The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

Raging Centrist

 

The "raging centrist" in question is a market researcher called Rich Thau who is running a Swing Voter Project in six battleground states  (AZ, GA, FL, NC, PA, WI) for Axios, studying voters who went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 in monthly focus group meetings, who has gotten the attention of Paul Kane, Washington Post's congressional bureau chief, with his finding that these swingers don't want a Congress full of "mini-Trumps" but are "quite sour" on Democrats as well, who leave them "indifferent... mixed to indifferent.. bored... ambivalent... "

Even though they strongly back abortion rights and disapprove of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and don't blame Democrats for inflation, which they understand as a consequence of the fight against COVID-19, and really don't have a lot of ideas one way of the other about current policy debates (not well covered in their preferred news sources of local TV, CNN, Fox, and Facebook).

So of course inevitably Thau and his colleagues are "pleading" with candidates to "steer toward the middle".:

C'est la faute à Rousseau

Just ten years ago, when the blog was just getting going, Rectification Central was all excited over a French presidential election, in which the Socialist Party's François Hollande defeated the corrupt conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. I appear not to have written a post claiming that all Europe was coming to its senses in acclaiming a triumphant left, but I'm pretty sure that's what I thought.

Sadly, no. Five years after that, the Socialist Party had virtually vanished from contention, and so had Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the last gasp of the former UDF, or whatever that thing was that was equally opposed to socialism and Gaullism, an exhausted iteration of the French version of Christian democracy that wasn't particularly Christian or democratic, or anything really.  Rather, the contest seemed to have altogether personalized itself at last, among a collection of new characters rather than parties with ideologies: Marine Le Pen, daughter of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, representing a neofascism "with a human face", so to speak; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, representing a kind of nationalist left more worried about "globalism" than anything else (though he has been pretty positive about immigrants, which I consider good, of course, and a bit brave as well); and Emmanuel Macron, representing some kind of ideal of bureaucratic competence, which won, not because anybody liked it very much but because they were less frightened of it than the others, a pattern that seems to be replicating itself this year.

When I find myself wondering if this is going to be the new party system in France after all, an essentially two-party system that weirdly resembles some of the stupidest takes on our own situation here in the US, polarized between an authoritarian conservatism that identifies itself as "populist" or "working class" (meaning of course "white working class") and a kind of authoritarian liberalism that identifies itself as smarter than you, technocratic, unapologetically elitist. While the left properly speaking is permanently sidelined, in its inability to recognize that it needs to adapt to flourish in a "center-right" country.

Green Lanternism

 

I've never been an aficionado of the Green Lantern, and one of the things I didn't know about him, or them, since there is apparently a whole Green Lantern lineage, sometimes coexisting in an intergalactic Green Lantern Corps managed by the Guardians of the Universe, was this thing in the earlier phases of development in which his magic power ring didn't protect him from attacks with wood, or vegetable matter in general. This is blamed on the very first Green Lantern, or first one on Earth at any rate, in ancient China, one Yalan Gur. Wikipedia explains,

Power ultimately corrupted this early Green Lantern, as he attempted to rule over mankind, which forced the Guardians to cause his ring to manifest a weakness to wood, the material from which most Earth weapons of the time were fashioned. This allowed the Chinese peasants to ultimately defeat their corrupted "champion". His ring and lantern were burned and it was during this process that the "intelligence" inhabiting the ring and the lantern and linking them to the Guardians was damaged.

And the ring and lantern retained this wood vulnerability when they were picked up by the original American Green Lantern, Alan Scott, but it didn't transfer to his successors, beginning in 1959 (Hal Jordan's lantern was vulnerable to the color yellow instead, and the entire topos of Kryptonite knockoffs eventually disappeared from the series).

This story sheds a whole new light on the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, a popular myth discovered by Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan, as Ezra Klein reported it in Vox in 2014:

Why I Hate The New York Times: Centripetality

Josh Gottheimer gets a commitment from the Speaker, 24 August. Via.

 

Josh Marshall does an excellent job of skewering the dreadful New York Times reporting on what happened yesterday on Capitol Hill, according to which the House's failure to vote on the "BIF" (Bipartisan InFrastructure bill, though it's getting less bipartisan every day as its few Republican supporters dwindle in number and commitment) is a "significant setback" for Biden's agenda produced by a "liberal revolt" and a "humiliating blow to Biden and Democrats" ("Something's Very Wrong With the Times"):

The president’s goal throughout has been both bills. They both have to pass. The last week has appeared to be on a steady course toward decoupling the two bills, passing the BIF bill and then facing negotiations over a reconciliation bill with no leverage at all over the two Senate holdouts who seem increasingly happy to let the reconciliation bill die on the vine. This is far from over. But what really happened is that the threat to kill the BIF bill got the two holdouts or at least Joe Manchin to actually start negotiating. What the Times calls a “significant setback” and a “humiliating blow” is actually the two bills being recoupled which has been the White House’s aim literally for the entire time.... But the outcome of yesterday is th[e] first good news supporters of the President’s agenda have gotten in days. Not seeing that means having a profoundly distorted understanding of the most basic dynamics at play here.

But he's not so clear on what exactly is wrong with the paper—what exactly is the profound distortion, and where does it come from? 

For the Record: Political Journalists

Following up on this now deleted tweet:

Starting with this CBS News reporter, whose Twitter bio says she's an "unrepentant candy corn apologist" and "Cheez-Its stan",  showing I guess that she's not afraid to make the tough calls:

That's what's wrong with political journalists. It's all a sport to you; of course Yankee fans can be friends with Red Sox fans. You have no understanding that political issues are life and death to some people, especially in the violent era of Trump.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2021

They're the same as the people who stopped European Jews from getting off the boat in Florida in 1940, or brought picnic lunches to lynchings.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2021

If so, you're voting to kill people. I can't understand the attitude that doesn't take these matters seriously.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2021

I had a lot of intellectual trouble with that survey result, anyhow.

Glimmerings

Via.

Jeff Greenfield in Politico's magazine ("The Democrats Need a Reality Check") laid it out in pretty grim terms: President Biden can't be FDR in 1933, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, because he doesn't have the votes in the Senate: a majority as thin as a razor blade and no cooperation from anybody in the opposition party. He thinks expanding the Supreme Court is a terrible idea (don't know if he's aware the Lincoln administration did that in 1863, adding a tenth justice in the hope of hemming in the vile chief justice Roger Taney) and getting rid of the filibuster is bad too; the John Lewis and For the People acts can't pass, and even if they could wouldn't solve the problem of state legislatures claiming authority to overturn national election. The only hope for Democrats, Greenfield concludes, is to find a way to "win more"—in "messaging", apparently, like by announcing every day that they want Jeff Bezos to start paying his fair share in taxes, an overwhelmingly popular idea with the American public. But it's difficult, because of the "political climate":

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for “defunding the police” can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness. (It’s one key reason why Trump gained among Black and brown voters, and why Democrats lost 13 House seats.)

Which, as Steve points out, is a problem Republicans (and bothsider journalists) have actively worked to create:

Germany note

 This is so cool—the Greens are now the most popular party in Germany, via the English-language The Local:

Sonntagsfrage zur Bundestagswahl • Forsa für RTL/n-tv: GRÜNE 28 % | CDU/CSU 21 % | SPD 13 % | FDP 12 % | AfD 11 % | DIE LINKE 7 % | Sonstige 8 %
➤ Übersicht: https://t.co/Gzilw3J3L9
➤ Verlauf: https://t.co/FJLtuxG3lb #btw21 pic.twitter.com/VJQFk8FjOZ

— Wahlrecht.de (@Wahlrecht_de) April 20, 2021

At 28% next to the Christian Democrats' 21% and the Social Democrats' third place with a pathetic 13%. This doesn't mean they're going to win the September general election, obviously. I don't see where they compete, really, except in those places where the SPD normally dominates, in the rich urban northwest and the area around Berlin where the post-Communist "Linke", otherwise very weak, is also a force.

2017 German general election results, constituency vote (where you vote for your representative by name) on the left and party list vote (where you vote for a party) on the right, via.

To win a majority, they'd have to win all the SPD's seats and make some inroads in the solidly conservative (and even richer) south, and I don't see how that happens. But if you look at all the places on the map where the SPD wins constituency votes but conservatives win the party list, in the Rhineland and in the Bremen and Hanover and Hamburg conurbation in the north, maybe the now-popular Greens could make a difference to the size of the overall left.

The Greens have also for the first time named a candidate for the chancellorship, the job Angela Merkel is finally leaving, Annalena Baerbock, a 40-year-old lawyer originally from Hanover but representing the eastern state of Brandenburg, with two kids, a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and three bronze medals in trampolining. Politically, she stands for a move to the "center" in contrast with the SPD and Linke, which in current German politics apparently means favoring a pro-NATO, pro-Europe foreign policy and suspicion of Russia, which is supposed to appeal to disaffected conservatives (and maybe that's what this poll is telling us about), but the party remains green in the sense of irreducibly environmentalist. 

Ich freue mich, dass Robert Habeck mich heute im Namen des Bundesvorstandes als Kanzlerkandidatin für @die_gruenen vorgeschlagen hat. #BTW21 !B pic.twitter.com/3gdeaKx3gj

— Annalena Baerbock (@ABaerbock) April 19, 2021

Pleased to have been named by Robert Habeck and the party leadership as Green candidate for the chancellorship, and the slogan says, "A policy that looks ahead, dares to do something new, listens to people and trusts them—that is what I stand for." So German politics gets interesting again, at the very least, and kind of more cheerful.

Reconciliation II, continued

 

Red-Green, by Eskemar.

Two years ago Brad DeLong https://t.co/k1silHdHv5 via @voxdotcom I can't imagine Biden managed to read this but it's almost as if somebody did

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2021

Now he's re-upped it, or the link to it, at his SubStack venue: that Vox interview, which I remembered quite well though I don't seem to have written about it at the time, about how old "Rubin Democrats" like himself need to give up and pass the baton to the democratic socialists, because his own way would never have another chance to succeed:

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were. 

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

Vaccine

Visualization of the SARS virus by 3D4MEDICAL, via NPR.

I forgot to mention that I got my first Impfung on Thursday, at a drug store in the valley east of University Heights. Moderna. A pretty long wait, though it was not a big crowd. The person ahead of me, an older Black lady chatting intensely with her husband. They were a sweet couple, but when her turn came up he looked up at the counter guy and said, "Jab her! Jab her good!" 

Afterwards I took a long walk through Central Park and out to Broadway. It was a glorious day, weatherwise. I signed three nominating petitions, one for Maya Wiley running for mayor, one for Liz Crotty of the Buffalo Crottys (her grandfather was Democratic boss of Buffalo before I lived there) who is the criminal lawyer who wants to be district attorney, an appealing concept, and one for a city council candidate I'm very unlikely to vote for (Maria Danzilo, who bills herself as "the moderate" and says she's all about the private sector, and allowed herself to get associated with the NIMBY mob who successfully hounded out the homeless guys parked in the Lucerne Hotel when de Blasio was moving people out of shelters to hotels to reduce the Covid danger, though she now claims to have a different and more conciliatory position than the mob did—the current member, Helen Rosenthal, a brave crusader for integration getting term-limited out, demonstrated in favor of the homeless guys, as did her predecessor, borough president Gale Brewer, who is also term-limited out and running to get her old job back). The vaccine is here and politics is coming back to the borough!

Zero thanks to The Former Guy for my injection, by the way, and not just because this idea that he ought to be thanked for the sake of comity or to get Democrats votes, to which our amiable but dim media have suddenly become so attached, is dumb politics, but especially since as far as I'm concerned he had nothing to do with it. In fact...

Rectification of Names: Socialism

 

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean.

At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism", 

If It's Really the End of Trump

Uncredited image from CityWatch Los Angeles, July 2020.

Commenter BradleyKSherman writes re the end of the impeachment drama:

On 8 September 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. That was the anticlimax to two years of built up tension. My hate was pure but my rage had no outlet. So I was prepared for this exact denouement. That was no more the end of the GOP than is this. It was the end of Nixon and I think this is the end of Trump.

Some thoughts from me:

That's at least half of a pretty happy thought IMO, but if it really is the end of Trump (of which I'm more hopeful than a lot of really smart people), I'm having a little trouble putting together the other half.

Getting rid of Nixon had two very important political consequences:

1. it created the space for big reforms in the system, to prevent the Nixonian abuses from happening again, which didn't in the long run work too well, either in stopping (GOP) presidents from manipulating CIA and FBI and DOJ for political ends or in curbing (mainly GOP) corruption through campaign money, and 
2.  it created the space for the GOP to be taken over by movement conservatives, which worked out all too well for them, creating this whole neoliberal era and the end of postwar social democratic prosperity.

The consequences of the end of Trump ought to have a similar shape, and I can imagine them being very positive indeed, though I don't quite know how to bring them about.

Forget it, Dave

English mezzo-soprano and raconteuse Anna Russell (1911-2006). Via.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "How Biden Could Steer a Divided Government", New York Times, 13 November 2020:

If Joe Biden wants to accomplish something as president, the last thing he should do is follow Senator Elizabeth Warren's advice to issue a bunch of executive orders to fix problems in desperate need of attention, like the Covid-19 pandemic, systemic racism and increasing income and wealth inequality, or the climate crisis. 

Instead he should form gangs with Republicans anxious to cooperate, like Senator Susan Collins, on some attainable goals like an infrastructure bank, or creating more factory jobs in the industrial Midwest to reduce our dependence on China, and persuade Majority Leader McConnell that it's in his own interest to allow the bills on the floor, to help increase his Senate majority in the 2022 elections.

And then, if that doesn't work, he should follow Senator Mitt Romney's advice to issue a bunch of executive orders to fix problems in desperate need of attention.

I'm not making this up, as opera comedian Anna Russell used to say when she was explaining the plot of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen (when Siegfried, having been drugged by the villainous Hagen into forgetting that he just got married to Brünnhilde, instantly falls in love with Hagen's half-sister Gudrun, Russell would say, "Well! She's the first woman he's ever met who wasn't his aunt!").

Paragraph 5:

For a pronominal consideration

Georg Baselitz, "Portrait of Elke I", 1969. Via.

David F. Brooks, "How to Actually Make America Great":

The frequency of the word “I” in American books, according to Putnam and Garrett, doubled between 1965 and 2008. The authors are careful not to put it into moralistic terms, but I’d say that, starting in the late 1960s, there was left wing self-centeredness in the social and lifestyle sphere and right wing self-centeredness in the economic sphere, with a lack of support for common-good public policies. But it was socially celebrated self-centeredness all the way across. It was based on a fallacy: If we all do our own thing, everything will work out well for everybody.

Robert Putnam, "with" Shaylyn Romney Garrett, in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, are careful not to put it into moralistic terms, but David Brooks will happily fix that. 

His own use of "I" in his column has diminished by a good 70% since 24 September ("How Faith Shapes My Politics"), when he used it 19 times, to today, when there are only six (excluding four cases of "'I'" in quotes, which is technically not using the word, to refer to himself, but mentioning it, as a word people use). But I digress.

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:

Art of the Possible

This kind of thinking from one of my Rose Twitter friends, speaking of Real Leaders, annoys me so much:

The guy who have Strom Thurmonds eulogy is not going to be the most progressive.

— Who will police the police? (@JinxSocialist) May 27, 2020

The piece is not about the "guy" it's about the party. If you want to be a leftist you should obsess less over personalities and pay more attention to institutions and structures.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2020

I was going to let it go as a little emoprog venting, though, until I saw the same tired personalization coming from the bothsiderist right, or self-denominated center, in the person of horserace commentator Matt Bai, who's anxious to "defend" Biden from the charge of being a revolutionary, in the Washington Post, which adopted him as a columnist (to fill the gaping hole in the inanity department left by the departure of Chris Cillizza, I guess) in January:

Could it be?

A nice column by Paul Waldman at WaPo ("How this crisis could help us get to health-care reform") asks a question I've been thinking about a little bit, whether the pandemic crisis might not stimulate us in in the US to do something about the inequities of our health care system. It's easy for rightwingers to say that socialized medicine in Italy and Spain is proving just as ill equipped to handle the logistic demands of the thing as our marketized approach is, but what can't be denied is that we're going to have a much harder time paying for it, as Waldman says:

untold numbers of people are going to get huge bills from being treated for covid-19. Insurance companies made a big deal about waiving cost-sharing for coronavirus tests, but if you get it and have to get treated, you could still face thousands of dollars in costs, especially if you have a high-deductible plan of the kind that has proliferated in recent years.

The number of people facing those costs will be enormous. As bad as the virus has gotten in some other countries, that’s one thing their citizens don’t have to worry about.

For the Record: Team Spirit

"Team of Rivals", 2013, by Mary Bailey/Flickr.

Think you misspelled Pramila Jayapal pic.twitter.com/Q89lAP81BR

— Renewed Vivor (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2020

The fact is that if Biden's the nominee, and we want to put an end to Trump's horrific and inhumane ethnonationalist immigration and refugee policies, you're going to have to vote for him. That's just a fact.

— Dan Nexon (@dhnexon) March 7, 2020

If anything, I’d say that the “purity politics” problem lays with moderate House Democrats... but I won’t go into that now.

— David Walsh (@DavidAstinWalsh) March 7, 2020

*lies not "lays"

Rudy confesses

On an unrelated quest, I just ran into this letter from last November to Lindsey Graham (it was covered by Fox) in which, it seems to me,  Rudy confesses:

I assure you, despite the false rumors and exaggerations of reality, everything I did was to defend an innocent man, in this case, the President of the United States. Not only from false charges but from a deliberately planned conspiracy to prevent him from being elected, and then the insurance policy to remove him by false charges and illegal methods.

Defending your client from not getting elected isn't what a defense attorney does; it's the work of a political agent. But it's the only thing Giuliani has done (what "false charges" against Trump has he dealt with, as a lawyer, or true ones either? I haven't heard of him addressing Trump's illegal behavior in the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal payoffs, or the long list of obstruction of justice counts in the Mueller report, have you?).

In the letter, he still seems to be trying to get visas for Ukrainian informants, maybe Shokin, against the "Biden Family" (promoting Joe with that capitalization to full-scale Godfather status)

There are at least three (3) witnesses who have direct (non-hearsay) evidence of Democrat criminal conspiracy with Ukrainians to prevent Donald J. Trump from being President, with the alternative to remove him from office based on contrived charges. This has been most recently established by Mark Zaid, the discredited anonymous informant’s lawyer, who called for a coup ten days after the January 2017 inauguration. These witnesses have oral, documentary, and recorded evidence of the Biden Family’s involvement in bribery, money laundering, Hobbs Act extortion, and other possible crimes. They do not seek anonymity, like the disappearing informant. They desire a visa and it will not be granted by Ambassador Bill Taylor’s embassy in Kiev. The Ambassador, apparently, has been too busy starring on mid-day soap operas, providing us with inadmissible second and third-hand information, including guesses and surmises. Some of which I personally know is false because his information about me is largely untrue.

Last night we were looking at the assertions of Trump lawyers in the Senate trial:

“He was not on a political errand,” Raskin argued. “He was doing what good defense attorneys do. …”

Wrong. He's always been on a political errand.

Yes, Bernie can win. And he's not the only one.

Annette Nancarrow, portrait of a young Mexican girl and mirror, no date, via Rosemary Carstens.

Who is Mr. Bret Stephens warning, or threatening ("Of Course Bernie Can Win"), as the case may be?

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

Is he talking to readers? Is he talking to his colleagues in the panditry? The general problem of confusing your desire with your forecast—you could call it the Bill Kristol problem,  because he's the one who made it the cornerstone of his thinking—is mostly more widespread among readers, I think, while typical pandits are more interested in realizing interesting or contrarian "takes" that they don't necessarily believe at all, like this one, which is interesting because the Very Serious People are united in believing Sanders is unelectable.

Is he talking to the staid conservative readers in The Times's audience, trying to spread panic so early in the season, and for what? What does he expect them to do about it? Register as Democrats and work for Biden or Bloomberg to nip the nightmare in the bud?

He's arguing against those who say that Sanders is doomed because he can't get enough votes: