It’s 2024! Let’s see where 2023 left off, based on links I collected over the past week while traveling. Twenty-two items below, including these topics:
- Thom Hartmann on GOP scams;
- Roger Rosenblatt on New Year’s Resolutions;
- Mike Johnson’s alliance with “the most morally corrupt politician ever to run for the presidency”;
- Uganda and Burundi’s harsh laws against gays, with the support of American Republicans;
- Nikki Haley and slavery;
- How banning books is pointless;
- PolitiFact’s top 10 fact-checks of 2023.
Thom Hartmann, AlterNet, 23 Dec 2023: Opinion | Why have Americans embraced so many toxic GOP scams?
This matches my perception:
The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics.
Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:
Healthcare and quality education for all. Treat all people and religions with respect and fairness. Trust women to make their own decisions. Raise the pay of working people and support unionization. Get assault weapons off the streets. Do something about climate change. Clean up toxic waste sites and outlaw pesticides that damage children. Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Nonetheless, the media persists in treating the two parties as if they were equally honest and equally interested in the needs of all Americans. In part, that’s because one of the GOP’s most effective scams — the “liberal media bias” scam — has been so successful ever since Lee Atwater invented it back in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.
He goes on to list some of the GOP “scams”: Originalism. Voter fraud. Right to work (for less). Bush v Gore. Money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” Cutting taxes raises revenues. Destroying unions helps workers. Corporations can provide better Medicare than the government. More guns means more safety. The media has a liberal bias. Republicans are the party of faith. Crime is exploding and you’re safer living in an area Republicans control. Global warming is a hoax. Hispanic immigrants are “murderers and rapists.” Helping people makes them lazy. Tobacco doesn’t cause cancer. For-profit utilities produce cheaper and more reliable electricity than government-owned and -run ones. The electoral college protects democracy.
For all these he succinctly explains why these are scams, i.e. are not true.
(On media bias: “The simple reality is that America’s media, from TV and radio networks to newspapers to websites, are overwhelmingly owned by billionaires and corporations with an openly conservative bent. … There is nothing comparable on the left. Even MSNBC is owned by Comcast and so never touches issues of corporate governance, media bias (they fired Brian Stelter!), or the corruption of Congress by its big pharma and Medicare Advantage advertisers.”)
He then just lists several more items beyond the “tip of the iceberg” already covered, items concerning Putin and racism and banning books and how queer people are groomers.
Hartmann is a political commentator whose work appears widely, I’ve only recently realized.
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Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 24 Dec 2023: Don’t panic, men: We’re not helpless — and we don’t need the right’s phony masculinity, subtitled “Republicans are exploiting male anxiety — and Josh Hawley’s warmed-over Bible snippets offer young men nothing new”
Jerry Coyne, 24 Dec 2023: Jon Haidt on the rise of antisemitism on campus
Salon, Areeba Shah, 24 Dec 2023: “Disturbing pattern”: The most unhinged right-wing conspiracy theories of 2023, subtitled “From the ‘fedsurrection’ to ‘the new Wayfair,’ right-wing media and GOP spent the year boosting blatant falsehoods”
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NY Times, Roger Rosenblatt, 26 Dec 2023: This Year, Make a Resolution About Something Bigger Than Yourself
The assumption behind resolutions is that something must be corrected and improved. One vows to be better than one was the year before.
Part of the nature of resolutions, particularly for those of us north of 60, has to do not only with the new year before us, but also with time already spent, or misspent.
We reflect on the years we’ve lived, on the past resolutions made and broken. Another New Year’s Eve come and gone. Every time the ball drops, the heart sinks. You are running out of time, and time is what we value most.
He seems to suggest there’s an undercurrent of Puritan ethic in the very idea of New Year’s resolutions. We’re never good enough; there is always more to be done. What is Rosenblatt’s alternative? Stop obsessing about yourself, and make the world a better place.
The great beautiful irony of all this, of course, is that selflessness is not the opposite of self-improvement. Selflessness is self-improvement — the most meaningful and lasting kind.
Of course the idea of hitching one’s goals to something “bigger than yourself” — a phrase in the title (i.e. written by an editor), though not the text — is very familiar. It’s claimed as the motivation for religion, among many other things. Though religious commitment, it seems to me, is just a back-handed way of congratulating oneself on being part of the grand plan, identifying with a grand plan that is really all about you. Because it’s not religion that has made the world a better place these last several hundred years.
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NY Times, 26 Dec 2023: A Record-Breaking Warm, Snowless Winter Confounds Midwesterners, subtitled “Jogging in a T-shirt in Minnesota in December? A scientist called the rare string of balmy days ‘a visceral feeling of what climate change looks and feels like.'”
Washington Post, Chris Mooney and Shannon Osaka, 26 Dec 2023: Is climate change speeding up? Here’s what the science says., subtitled “This year’s record temperatures have some scientists concerned that the pace of warming may be accelerating. But not everyone agrees.”
Jerry Coyne, 26 Dec 2023: The Atlantic: how DEI is ruining humanities in American universities
The third item is one of a series of debates in various venues recently about the usefulness of the humanities, particularly if you’re a pragmatist and see the value of education simply as a means to get a good job.
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 27 Dec 2023: The twisted fantasy behind Mike Johnson’s “purity” pledge, subtitled “Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a fundamentalist with a theocratic agenda that he’s been pursuing for years”
Creepy purity pledges aside, the key point here is true of virtually the entire Republican party.
Mike Johnson aligned himself with the most morally corrupt politician to ever run for the presidency and he doesn’t seem in the least bit conflicted by it.
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NY Times, Opinion, Jane Coaston, 27 Dec 2023: The Factors That Made Evangelicals Ready for Trump
An interview with Tim Alberta, author of that recent book about evangelicals.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 27 Dec 2023: GOP’s Biggest Loser of 2023 Moms for Liberty has us asking: How many sex tapes are there?, subtitled “‘You deserve to be fired’: Amid a growing sex scandal, founder Bridget Ziegler was just confronted by a gay student”
Salon, Jonathan Larsen, 27 Dec 2023: GOP congressman traveled to Uganda to support anti-LGBTQ death penalty law, subtitled “Rep. Tim Walberg co-chairs the National Prayer Breakfast — and urged Uganda to ‘stand firm’ on ‘death to gays’ law”
NY Times, 31 Dec 2023: Burundi’s President Says Gay People Should Be Stoned
As has been previously noted, attitudes and laws in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa against gays were inspired by American Christian missionaries.
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MSNBC, Steve Benen, 28 Dec 2023: Why Nikki Haley flubbed a simple question about the Civil War, subtitled “It seemed like a simple question: ‘What was the cause of the Civil War?’ Nikki Haley’s unfortunate answer was emblematic of a larger problem.”
My take: because Republicans/conservatives have *always* been apologists for slavery. Deep down, they believe in a hierarchical world in which everyone knows their place, and white Christians are destined to rule over everyone else. This attitude apparently hasn’t changed, or we wouldn’t keep getting answers like Haley’s.
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LA Times, Erika D. Smith, 28 Dec 2023: Column: In flub over Civil War, Nikki Haley reveals a surprising truth about the culture wars
Politico, Joshua Zeitz, 28 Dec 2023: Opinion | Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to Say ‘Slavery’? History Has the Answer, subtitled “The presidential candidate’s recent (and swiftly qualified) comments about the Civil War helped spread a myth that has warped American history for over a century.”
Why did anyone fight for the Confederacy?
Of course, we know why Colonel Sartoris raised arms against the United States. So does anyone with a high school diploma — assuming they used up-to-date textbooks. And so did Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in 1861 famously asserted that the “cornerstone” of the new Southern nation rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The narrative about “states’ rights” boils down to the right to enslave people.
NY Times, Opinion, Steve Inskeep [the NPR host], 29 Dec 2023: What Nikki Haley Didn’t Say
Kansas City Star, Medlina Henneberger, via Yahoo News, 29 Dec 2023: Stop calling what Nikki Haley said about the Civil War a ‘blunder’ or ‘gaffe’ | Opinion
But her remarks weren’t blurted in error. Instead, they were the broadest possible wink to MAGA nation that she sees them, as she always has, and is with them, still.
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Why do so many people respect this man? What does is say about *them*? (Quite a lot, it seems to me.)
Snopes, 27 Dec 2023: ‘May They Rot in Hell’: Trump Curses Political Enemies in Christmas Day 2023 Post, subtitled “Readers asked Snopes if it was true that the former U.S. president had ended a Christmas message with the words, ‘May they rot in hell.'”
Rating: Correct attribution.
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Slate, Laura Miller, 28 Dec 2023: Forbidden Knowledge, subtitled “Banning books about LGBTQ+ issues doesn’t stop kids from learning about them—because that’s not where they’re learning about them in the first place.”
Key point:
[A] lot of social conservatives seem to believe that if their kids simply never find out about homosexuality or transgenderism, they’re guaranteed to grow up to be cisgendered heterosexuals. First of all, any number of queer people who grew up in small towns in the 1970s will be happy to assure you this isn’t true. But secondly, these days, banning books about LGBTQ+ issues wouldn’t succeed in shielding kids from this forbidden knowledge—because that’s not how kids are discovering it in the first place.
One guess.
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Vox, Li Zhou, 27 Dec 2023: House Republicans’ humiliating year, explained, subtitled “Even by House GOP standards, 2023 was absurd.”
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PolitiFact, 20 Dec 2023: PolitiFact’s top 10 fact-checks of politicians and pundits in 2023
Of the ten, three are about Gavin Newsom or Joe Biden. Their items are rated “mostly true,” “half true,” and “half true.” The other seven are about Republican politicians or conservatives commentators. Their items are rated “false” (4), “half true” (1), and “Pants on Fire!” (2).
