(I’m rerunning a previous pitch for financial support because this one brought in a lot of dough!)
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The tale of two Americas continues.
In New York City, the Dominant Media, and other precincts of a weary nation, the resurgent pandemic is everywhere, all the time, a consuming preoccupation with rules, charts, stats, and grave anticipation that the worst is yet to come. Personified by the metro areas of the coasts, here masks are an omnipresent symbol of the never-ending story.
In the Redlands and (truth be told) among a not insignificant number of Blueville denizens, the pandemic is over, life is back to normal, and COVID is akin to the flu, something too boring and backward looking to even discuss. Personified by Ron DeSantis’ Florida, here masks are for plane flights, not part of everyday life.
I still think of the pandemic’s history in America as to a large extent the story of the failure of two presidential administrations to get this right.
Essential reading: The New York Times on the tragic/comic inability of the U.S. of A. to have a rational and effective testing system, still.
Essential reading: The New York Times on Team Biden’s ongoing struggle:
The president’s plan for getting the nation through the winter surge includes booster shots for all adults, an expansion of at-home testing paid for by health insurance plans, tougher rules for international travel, the use of new anti-viral pills to help prevent hospitalization, and new efforts to keep schools open.
On Friday, the C.D.C. announced a new policy in which even unvaccinated students who are exposed to the virus can remain in school as long as they test negative twice in the days after the exposure. The so-called test-to-stay protocol is intended to help the nation’s schools stay open during the latest surge….
The question for Mr. Biden and his team is whether anything they are doing can help soothe the psyches of Americans as they brace for potentially more months of Zoom meetings, canceled sports games and masks.
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My Blue readers tell me regularly I am too tough on Joe Biden and too soft on Donald Trump.
My Red readers tell me regularly I am too tough on Donald Trump and too soft on Joe Biden.
My mother tells me that this dual criticism must mean I’m doing something right.
My Blue and Red readers tell me that means I’m doing everything wrong.
There are a lot of ways in which the media is failing to meet this Trump-Biden moment, ways that are seriously hurting our democracy and chance for national reconciliation — and undermining the prospects that The Presumption of Grace could be our collective animating dynamic.
One key aspect of that failure: Very few journalists or news organizations are willing to speak truth to power regarding both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The reasons this near utter absence is so deleterious to our national interest seem too obvious for me to type.
Suffice to say that if you are a “news” organization and all you do is produce content to run down Joe Biden, or, alternatively, all you do is produce content to run down Donald Trump – in both cases motivated by a combo of a desire for financial success and ideological bent – you are hurting our democracy (despite your belief that you are doing just the opposite).
So, in one of the most essential reads of 2021, I present to you Mr. Andrew Sullivan’s latest opus, which lays bare a particular kind of reality regarding our current and most recent past presidents.
On Joe Biden:
The Democrats are a party fronted by an exhausted generation in their 70s and 80s — intimidated by an elite class of indoctrinated twenty-somethings. The idea that Biden can run again in 2024, when he would be 82, and be able to run the country even when he turns 86, is a non-starter. This is Andropov territory. The idea that Kamala Harris could succeed him and win is more preposterous yet. And this is a major problem.
A first-term administration with no credible candidate for a second term is the lamest of ducks. It quacks and flaps and flails and never gets off the ground. If the Dems lose the 2022 midterms in a landslide, as seems more than a little likely, the duck will have expired completely. In my view, the Democrats need to start looking frantically for a standard bearer who stands a chance in 2024. Biden doesn’t. Harris has lower approval ratings as veep than anyone in 30 years.
The Biden administration is weakest, it seems to me, on the issue of competence. This was one central reason people voted for him — to move past the improvised chaos of the previous four years. But in several key areas, incompetence seems more accurate a description. Inflation has emerged as a big issue, and Biden just keeps saying it isn’t happening, is the fault of greedy oil companies, or will soon go away. The chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal — however defensible — self-evidently caught the administration off-guard. The Southern border — where almost two million migrants tried to enter this past year — is a shit-show. The pandemic remains a wild card.
On Donald Trump:
In a functioning liberal democracy, Trump would be seen right now as a once-in-a-century kind of monster, his despicable assault on our democracy a turning point for the GOP in coming to its senses. He would be a pariah far beyond what Nixon was in 1974 — untouchable, toxic, despised, his grotesque and corrosive lies about the election are disqualifying on their face. He would not be able to appear in public without booing. But our liberal democracy is extinct after four years of Trump. It no longer exists. We are in a tribal war now, in which our democratic institutions are mere tools for the conduct of hostilities….
Has any political leader in American history ever had that kind of power: the power to get Americans to despise their own democracy; the power to persuade people that black is white; the power to get them to trust in him rather than in any election process; the power, having lost an election, to dictate who gets to fight the next one? I can’t think of a precedent, can you?
This is not about creating equivalencies, false or otherwise.
This is about explaining, storytelling, and speaking truth to all power.
Like: journalism.
Read it in full.
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The Biden administration is considering a plan to redirect helicopters and other military equipment once allocated for the now-defunct Afghan military to Ukraine to help quickly reinforce its defenses amid a buildup of Russian troops near its border, U.S. and Ukrainian officials said.
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Aired Friday night:
Charlamagne Tha God interviewed Vice President Harris on “Tha God’s Honest Truth” on Comedy Central.
This Veep press strategy remains an interesting work in progress.
I still have not divined the theory of the case here.
***
This New York Times story has, as Bill Hader’s Stefon would say, everything: rats, Peanut Butter Oreos, trap doors, and a hard-partying mayor-elect:
The Italian-made battery-operated device, which wouldn’t look out of place in the MoMA design store, is a new development in controlling New York’s four-legged foes. They’ve also caught the attention of Mayor-elect Eric Adams. In a radio interview this fall, he called the traps “amazing” and vowed to explore deploying them across the five boroughs once he is officially leading City Hall.
Besides its innovative design and noxious chemicals, the rat trap also has a secret weapon: Oreo cookies. “Peanut butter Oreos are the best,” said Jim Webster, Rat Trap Distribution’s director of operations, while installing the contraption outside of Casa La Femme.
The scent of the cookies, crumbled and placed in the top compartment of the two-part trap, along with sunflower seeds, acts as a lure. For a week or so, rodents will be free to crawl through the device’s holes and snack as much as they want.
Once the rats become regulars and “get comfortable,” Mr. Webster said, the device will be turned on, and a platform will drop them into the lower part of the contraption, which serves as a catch basin not unlike a dunking tank at a carnival booth.