In particular, about a GOP congressman’s hypocrisy concerning his son’s gay marriage, how the Republican witnesses at the Jan. 6th hearing abandoned their jobs only at the last possible minute, and how people in red states have a distorted view of life in blue states.
Media Matters, 25 Jul 2022: Fox News attacked LGBTQ people on over 100 days in the first half of 2022 — including nearly 90% of days during Pride Month
Subtitled: “Anti-LGBTQ attacks have been a central part of Fox News’ right-wing propaganda machine in 2022”
No comment.
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CNN, 26 Jul 2022: GOP congressman attends gay son’s wedding after opposing protections for same-sex marriage
and
Salon, 26 Jul 2022: “GOP hypocrisy”: Republican attends gay son’s wedding days after voting against gay marriage
Do Republicans actually believe in anything? Or do they “believe” one thing when it involves family and their personal life, and another when, for the sake of their job, and their position of power, they need to pander to bigots in the heartland?
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Two days ago I noted a Washington Post piece by Matt Bai calling out the Republican Jan. 6 witnesses as not being heroes, but being complicitors until the very last moment.
Not just the witnesses.
Salon, Lucian K. Truscott IV, 23 Jul 2022: Liz Cheney’s smug, self-satisfied con job: Don’t fall for it
Subtitle: “Liz Cheney stood by Trump for 3.9 years while he loaded up the Supreme Court with Visigoths. Don’t be fooled”
Again, do Republicans actually believe in anything? For all of Liz Cheney’s composure at the Jan. 6th hearings, and her blunt summation of the perfidy of Donald Trump, she has in fact supported the majority of his policies for all these four years, his despicable character notwithstanding. (Was he the best Republicans could do, to get their way?, a question I keep wondering.)
The writer reminds us that these witnesses, sounding so noble and sanctimonious, in fact waited to resign until they only had a few weeks on their jobs anyway, given the impending presidential transition. One of those witnesses was Matthew Pottinger.
Then what does Pottinger tell us? A complete and utter crap-load of smarmy claptrap about how dedicated he is to “national security,” and how proud he was that he served as deputy national security adviser, and how Trump got “tough” with China and put together some treaty in the Middle East that’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
Mr. Pottinger was at his desk in the National Security Council office when Trump was completely and utterly capitulating to Vladimir Putin at Helsinki. He was sitting there in the Executive Office Building working for John Bolton when Trump was putting a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and telling him he wanted the “favor” of trashing Joe Biden before Trump would release $400 million in military aid the Ukrainians needed in their fight against the Russian incursion into their territory. Pottinger sat there on his hands when Trump fired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on utterly spurious grounds, knowing that she had done nothing to deserve it and that Trump was just positioning himself to exploit Ukraine in his effort to get reelected.
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Thematically cycling back to Fox News… What does Red State America know about Blue State America if all they know is from Fox News?
From today’s paper, posted yesterday:
NYT, Paul Krugman, 25 Jul 2022: The Dystopian Myths of Red America
He begins:
Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.
What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.
Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners.
But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.
Followed by examples of how Republicans claim that *Democrats* are promoting violence and civil war, that they are Marxists, that the Black Lives Matter demonstrators “looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.”
Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime.
Whereas conservatives openly admire Viktor Orban; 75% of extremist killings are perpetuated by the right, only 4% by the left; and the damage caused by BLM protests cost as much as $2 billion… whereas Texas governor Greg Abbott’s stunt to impose extra security checks at the border cost the economy some $4 billion.
And the impressions of violence in America’s cities is grossly over-estimated.
In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.
First, the big point no one remembers is that crime has fallen dramatically, everywhere, since the 1990s. There are always fluctuations up and down. Red state critics always cherry pick to focus on the relative upswings. –And even these, I keep reminding, are less matters of statics than matters of media bias, the simple bias toward exceptional events, regardless of statistical significance. As I’ve explained many times before.
Krugman concludes:
The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.
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To my post two days ago, the one titled “Imposters,” I’ve added the following in the section about Republican refusal to acknowledge the Jan. 6th hearings:
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Of course this is a specific example of the general observation that you cannot change the minds of the vast majority of people by laying out the facts and expecting them to reach the obvious conclusion. (As I captured here.)
Or maybe a refinement, not an example. The very people who cling to prior beliefs and resist evidence are of course those most committed to ideology, whether religious or conservative or even to a lesser extent the radical left (who tend to reject biology for certain purposes). But it’s because Republicans are so ideologically driven that they are the prime examples of this unfortunate facet of human nature. (But see my upcoming discussion of David McRaney’s new book for a plausible reason this dig-in-the-heels tendency might, in fact, have served an evolutionary purpose.)
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–Which is partly to say, review of the new McRaney book forthcoming, this week or next.
