war is peace.
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They care so much about American lives that they ship them to the other side of the ocean, right where they’re liable to cause conflict. But hopefully the local people never think to respond to being harmed in ways that might put said Americans in danger, because we all know military strikes become escalation when they do them. 
So much at stake in the world right now, and this is what the government decides to be violent idiots about.
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Catering a USian audience, I know. But FFS, the Estonians, Latvians and Latvians and, especially, the Poles would be the first on my mind who could say they “know Russia”, in relation to Ukraine. Throw in the Moldovans and Romanians for good measure and some other very compelling reasons like sharing a border. Slovakia and Hungary are also right there, and have chosen their somewhat different diplomatic stances based on their own evaluation.
…or, in case of Europe, and especially Germany, we are not even sending ammunition.
Just FTR:
This might read as if Germany would be pressing the other countries to step up. They are, however, only very reluctantly placing orders themselves.
This might sound like a success:
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/nato-signs-11-bln-euro-contract-155mm-artillery-ammunition-2024-01-23/
But consider the date. This is Jan 2024. This order should have been placed two years ago, so the ammunition could have been produced. In Germany, it is forbidden, by law, to produce ammunition without a contract and a written permission by the German government. Please keep that in mind whenever you hear that Ukraine is running out of ammunition in the next couple of months: production needs time. And orders have not been placed early enough. This is a major flaw in Germany’s argument that other countries should step up, which is both employed domestically as on the international level. I call bullshit.
February 3, 2024 (Saturday)
Another marker for today:
Yesterday, after the U.S. military’s strike on more than 85 targets at four facilities in Syria and three in Iraq used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the militant groups it sponsors, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was clear that there would be additional responses to the attacks on U.S. troops.
Today, U.S. and British forces launched strikes against 13 military targets in areas of Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis, who have disrupted international shipping by attacking international vessels in the Red Sea. The coalition struck against “deeply buried weapons storage facilities, missile systems and launchers, air defense systems, and radars,” according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Austin continued: “This collective action sends a clear message to the Houthis that they will continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels. We will not hesitate to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways.”
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February 4, 2024 (Sunday)
On February 4, 1870, the Chicago Tribune announced: “The rebellion may now be regarded as over and the great war finished.” Referring to the Civil War, which had ended just five years before, the paper’s editor explained: “That rebellion was undertaken to preserve and perpetuate human slavery, and, within ten years from the date of the first secession ordinance, the great struggle has been terminated in the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments….”
On the previous day, February 3, 1870, enough states had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to make it part of the U.S. Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments, added to the U.S. Constitution both to bring the United States closer to the ideal of liberty promised in the Declaration of Independence and to make sure that insurrectionists could never again try to destroy the nation.
Key to that protection was cementing into the nation’s fundamental law the power of the federal government over the states.
Congress passed the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, in January 1865, and the states ratified it on December 6 of the same year. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished human enslavement in the United States, except as punishment for a crime (an exception that later enabled the use of chain gangs). President Abraham Lincoln and the congressmen who embraced this monumental change to the Constitution expected that ending enslavement would end the power of a few elite southerners to dismantle the United States.
Enslavement, they believed, had enabled a few men to monopolize wealth and power in the American South, where they dominated state governments and wrote laws to protect their own interests. Those same men had taken over first the Democratic Party and then the national government, controlling the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the presidency.
The elite southerners insisted that the national government had no power to do anything that was not spelled out in the Constitution. It could protect the property interests of enslavers—through a law forcing free states to return escaped slaves, for example, or laws protecting enslavement in the western territories—but it could not do anything to help ordinary Americans, like dredging harbors, building roads, or establishing colleges, no matter how popular those measures might be.
During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans rejected this old formula and created a new one. They pioneered a government that responded to the interests of ordinary Americans. Amending the Constitution to end enslavement was not simply an attempt to guarantee freedom for Black Americans; it was also designed to cement in place the government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Demonstrating that momentous change, the second section of the Thirteenth Amendment added: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The first ten amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—limited the power of the federal government. The Thirteenth was the first to expand it.
Republicans knew that Black southerners supported this new government. They believed that poorer white southerners who had been crushed economically before the war as wealthy white enslavers gobbled up the region’s best land and who had borne the brunt of the war would also embrace it. Under the Republicans’ new system, the North had defied all expectations and thrived during the war, and Republicans thought its superiority to the old system was so obvious that ordinary southerners would jump at it.
Many did…but white lawmakers in the southern states did not. They agreed to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, but enabled by President Andrew Johnson, who took over the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, they passed a series of laws that bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in white-owned fields, prohibited Black Americans from meeting together or owning guns, demanded that Black Americans behave submissively to white Americans, and sometimes punished white people who interacted with their Black neighbors.
The Chicago Tribune wrote, “The men of the North will turn the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.” To counter these “Black Codes,” Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, and the states ratified it in 1868.
Congress designed the Fourteenth Amendment to end forever the ability of state lawmakers to undermine the United States of America. The amendment declared anyone born or naturalized in the United States to be a U.S. citizen and then established the power of the federal government to stop states from discriminating against citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment establishes that states must treat everyone equally before the law, and they can’t take away someone’s rights without due process of the law.
With the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress tried to protect voting rights by establishing that states that did not permit Black men to vote would lose representation in Congress in proportion to the number of people they disfranchised. It also barred from office anyone who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Finally, to guard against former Confederates undermining the nation by refusing to honor its debt, Congress added that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law…, shall not be questioned.”
Once again, the amendment gave Congress the “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Two years later, when it became clear that the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment for protecting a man’s right to have a say in his government had fallen short, the nation amended the Constitution a fifteenth time. The Fifteenth Amendment established that the right of citizens to vote could not be denied or restricted either by the United States or by any state “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congressmen believed that so long as people could vote, they could elect lawmakers who would protect their interests.
Once again, the amendment gave Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
It seems clear that the men who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments expected men like former president Trump to be disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment, as 25 distinguished historians of Reconstruction outlined in their recent brief supporting Trump’s removal from the Colorado ballot.
But the Fourteenth Amendment did far more than ban insurrectionists from office. Together with the other Reconstruction Amendments, it established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation.
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That sounds pretty much like the Originalist school of thought. Everything old is new again, and the fucking Confederates are back for a second run st it.
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February 5, 2024 (Monday)
It’s been an exceedingly weird 24 hours.
Last night the Senate released the text of the national security supplemental bill on which a bipartisan team of negotiators has been working for four months. Negotiators were working on adding a border component to an urgent measure to fund aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza, since extremist House Republicans said they would not pass such a measure until Congress also addressed what they insisted was a crisis at the U.S. border.
The measure appropriated $60.1 billion in military aid to Ukraine, $14.1 billion in security aid for Israel, and $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Palestinians, Ukrainians, and other civilians in crises. It also invested about $20 billion in securing the southern border of the U.S., money to be used in hiring new officials, expanding detention facilities, and increasing the screening abilities of border agents to detect illicit fentanyl and other drugs.
Other provisions would trigger border closures if the volume of migrants climbs past a certain number and make it more difficult to qualify for asylum. At the same time, the measure offered more pathways to citizenship and more work visas.
But it appears the MAGA Republicans never really intended for such a measure to pass. They apparently thought that demanding that Congress agree to a border measure, which it has not been able to do now for decades, would kill the national security bill altogether. Certainly, once news began to spread that the negotiators were close to a deal, both former president Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who said he was conferring with Trump, came out strongly against the measure even before anyone knew what was in it.
Trump and MAGA Republicans have been drumming up hysteria about the border as an issue before the 2024 election in part because they have very little else to run on. Voters are angry at the Republicans’ restrictions on abortion—especially in Texas, which has had a number of high-profile cases—and the economy is too strong for Republicans to get much traction by attacking it, especially as the numbers under Biden are dramatically stronger than those under Trump.
Keeping alive the immigration issue could cut into those numbers, especially in Texas.
But as David Kurtz points out in Talking Points Memo today, it is a terrible mistake to forget that the measure Trump and the MAGA Republicans are blocking is primarily a bill to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion, because the administration believes that Ukraine’s stand against Russia is vital for our own national security. Without U.S. weapons and money, Ukraine is running out of ammunition and Russian forces are beginning to take back the territory Ukrainian forces had pushed them out of.
Funding Ukraine is popular in the U.S., even among a majority of non-MAGA Republicans. Americans recognize that Ukraine’s forces are not simply defending their sovereign territory, they are defending the rules-based international order that protects the United States. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is trying to destroy that order, replacing it with the idea that bigger countries can conquer smaller countries at will.
Putin’s war on Ukraine has drained Russia’s money and men—just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russian civilian airplanes are malfunctioning as sanctions bite—and Putin would clearly like the U.S. to abandon Ukraine and clear the way for him to take control of the country.
Trump and the MAGA Republicans have always had an unusually close relationship with Putin. Over the weekend, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who routinely echoed Russian talking points on his show, was spotted in Moscow. Reports say he has been there since last Thursday, staying in the city’s top hotels and visiting its main cultural sites.
Carlson was fired from Fox in the wake of the election lies in which he participated, and which cost the company $787 million. He said on his now-defunct show that in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, he was “rooting for Moscow.” The Russian Union of Journalists has said they would gladly accept Carlson as a member.
President Joe Biden and his administration, along with congressional Democrats, are so adamant that the U.S. must aid Ukraine that they were willing to cut a deal with the Republicans in order to get that funding through. That deal did not include a path to citizenship for so-called Dreamers, people brought to the U.S. without documentation as children who have never known another home but this one, a demand Democrats in the past have stood by. Biden today expressed his frustration that the Republicans excluded the Dreamers from the bill, but he still urged Congress to pass it.
Indeed, as soon as the bill was available, Biden urged Congress to pass it immediately and promised to sign it into law as soon as Congress sent it to him. Over the course of today, those interested in a border measure joined with those interested in aiding Ukraine to call for the bill’s passage. The spectrum of those urging Congress to pass the bill was wide. The right-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Border Patrol union both called for the bill’s immediate passage.
But MAGA Republicans stood against the bill from the start. By midday, the top Republicans in the House—Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY)—had released a statement saying: “Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.” Although it seemed clear that the measure would pass the House if it came to the floor, Johnson said he would not introduce it.
A storm raged throughout the day as the Republican senators who had negotiated the bill joined with Republican senators who want Ukraine aid and with Democrats to demand the passage of the bill. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted that Johnson was “blocking the overwhelming majority of the House. Last September, when a related piece of legislation was on the floor, the House voted 311 to 117 in favor of continuing to provide security assistance to Ukraine.” In the Senate, CNN’s Manu Raju reported, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) urged the bill’s passage, noting: “This is a humanitarian and security crisis of historic proportions, and Senate Republicans have insisted—not just for months but for years—that this urgent crisis demanded action.”
But by the end of the day, enough Republicans had peeled away from the measure that senior senate reporter for Punchbowl News Andrew Desiderio reported that McConnell had ceased to push the measure, saying that “the political mood in the country has changed.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) wrote. “They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum reflected on the teetering national security measure and wrote: “People will die, today, because of the cynical game played by the American Republican party. Their irresponsibility is breathtaking.”
Foreign affairs specialist Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote: “Letting Ukraine fall because of [Republicans’] cultish loyalty to Trump will be a betrayal that will stain America forever—and probably end up pulling us into a fight for Europe later. This is one of the rare moments when the path to disaster is clearly marked and avoidable.”
Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) summed up the day’s crisis over the national security measure: “On Trump’s orders, Republicans in Congress are rejecting the border security deal. They’re also abandoning America’s allies in Ukraine. Trump and the [Republicans] are losing the war on purpose in an inexcusable betrayal that will strengthen America’s enemies for years to come.”
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Or they might opt in to splendid isolation, abandoning NATO altogether and letting Europe fight it’s wars alone. Which, quite frankly, it can not.
Le Pen already stated that she would not use French nukes to defend other countries. The British nukes are US nukes, I think? Germany has no nukes if the US withdrew, which the last US government already wanted to bring on.
And that’s just the (hopefully) abstract concept of nuclear deterrence. Don’t start digging for the question of conventional abilities. Europe would need at least another ten years, maybe 20 to 40, to build up a force which would outweigh the American retreat from the obligations of the North Atlantic Treaty, if news sources over here have that right. Which I do not doubt, currently.
So, a historical moment, isn’t it?
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The only way that could happen is if Trump is elected again. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I’m starting to see a new round of “ugh, I don’t like either candidate, they’re both bad, they’re both old, WAH WAH WAH” comments and videos all over the internet, including from sources I usually like. So who knows?
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As I have said before, here and IRL, that sort of statement can only come from a position of ridiculous privilege. It needs to get called out as such whenever it raises its ugly head.
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I don’t really like either candidate, but there’s only one of them I know can be replaced later without mass casualties. You’d think that would be enough.
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If I had my way, we’d have a Democratic-Socialist in there, but I know that there are not enough people who think like me in this country yet to elect someone like that. Until that day happens, it has to be a Democrat. And right now, that’s Biden. And for all his faults, which are many, he’s still managed to have the most progressive Presidential Administration since probably LBJ. I realize that’s a low bar, but still…he’s the first President to even try to push this country back towards the left in a long, long time. Do I like him? Meh. Will I vote for him enthusiastically? Hell yes.
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“Bedingt abwehrbereit.”
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February 7, 2024 (Wednesday)
Amidst the Republican meltdown in Washington, a disturbing pattern is emerging.
Under pressure from former president Donald Trump, Republican senators today killed the $118 billion Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act that provided funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian assistance for Gaza and also included protections for the border that Republicans themselves had demanded.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), one of the team of senators who had negotiated the bill, called out the Republicans who had staged photo ops at the border and insisted that Congress must address the rise in migration across the border…until Trump told them the opposite: “After all those trips to the desert, after all those press conferences, it turns out this crisis isn’t much of a crisis after all. Sunday morning, it’s a real crisis,” she said. “Monday morning it magically disappeared.”
After four months of Senate negotiations over the bill produced a strong bipartisan agreement, Trump pulled the rug out from under a measure that gave the Republicans much of what they wanted, partly because he wanted the issue of immigration and the border to run on in 2024, it seems, but also to demonstrate that he could command Congress to do his bidding.
It appears that Trump is trying to turn the Republican Party into an instrument he can use as he wishes.
Senator James Lankford (R-OK), whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to negotiate the bill, today told the Senate that four weeks ago a right-wing media personality had told him “flat out—before they knew any of the contents of the bill, any of the content, nothing was out at that point—that told me flat out, ‘If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.’”
Lankford added, “[They] have been faithful to their promise and have done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks.” (MAGA radio host Jesse Kelly later claimed he was the person to whom Lankford referred, and called the Oklahoma senator a “eunuch.”)
It is not a normal part of our political system to have members of Congress deciding what laws to support on the basis of threats.
In Politico today, Burgess Everett reported that Trump-aligned MAGA Republican senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) are calling for McConnell to step down because he backed the national security measure with the border fixes MAGA demanded, suggesting that negotiating with Democrats is off-limits. Trump has consistently called for McConnell to be replaced with someone friendlier to him.
Senators aligned with Trump—Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL), and J.D. Vance (R-OH), as well as Cruz and Lee—took a stand against the national security measure, creating such pressure that McConnell’s supporters quietly turned against it. Everett noted that the rapid about-face Senate Republicans made over the national security measure “is evidence of a major drift away from McConnell’s style of Republicanism and toward Trump’s.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said, “I have a difficult time understanding again how anyone else in the future is going to want to be on that negotiating team—on anything—if we are going to be against it.” She said: “I’ve gone through the multiple stages of grief. Today I’m just pissed off.”
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is showing as well in his attempt to take over the Republican National Committee, in particular a plan to replace as its chair his hand-picked loyalist Ronna McDaniel, who has ties to the old party, with someone even closer to him. Since 2016, “[t]hey’ve merged the DNA of the president’s campaign and the RNC,” a Republican operative told Matt Dixon, Olympia Sonnier, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News.
Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer reported yesterday in the Washington Post that Republicans are afraid to stand up to Trump out of fear that he will retaliate against them. In Politico today, Peder Schaefer described how in Republican-dominated Wyoming, Democrats are afraid to admit their political affiliation out of concern for their safety.
Yesterday, Politico’s Adam Wren pointed out that Trump has spent much of the last week attacking elections officials in Indiana for helping former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is running against him for the Republican presidential nomination. He is apparently working with loyalist Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) to push the lie that Haley had forgotten to fill out the paperwork to get onto the Republican primary ballot and that election officials were cheating to get her onto it.
Officials say that these baseless accusations are an attempt to sow distrust of the 2024 election.
“Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” Evansville attorney and former Indiana Republican delegate Joshua Claybourn told Wren. “It sets the stage for yet another crisis of legitimacy in the November general election.”
Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives, offered Wren a different theory about Trump’s actions: “The bottom line is he’s completely unhinged. He is literally off his rocker.”
But there is a method behind the madness. Trump’s actions are not those designed to win an election by getting a majority of the votes. They are the tools someone who cannot win a majority uses to seize power.
Trump’s base is shrinking as his actions become more extreme, but he has a big megaphone, and it is getting bigger. As Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova pointed out in the Washington Post today, Putin’s awarding of an interview to right-wing former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson in Moscow this week “demonstrated Putin’s interest in building bridges to the disruptive MAGA element of the Republican Party, and it seemed to reflect the Kremlin’s hope that Donald Trump would return to the presidency and that Republicans would continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”
Yesterday, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced, and more than 60 House Republicans co-sponsored, a resolution denying that Trump had engaged in insurrection in his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Former District of Columbia police officer Michael Fanone, who was badly hurt on January 6, said the resolution was “a slap in the face to those of us who almost lost everything defending the Capitol on January 6th, including protecting some of the very Members of Congress who are now attempting to rewrite history to exonerate former President Trump.
“But no piece of paper signed by a group of spineless extremists will ever change the facts about that dark day:” he wrote, “the insurrection was violent, it was deadly and it will happen again if we do not expunge the MAGA ideology that stoked the flames of insurrection in the first place. Rep. Matt Gaetz and every supporter of this resolution must be held accountable for their lies and un-American efforts to undermine our democracy.”
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February 8, 2024 (Thursday)
I’m on the road again, and was happily writing away on a couple of interesting stories tonight when I saw my laptop battery was almost gone. Went to plug it in and realized I did not pack my charger.
Tonight, therefore, is an emergency picture.
It’s miserable for this to happen mid-draft, but the good news is that there is no news that isn’t part of a much longer story, so nothing is breaking (and yes, I’m saying that even though I have read the entire 388-page report about President Biden’s handling of classified documents-- that’s where the battery went).
Anyway, a bit of a respite with a picture from a couple of days ago in Florida. I loved how much this looked like a committee meeting.
Sorry about this. But will be back at it tomorrow.
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Well, that makes one of us.
ETA: I’ve read that back and it sounds snarky.
Not meant to be.
Context - When my little overweight dog sits on my lap - “You comfy, mate? Well, that makes one of us”.
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(I’ve noticed that inside jokes are common at this here scuttle butt, and woe betide those uncool enough to ask for an explanation. )
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I have no issue being the butt of a scuttle-joke.
I have a pretty thick skin.
and a small dog who kills on command…
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February 9, 2024 (Friday)
Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023 to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents before he was president, released his report. It begins: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The Department of Justice closed a similar case against former Vice President Mike Pence on June 1, 2023, days before Pence announced his presidential bid, with a brief, one-page letter.
But in Biden’s case, what followed the announcement that he had not broken a law was more than 300 pages of commentary, including assertions that Biden was old, infirm, and losing his marbles and even that “[h]e did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” (p. 208).
As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their teams came out swinging against what amounted to a partisan hit job by a Republican special counsel. The president’s lawyers noted that it is not Department of Justice practice and protocol to criticize someone who is not going to be charged, and tore apart Hur’s nine references to Biden’s memory in contrast to his willingness to “accept…other witnesses’ memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”
They pointed out that “there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report, that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”
Nonetheless, they note, Biden provided “often detailed recollections across a wide range of questions, from staff management of paper flow in the West Wing to the events surrounding the creation of the 2009 memorandum on the Afghanistan surge. He engaged at length on theories you offered about the way materials were packed and moved during the transition out of the vice presidency and between residences. He pointed to flaws in the assumptions behind specific lines of questioning.”
They were not alone in their criticism. Others pointed out that Republicans have made Biden’s age a central point of attack, but Politico reported last October that while former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was publicly mocking Biden’s age and mental fitness, he was “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America and Message Box noted that the report’s “characterizations of Biden don’t match those relayed by everyone who talks to him, including [Republicans].”
He explained: “There are few secrets in [Washington], and if Joe Biden acted like Hur says, we would all know. Biden meets with dozens of people daily—staffers, members of Congress, CEOs, labor officials, foreign leaders, and military and intelligence officials…. If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret."
But the media ran not with the official takeaway of the investigation—that Biden had not committed a crime—or with a reflection on the accuracy or partisan reason for Hur’s commentary, but with Hur’s insinuations. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that the New York Times today ran five front-page stories above the fold about the report and Biden’s memory.
Matt Gertz of Media Matters collected some of the day’s headlines: “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024 (New York Times); “1 Big thing: Report Questions Biden’s memory (Axios)”; “Biden tries to lay to rest age concerns, but may have exacerbated them” (CNN); “Biden disputes special counsel findings, insists his memory is fine” (CBS News); “Age isn’t just a number. It’s a profound and growing problem for Biden” (Politico); and so on.
As far back as 1950, when Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) insisted—without evidence—that the Department of State under Democratic president Harry Truman had been infiltrated by Communists, Republicans have used official investigations to smear their opponents. State Department officials condemned McCarthy’s “Sewer Politics” and the New York Times complained about his “hit-and-run” attacks, but McCarthy’s outrageous statements and hearings kept his accusations in the news. That media coverage, in turn, convinced many Americans that his charges were true.
Other Republicans finally rejected McCarthy, but in 1996, congressional Republicans frustrated by the election of Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Democrats’ subsequent expansion of the vote with the so-called Motor Voter law in 1993 resurrected his tactics. They launched investigations into two elections they insisted the Democrats had stolen. They discovered no fraud, but their investigation convinced a number of Americans that voter fraud was a serious problem.
There were ten investigations into the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed and several others wounded; Republican-dominated House committees held six of them. Kevin McCarthy bragged to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the Benghazi special committee was part of a “strategy to fight and win” against then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The strategy of weaponizing investigations went on to be central to the 2016 election, when Trump ran on the investigation of Clinton’s email practices, and to the 2020 election, when Trump tried to weaken Biden’s candidacy by trying to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say that Ukraine was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and the company he worked for.
Going into 2024, the House is investigating Hunter Biden, and while witness testimony and evidence has not supported their contention that President Biden is corrupt, the stench of the hearings has convinced a number of MAGA voters of the opposite.
And now the media appears to be falling for this strategy yet again.
Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen outlined how Biden’s performance disproves the argument that he is unfit for the presidency: “The thing about Biden’s memory,” Cohen wrote, “is that he’s presided over the addition of ~15 million jobs & 800k manufacturing jobs, 23 straight months of sub-4% unemployment, surging consumer sentiment, wages outpacing inflation, the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPs Act, PACT Act, infrastructure law, gun safety law, VAWA, codified marriage equality, canceled $136 billion in student loan debt for 3.7 million borrowers, bolstered NATO, and presided over electoral wins in ‘20, ‘22 and ‘23.”
Political strategist Simon Rosenberg had his own take: “As we end this crazy week I am struck that somehow the claim that Biden’s memory is faulty has gotten more attention than a jury confirming that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.”
It may be, though, that the report has been a game changer in a different way than Hur intended it. Hur’s suggestion that Biden does not remember when his son died seems to echo the moment in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings in which Senator McCarthy was trying to prove that the U.S. Army had been infiltrated by Communists. Sensing himself losing, McCarthy attacked on national television a young aide of Joseph Nye Welch, the lawyer defending the Army.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch demanded. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy didn’t, but Americans did, and they finally threw him off the public stage.
Biden supporters took their gloves off today, producing videos of Trump’s incoherence, gaffes, and wandering off stages, and noting that he mistook writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted, for his second wife, Marla Maples, when asked to identify Carroll in a photograph. They also produced clips of Fox News Channel personalities Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters messing up names themselves on screen, and gaffes from Republican lawmakers.
Senior communications advisor for the Biden-Harris campaign T.J. Ducklo released a statement lambasting Trump for a speech he gave tonight in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying: “Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated the gun lobby weeks after telling parents to ‘get over it’ after their kids were gunned down at school. But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows.”
But it was Biden who responded most powerfully. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he told reporters. “How in the hell dare he raise that…. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” And when asked about Hur’s dismissal of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden responded with justified anger: “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been President. I put this country back on its feet.”
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