That was a bit of a shaky close for Joe Biden. I don’t know how else to put it. You don’t get a lot of leeway on that kind of thing when your in your mid-70s. I don’t know if that matters or not. Because on balance I thought he had a pretty good debate. He was much more focused and aggressive than he was in the first debate. He got hit from all sides but he hit back and often effectively. In the first debate he just didn’t seem to be expecting or prepared to defend himself or his record – which is a bit bizarre as a frontrunner heading into his first campaign debate.
I found the first two series of Democratic presidential debates painful to watch, and I don’t think it was simply the result of the format or of the questions asked. It was because in their preoccupations, I don’t think the Democratic candidates have developed the message and the language that can win the White House for the party.
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Let me share a few more thoughts on last night’s debate. It was a bit jagged. Biden’s closer was cringey. But there’s a more salient point about the whole thing put together, and here I include both debates combined. There is a small but highly vocal minority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who see Barack Obama’s presidency as a failure. I don’t mean simply that he screwed up or wasn’t a good leader but more specifically that the policy premises and political strategies of his presidency were simply and fundamentally wrong. I have a friend/acquaintance. Over the years he’s drifted far away from my take on politics and that of many mainstream or middle of the road Democrats. He repeatedly presses the point to me that Obama’s presidency was a disaster and that Democrats can’t fix things, either substantively or politically, until they recognize that fact.
Earlier this week we brought you this must-read report on Donna Arduin, the itinerant grim reaper of state budgets who has for more than twenty years been going from state to state when a new Republican governor comes into power cutting state spending down to the bone and making way for tax cuts for the wealthy. Now she’s at work in Alaska for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the state’s new governor. And here’s a story about cuts of roughly 40% of the state contribution to the University of Alaska system ($130 million). The jobs of some 1,300 academic are, reportedly, at risk.
Rep. and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel (D-NY) says he doesn’t expect Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to impeachment to last much longer. “That’ll change. I think more and more members are going to decide that the role of Congress right now, the proper role, is impeachment.”
Engel himself announced his support for impeachment only days ago. He is among the highest ranking members of the Democratic caucus to do so. He faces two primary challengers, each of whom is focusing on his comparatively hawkish foreign policy stances.
Authorities are still sorting out the background of the gunman in this horrific far-right terror attack in El Paso, Texas. But he appears to have left a “manifesto” and a lengthy social media trail. Assuming these identifications are correct, they portray a sadly familiar “great-replacement” theory, white-supremacist radical.
What is particularly notable in this case is the intermingling and co-evolution of these manifestos with more mainstream right-wing media dialog. Read More
I understand and respect those who say we shouldn’t publish these mass murderers’ names and report their manifestos. Indeed, there are limited ways in which this impulse may be salutary — less above-the-fold use of their picture and perhaps more secondary use of their given names. But this impulse, while well-meaning, is actually dangerous and misguided.
“President Trump looks forward to visiting with the patriots of Texas who are on the front lines of the struggle against open-border Democrats who allow drugs, crime, and sex trafficking all along our border every day.”
—Trump campaign COO Michael Glassner,
in advance of a Trump rally in El Paso,
February 2019.
We decided to put this piece together last week, before the events of this past weekend. At this point I don’t even remember which particular arrest or attack or threat it was in response to. It’s a list of two dozen planned or completed violent attacks — ranging from unsuccessful efforts to simple assaults to multiple murders. It does not even include various racist or xenophobic “great replacement” attacks which didn’t name check the President but echo his campaign message and various Twitter screeds. Take a look.
It is a sign of the dark state of the country that we now have to distinguish between different categories of mass shooting – ones based, as nearly as we can figure, on a kind of inchoate suicidal rage, others based more clearly on ideology (whether white supremacist, incel-based or Islamist) and some based on personal and individual grudges. But in every case we have the power of the gun.
Guns are powerful in themselves. They shoot high velocity projectiles quickly and easily. Modern ones can kill large numbers rapidly. The shooter in Dayton, Ohio was himself shot dead less than a minute after he opened fire but managed to kill nine people and wound a couple dozen others. But part of the gun massacre spectacle is tied to a different sort of power.