Josh Marshall
Remembering 9/11 Before ‘9/11’
So here we are 20 years later. I saw someone ask a couple days what was your most mundane memory from 9/11. I realized I don’t have any mundane memories from that day. This isn’t to say my day was especially traumatic, especially compared to so many others. I wake up to the TV I had left on to CNN the night before (I was single at the time) and see the first tower on fire and trying to make sense of it. Not in some deep existential sense – I was half asleep. What am I seeing? Then the second tower gets hit. (I’m still not certain if I saw the second tower hit live or a replay from a few moments earlier. I think it was the former but it’s all a jumble.) Then I’m talking to my then girlfriend in her office on Capitol Hill on instant messenger who’s telling me ‘we’re next, we’re next’. Then they get a call to evacuate. My most jarring memory from that day was seeing military vehicles on the streets of Washington, DC, something that seemed simply unimaginable. I don’t remember what kind precisely, some kind of APC, I think. Not being moved from one place to another but on patrol.
In some ways that was the most jarring thing for me. After getting my initial bearings I went outside to make sense of what was happening to report on it. I was still trying to make sense of what any of it meant. I had literally just rolled out of bed, remember. Seeing military vehicles patrolling the streets of the American capital. I understood deeply and intuitively that that meant something terrible and unimaginable had happened.
In the twenty intervening years I’ve become mostly accustomed to seeing national guard troops in fatigues carrying automatic weapons in train stations. If you’re old enough to remember, this was simply unimaginable before 9/11.
Biden’s Vax Mandate is Good Politics In Addition to Good Public Health
President Biden’s new vaccine mandates are not only good public health. They’re good politics. We hear constantly how we’re divided as a country, polarized into two roughly equal camps. On vaccinations though that’s not true. Epidemiological vaccination rates are not the same as electoral vaccination rates. Already an overwhelming percentage of adults are vaccinated. Roughly 65% of Americans over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated and over 75% have had at least one shot. What’s more, the older you are the more likely you are both to be vaccinated and to vote. So if anything that 65%-75% benchmark understates the voting majority of the already vaccinated.
If you’re vaccinated, requirements and mandates don’t seem burdensome. In fact they seem to have widespread support since the vaccinated, who make up the overwhelming majority of the country, are losing patience with the voluntarily unvaccinated who they blame (rightly) for keeping us stuck in the pandemic. Biden spoke for a lot of Americans yesterday when he said: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us, so please do the right thing.”
Joe Manchin, DC Insider Culture and the Long Derply Hand of Mark Penn
In yesterday’s episode of the podcast Kate Riga and I were trying to make sense of Joe Manchin’s various feints and positions and un-positions over the last eight months. It’s sort of a parlor game to try to make sense of the motives of people you disagree with or frustrate you. Maybe it’s not that complicated? Maybe the reason they keep doing X is because they want to do X. The fact that you don’t like X doesn’t make it that hard to understand.
Yet there’s something a bit more to it with Manchin. His notional arguments for the ‘strategic pause’ on the President’s agenda doesn’t really add up. He says we need to worry about ‘runaway inflation’ when inflation is lower than it was in the 80s after Paul Volcker had tamed it. He says we need to keep our powder dry in case COVID gets worse and we need more massive relief packages. But actually what’s being discussed is spending over ten years. If COVID turns out to be catastrophically different in a year we could just change the plan. Even diehard inflation hawks like Larry Summers don’t think the spending over a decade is an issue on this front. And none of these things are really different than 6 or 7 weeks ago when Manchin gave all signs that he was at least broadly on board, subject to some hacks and shaves, with the $3.5 trillion package.
Scenes from the Culture War in New York State
This isn’t new news. It happened more than a week ago. But I’d missed it. So maybe you did too. The Chief Judge of the New York State court system, Janet DiFiore, announced on August 23rd that court employees would have until September 7th to get vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
In response Dennis Quirk, President of the New York State Court Officers Association, published the addresses of DiFiore’s two homes and called for protests outside her homes. He was suspended for doxxing the Chief Judge. But as he pointed out the state can’t suspend him as President of the union.
So What Was Jason Miller Doing in Brazil?
I have no insight into why arch-Trump toady Jason Miller was stopped and questioned at the airport in Brazil on the way back to the United States. But he and a lot of other US right-wingers were there for something called “CPAC Brazil”, which as the name suggests is a CPAC event held down in Brazil. But given that that event is another example of the Trumpite International, which has US and Brazil as two of its dominant players, it’s important to see the Brazil event – which has been embraced by most all Trumpers – through the prism of what’s happening on the ground in the country.
There are various points here from TPM Reader PT that I disagree. I don’t think there was ever a “Clinton / Gore / Lieberman wing of the party”. I also think it’s hard to argue that moderate or conservative-leaning Dems are obsolete when they have it entirely within their power to sink the President’s entire agenda. But there are enough accurate points that I wanted to share PT‘s take.
I’ve been paying a modicum of attention to the ongoing freakout of conservative Democrats in Congress, as I’m sure you have been as well. I have a couple of thoughts about them that I’d like to share with you.
First thought: to understand what’s going on, it’s helpful to think of this faction as a kind of ethnic group within the Democratic Party, and one that has until recently been at the top of the status hierarchy of their society (that society being, again, the Party). They were always the ones you needed to get things done; they could tank — or rescue — any legislation, they were the ones who could cut deals with the less conservative Republicans, they were the ones whose interests were always catered to. If you wanted to get ahead in national politics in the Democratic Party, you had to make sure everyone knew you were in the Clinton / Gore / Lieberman wing of the party, and not with that collection of leftists who didn’t know how to win an election.
What About the Contractors?
As I read more about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, virtually everything I read confirms in my mind the basic points I’ve been making here over the last few weeks. The one possible exception is the withdrawal of US contractors which, we’re told, was key to depriving the Afghan Army of the close air support that gave their ground troops the confidence to meet the Taliban in head to head confrontations. This article in Foreign Policy gives the basic argument.
Since they are generally indifferent to the actual work and function of government, Republican elected officials are generally much more adept at holding test votes to put people on record for views out of step with public opinion. That’s a big benefit of holding the majority, even the slenderest of them: you get to schedule the votes. The new Texas abortion law is a case in point. De facto bans on abortion are not popular. Abortion vigilante bills are really, really unpopular. There are any number of ways you could craft votes which force everyone to go on record supporting or opposing them. You could craft actual laws or just sense of Congress resolutions. Whatever. It hardly matters. Good government scolds won’t like it. But who cares. Lets get to this.
One notable thing about a nakedly political Supreme Court majority is that a handful of legal academics, wholly cocooned from everyday life, aren’t terribly adept at politics. You can see this in the reaction to the Court’s effort to moonwalk Roe v Wade out of existence earlier this week. They seem to have thought they could throw up their hands and pretend they weren’t really doing anything or didn’t have any choice in the matter. Even John Roberts showed them the path toward overruling Roe through the normal review process some time next year. The majority both couldn’t hide its impatience to strike down Roe but also wanted to do so in the middle of the night – by not acting rather than acting – and that somehow no one would notice.
People noticed.
There’s a fairly anemic jobs report out today. The economy added 235,000 jobs in August. That’s just okay in normal times and pretty disappointing compared to recent months when closer to a million jobs were created. Commentary I’m seeing is pointing to a weaker than expected recovery. And that’s true as far as it goes. But what jumps out to me is that the dialog about the economy, the robustness and consistency of the recovery, hasn’t really caught up to the fact that COVID isn’t actually over.
Everything’s relative. We’re in a much better position than we were a year ago. Getting gravely ill from COVID is now mostly voluntary. But over 1500 people died in the US from COVID yesterday. Schools are opening but with various kinds of in-person mitigation. Most people I know are still not dining out or socializing or traveling in just the same way they did before the pandemic. More than a year ago, definitely. But not the same as two years ago. I’m not telling you anything more than we all know. My point is that we still appear to be operating in – or at least economics and politics talk seems to be operating in – this model of how quickly we’re bouncing back even though we’re still in it. So it’s not a huge surprise that we’re not bouncing back that quickly. Or that the bounce back is partial and limited.