Lance Mannion

Fighting with the Fighting Irish

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday morning, September 12, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, September 19.

Notre Dame sophomore running back Kyren Williams running for daylight in Saturday's game against Duke. Williams ran for 205 yards and the Fighting Irish beat the Blue Devils, 27-13, and, hopefully, with the luck of the Irish, everyone on the field and in the stands beat the odds of catching the Covid virus. Courtesy of Notre Dame Athletics.

There’s a priest I follow casually on Twitter---not Father Martin, not even a Jesuit, so there’s no danger his tweets are going to tempt me into returning to the Church, but he’s often amusing, usually pithy, and routinely exasperating in a forgivable way in his contrarianism, which makes him hard to peg as a liberal or a conservative---something I think he takes too much pride in, and pride, as he would know, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins---and he’s on the faculty at Notre Dame.

I have a sentimental attachment to Notre Dame. Mrs M’s brother went there. My brother Lyle earned his M.A. in theology there. When I was a kid I thought that as a good Irish Catholic I was required to go there for college. I thought everybody who went there and taught there and played football there was Irish or at any rate Catholic. I thought this even though Ara Parseghian was their coach at the time and not only was he not Irish, he was famously not Catholic. He was Presbyterian. And then of course, there’s Joe Montana.

So, this priest posts this anecdote this morning and for those sentimental reasons and because it brought out the old altar boy in me I laughed out loud and immediately RTed…

First Saturday of football and I walk out of my office to this traditional gameday conversation: A Senior explaining to a Sophomore how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with the breviaries we have in our chapel

Story also appealed to me as a former college professor who misses his students. So like I just said, I retweeted it immediately.

And immediately regretted it.

Because I could see the scene too clearly. And what I saw was that those students weren’t maintaining their social distance and neither one was wearing a mask.

I called the priest on this, in a less than tactful way…

I'm assuming they were wearing masks and maintaining social distance and if not you reminded them, otherwise this isn't quite the amusing anecdote it would be

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m usually more politic than this. And I knew why he’d left the masks and the social distancing out of the anecdote. It would have wrecked the flow of the story and ruined the joke. But I was feeling grumpy and impatient because I was waiting at UrgentCare for a checkup and Covid test and I took it out on him. He, naturally, took umbrage at my tweet.

Everyone was, of course [he replied]. Very strange comment.

I blundered on…

There's no "of course" about it. Or aren't you aware of what's going on at many other schools? And what do you think is going to go on in the stadium?

He retorted with an implicit “Excuse me!”...

I think it was an odd comment because it suggested I might be indifferent to doing my job. I would not be highlighting a situation that was dangerous--I'm well aware that here and at other places it requires constant vigilance. But that doesn't mean I expect that a wholly separate observation needs the skew line of "but did you do your job?"

To which I replied by pointing out that...

My followers don't necessarily follow you so they aren't going to automatically give you the benefit of the doubt

But they're really unlikely to give the benefit of the doubt to a pair of college guys even if they are good Catholics

I have to confess I was getting sardonic pleasure out of being rude to a priest. In 2002, my by then tenuous relation with the Church ended with me being rude to a priest, for which I offer no penance, because he deserved it and then some. I was looking forward to more but the good father was willing to let it go. He had a game to get to, after all. And I was being called in for my checkup.

But I wasn’t willing to let it go. I don’t have to let things go. It’s why I have a blog. So here I am, not letting it go.

For the record, I’m fairly certain this priest doesn’t read my blog.

Anywho…

Like I said to the priest, there’s no “of course” about it. Colleges that opened for classes last month are already shutting down because of outbreaks of infection among the students who---here’s a shocker---aren’t wearing masks and maintaining social distance. SUNY Oneonta here in New York has closed for the semester. Ken Mannion’s classes at SUNY New Paltz are all online by his choice, but he won't risk going up to campus even though it's practically a ghost town to use the library, the cafeteria, or the gym. My sister Laura’s daughter is back at SUNY Geneseo but she went back reluctantly. She’s a dance major and her dance classes aren’t offered online. The protocols in place make it practically like she’s in prison. Students are pretty much confined to their dorm rooms when they’re not in class. She and her roommate and floormates are being diligent, but they’re girls. The worry is that some maskless, self-believingly immortal, invulnerable guy will burst in the door some night to yell, “We’re having a party! Come on down!” Another niece, my sister Linda’s daughter, is aghast and appalled and frightened by the recklessness of students at her college out in Texas. She lives in her own apartment off campus, but when she walks to class she has trouble avoiding other students, maskless, traveling in bunches, convinced they have nothing to worry about because they’re young, and young people are immune, and, besides, it’s Texas---Covid only affects old brown and black people in Blue States and where did you get those numbers, Yankee? Notre Dame is in Indiana, a state full of idiot, Trump-loving Republicans of the type who make up most of the crowds at football games.

But there’s one more thing I wanted to remind him of, if he and the nurse waiting for me to gather up my effects and follow him into the examination room had given me the time to tweet.

Lou Holtz, arguably the greatest football coach in Notre Dame’s history, had just been given the Medal of Freedom by you know who. And you know who gave it to him as a political reward for speaking at the Republican convention where mask-wearing and social distancing were conspicuously not only discouraged, they were treated as cowardly and un-American.

What did he suppose students at Notre Dame made of the sight of those gleeful, maskless supposed adults sitting shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs on the White House lawn? Hopefully, the same thing most kids their age make of adults in general. But even if they know better, the adults in their sphere probably don’t. The crowds at college football games aren’t made up of students or even alumni. They’re made of average middle-aged, middle-class chuckleheads for whom college football is a tenet of their personal religion and an expression of their patriotism. Fans of the Fighting Irish come to South Bend from all over the Hoosier state---all over the country really---to worship and wave the flag.

And not incidentally watch young men risk life and limb for their amusement.

The fans are there by choice.

The players have to be there or else.

If that priest had been willing---and foolish enough---to get into it with me, I’d have liked to argue theology with him.

See, in my religion, holding a football season during a pandemic is a sin.

Incentivizing work...on THEIR terms

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, July 13, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, August 1.

“Incenting” keeping workers in line: Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin speaking at a Cornonavirus Task Force briefing at the White House, April 2, 2020, while President Trump looks on, waiting for his turn to take over the microphone and begin another one of his lunatic stand-up routines. Reuters file photo by Tom Brenner via Business Insider.

[More July catch-up.]

The GOP is not the party of the working class. Not even of just the white working class. It’s not the party of workers at all. It’s the party of bosses. It’s the party of putting you to work on their terms.

In an interview on CNBC, Mnuchin said he favors extending enhanced unemployment benefits beyond their scheduled July 31 expiration, but he said any extension must protect both employers and employees.

“I’ve heard stories of where companies are trying to get people back to work and they won’t come because the enhanced unemployment,” Mnuchin said. “But we’ll fix that and we’ll figure out an extension to it that works for companies and works for those people who will still be unemployed.”

Said Mnuchin: “We’re going to make sure that people are incented to go back to jobs.”

---from “Trump Administration On Next Stimulus: Unemployed Shouldn’t Be Paid More Not To Work” by Kelly Ann Smith in Forbes, July 9, 2020.

I’ve heard stories of people not wanting to come back to work because they’re naturally “incented” to not risk getting sick and dying in a pandemic that’s still out of control. But YMMV.

Barbers on the margin, along with just about all of us

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Friday, May 15, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, May 21.

The shop in Kingston, New York, where the barber Oliver Mannion calls the Speak-Easy Barber claims he didn't cut the hair he was accused of cutting: Photo Ivan Lajara, the Daily Freeman.

A barber who continued to cut hair at a shop in New York over the past few weeks in violation of the state's stay-at-home order has tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to the Ulster County Department of Health and Mental Health.

In a statement Wednesday, the county health commissioner advised anyone who received a haircut in the past three weeks at a barbershop on Broadway in the city of Kingston, about 20 miles north of Poughkeepsie, to seek testing for the coronavirus. The statement did not identify either the barber or the shop.---Janelle Griffith, NBC News, May 14, 2020. 

I don't blame the barber, and I sure hope he doesn't get sick. Barbers operate on the margins at the best of times. I’d blame the Small Business Administration for not getting the CARE Act money to the smallest businesses fast enough and to large businesses too fast. But I don’t know if the barber got his or even applied.

Barber shops and hair salons are among the businesses that won't survive this. Even after we "re-open" they're not going to have what they need to stay open for long

Their customers won't come stampeding back, their suppliers are going to have raised their prices trying to make up for their own losses. Their landlords are going to landlord.

This crisis has revealed how unprepared we were for any crisis, including a financial one. It's also revealed how anemic the recovery from the 2008 Recession was...IS!

The "booming" recovery the media was touting and that Trump was taking undue credit for and counting on getting him re-elected was a matter of rising stock prices and trading and job numbers that didn't take into account that most of the new jobs were low paying and without benefits, and in many instances held by the same persons working two and three jobs in order to make ends meet. President Obama benefited from this notion too.

Future pandemics are easy to wish away. Financial downturns are as predictable as snow in the mountains in winter.

By the way, Kingston is part of the Mannion stomping grounds. Mrs M's therapists and her neurosurgeon have their offices there. We made a habit of going to what became one of our favorite diners after her appointments

It's not a big city but it's compact and people are always - or were - out and about. The few customers whose hair the barber cut can spread the virus to thousands in a matter of days

Almost done. Just going to cc this to our Congressman who talked about the Democrats' plans to address the problems of small business owners like the barber (who is one of his constituents, after all) in his teleconference yesterday…

But it sounds like too little too late for the barber and others in the same fix.

____________________________________________________________________________

Is it an update if you added it before you post or is it a PS? Whichever, here’s more…

The name and address of the barber and his shop have been identified in stories by several national and international media outlets. The barber himself, whom Oliver Mannion has dubbed the Speak-Easy Barber, is one of the sources. He says he’s just been doing what millions of others have been doing, working from home. See, he hasn’t been cutting hair in the shop. He’s been doing it in his home. Which is behind the shop. No matter:

[The Governor] said do not open up your shops, barbershops, beauty parlors, nail salons, tattoo parlors,” LaLima told the newspaper. “So I didn’t.”

I think he has Andrew Cuomo there.

Still, he has tested positive---he says he picked up the virus from a customer---and the district attorney’s office is investigating whether he knew he had it when he was cutting hair.

Reminds me. All us Mannions have been tested. We’re waiting for the results.

Also reminds me. The four of us really need haircuts. Doesn’t just about everybody?

Some people in Michigan got theirs yesterday. They held a protest they called Operation Haircut in front of the State Capitol Building in Lansing. Barbers gave free haircuts. Not all of them wore masks. Many of the protesters waiting to get a trim deliberately stood less than a social distance away from each other. NBC headlined their story “Anti-lockdown demonstrators trade guns for scissors at Michigan 'haircut' protest” which is a case of the producer giving into the temptation of an obvious jokey hed instead of taking the facts seriously. Of course people brought guns to the protest.

NBC also did the national media thing of trying to placate the mobs they’re courting as readers and viewers by treating them as part of a grassroots movement and their protest as another spontaneous populist uprising of regular folks. But, as NBC reported without comment, the protest was organized by the Right Wing Trump Worshipping Michigan Conservative Coalition. And it wasn’t an anti-lockdown protest. It was a campaign rally for Trump, who needs to win Michigan, and for Republicans in general to keep control of the state legislature and send their Congress critters back to Washington.

And...please, national media, stop reporting the relatively small crowd sizes at these things as if they represent masses. Three-hundred and fifty people milling about in a city of 118,427 in a state of 9.9 million is a statistical blip. It’s hardly enough people to fill up a movie theater---when those reopen. And, by the way, why aren’t studios sponsoring more outdoor showings everywhere? The country needs more drive-ins, damnit!---or a church on Easter Sunday.

Still, like I said up top, I don’t blame the barbers, seven of whom received tickets I hope get thrown out, and Operation Haircut strikes me as less of a protest than a solution in the making.

Minus the guns, of course.

Support your local papers: Read Paul Kirby’s whole story on the Kingston barber at the Daily Freeman by following the link: “Ulster DA launches probe into Kingston barber who stayed open and tested positive for coronavirus”.

The Detroit Free Press has the AP story by David Eggert: “7 barbers ticketed for cutting hair at Michigan Capitol protest”.

Do like Monk, only maybe less...

Posted Saturday morning, May 16, 2020.

It’s even more of a jungle out there: Tony Shaloub reprising the obsessive-compulsive, germophobic, anxiety-ridden genius detective Adrian Monk for the Peacock Presents At-Home Variety Show.

Monk in self-isolation:

“While I have you, you guys have any extra hand sanitizer? I’m down to my last twelve cases.”

“”That’s hoarding! He’s hoarding!”

“No, no. It’s not hoarding, Randy, if you bought them twenty years ago.”

Do like Monk, only maybe dial it a little back, particularly when choosing your hand-washing song…

The sketch starts at 1:40 in, but I recommend watching Seth Macfaralane’s intro for the suggestions for organizations to donate to help vulnerable communities and essential workers and first-responders. I like Macfarlane calling them front-line workers and I’m adopting the term.

Here’s the link:

https://youtu.be/f4W2xmqjvx4

Hat tip to Oliver Mannion.

Sobering note: Shaloub and his wife, actress Brooke Adams both had COVID-19. They’re over it now, but it was scary.

Cold Comfort

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday afternoon, March 31, 2020. Posted Monday morning, April 6.

Reinforcemnt not rescue: The U.S. Navy’s hospital ship the U.S.N.S. Comfort being guided into port past the Statue of Liberty by a tugboat, Monday, March 30, 2020. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Yahoo News.

[Another rant as I struggle to catch up.]

"The president showed up to send off the Comfort in a show of national unity in a crisis." ---the New York Times, Monday, March 30, 2020.

No, he didn't. And the editors at the New York Times know he didn’t. That’s a gratuitous bit of flag-waving in an otherwise sober and informative article. Trump showed up to get his picture taken looking like he was personally sending the Comfort to the rescue, and doing his usual bad job of acting like he thinks his base thinks real Presidents act, which is like Reagan who was always acting like he thought a real President acted, which was not like any actual President but like Douglas MacArthur would have acted if he’d become President and how he’d have played a President in a movie if his movie career had continued through the 1960s. Trump was mimicking an actor mimicking himself mimicking a disgraced Army general mimic being the President.

Any president would have made the most of the photo op but this one was only there for the photo op. That's how he rolls.

And national unity has never been on his agenda. Division and discord have been his goals since he announced his run for the presidency. It was practically his only real campaign issue. It’s essentially his only policy now that he’s president.

The Times carries stories every day reporting the ways he sews division and discord and relishes it. That's what the rallies are about: "US" against “THEM!”

And he's been doing it throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Every day at his press conferences he says things that divide the country. And he's made clear New York City is on his list of THEMs!

When this worsens, as it will. [Editor’s unnecessary note: As it has!] He will use the Comfort as a weapon against New York. "I sent them the ship. Cuomo didn't know what to do with it."

He’s not a normal president, even when he appears to be doing and saying things like a normal president. The political media has got to cut out entirely covering him as if he isn't him.

And just for the record, the "enormous" ship: one-thousand beds. That's all it has, according to the Times’ own reporting---although it takes a long time into the story before it gets reported. Nowhere near enough to be of much help.

It's not sailing to the rescue. A thousand beds? That's not even relief. It's there as reinforcement.

The Comfort is there to create a small island of order in the growing ocean of chaos.

This is a lesson of the crisis: there is very little we can do when nature decides to assert itself. All we can do is prepare to fight off the worst---and that we failed to do---protect ourselves as best we can when it hits---which Trump has made it hard to do---save as many other people as we can---which Trump and other money-before-everything conservatives believe is only as many as are needed to get the economy back up and running, doing what they believe it’s only supposed to do, helping the already wealthy grow wealthier---and then do our best to recover when it's done

._________________________________________________________________________________________________

I feel I need to repeat that paragraph, this time without the anti-Trump editorializing interrupting the flow of my existential despair...

This is a lesson of the crisis: there is very little we can do when nature decides to assert itself. All we can do is prepare to fight off the worst, protect ourselves as best we can when it hits, save as many other people as we can, and then do our best to recover when it's done.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taking on victims of the novel coronavirus isn’t the Comfort’s job, as the headline on the Times’ story makes clear. Its job is to take pressure off city hospitals by providing care for patients with other life-threatening conditions who need immediate hospitalization. To read the whole article by Helene Cooper and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, follow the link to “Navy Hospital Ship Reaches New York. But It’s Not Made to Contain Coronavirus.” at the New York Times.

Kudlow and a lot of people

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Monday morning, March 30, 2020. Posted Thursday afternoon, April 2.

“Err...what I meant to say…”: “White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow adjusts his tie before speaking with reporters about the impact of the Coronavirus on markets in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Friday, Feb. 28, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)”

[Editor's apology to our readers: There's going to be a bunch of posts that will make it seem like I'm living days and weeks behind you. It's not that I haven't been trying to keep up or that I haven't been writing about it. But there’s too much I don’t know. Too much happening for me to write fast enough to keep up. All I can manage are rants on Twitter and in my notebooks that events render quickly out of date, like the one below. But all I got is what I got, so I got to go with that…]

Well, one people in particular…

ABC: You told CNBC a month ago that the coronavirus was "contained." Why should people trust you?

LARRY KUDLOW: "Look, I'm as good as the facts are. At the time I made that statement, the facts were -- contained ... a lot of people agreed with me."

That’s National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, quoted in a post by Summer Concepcion at TPM, attempting to explain away “his baseless claim earlier this month that COVID-19 was “contained” during an interview on ABC News Sunday morning.” He wasn't done...

'In fact, at the time, a lot of people thought that the flu was worse than this virus.”

Agreeing with whatever Trump is blathering on about on a given day is the first rule of working for him. What Kudlow is admitting is that he was toeing the company line to please the boss.

But if there were "a lot” of other people who agreed with him, they weren't health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, scientists, nurses etc, all of the likes of whom SCREAMED in disagreement at the time

"Kudlow then said that “as soon as the facts changed,” the Trump administration changed its “whole posture” and its “whole strategy.”"

The facts didn't change. Things began to happen that made it impossible for the Administration to deny the facts any longer.

And the "posture" and "strategy" the administration changed were the ones that were making Trump look bad. That's the only reason Trump ever changes course, to prop up his image.

Even so, there was no "soon" about it.

And let's be clear. It was the stock market crashing and the unemployment numbers rising that convinced Trump to do something. From the first all he's thought about is how the crisis affects his re-election chances

That's all he's still thinking about. Listen to the way he talks about all the people sick and dying, all the people who have died. How he keeps congratulating himself. How proud he is of his "ratings".

He's finally been forced to change "strategy" and "posture" to take what is still minimal action. That's good but he’s still part of the crisis himself and so are Kudlow and any of the political hacks who work for him.

It's natural for people trying to explain things off the cuff to fall back on saying "a lot of people" as though that proves something more than "I think I have real reasons for thinking this other than my own high opinion of my intelligence".

But Kudlow is someone who shouldn't be speaking off the cuff at the moment. He should be able to state the facts off the top of his head. He should be able to say who those "a lot of people" who agreed with him are.

But it's the mark of mediocre minds---and hence the mark of conservative "experts"---that they believe that saying things like "a lot of people agreed with me" is ENOUGH.

They accept that their own high opinion of their own intelligence is enough, and they don't need facts. They truly govern by "gut instinct", which is to say by vanity and desire, and they scorn everyone and everything that shows their instinct is wrong

This was the case with the George W. Bush administration. It's how we got into Iraq and how they came to let New Orleans drown.

And it's even more the case with this crew.

To read the whole post that got me ranting, follow the link to “Kudlow: ‘Facts Were Contained’ When I Falsely Claimed COVID-19 Containment” by Summer Concepcion at Talking Points Memo.

And there’s more at AP’s website: “Trump tries to shift blame as virus outbreak rattles markets”.

The work of hoarders is another thing...

Posted Monday evening, March 9, 2020.

 Health crises estrange neighbors: Strong national leadership on display at your local supermarket: Hannaford Supermarket, Niskayuna, New York. Today around five-thirty p.m.

The work of hoarders is another thing:
I have come after them and tried to shop
Where they have left not one roll on a roll
But they would stock up on essentials
To quell their rising fear...

---Lance Mannion, after Frost, thinking he's being clever.

A tale of two charities

Adapted from the Twitter feed, January 27, 2019. Typed up and posted February 3.

President of the World at Work: Bill Clinton having fun doing good and being Bill in Puerto Rico heading a Clinton Foundation initiative to bring more disaster relief to the island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria. That’s Hillary Clinton in the blue top on the right. Uncredited photo courtesy of the Clinton Foundation.

Got an email last week from the Clinton Foundation announcing they're helping to send 30,000 pounds of medical supplies to Puerto Rico. The supplies---which include hospital beds, ambulation devices, general primary medical supplies, exam tables, stretchers and which “Accion Social will distribute the equipment to home care providers that service for over 1,000 older adults throughout the 76 municipalities, and to Federally Qualified Health Centers in Hatillo, Arecibo and Utuado that care for over 16,000 patients per year”---are travelling to Puerto Rico via an airlift being organized by the Ayfa Foundation, with funding donated by the Greater New York Hospital Association and Pearl Aircraft’s Chairman Jan Söderberg. Swift Air has donated the cargo space on the 737 jet. “StratAir is assisting with the cargo buildup, breakdown, and ground handling” and the Clinton Foundation is handling the coordination and support. This is the same foundation the media called to be shut down during the 2016 Presidential campaign because “questions could be raised.”

Questions were being raised---by reporters’ Republican sources asking “Why are you running so many negative stories about Trump? Where are the ones about Hillary?”

They were also being raised by Trump himself who was busy performing the usual Republican trick of accusing his opponent of doing what he was in trouble for. Republicans are habitual projectionists but Trump does it with wilder abandon and more than a touch of real delusion.

“Disgusting” he called the Clinton Foundation. “The most corrupt enterprise in political history” he said another time. Over and over again at his rallies he accused Hillary Clinton of having been on the take when she was Secretary of State. At his and Hillary’s third and final debate, he pretty much accused the Clintons of collusion with the Saudis. Horrible figured in his description of the people he’d be defending from allegations of murder two years later.

Mike Pence just outright lied.

And for the most part the media played along.

They reported the tale of the two foundations the way they reported other Trump outrages and scandals:

“Yeah, what he did was less than kosher, but she’s no angel. And even if she didn’t say or do things anywhere near as bad, she said and did things we don’t approve of and she should know better than tick us off.”

Over and over again they reminded us that they each had the lowest approval ratings of any major presidential candidates ever, without noting how much lower his were than hers or bothering to explain who disapproved of them and what they disapproved of. The words liar, bigot, and fraud didn’t appear in their reporting. “Populist” was their convenient term for avoiding saying “Right Wing authoritarian racist demagogue”. They went on covering his rallies as if they were rock concerts and sporting events, judging them as spectacles and entertainment and scoring them according to how riled up his mobs of hideous men got. Then they shook their collective heads over the enthusiasm gap.

Mostly they tried to have it both ways, focusing a critical but but cynically non-judgmental eye on him while finding and taking every opportunity to criticize her. This story from NPR is typical. It does a credible job or listing all the signs the Trump Foundation was a fraud and a good deal of the evidence the Clinton Foundation wasn’t. But it glosses over the part where the Clinton Foundation’s work actually saves thousands and thousands of lives a year and devotes at least as much time and space to emphasizing the appearances of less than ethical strictness in all matters and at all levels.

There are fair criticisms of the way the Clinton Foundation goes about doing the business of charity. Not every one of its initiatives is handled in the most efficacious manner. The role the Clintons themselves play as the public personas of the Foundation---particularly Bill’s clearly loving playing at being President of the World---can be off-putting to even their admirers and perhaps throw things out of kilter and...well...create the appearance that ethical strictness is being sacrificed to personal vanity. But there’s no doubt that the Clintons intend to do good and routinely succeed in doing it, and the Foundation earns its high ratings.

And there’s no comparing it to the Trump Foundation or, rather, no comparing the Trump Foundation to it except to show what a fraud Trump has been perpetrating.

There's never been any evidence that the Trump Foundation was anything more than a tax dodge and a personal piggy bank for Trump and now it's one of the scams he ran that might get him perp walked by the state of New York. But you know...her emails!

The media's coverage of that election was an ethical disgrace. The country deserves an apology and more than that an explanation.

Fat chance will get either.

Where in the world is Hillary Clinton? Where she believes she should be...

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, January 28, 2019. Posted Monday morning, February 4.

And that’s not on the campaign trail

I have a feeling she’s not in Iowa anymore. Or New Hampshire. Or in any diners in the South or Midwest: Not-candidate for President in 2020 Hillary Clinton (second from left) and former President Bill Clinton (in his Wellies, center) touring a farm in Puerto Rico, January 28, 2019, on behalf of the Clinton Foundation which has just announced an airlift of 30,000 pounds of medical supplies it’s sponsoring in partnership with the AYFA Foundation, Swift Air, and GYNA to the territory which is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Maria and in need of more than the paper towels Donald Trump tossed out during his photo op there back in 2017. Uncredited photo courtesy of the Clinton Foundation.

Other day, President of the Center for American Progress and some time advisor to Hillary Clinton Neera Tanden sighed in frustration and dismay on Twitter :

Every few months, someone whispers to a reporter that Hillary has not signed in blood that she won’t run and we get this media swarm which is an opportunity to drag her. It then ends within a day with actual advisors saying she’s not running. It’s painful and mean and should end.

It should but it won't. Even when it's clear she's not running because one of the announced candidates has emerged as the clear front runner they'll still go after her. They'll just use her as a foil…

Either the front runner is doing it right by not being like her or doing it wrong by being like her or they'll have it both ways. And along the way they'll be telling us how she's getting ready to jump in a play spoiler because both Clintons are monsters of ambition and ego, unlike every other politician in the world.

Unlike journalists and pundits at elite news outlets, as well.

I don't know why they hate her like they do but they do hate her. She is their bête noire and they project onto her everything they dislike about liberal politicians.

Like I would know, but it’s always been my suspicion that what they most dislike about liberal politicians and liberals in general is that they won’t let them get away with treating politics like a game between two equally cynical teams of power-hungry opportunists with no other goals than winning elections and serving their donors. The media pride themselves on their own cynicism which they think of as healthy, professional skepticism. They don’t take sides, you see! They’re outside the fray. Not taking sides frees them to have their favorite players without it mattering what those players stand for. This is how likability becomes the most important quality in a candidate. Likable means doesn’t make me think about what happens if this or that player actually wins.

The political media corps was full of people who did not like Hillary and couldn’t stand the thought of her becoming President. That the only alternative was Donald Trump didn’t seem to cross their minds. They just assumed she would win and that prospect infuriated them, and they went to work making sure she’d be a one-termer before the first votes were cast. She would lose by winning. They were determined to see that.

Now she makes them mad by having been right about Trump, right about his base of deplorables, right about just about everything, and by having been right but not shutting up and going away, she is a constant reminder that the media blew it.

Their vanity and egos won’t let them stand for that.

But, like I said, like I would know.

By the way, the NBCNews story Tanden links to isn't that bad. It gets Mark Penn right---he’s a quisling on his way to be an out and out turncoat…

Penn was once a top strategist for Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, but was banished years ago from her inner orbit after being saddled with much of the blame for her loss. He was not invited back to her 2016 campaign.

More recently, Penn has become a vocal defender of President Donald Trump in the ongoing Russia probe, and a promoter of some of the questionable criticism Trump lodged at Clinton during the 2016 campaign...

...and accepts the fact that she's not running without doing the usual Hillary bashing.

It's the CNN story it’s actually refuting that's doing the usual song and dance and which I suspect is the one causing Tanden her dismay and despair. Anyway, you should read it. The NBC story not CNN's. Story’s by Alex Seitz-Wald and you can read it and watch it by following the link to “Hillary Clinton runs to Puerto Rico, not the White House” at NBCNews. It includes the link to CNN’s story, if you want to read it, but I think it’s best not to encourage them.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Recommended relevant Mannion re-run: "Likable Liz and Unlikable Hil"...

Many women are justifiably irked at the media’s sudden interest in Warren’s likability and the way likability is an issue for women politicians in a way and to a degree it’s not for men running for office. “Likability” is a way for men to police their behavior and their language and keep them in their place, submissive and subservient to men who take their own likability for granted. But there’s a key point in the current discussion that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s not so much whether Warren and other women politicians are likable. It’s that a particular woman politician wasn’t...

Unidos

Posted Wednesday evening, October 4, 2017.

Outside Bobby Burrito. Newburgh, New York. Late this afternoon.

Wish this was a more dramatic photo with all the flags waving together in the breeze, but the breeze and the flags and my camera couldn’t coordinate. In case you can’t make the first three out, these are, from left to right, the flags of Puerto Rico, Texas, and Mexico, with the Stars and Stripes at the end of the line, flying, as any good Scout will tell you, as it should, a little higher than the others.  They’re not being flown by the Subway. They belong to the owner of a little Mexican restaurant in the same building. Bobby Burrito. (There’s a Chinese take-out in there too.) That’s the owner getting into his truck underneath the Puerto Rican flag. He told me, shyly but proudly, that he ordered the flags from an online supplier. I didn’t think to ask him if he has Florida and Nevada flags on the way. I didn’t have time to get a burrito tonight, but I promised to come by Friday for lunch. I’ll ask him then.

Why didn't they evacuate?

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, August 30, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, September 3.

“Rescue boats fill a flooded street at flood victims are evacuated as floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey rise Monday, Aug. 28, 2017, in Houston.” Photo by David J. Phillip/AP. Courtesy of the Associated Press, via 10tv.

Good question.

Why didn’t they evacuate?

What was the matter with them? What’s wrong with them? Why didn’t they know better? Why didn’t they get when the getting was good?

That’s what I’d have done.

As if the getting’s ever good. As if we can always know better. As if we can always know to know better.

Why didn’t they evacuate?

The question’s been asked online, on TV, on the radio, mostly by people who live nowhere near Houston and the other areas Harvey’s blown through. I gather it’s also mostly conservatives asking it. Which doesn’t surprise me. But I wouldn’t know. I don’t listen to them, watch them, or read them. What I know of their asking I mostly know through the answering coming from liberals I do read, listen to, and watch, who have responded with earnest lecturing on what it's like to be poor and not have the money for gas and food and lodging to sustain your evacuation, even if you have somewhere to evacuate to.

But this assumes that everyone who didn’t leave was poor.

Of course that’s what a lot of people asking the question are assuming. They’re also assuming some things about those poor people. Which, rightly, has provoked a great deal of indignation. Liberal indignation. Religious indignation. Moral indignation. Human indignation. People of good heart recognize the question as what it is, coming as it does from the usual quarters: an act of blaming. An excuse not to care.

Serves them right. If they're not going to help themselves, why should we pay to help them?

These quarters always speak up when people need government help or seek legal redress---other people. We heard from them loudly and clearly during Katrina, during Sandy, during Irene.

Who else would ask that question?

Well, actually...

Everybody.

Everybody else.

Any of us. All of us. Well, not you, of course. Not me either. We’re special. We’re saints. But the rest of the sinners,with whom, for rhetorical effect, I’ll be including myself despite my halo. We would. And did. Maybe not out loud. Maybe not as our first thought. But it's a natural enough question. We're used to lines of cars carrying people away from hurricanes, forest fires, erupting volcanoes. Where were the lines of cars leaving Houston? Why didn't they get out when they had the chance?

Why didn't they evacuate?

There are practical reasons for asking the question---what can be done in the future to stave off or at least mitigate the effects of such a natural disaster, of which, thanks to climate change, there are going to be many more---and practical answers to it that are not simply political or economic. Evacuating a city of 2.3 million people is next to impossible. People died in the evacuation preceding Hurricane Rita. People were preparing for a hurricane not a 500 year tropical storm that would cause flooding of near-biblical proportions. And even if more people had left, that wouldn’t have meant their lives weren’t ruined. They couldn’t take their homes and all their possessions with them.

But why didn’t they evacuate is not really the question most people are asking. It’s the disguise the real question wears. The real question is What if this was happening to me?

What would I have done?

How would I have escaped whatever trouble, suffering, and pain randomly inflicted by an indifferent universe or a heartless God?

It’s a reflexive and defensive and superstitious question. The impulse behind it is to assure ourselves we’d have been fine, we’d have survived. Whatever happened wouldn’t have happened to us.

I’d have done this. I’d have done that. I’d have planned. I’d have taken action. I’d have done whatever it took and I’d have come out all right.

Right?

Right?

And if we’re honest, our answer, which might take a few steps to reach, would be: Maybe not.

We might not have come out all right. We might not have escaped. We might not have survived. Or if we did it would be due as much if not more to luck than to our own careful planning and quick thinking. We might not have handled it better. We might have handled it worse!

Asking the question can be the first step to putting ourselves in others’ shoes.

There but for the grace of God…

A way to tell conservatives from everybody else is what they mean when they say that. What decent people mean is, Gosh, I’m lucky!  What conservatives mean is, Gosh, God must love me and think I’m special, what a good person I must be.

The corollary to this is, of course, And God must not love you or think you’re special. What a bad person you must be.

You can see how such thinking would be habitual for conservatives. If you do the right things, follow the rules, go to church and say your prayers, you'll be fine. God will look out for you. If you aren't fine, God wasn't looking out for you, you brought your trouble on yourself.

I’m talking about religious conservatives. Other conservatives simply frame things in terms of ego, vanity, and pride supported by a belief in social Darwinism and libertarian politics.

I’m doing fine. I’ll continue to do fine because I’m strong. I’m smart. I know how to take care of myself and my interests. Through my own efforts and will I’ve made myself a superior specimen. I’d have survived, I’d have escaped, I’d have come through all right because I’m not like them.

But at the moment it doesn’t matter who’s asking the question and why and what they mean by it. It's forgivable if your first question was Why didn't they evacuate, as are any of the questions you ask after it, if your last question is What can I do to help?

A lot of people have put their lives on the line, some have even died, answering that question. Many of them are liberals, many of them are conservatives, many of them are religious, many of them have no politics either way or religion either. There’s no telling them apart and no point to it. All there is to say of them is what that late great Texan Molly Ivins used to say whenever she wanted to praise someone. “Good on them!”

The rest of us, those who don’t live nearby or who for one reason or another can’t be on the scene to physically help can help by donating whatever we can. The best thing to donate right now is money. The Houston Food Bank can use the help and they’ll put your donation right straight to work. Our good pal and blogging buddy Tom Watson, who is in the business of helping effective charities be even more effective, has a suggestion. Here’s the note he left on Facebook:

Folks, as someone who works in organized philanthropy I often am asked about responding to natural disasters when people feel the urge to give and to help out. I always suggest GlobalGiving because the funds are directed via local nonprofits that are carefully vetted as partners of this stellar nonprofit whose founders are personal friends and people I trust. Nothing against the Red Cross - they'll raise tons and it will be helpful - but if you're looking to help people in Texas in the aftermath of the #Harvey disaster, I'd urge you to take a look at GlobalGiving's special fund. That's where I'll be making a donation.

That’s where we Mannions donated too. We also gave to the Food Bank.

Here’s the link to GlobalGiving’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund.

And here’s the link to the Houston Food Bank.

“Port-au-Prince was never an easy place to live.”

Geography is destiny:

Port-au-Prince was never an easy place to live. Sixty million years ago, the land under it was caught in the middle when the buoyant continental crust of North America crashed into the Caribbean Plate.  The two plates had been pushing against each other for ages, forcing up from the seabed an arc of islands that would one day be known as the Greater Antilles. Then came a jolt so violent that it the plates’ direction, catching the arc in a sideswiping collision that would slowly tear each island to splinters. On the second-largest island of the Greater Antilles, these shearing forces forged the highest mountains and deepest troughs of the archipelago. On its northern half rose the Massif du Nord; in the southwest, the Massif de la Hotte and Massif de la Salle. Between these mountains , at the foot of where the Caribbean was being pushed over the volcanic terrane, was a solitary lowland depression just seven and a half miles wide. That is where Port-au-Prince would be built.

---from The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz.

Pakistan

UNICEF

CARE

Catholic Relief Services

Doctors Without Borders

The Red Cross

Another heckuva job, Brownie

A thing to remember about Right Wingers when they start smearing Democrats, Liberals, feminists, environmentalists, journalists, and, oh, widows and orphans, the sick, the poor, and the helpless, anybody and everybody they hate, is that whatever they accuse their enemies of doing they’re doing it themselves.

A J’accuse! from the Right is synonymous with an “I confess!”

I noticed this during the Impeachment Crisis when, one after another, Republicans who were trying to run Bill Clinton out of office for having fooled around on his wife were revealed to be serial adulterers, orgy guys, fetishists of the kinkiest tastes, and, in one case, essentially a high-priced call girl.

Before these “youthful indiscretions” of men and women well into middle-age came to light, I had thought that Republicans were obsessed with the sex lives of Democrats like Bill Clinton and the Kennedys because they had no sex lives of their own.

Shows what I knew.

Events then and events since have proved that Republicans get a lot of sex.  A lot of sex. 

Doesn’t seem to make them happy.  Which is probably why they get so mad when they find out other people are having a good time in bed.  Republicans can’t seem to do it without making it dirty in some way.  Someone once asked Woody Allen, “Is sex dirty?” and Allen said, “It is if you do it right.”  But Republicans don’t have dirty sex that’s dirty the way Allen meant.  They dirty it up with money, with guilt, with weirdnesses, and with stunningly arrogant hypocrisy.

And by setting out to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

I’m not saying Democrats and liberals are saints. (Cough John Edwards cough.)  But we don’t make a fetish out of pretending that we are, nor we do put people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich out there to lecture on morality and virtue, nor do we set out to vilify and punish people whose sex lives seem happier and healthier than our own.

So, since 1998 I’ve lost count of the number of Family Value promoting Republicans who’ve turned out to be adulterers, sexual deviants, inverts, perverts, harassers, molesters, wide-stancers, Appalachian Trail hikers, diaper babies, and cads and creeps of all kinds.

My rule has been if they’re railing about the supposed sexual sins of others, then they’ve just paid the driver to take their mistress home---or in the case of John Ensign paid off her husband to keep his mouth shut.

If they’re railing against gay sex, they’ve just paid off the rent boy.

But it’s not just sex.

If they rail about corruption, they have both arms in the till up to the elbows.

If they rail about liberals being anti-military, they’re about to propose a cut in veteran’s benefits or soldiers’ pay.

If they rail about earmarks, you’ll need both hands and one foot to tally up their friends and relatives whose businesses depend on government contracts.

If they rail about welfare cheats, they’ve spent their lives on the Conservative dole or---in the case of Tea Party types---they’re collecting unemployment, disability, or Social Security.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s the selfishness and the hypocrisy and the push to deny others the help they take for granted for themselves that are evils.

If when pushing for war and more war they call opponents and dissenters cowards and traitors, they not only have never served in the military themselves, they will tell you that they better serve the country from behind a desk or at a keyboard safe at home.

And if they accuse Democrats and Liberals of wanting to see America fail…

Michael Brown, George Bush’s criminally incompetent head of FEMA during Katrina, the guy who went out to dinner and enjoyed a nice bottle of wine while New Orleans went under, went on TV the other day and said this about President Obama’s response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf:

"This is exactly what they want, because now [Obama] can pander to the environmentalists and say, 'I'm gonna shut it down because it's too dangerous.'"

As if that isn’t clear, what he said was that President Obama wants the beaches from Louisiana to Florida and around and on up to Georgia and the Carolinas coated with oil and all the fishermen working those waters put out of business and the marine life and wildlife dead so he can push his anti-business, pro-socialist, hippy dippy environmentalist agenda.

Brown accused the President of wanting to poison a large chunk of the United States to get cap and trade.

Of course he should have immediately been asked, “Is that why you let New Orleans drown, to prove Big Government can’t solve problems?”

Or “Do you think that’s why an qualified screw-up like you was put in charge of FEMA in the first place, so that there was no way your agency could solve any problems?”

Or, possibly more to the point, “Still feeling guilty about all those people you let die, Mike?  Figure if you can get people to think President Obama is doing a poor job in the Gulf they might forget what a historically and horrifically miserable job you did in the Big Easy?”

But he was on Fox News, so he wasn’t asked.

And, at any rate, because he was on Fox News, he wasn’t there to talk about himself or for himself.  He was there to help the Republican Party---for which Fox News has become Campaign Central---push its favorite theme:  President Obama is out to ruin the country.

In other words, Obama and the Democrats want America to fail.

And only the Republicans can save us!

This would be laughable if it weren’t such a threat not only to the nation’s well-being but to democratic government.

Because it’s Right Wing Republicans who want America to fail.

This isn’t even another routine case of projection.

They flat out admit it.

Called on it, they’ll lie, of course.  “We never said any such thing.”  Showed that they have said such things and worse, they’ll dodge.  “We want Obama to fail because we believe his success will be the ruin of our country.”

And they mean “our” as in their country.

Rooting for the President to fail means rooting for the economy to continue to stink and stink worse.  It means rooting for more people to lose their jobs and go broke and lose their homes and for their families to break up and for their kids not to be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick and for their schools to shut and their future prospects to vanish like breath.

Rooting for the President means rooting for us to lose the war in Afghanistan and re-lose the war in Iraq.

Rooting for the President to fail means wishing that car bomb had gone off in Times Square, wishing the underpants bomber had set fire to more on that plane than just his shorts, wishing that some Islamofascist succeeds in putting another crater in New York or Washington or Chicago or any other blue city where they don’t plan to be when it happens.

Oh, and rooting for the President to fail means rooting for every pelican and crawfish and maybe a few people living in the Gulf sicken and die.  Ok, maybe only rooting for the people to get sick.  But it definitely means rooting that what happens in the Gulf turns out to be worse than what they did to New Orleans and nearly 2000 people died there.

Rooting for the President to fail means rooting for America to fail.

I don’t know about you but I wanted George Bush to win the war on terra.  I wanted him to save New Orleans.  I wanted him to get his immigration reform bill passed.  I believed his policies wouldn’t work, but I desperately hoped they would and I didn’t care if that meant another twenty years of Republicans in the White House.

But that wasn’t going to happen, because the Republicans wanted their own President to fail.  They want their own supposed policies to fail.

The awful, terrible, terrifying, loathsome thing is that don’t want President Obama and the Democrats to fail, and with them the nation, so that they can get back into power to do what they think is better for the country.

They want them to fail so that they can get back into power in order to be back in power.

They don’t want to do anything for the country except to make it more their country.  They want power only to protect and expand their wealth and their status.  They want power for power’s sake to use it against anyone they believe is threatening their wealth and their status and their control of the country and their sense that it is their country.

This is what they’re up to as they actively work to cause the President to fail.

Over at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg asks:

In what universe does it make sense for a party to seek political power on the open and avowed basis of preventing others from fixing dire problems? Not just refusing to help solve problems, mind you.  That would be irresponsible  enough.  But actively working to block  any solutions whatsoever? In what universe does that make sense?

And then he answers himself:

That is not a rhetorical question.  Because the answer, obviously, is "ours."

He follows that up with another question:

But why is our universe the way it is?

His post is an attempt to explain why and it has to do with conservatives never having had in the United States what conservatives everywhere and in all eras have always wanted and which they enjoy in plenty of other countries---one hundred per cent control of everything.

“Conservatives,” he says, “believe they should rule the world.”  American conservatives believe they should rule the United States.  Rule not govern, not run, not manage.  Rule.  And because our democracy, flawed as it is, hasn’t let them rule the country, not, says Rosenberg, “in the virtually uncontested way they have ruled other countries,” they have always hated our democracy and looked for ways to undermine and destroy it.

American conservatism has always been fundamentally seditious in a way that no other brand of conservatism in the world has been.

Read the whole post, America’s delusional politics.

Meanwhile, given the way our universe has been operating, given what the American Right wants, and given their habits of projection and of accusing the Left of wanting to do what they themselves are in fact doing while making the accusation, Michael Brown should have been asked and made to answer:

Was that what was going on in New Orleans?  Was that why you were in charge?  To discredit the Federal Government?  To make people believe that their own government couldn’t help them in times of trouble and crisis?  To convince them never to trust any even mildly Progressive politician promising to make government work for them so that they will vote for the Party that will put an end to government doing anything except protect the wealth and status and power of conservatives?

Was that your job, Michael?  Was that what your bosses wanted you to do?  Fail?  Were you hired to be the screw-up you proved to be?  Were you expected to let a city drown?  Were you expected to let whole neighborhoods sink so that thousands and thousands of poor people would be left permanently homeless to punish them for voting Democratic and teach them not to do it again?  Were you expected to let people die?

Heckuva job, Brownie.

Another tip of the hat to Avedon Carol and one to Garry Trudeau too.

Owning Katrina

Any journalist or pundit who uses any variant on the phrase “The oil rig disaster in the Gulf” coupled in any way with any implication that the disaster is, could be, might have been, or still might be “Obama’s Katrina” without also using words like “Superdome,” “bodies floating,” “old and sick left to drown,” “cattle pens,” and “air guitar” should follow up with words that pretty much say, “I resign as of the next commercial break or early deadline because I am morally and intellectually bankrupt.”

This one doesn’t seem to be catching on, I hope because it’s so obviously wrong-headed that no one with two brain cells to rub together or half a heart could take it seriously, but it’s out there.  Serious journalistic types, not just Right Wing propagandists, have been wondering if what’s happening in the Gulf is President Obama’s Katrina.

To even raise the question as if it doesn’t answer itself with a resounding NO is to reveal a shocking misunderstanding of what made Hurricane Katrina George Bush’s Katrina.

It wasn’t just that Bush neglected the levees beforehand despite continual warnings that they were in perilous shape and that when Katrina had built to the point where it was clear that it was going to be one of the most ferocious hurricanes in the Gulf in decades and was heading for land he made no moves towards helping the states in Katrina’s path get ready.

It wasn’t just that after Katrina struck and the levees broke and large swaths of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and almost all of New Orleans were underwater Bush’s Homeland Security team was appallingly slow to take any action---they did not exactly rush to the rescue.  Private citizens speeding in from faraway states in vans loaded with bottled water and other desperately needed supplies got into New Orleans ahead of Federal reinforcements.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t get the cleanup, repair, and recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans underway immediately.

(For as much as his Administration actually helped afterwards, it can be argued that he never really did get it underway; three and a half years later, when he left office, New Orleans was still in shambles.  Meanwhile Mississippi, with its Republican governor, got attention and money stat.)

It was that Bush himself didn’t seem to care!

Bush’s Katrina was a moral failure.

While the worst was happening, while people were drowning, while people were dying from causes that could have been treated if they could have gotten to the hospital, while hospitals were deciding which of their patients they would have to leave behind to die, while people were clinging to the rooftops of their sunken homes waving for help that was not on its way, while people were being herded into what were essentially cages to keep them from leaving the city and left to broil there while bureaucrats tried to figure out what to do with them, while thousands and thousands of Americans were being left to swelter and suffer and sicken and die in filth without adequate supplies of water or food, Bush was to be seen on television playing air guitar.

This is true.  He was on TV accepting the gift of a guitar he could only pretend to play and that’s what he did.  There he was, looking like some teenager in his parents’ basement perfecting his moves for when he fronted the band he would form once he learned how to play.

And then the next we saw him he was out in Arizona delivering a birthday cake to John McCain.

It was as if he didn’t even know what was going on.

When he finally did start paying attention his first act was to stage a blatant photo op aboard Air Force One during a brief flyover above New Orleans.  It was meant to remind people of the photo of him aboard Air Force One looking down on the smoldering wreckage of the Pentagon on 9/11.

What it did was make people wonder if that had just been a photo op too and if Bush had been just as disengaged then as he clearly was now.

And when at last he bothered to set foot on the ground down there it wasn’t to fire his criminally incompetent head of FEMA.  It was to congratulate him on doing a “heckvua job.”

Then he went over to see Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and gave a little speech that implied that Bush himself would consider the disaster dealt with when the millionaire Lott’s mansion was rebuilt apparently, for all Bush made any distinction, with the same Federal help and money that was supposed to help not rich people who had been wiped out of everything.

Bush had shown himself up to be incompetent, that’s true.

But if the comparison between his handling of Katrina and Obama’s handling of the Gulf disaster hinges on whether or not Obama proves he is getting the problem under control and then goes on to fix everything, besides ignoring that this was BP’s fault, it reduces things to a debate over managerial skill, style, and decisions.

As I said, Katrina was not simply a failure of management.  It was a moral failure.

What was astounding was that as a moral test it should have been easy to pass.

But what was absolutely damning for Bush was that it woke people up to his even greater moral failure---the war in Iraq.

Which, as if we only found this out in the late summer of 2005, two and a half years into the war, was also a spectacular managerial failure.

So far President Obama and his administration appear to be passing the managerial test.  It’ll be a while before we know how well they scored.  But there’s a limit to what they can do.  Fishermen are already ruined and oil is washing ashore and oozing inshore.

But clearly he passed the moral test with flying colors right from the start.

Not that he should get much credit for that.

Taking care of the welfare of Americans during crises is what Presidents are supposed to do as a matter of course.

The only reason not to take it for granted is that Bush failed so horrifically.

That moral failure is what makes Katrina Bush’s Katrina.

That moral failure defines it and defines it to the point that the only way the Gulf disaster could be to Obama what Katrina was to Bush is if the President had pulled the Coast Guard out of there immediately and said, “What’s a few pelicans?  Let the states deal with it, I’m taking the family to Disneyland!”

Since he did nothing remotely like that and in fact passed the moral test within seconds there was no comparison between him and Bush here.  It was instantly not Obama’s Katrina.

So why was it even brought up?

Well, because the Right Wing Noise Machine brought it up.

We know the Right and its propagandists and apologists will say anything to smear and discredit Democrats and the Left and to hide and deny their own failures, crimes, and sins.

And we know how for the a decade and a half they managed to insinuate their lies and smears into the political debate and got the National Press Corps to “report” those lies and smears as if, not always facts, then as legitimate and credible points of view.

But why does the Media still fall for it?  Why do they play along?  Especially after Iraq and Katrina?

Because it’s easier than pushing back.  Because they’re fat and lazy and that’s made them stupid.  Because their thinking is facile and fatuous while their self-opinion is as high as a Greek god’s and they accept what ever trivial half-baked idea pops into their heads as a revelation unto genius.

Because it’s more important to them to be able to congratulate themselves on their lack of a liberal bias than to report the facts as facts.

Because they are corrupted by money, by celebrity, by vanity, and by cowardice.

What it gets down to is that the phrase “Obama’s Katrina,” even if said in order to show that this isn’t Obama’s Katrina, is another sign of the Beltway Insiders’ ongoing moral failure.

_________________

The Washington Post’s Michael Shear lays it out blunt and clear, although it’s frustrating that he has to:

The gulf oil spill is no Katrina, in which 1,836 people died amid the near total devastation of one of America's great cities…

Good for Shear, but his analysis is still maddening because he treats both disasters as simply problems of management:

Unlike Katrina, there has been no obvious failures of government, no images to compare to the Superdome or the flooded streets of St. Bernard Parish. And unlike Katrina, there is an easy target for blame in the current oil spill: the oil giant BP, which by law is the "responsible party" and must pay for all of the costs of the cleanup.

And even worse, he presents Bush’s failure as being foremost a political failure and President Obama’s main task being the containment of any political damage:

As President Obama prepares for a Sunday morning visit to the gulf coastline, where a massive oil spill threatens environmental devastation, his administration faces the politically tricky task of appearing in control of the response while avoiding the blame.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 proved how debilitating a disaster can be for a presidency if the public perceives that the administration did too little -- either before the incident or after -- to protect people, the environment or the economy.

Let’s not bother with finding out if the President actually failed to do his job.  Let’s look at how well he appeared to be doing it and how successfully he avoided blame.  Let’s examine how he was perceived, a purely subjective call that we the Insiders are the only ones qualified to make.

Well, it is the Post, one of the Insiders’ club newsletters, and that’s what it’s all about for the Insiders.  Perception and political gamesmanship.

Those 1,836 people who died in 2005?

They just didn’t play well in the polls.

Hat tip to Steve Benen.

Related Mannion re-run from 2005: It’s not political; it’s moral!

Our corrupt national press corps trying to make Haiti part of the game

As John McQuaid says, there are no meaningful comparisons between what’s happening in Haiti and how the Bush Administration screwed up on Katrina, unless you reduce both events to nothing more than political theater.

As has been bewailed constantly in the liberal blogworld (see this post by Glenn Greenwald for a recent example), to the insiders in the Washington Press Corps, politics is just a game---and a game Democrats can’t win even when they don’t lose and Republicans can’t lose even though they keep getting beaten time and time again---with nothing at stake but which team scores the most political points.

Scoring is kept my the insiders themselves without regard to polls, election results---when those results favor Democrats---history, or even obvious facts.

This is why and how Howard Fineman, an Insider’s Insider, can write an “analysis” that deals with the devastation in New Orleans five years ago and in Haiti this week as matters of perception.

As Fineman sees it, the problem in New Orleans wasn’t that the city drowned because of the Bush Leaguers’ incompetence and negligence.  The problem was that voters blamed George Bush.

So the problem for President Obama isn’t to coordinate US aid to Haiti but that he avoid being blamed for that aid not doing a good enough job once it gets there.

Of course it’s Fineman and his colleagues who get to decide how good a job the President does and, since there’s no evidence that Americans who are desperately praying for the people of Haiti and donating their money and volunteering to go down and help are thinking about what the President’s doing even in passing, it will be up to Fineman and his colleagues to place the blame.

Fineman’s “analysis” is a trivial and heartless exercise in self-importance on his part, of course, but that’s his job as an Insider.  You have to wonder, though, why he felt he had to do that job now while the horror is still unfolding.

I can’t help thinking that part of his motivation is the chance that’s opened up to flatter Republicans, once again by suggesting that even though something terrible happened on their watch it wasn’t caused by their policies.

Seen as merely part of the game, all that Bush did wrong five years ago---and remember, he was busy delivering birthday cakes and playing air guitar during the worst of it---was fail to score enough points.

And Fineman can further flatter Republicans by suggesting that Barack Obama might make exactly the same mistake, he’ll fail to score enough points, which would mean that Obama is just as big a screw-up as George Bush was.

Which brings me to another feature of the Insiders’ coverage of the game.

The possibility of a Republican “win” or a Democratic “loss” is always more real and worth more attention than any actual outcomes.

Republicans score points just by getting the Insiders to predict that they might score points.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, tens and tens of thousands of people have died, many more are dying under the rubble, and many more are likely to die from outbreaks of disease or inadequate treatment of their injuries---the quake didn’t spare hospitals or doctors and nurses.

This is a press conference held by Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday.  I doubt things have gotten a whole lot better in a day and a half.

Playing air guitar while the city drowned

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The stories they need to tell themselves

Memory is a tricky thing and I can understand how three and a half years later Bobby Jindal might "remember" being in room while the sheriff was on the phone yelling about how the bureaucrats were getting in the way of helping people in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

What doesn't make sense is why he was telling that story at all.  Why would any Republican want to bring up Katrina?

You don't need me to tell you what a disaster Jindal's response to the President's speech the other night was, both for Jindal personally as a potential Presidential candidate and for the Republican party.  But for me Jindal's speech brought back the question, Are they evil or are they stupid?

I think that's a chicken and the egg question.  They are evil and pursue selfish goals of increasing their personal power and money instead of doing the smart and right things and so they do and say stupid things.  They do stupid things instead of doing the smart and right things and the result is pain and sorrow and death.

Bringing up Katrina seems like a stupid move.  Why remind the American people of the reason they turned almost all together and at once against George Bush?

Do Jindal and the officials from the commissariat who approved his speech think we're so dumb we've forgotten just which Party was running the government when Katrina hit?   Or are they so dumb they don't understand why "Heckuva job, Brownie" has become a catchphrase for summing up Republican malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence, ranking right up there with "I am not a crook" and "Are you now or have you ever been?" and "Mission Accomplished"?

Whichever it is, the important point here is that Jindal went on television to promote another Republican Big Lie.  I'm not talking about whether or not he actually overheard the sheriff.  The Big Lie was, and I expect for the next hundred years, if the Republican Party survives that long, will be that what happened in New Orleans in the late summer of 2005 was the Liberals' fault!

New Orleans didn't drown because our feckless Republican President chose to play air guitar and attend birthday parties while people died, leaving what passed for rescuing the city in the hands of incompetent and heartless flunkies.  New Orleans drowned because the people there relied on the Government to help them and we all know that the Government is a liberal entity even when it is controlled by conservatives.

In short, it doesn't matter that the President at the time was a Republican or that both Houses of Congress were in the hands of Republicans.  They weren't in charge. 

That being the case, Republicans are irrelevant to the story.  There was a hurricane and the Government failed the people of New Orleans by trying to help them.

The Government was, and the Government is Liberal and therefore Evil.

As fast as they can the Republicans are erasing the Presidency of George W. Bush from their official history, just as they've pretty much written Richard Nixon out of it and written out Republican isolationism and pro-fascist sentiment in the years leading up to World War II.  They still aren't sure what to do with Joe McCarthy.  They'd probably like to make him a non-person too but that darn Ann Coulter is so cute when she talks about what a hero Tail-gunner Joe was you just have to think she has a point.

For going on seventy years the National Republican Party has consoled itself, sustained itself, and kept itself alive by telling itself and anyone who will listen an alternative history of the United States.  In this alternative history the New Deal didn't do any good at all, the Cold War was fought and won entirely by super-patriotic Republicans, welfare not racism or systemic poverty destroyed the African-American family, anyway racism ended when Martin Luther King's birthday became a national holiday (alternative to the alternative: racism ended with the election of Barack Obama), the 1960s are the root of all evil, the hippies and the liberals lost the War in Vietnam, 9/11 was Bill Clinton's fault, the financial crisis was Bill Clinton's fault, Barack Obama is turning America into a socialist dictatorship.

The Republican Party shouldn't need to tell these lies.  After all, it's the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Republican Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and mayors---Fiorello LaGuardia was a Republican---have done good and great things for the United States.  But, thanks to Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt, the party lost a good chunk of its Progressives.  Then thanks to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan it lost the rest.   The Party was taken over by the most retrograde and selfish members of its Big Business wing, which is to say by its would-be aristocrats who had to make common cause with Right Wing extremists, religious fundamentalists, and Southern racists in order to put together enough votes to win elections.  These groups had and have only one thing in common, a belief that they are the only rightful inhabitants of America and inheritors of its blessings and that everybody else is out to take away their privileges and wealth.  They are the people who self-identify as conservative, although there is nothing they want to conserve.  They are reactionaries who want to turn back time to a mythical golden age in which they ran things to their liking without any complaint or criticism from "the others."    And as reactionaries, as people at war with progress and enlightenment, they have been on the wrong side of history since the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.  They need there to have been an alternative history of the United States in order for there to be a history in which they are not the villains and losers.

They need a history in which they would not have supported King George's right to treat the Colonies however he wished, a history in which they would not have defended slavery, a history in which they would not have pursued their own selfish business interests at the expense of the nation's interests and caused the Great Depression, in which they would not have argued that Hitler and Mussolini were doing some great things and maybe we could use some of their efficiency here, a history in which they would not have been cheering for a drunken demagogue as he terrified the nation and ruined countless lives with his lies, a history in which they would not have opposed the Civil Rights movement, a history in which they did not vote for a feckless and incompetent swaggering bully for President and cheer him on as he bankrupted the treasury, took us to war unnecessarily and then lost the war, let Osama bin-Laden get away, broke the Government's regulatory system, allowed the banksters to loot and wreck the country, and, incidentally, played air guitar and went to birthday parties while a great American city sank into the poisoned water and people died waiting for him to help.

They need an American history in which their selfishness and resentments are justified and in which they, as the inheritors of an anti-democratic philosophy of government and economics that preaches that the single-minded pursuit of individual power and wealth leads to heaven on earth, are the true heirs of Washington and Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

They need an alternative history in which being angry, selfish, resentful, greedy, and defensive of nothing but their own right to be angry, selfish, resentful, and greedy is the definition of patriotism and in which instead of standing in the way of progress it's the way to bring it about.

They need an alternative history in which acting as though the equation whatever I want = what's best for America is true is not like insisting 2 + 2= 5.

They need this alternative history to hide the truth about themselves from themselves and from potential critics and potential recruits to the Party.

Everything the Republicans have been doing and saying since November they've done and said to keep up their own morale and to rile up the Party faithful.    They don't have any plans except to hold onto as many seats in Congress as they can in 2010 and hope that either the country falls into chaos and despair and the people turn on President Obama or that good times return soon enough that by 2012 people will have forgotten who brought about the bad times.  In the meantime, though, they have to hold their Party together anyway they can, and they are simply going with what has worked in the past, lying.

About everything.

Because they have been wrong about everything.

So they sent Bobby Jindal out to tell the Big Lie again.  Jindal delivered the Republican alternative history, adding a new chapter in which what happened in New Orleans was the Government's not George Bush and the Republicans' fault.

Do they think we're stupid or are they so stupid they fall for their own lies?

Doesn't matter.

Either way, what Jindal really did the other night was go before the American people and promise that the next time the Republicans get control of the government they will do they same stupid and evil things they did the last time.

They will let the nation drown and rot the way they let New Orleans drown and rot and then blame it on the Liberals.

They need help

Please help the Red Cross help the people whose lives have been shattered by the tornadoes.

You can make an online donation or send a check to:

American Red Cross
Mid-South Chapter
1400 Central Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
901-726-1690

Hat-tip to Susie Madrak.

Do Democrats know what it means to miss New Orleans?

Watson's got a good point.

The Democrats should be running hard with this one.

Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans marked the end of the Bush Presidency.  More than the failures in Iraq, the President's rushing off in the opposite direction from the disaster areas to play air guitar while one of the great American cities disappeared and giant swaths of the coastal south sank from view opened the nation's eyes to the Bush Administration's incompetence, fecklessness, and sociopathic disinterest in the lives, and deaths, of average Americans.

The Democrats don't need to harp on Bush's personal failure at the end of the summer of 2005, but they can and should be promising to end the continued failure of the government to rebuild the city and other devastated areas and bring people home by giving them something worth coming home to.

If there is one thing Democrats have proven over the last 70 odd years that they can do better than Republicans, besides balance budgets, protect the environment, see that basic goods and services are delivered, encourage economic growth, and resist politicizing the criminal justice system, it's build things.

They can also point out that a major reason state and local response to the disaster was so inadequate is that large numbers of National Guardsmen and their unit's equipment were over in Iraq.

Kansas is now having the same problem.