercising his free speech rights, don't be. Rand Paul's argument

Paul also noted that Trump was within his First Amendment rights when he addressed a crowd of supporters before the attack on the Capitol that led to the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.

“People are going to have to judge for themselves … are we going to potentially prosecute people for political speech?” Paul ​questioned​.

H​e said if that becomes the case and speech is criminalized, then Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, could be impeached over ​their fiery rhetoric against Trump​, his allies, as well as the lawmakers who stirred up protesters last summer.

in addition to showing some remarkable ignorance (he's been in the Senate how many years and he still doesn't know that impeaching a senator isn't a thing that the Constitution allows for?), is a pure red herring, and it's starting to smell, because in the first place the president doesn't have free speech rights. No government employee does, if they are speaking in their official capacity: 

So We'll Walk Up the Avenue

<

The Feast of the Epiphany started off with a bang just a little while after midnight when it became inescapably evident that not just Reverend Raphael Warnock but also Jon Ossoff were going to be elected to the Senate, though the networks weren't calling it yet, and I went to bed in a fog of sleepy triumph, only to wake up around 3:30 with an appalled sense of how high the stakes had just gotten: in the sense that we—I mean Democrats, speaking for myself—have just lost our biggest excuse for not getting our agenda done, but it hasn't gotten practically easier almost at all.

I'll get back to that eventually, but it got completely overshadowed by the other big epiphany of the day, that afternoon, with the two thousand participants or so in the Million-MAGA March, after Trump gave them the signal they were waiting for:

Stupid Coups

Temple Trees, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photo by Jack Moore/The National.

In October 2018, Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena decided to get rid of his "extremely liberal" prime minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, and replace him with his own predecessor as president, the authoritarian Mahinda Rajapaksa, a man with a reputation as a Sinhalese "ethno-nationalist populist" involved in war crimes against the Tamil insurgents during the Civil war and blatant corruption during his political career (the corruption was a big theme of the presidential campaign in which Sirisena defeated him, which made Sirisena's choosing Rajapaksa as PM seem particularly odd). The move was blatantly unconstitutional, since Wickramasinghe hadn't lost his parliamentary majority, and launched a seven-week constitutional crisis, with Wickramasinghe refusing to move out of the PM's residence, known as Temple Trees, and his partisans including numerous Buddhist monks occupying the grounds, massive street demonstrations from both sides, MPs throwing chairs and chili powder at the Speaker, and at last

Member of Parliament Range Bangara released an audio recording of a call that substantiated rumors that Rajapaksa’s allies were offering bribes of up to $2.8 million in exchange for political support.

When the call went viral on social media, the political tide began turning against Rajapaksa, according to Sanjana Hattotuwa, a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a local think tank.

“The scrutiny of the bribes was a severe embarrassment. Nobody could have taken the money after that and survived politically,” he said.

Following which embarrassment, Sirisena gave up and decided instead to dissolve Parliament and call a general election. When the Supreme Court found this move unconstitutional, he had no choice left but to recall Wickramasinghe to finish his term.

It was a "stupid coup", writes Indi Samarajiva at Medium, but its inevitable defeat wasn't exactly a defeat:

My Vote Is a Precious Thing

 

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, in the Washington Post:

In 2016, I never considered voting for Donald Trump. The Johnny-come-lately Republican and his nasty schoolyard jibes seemed to me the worst degradation of American politics.

Well, yes, though she didn't do anything to stop him from getting elected in 2016,

"[W]hile I will never vote for a Democrat in wolf’s clothing like Trump, I will also never vote for a candidate as dishonest, as rapacious, as Hillary Clinton," Pletka told Politico's Michael Crowley in an email. "My vote is a precious thing."

and started softening on him the weekend before Election Day, wriggling toward Just-the-Tip-Trumper status,

Donald Trump is probably going to lose the election Tuesday. For many Republicans and conservatives, that will be a blessed release from an annus horribilis. But we will make a fatal error going forward if we do not acknowledge what Trump got right and attempt to fix the problems that enabled his hostile takeover of the GOP.

Consider the Trump themes that resonated deeply with tens of millions of Americans: We don’t win anymore. We have no strategy to fight our enemies. Our allies aren’t paying enough freight. Defense cuts and feckless leadership are projecting American weakness. Trade deals help only some Americans. Washington doesn’t work. Separate the bill of particulars from Trump the person, and the reality is, these complaints make sense.

Funny, they hadn't made that much sense to her in June 2016, on the allies paying freight:

Do They Even Math, Bro?

Shorter Douthat: TBF, a merely mediocre president probably would have killed a lot of people too. https://t.co/jPbOrZXtOU

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

Honest to god that's the column ("How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved?"). Maybe a great president would have been OK, the monsignor allows, but an ordinary president would have been more or less as bad as our psychopath, therefore maybe he's really not so bad, or so he implies (not saying, just saying).

the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the pre-emptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that hundred thousand or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness, not merely replacement-level competence. We can say without a doubt that Trump whiffed when this call for greatness came. But distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

Really?

Conservatives don't know how to math, part 5,043:

You can't compare US cumulative deaths to Spain's or France's until they've stopped cumulating; we're still in the middle. pic.twitter.com/FkBsyrGBIm

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

The column isn't worth fisking in detail, because this stupidity makes it nonsensical, but I had to say something. If US Covid-19 deaths per million in today's official figures are 571.61 and Italy's are 588.32, then Italy's numbers are not much worse, but Italy is basically at the end of its wave and has been for some time, since late May, while ours is continuing to climb and about to bypass theirs; that's a curve that hasn't flattened at all.

According to the projections of the so far pretty reliable Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the US is on a path to add another 225,000 deaths between now and 1 January, for a cumulative total of 410,000 by then, or a rate of around 1,240 per million, more than twice as high as Italy's (which will be a bit higher by then, no doubt, but not a lot).

That's a slightly pessimistic projection, based on the assumption that vigilance will keep relaxing as it has been doing. It could be a lot worse, or a lot better, depending on what we choose to do:

• If a herd immunity strategy is pursued, namely no further government intervention is taken from now to January 1, then the death toll could increase to 620,000 by January 1. Compared to the reference scenario, this would be 210,000 more deaths from now to the end of the year.  

• Increasing mask use remains an extraordinary opportunity for the US. Increasing mask use to the levels seen in Singapore would decrease the cumulative death toll to 288,000, or 122,000 lives saved compared to the reference scenario. This would be a 30% reduction in the deaths expected from now until the end of the year.  

But even in that best-case Singapore-style scenario we'd be hitting about 873 deaths per million, or still a hell of a lot more than Italy will have by that point, to say nothing of France (currently 470.73 per million) or the deservedly maligned Sweden (577.96), and almost certainly beyond the horribly handled UK (612.11) too. And it still won't be over!

Douthat's transparent desire to make excuses for the president would be funny, but he's also such an idiot.

Huge News

President @realDonaldTrump is pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions. pic.twitter.com/dXMJgjmo0w

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 8, 2020

🚨 HUGE NEWS 🚨 @realDonaldTrump announces Executive Order to ensure that health insurance companies cover pre - existing conditions.

MAJOR!

— Boris Epshteyn (@BorisEP) August 7, 2020

I really don't get how they're so bad at this: announcing that he's planning to issue an order advising that something that has been the law for the past 10 years is, in fact, the law (though Trump's Justice Department will be arguing sometime in November, against Trump's Health and Human Services Department, that the law including the pre-existing conditions coverage part of it is unconstitutional, and urging the Supreme Court to strike it down), and expecting I don't know what kind of acclaim.

But the most abysmal example of the week in that unspeakable phony cornpone Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), with his flabby eunuch's face and Grand Ole Opry hair, quizzing the former acting attorney general in the Senate Judiciary hearing on the Russia Hoax, or origins of the deadly FBI conspiracy to take advantage of the pesky Russian effort to install Donald Trump as president as an excuse for uninstalling him:

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:20)
You don’t like Donald Trump, do you?

Sally Yates: (02:18:24)
I don’t respect the manner in which he has carried out the Presidency.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:28)
Okay. You despise Donald Trump, don’t you?

Sally Yates: (02:18:31)
No, I don’t despise anyone, Senator.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:34)
Okay. Isn’t it true that there were a handful of people at the FBI that despised Donald Trump and wanted to do everything they could do to keep him from being president?

Sally Yates: (02:18:51)
I can’t speak as to what other people despised Donald Trump.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:56)
Were you part of that group?

Sally Yates: (02:18:59)
No, Senator I was not.

Senator Kennedy: (02:19:01)
Isn’t it true that there were a handful of people at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration that despised Donald Trump and did everything in their power to keep him from being president?

Sally Yates: (02:19:14)
I’m not aware of anyone at the Department of Justice doing anything to try to keep Donald Trump from becoming President. That would be have been inconsistent-

Senator Kennedy: (02:19:21)
Were you part of that group? I’m sorry, were you a part of that group?

His interrogation technique is basically: on no account listen to anything the witness says, it will only confuse you.

Kennedy also seems to think the deputy attorney general is obliged to personally duplicate all the FBI's investigative work before signing off on a FISA application, 

Senator Kennedy: 02:21:12
Go ahead. My question was, isn’t it a fact that the Steele dossier’s junk?

Sally Yates: (02:21:17)
I think that there is certainly evidence now, but there was not at the time, that calls into question the reliability of many portions of the Steele dossier. I have [inaudible 00:13:27]-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:26)
Okay. Did you check to see if it was junk before you signed off on the FISA application?

Sally Yates: (02:21:34)
Senator, the affidavit that was provided by the FBI sets forth the factual basis. We rely upon the FBI to be the fact finders in the FISA process-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:45)
[crosstalk 02:21:45] So, you didn’t independently check?

Sally Yates: (02:21:48)
No, sir. I did not independently fact check, and I’m not exactly sure how I would go about doing individual-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:53)
Let me be sure I understand. You signed off on two of the applications. You’re asking for permission to surveil somebody who is close to a candidacy for the President of the United States in one instance, and in the second instance actually was the President of the United States. You took no independent steps to see if the Steele dossier was accurate? Is that your testimony?

Sally Yates: (02:22:35)
Senator, I’m sorry. I’m not following your question when you talk about who was the subject of the FISA application.

Senator Kennedy: (02:22:40)
Let me try to be clearer. The Steele dossiers was critical to at least several of the FISA applications, one of which you signed off on. You said that to get the … Let me finish my question. You said that the Steele dossier, with hindsight, may not have been completely accurate. You’re investigating a President of the United States and you didn’t check to see if it was accurate?

and to labor under the mistaken belief that the FBI took out FISA orders not only on Carter Page, PhD, but also on Donald Trump, and to believe that this happened after Trump was already president, which means he is so far behind the curve that he really should have stayed home. It's nice how Yates takes her turn to pretend she doesn't hear ("I'm not following your question"), but Kennedy just doubles down. Yates tells him very carefully that Trump was not the object of any surveillance order, only "an individual... who was not a current member of the campaign", i.e. Page, and goes through the Woods process in which every fact in the affidavit is documented by the FBI and the DOJ's National Security Division (all the mistakes in the Page application involved information that had been left out, not information that had been put in), and Kennedy replies

Senator Kennedy: (02:26:21)
Could you just tell me every step you took to verify that the accuracy of the Steele dossier?

Sally Yates: (02:26:2102:26:09) I relied upon the FBI as the fact-finders here, and the lawyers in the National Security Division to vet the accuracy of the FI’s application. My job-

Senator Kennedy: (02:26:21) All of whom hated Trump, right?

I can't even.

There's lots more to say about the Yates hearing, but I'm taking a break.

To be continued. Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Literary Corner: A Very Exciting Two Weeks

Last five questions of a sample Montreal Cognitive Assessment test.

Fresh off yet another stunning performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment suggesting that he's probably not suffering from mild dementia, unlike Chris Wallace, he suggested in an interview with Chris Wallace—

TRUMP:  It's all misrepresentation. Because, yes, the first few questions are easy, but I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions. I'll bet you couldn't, they get very hard, the last five questions.

WALLACE:  Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven.

TRUMP:  Let me tell you...

WALLACE:  Ninety-three.

TRUMP: ... you couldn't answer -- you couldn't answer many of the questions.

WALLACE:  Ok, what's the question?

TRUMP:  I'll get you the test, I'd like to give it. I'll guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.

Like, how many words beginning with F can you name in 60 seconds? Can you name a similarity between a banana and an orange? Can you recall all five words "face, velvet, church, daisy, red", with or without clues? And the last, my favorite, can you tell me the date, month, year, what building and what city you're in?

—Fresh, as I say, off another triumphant demonstration that if Chris Wallace or Joe Biden is suffering from mild dementia (there's no evidence that either one is), then he may be suffering from it less, though odds are that Trump himself hasn't been told it's a diagnostic for cognitive dysfunction and believes it's a test of how big his genetically superior big brain is, he showed up for some virtuoso freestyling in his Chris Wallace interview that will take your breath away, for example in this dazzlingly surreal answer to Wallace's question on why his administration has failed to come up with a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act in its three and a half years:

For the Record: Stupid or Wicked?

Kin Ming Estates, Tseung Kwon O, Hong Kong, housing 22,000 people. Image by Baycrest via Wikipedia.

Roy (subscription) asks, on the subject of the contrast between helpless Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher and malevolent Tucker Carlson, where we draw the line for conservatives between stupid and evil. It generated a huge amount of very interesting commentary, from which my main contribution:

Yastreblyansky30 min

I'm enough of an old-school love-me-I'm-a-liberal, by upbringing and temperament, that the question makes me kind of uncomfortable. Am I implicitly wondering whether we in the progressive community are really, really smart, or just really, really good?

There's a classic liberal answer according to which stupid and evil are two sides of one coin. People are evil because they don't know any better, and they're stupid because they're too selfish to bother learning. Chicken and egg. Conservatives are evil because they're so unconscious of the exigencies of life outside their own tiny and comfy community that they can't conceive how anybody could get into trouble unless they were bad people, and therefore feel no pity. There's a parallel failure of perspective among liberals like Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby, whose emotions were wholly devoted to starting a mission in Africa while she lost track of her neglected children and suicidal husband, but at least Mrs. Jellyby has some moral imagination.

If conservatives are forced to find out, they might learn. I think David French truly learned something about what it's like to be a black kid when he adopted one and his ugly-white community turned on them. Everybody knows about Mrs. Reagan realizing that stem-cell research isn't immoral when she was caring 24/7 for an Alzheimer's patient and heard that the research could help. That's why we love stories like The Prince and the Pauper or Trading Places.

The thing that distinguishes Tucker from Jonah is the energy he's willing to put into staying ignorant or, if necessary, turning to ignorance on a 1984 dime, as he did with the subject of mask-wearing the other day, adopting the Trump view after weeks of telling his audience the (scientifically correct) opposite. Jonah doesn't have any energy and trusts his friends to make the decisions (David Brooks has a wider circle of friends and adopts three or four contradictory viewpoints without noticing the contradictions). Tucker actively looks for the view that will advance his power goals whether it's true or not, and I agree that's evil. But he doesn't think it's important because he's too stupid to imagine the real-world consequences; he's just a high school kid taking the side the debate coach assigned him, doing his best to win it for the team.

The conversation quickly fell into worrying about "DLC Democrats" or "establishment Democrats", and I had something to say about that as well:

For the Record: Is Sanders a Russian tool?

Do Popes shit in the woods? More relevantly still, is the Bear Catholic?

Via.

Whether Sanders ends up being the nominee or not, if you don't like him it would be better not to dislike him on the basis of fake news: I was really annoyed by this:

That's not quite honest. The 2017 measure was a Republican bill including a poison pill meant to sink the Iran deal. pic.twitter.com/ItYsCA8Rrk

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

In 2014 Sanders supported Obama's executive action to sanction Russia over Ukraine. Rightwing noise machine spread the idea that he didn't https://t.co/KDxG3E1zAU

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

By all means oppose Sanders if you want--he's not my candidate either--but not with falsehood and rightwing propaganda.

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 22, 2020

Update 3/1/2020: Wrong on that last item: Sanders and Whitehouse both voted against the second bill implementing Magnitsky sanctions as well.https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=2&vote=00223

What brought it on, obviously, is the Washington Post story on Russian efforts to "help" Sanders, of which he was apparently informed by national security officials a month or so ago. I don't see why anybody should be surprised to hear about these Russian efforts, by the way—they did the same thing in 2016, for the same reason, to foment quarrels and disaffection in the Democratic party and eventually as part of their strategy to boost Trump, not out of any desire for a Sanders presidency, as old Boot noted in the original tweet up there, and it's not a secret:

For the Record: Ignorance

One of the best of a lot of online proposals that could really change his life if he wasn't so goddamned dumb. iPetitions: Give Trump a Military Haircut.

Can't really agree. At some point, the distinction between saying false things with utterly reckless disregard for whether they're true while perhaps not knowing with absolute certainty they're false...and saying false things while certain they're false = distinction w/o meaning.

— O. Aguabonita (@Oaguabonita) January 13, 2020

Remember when he told us health insurance was something you could get for $12 a month and start collecting when you retired? He literally doesn't know what health insurance is or that Medicare exists.

— Scorned by the Rafical Left (@Yastreblyansky) January 14, 2020