Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Bark louder, little dog.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

We still have time to mess this up!

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

When we show up, we win.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2020 / Political Weathervanes Open Thread: The Media Villagers Switch Sides

Political Weathervanes Open Thread: The Media Villagers Switch Sides

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Thursday evening, erstwhile Young Republican Jonathan Karl got the first question at Trump’s hastily-called ‘presser’, and boldly demanded, “President Trump, why did you lie to the American people?”

Trump, predictably, responded by calling it ‘a very bad question’, ‘not true’, a ‘disgrace‘ promoted by The Failing Blah-Blah-Blah. Karl spent the first segment of the nightly national news taking a victory lap.

Comes a point, in every failed autocracy, where pulling down the wounded Beast becomes more rewarding than protecting It from Its many enemies. Annie Linskey made her journamalistic bones at the Boston Globe hate-stalking Elizabeth Warren during Warren’s senatorial campaigns; she was lured to the Washington Post to do the same job, then promoted to ankle-biting Joe Biden once he wrapped up the nomination. But now Trump is the ‘high visibility’ target!

Fearing a coming cash crunch, President Trump’s campaign has pulled back from television advertising over the last month, ceding to Democratic nominee Joe Biden a huge advantage in key states and sparking disagreements over strategy within the president’s senior team…

The complaints have upended the dynamics that dominated much of the race so far. With less than eight weeks before Election Day, the once-lean Biden campaign is flush with cash, while the massive Trump operation is facing tough budgetary decisions down the stretch that have increased tensions around the president.

Among those worried is Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, who recently told the president she was concerned his ads were not on television in states such as Michigan and Florida where Biden was blanketing the airwaves, according to people familiar with the conversation. The president shared the concern, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations…

The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser, continues to oversee the campaign’s major financial decisions, and has signed off on Stepien’s new approach after previously backing spending sanctioned by his predecessor, Brad Parscale, who was demoted by Trump this summer.

Parscale’s planning had assumed a large influx of smaller, online donations at the end of the campaign, which Stepien is less certain will arrive, say officials familiar with the discussions. In August, Trump raised $210 million, compared with $364.5 million for Biden’s operation…

And of course the Son-in-Law is the one guy who can’t be fired. Lock on target!

It’s not gonna be pretty to watch if (as I sincerely hope) this shift in the political winds continues. But then again, it hasn’t been pretty to watch the ascendance of the Squatter-in-Chief, either…

Reader Interactions

101Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    Only real question is what fraction is being grifted away by Trump, his family, and all of the assorted hangers-on and parasites that surround him. I’m guessing it’s a big fraction.

  2. 2.

    cain

    I’m praying for casualties. You can bet that if he fails to get money – he will fail to grift and siphon it to his hyenas. They will of course turn against him – other than his children of course. If Trump looks like he’s losing Putin might also do something as well. Casualties. A lot of them.

  3. 3.

    Chetan Murthy

    AL, you and the other FPers are so great, keeping all these receipts!  Indeed, when I saw that Jon Karl clip, I thought “how now brown cow!”  I remember him, such a suck-up to the Dubya flacks back in the day.  And now he’s relentless with Hair Furore?  Heh, maybe he’s tired of not being able to eat out in restaurants, get his hair done at his favorite salon, and in general partake of the many services the servant class offers to men of his station.  For.  Fear.  Of.  Dying.

    About time, Mr. Karl.  About. Fucking. Time.

  4. 4.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Annie Linskey is the perfect Villager.

    Also, too:

    Parscale’s planning had assumed

    My wise first First Sergeant once told me that assume makes an ass of you and me.

  5. 5.

    piratedan

    sorry, right now I’m feeling very much like being in “no prisoners” mode for these elections.  We can see what Barr and Trump and McConnell and Putin have in mind and if we defeat them, as soon as they get their due process, I would just as soon have their pieces removed from the board altogether. Maybe that makes me a bad person, right now, I not only want to defeat them, I want them to pay and each and every enabling asshat that looked the other way or was too much of a coward to do what needed to be done, be removed from public office and doing time, stripped of their assets or raking our forests…

  6. 6.

    Ken

    I was a little surprised that they had to cut ad buys to pay for the campaign headquarters. I thought they got the use of the White House for free.

    BTW, anyone know how Hatch Act fines are assessed?  I know they’re a pittance, but if (for example) each misuse of the White House by each person counted as a violation, it could add up.

  7. 7.

    Elizabelle

    @Villago Delenda Est:   Yeah.  Gag — Annie Linskey.

    I did notice that it was young Republican Jonathan Karl asking that very pointed question.

    I thought “the worm turns.”

    Which can be both a figure of speech, and an observation of Karl.

  8. 8.

    Mike in DC

    I really need old school establishment Dems like Biden, Pelosi and Schumer to discover their inner ruthless streak, politically speaking.  Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, former Trump officials and the crop of 2024 pretenders don’t deserve any mercy, nor will giving them mercy result in anything but the scorpion stinging our backs halfway across the stream.  Throw them an anchor, step on their necks, back up and run them over again, etc.

  9. 9.

    Jeffro

    It’s going to be interesting when the Repub donors find out where all the money got siphoned off to…

    It’ll be even more interesting to watch what happens when GOP candidates all around the country figure out what a drag this orange loser is on the ticket and start to try and save themselves…

    Go

    Long

    On

    Popcorn

    Futures!

  10. 10.

    Jeffro

    @Ken:anyone know how Hatch Act fines are assessed?  I know they’re a pittance, but if (for example) each misuse of the White House by each person counted as a violation, it could add up.

    An aggressive approach would take each violator, multiply by each violation, etc etc.

    A really aggressive approach involves tarring and feathering (it’s in the fine print, take my word for it).

  11. 11.

    Ken

    @Jeffro: A really aggressive approach involves tarring and feathering (it’s in the fine print, take my word for it).

    The Supreme Court might find otherwise, but it could take months for the cases to work their way through the system.

  14. 14.

    Jeffro

    Speaking of getting people to switch sides…what’s YOUR plan for actually beating back the pandemic, mr. president* trumpov?

    Here’s Uncle Joe’s

    Joe Biden has created a war-cabinet-in-waiting on the coronavirus pandemic, with major figures from the Obama, Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations drafting plans for distributing vaccines and personal protective gear, dramatically ramping up testing, reopening schools and addressing health-care disparities.

    The effort began six months ago when the campaign consulted David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton, and Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general under President Barack Obama, on how to run a presidential campaign during a pandemic.

    The pair, along with a growing cadre of volunteer health experts, has been working behind the scenes to craft plans that could take effect Jan. 20, when the next president will take the oath of office, said Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser on the Biden campaign.

    Biden has laid out a far more muscular federal approach than has President Trump, whose “failures of judgment” and “repeated rejection of science” the Democrat first pilloried in a Jan. 27 op-ed about the crisis.

    God willing, the country won’t wait until January 20th to start (finally!) doing the right things.  But this is kind of a slam-dunk here: one guy has a plan, the other just wants to keep golfing and watching Fox News.

  15. 15.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Woodward is going to be on 60 minutes this Sunday, with the NFL as a lead-in.  Then he’ll do Maddow and CNN.  It’ll be wall-to-wall next week, with the volume turned up to 11.

     

    Then in two weeks, Showtime has a two night special movie on RussiaGate (video)

  16. 16.

    Bruuuuce

    AL@OP:

    It’s not gonna be pretty to watch if (as I sincerely hope) this shift in the political winds continues.

    Pretty, no. Satisfying, schadenfreude-y, even, you betcha.

    And then we need to clear all of those weathervanes out so we can ensure fair reportage in the Biden Administration.

  17. 17.

    Calouste

    You know, when there’s a horse race and one horse has a lead of three lengths and gaining, the commentary switches from whether the loser can still mount a challenge to whether it’s time to retire him, and if he could make money as a stud in retirement or if he maybe should be sent straight to the glue factory.

  18. 18.

    SFAW

    @piratedan:

    as soon as they get their due process, I would just as soon have their pieces removed from the board altogether.

    Not to be pedantic, but shouldn’t that be “I would just as soon have them removed in pieces”?

  20. 20.

    J R in WV

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    My wise first First Sergeant once told me that assume makes an ass of you and me.

    I learned that in a systems analysis course.  Assume = Ass|u|me she (the very excellent prof)  wrote on the board.

  21. 21.

    piratedan

    @SFAW: I dunno, myself, we could just give them the Colonel Turner treatment as far as I’m concerned, but I suspect none of them would take that option.

  22. 22.

    West of the Rockies

    Not sure if this has been discussed yet on BJ, but if/when Trump loses, what do you all think will happen to AG Blob Barr come January 20th?  Will he be investigated and indicted?  I desperately hope he meets disgrace and ruin.

  24. 24.

    noncarborundum

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    This is why I presume instead of assuming.  I keep hoping it’s going to make a Pres. of you or me, or actually anyone other than the current defiler of that office.  So far, though, no luck.

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    It never never fucking ends:

    Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19

    The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
    In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

    But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
    Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

    Caputo’s team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”

  26. 26.

    NotMax

    Kushner adding FCC chairman Pai to his speed dial as we snark.

    “Ours aren’t campaign ads, they’re valuable national security messages for the country.”

    :)

  31. 31.

    Kent

    @Ken: I was a little surprised that they had to cut ad buys to pay for the campaign headquarters. I thought they got the use of the White House for free.

    BTW, anyone know how Hatch Act fines are assessed? I know they’re a pittance, but if (for example) each misuse of the White House by each person counted as a violation, it could add up.

    As far as I know, it can really only be meaningfully enforced as a practical matter on career civil servants by doing things like a reprimand in your personnel file that would jeopardize a promotion when the worm turns and the next administration comes into town.   Or get you sent into the dungeon to count paperclips.  Or even actual demotions.

    I know one thing for certain. If I was still a Fed in a government agency and had some level of authority. I’d sure as hell be taking notes on who all is violating their oaths by acting in impermissible political ways for Trump. And then take it out on them and the next possible chance. Not just for Hatch Act stuff, but for deliberately fucking with the science due to political pressure. All that stuff.

    But the folks like Barr who aren’t going to be around for a Biden Administration? I don’t think there is all that much you can really do.  The fines for folks who don’t care about Federal careers are pretty trivial

    The Hatch Act is mostly a hammer against Democrats buried in the Federal Bureaucracy, not for top level political Republican appointees.  That’s why it is called the Hatch Act.  After Orin Hatch

  32. 32.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @West of the Rockies: I don’t remember ever being quite so aware of the dates of transition of power before. So I only learned this year that the new Congress begins January 3. If we have a Democratic majority in both houses, Barr’s troubles might begin earlier than Jan 20.

  34. 34.

    mrmoshpotato

    @dmsilev:

    Only real question is what fraction is being grifted away by Trump, his family, and all of the assorted hangers-on and parasites that surround him. I’m guessing it’s a big fraction. 

    Good.  (Seriously.) Let them rob the RNC and their racist, fascist white trash supporters blind.  I’m so fucking done with these idiots who drool over a racist conman.

  36. 36.

    prostratedragon

    @dmsilev:  So, in March Blabby Boy is telling Woodward how he likes to “play it down,” and in April he’s installing the team at CDC  that is supposed to see to it.

  37. 37.

    sdhays

    @West of the Rockies: I’m not getting my hopes up. I suspect that Barr has committed ethical breaches worthy of getting him disbarred, but hasn’t committed any crimes that are on the books or are easy enough to prove/clear enough to explain for a Biden AG to prosecute.

    But I also believe he’s not as clever as he thinks he is, so maybe the knives will come out next year.

  42. 42.

    opiejeanne

    @J R in WV: In college, the jazz band director told someone this who was late to class because we had a bomb scare, and he just assumed the class was cancelled.

    They moved the class to the director’s backyard, about 3 miles from campus but they had to wait for enough people with cars to show up so they could move the big instruments.

    And there was no bomb.

  46. 46.

    RaflW

    @Jeffro: With just over seven weeks left, I’m thinking that if they’re just now discovering his broke-ass, sinking like a Lake Travis anchor chain candidacy, they’re a) not too bright and b) fucked.

    Or at least I hope so. Susan Collins pulling her patented “I refuse to be pinned down on wether I’ll vote for the top of the ticket upon which I am also running” is just so hilariously, perfectly Susan. And useless. Which is Susan.

  48. 48.

    Lyrebird

    @Chetan Murthy:

    Three things:

    1.

    AL, you and the other FPers are so great

    QFT

     

    2. Yeah about time.  I went to school with Jon Karl when he was heading up the Buckley newspaper on a liberal campus, seemed like all they wanted to do was see how close to slander & harassment they could get without getting charged.

     

    3. Thank you for understanding and correcting my wording mistake the other night.  Yes I meant Biden making an overture to Prof. Hill, not the other way around, whoops!

     

    One more thing to all o’y’all:

    I miss efg!  I recall him saying it might be like this, like Nixon days, where it took forever but the rats did leave the ship…

  49. 49.

    West of the Rockies

    @sdhays:

    I suspect the porcine racist walks but loses any future position of power.  I know this probably sounds terrible, but I truly hope his health immediately deteriorates and he ends his days in misery.  He has caused so much damage and destruction.

  50. 50.

    Amir Khalid

    “Why did you lie to the American people? Why should we trust what you have to say now?”

    Trump can run from these questions, but he cannot hide.

  53. 53.

    Nettoyeur

    It has always seemed to me that the DC establishment press are medium size piranhas. They have been subsisting on a diet of the minnows of access journalism, but now they are starting to smell the blood of a fat, wounded  animal— that means talk show invites, pundit perches, book advances, Pulitzers, and screen plays. If a few chunks of flesh  start appearing, there is going to be a rush . . .Youtube has a number of piranha feeding videos.

  55. 55.

    Sab

    @Jeffro: Sort on topic. Ohio’s Health dorector quit months ago after the crazies started harassing her family and neighbors. So we have had only an acting director since then, and it shows.

    Gove DeWine anounced Thirsday that he had found a new director. Twelve hours later she announced that she was withdrawimg her acceptance. No explanation why.

    Now we know. It turns out that while she was busy fighting the pandemic in South Carolina, she hadn’t noticed how Dr. Acton was being treated in Ohio. After she accepted and started to touch base for the transition she learned, and decided she was not going to subject her own family to that.

  62. 62.

    Chetan Murthy

    @prostratedragon: Y’know, I don’t like the way this conversation about Caputo is going: how’s a guy supposed to pay for his kids’ college without betraying his country, eh?!?!?!

  64. 64.

    Kay

    Kayleigh McEnany
    @PressSec
    US government account
    On
    @seanhannity
    next – BEST show on television!

    Another hard day at work for the low quality Trump hires. I’ve noticed over the years none of these people do any actual work. I feel like that should be mentioned more.

  68. 68.

    ...now I try to be amused

    Comes a point, in every failed autocracy, where pulling down the wounded Beast becomes more rewarding than protecting It from Its many enemies. Annie Linskey made her journamalistic bones at the Boston Globe hate-stalking Elizabeth Warren during Warren’s senatorial campaigns; she was lured to the Washington Post to do the same job, then promoted to ankle-biting Joe Biden once he wrapped up the nomination. But now Trump is the ‘high visibility’ target!

    I’ve long thought the media are a lagging indicator of public opinion. You articulated a good reason why.

  70. 70.

    piratedan

    @Kay: agreed, there’s not even a bad faith effort being made, hell they just copy down some notes from the RW pundit du juor and then try and pass that off as some kind plan.  No numbers, no structure, no bullet points, everything they toss out consists of crappy premise —–>underpants gnomes—> fairy dust —-> profit!, shit we saw more planning out of a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “let’s put on a show!” than with these cretins…

  72. 72.

    MomSense

    @piratedan:

    I’m at gallows or firing squad.  I’ve never felt more full of rage in my life.  Sometimes it surprises me how present it is even when I’m doing something totally unrelated – I’ll hear some NPR host tiptoe around an atrocity and the fury comes pouring out of me.

  75. 75.

    Redshift

    @mrmoshpotato: From a year and a half ago:

    Trump has consolidated political power, moving to turn the Republican National Committee into a subsidiary of his own campaign committee by sharing office space, staff and fundraising operations

    The one positive thing Trump has done is infesting the RNC with grifters from top to bottom, and whatever amount of money they claim to raise, a large portion of it will be siphoned off.

    I’m fully expecting we’ll hear stories of House and Senate campaigns who had reasonable expectations of investments from the RNC, only to find out that “the money wasn’t there.”

    But I’ve always been an optimist.

    (I’m also hoping the grifting culture is hard enough to eradicate that it drags then down well into the future.)

  78. 78.

    MomSense

    @Lyrebird:

    I miss him so much and I think of Mrs EFG, too.  I remember that she loved to watch all the hallmark Christmas movies.  Lately I’ve been so stressed out I’ve started watching cheesy movies like those and I was thinking of Mrs EFG.

  79. 79.

    MomSense

    I hate his stupid accordion hand gestures.  I just watched the stupid video and there he goes with the accordion hands.

  80. 80.

    randy

    Those of us who manage to conceal our predatory nature may use empathy or intelligence or cowardice. So the most visibly criminal predators are those who lack all three, where lack of prudent cowardice comes through as arrogance. The social pathology we call trumpiness is built on cowardice frozen into a desperate deceit, the pretense of arrogance. The most spectacular predators are the most pathetic when they fall, very attractive to lessor predators in the feeding frenzy that covers each ones terror of yos own similar weakness.

  82. 82.

    mrmoshpotato

    @MomSense:

    I hate his stupid accordion hand gestures.  I just watched the stupid video and there he goes with the accordion hands. 

    LOL

    Tiny accordion hands.

  83. 83.

    TS (the original)

    @Elizabelle:

    I did notice that it was young Republican Jonathan Karl asking that very pointed question

    I’m amazed they stopped leaving it to the women to ask the pointed questions. Trump will have to think up a new word for mail press pundits.  The women are nasty people, it’s taken a long time for the men to realise what they are dealing with.

  84. 84.

    ballerat

    @MomSense: I’m there too.

    It’s the calculatedness and yet the arrogant casualness of the abuse that ought to enrage and horrify any decent person.

    Consider this: These are people who sat down and thought about how they, with the powers, personnel and offices of government under their thumbs, could best harm, humiliate, degrade, agonize and destroy people, children, families, the powerless, the weaker, the vulnerable.

    These are Nazi times.

  88. 88.

    opiejeanne

    @Brian: I wasn’t in the jazz band yet when it happened. Maybe I’m remembering two things that didn’t happen at the same time, though. I know John said it to someone, and I remember them taking the equipment to his house to practice the day of the bomb scare. Probably my first year back at college, 1973-74, and possibly before I met you.

  90. 90.

    Geminid

    Sarah Gideon and Susan Collins debated last night, along with two independent candidates. From accounts in Slate and the Bangor Daily News, they sparred over health care, judges, and Collins’ reticence regarding whether she will vote for trump. Polls are showing Gideon even or with a slight lead, trump down by double digits in Maine.   Freshman Democrat Jared Golden is in a close race in the ME 2nd District he flipped in 2018; this one is getting extra money and attention as Maine, like Nebraska, awards an electoral vote to the party winning a congressional district.

  91. 91.

    bemused

    @Kay:

    Right. I’ve thought for a long time, what in the world do these trump employees do all day because they appeared to be not only totally incompetent but the laziest people on earth.

    Just read interview with Samantha Cohen in Hive, Vanity Fair. Samantha got an intern job at WH but thought she’d go crazy after a week. “No one was doing anything. I would sit at my computer screen just staring. Everyone looked liked Kellyanne Conway.”

  92. 92.

    Frankensteinbeck

    It just occurred to me:  These tapes might make a bigger difference to the press than us.  The press has a huge ‘you can’t know what is in a man’s heart’ thing.  (Like all press traditions, Republicans get more benefit of the doubt.). The have said repeatedly they don’t feel comfortable using ‘lie’ because maybe Republicans believe what they say?  How can we KNOW???  Well, this fits their pathologically strict requirements for proof.  Trump said, on tape, shoved in their faces by someone they respect, that he knew.  Not just contradictory statements.  He said he knew.  ‘Lie’ is now an okay word.  He still can’t be called ‘racist’ because he hasn’t been recorded sayin n-clang.

    @sdhays:

    Barr isn’t a fraction as smart as he thinks he is.  What has he succeeded at other than “You can’t make me turn over documents”?  He throws out bullshit attempts to smear Trump’s enemies and they flop.  With a friendly Supreme Court his DoJ still has a shitty record of winning cases and uses transparently stupid arguments.  Hell, he can’t get “Nevermind, we’re dropping the case” to stick.

  98. 98.

    Tokyokie

    @piratedan:

     

    We saw more planning out of a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “let’s put on a show!” than with these cretins…

    Yes, but Judy and Mickey usually had Busby Berekeley on standby to do the choreography.

  99. 99.

    dww44

    @Kent:  Interesting.   I didn’t know this was a GOP initiative. More along the lines of what’s good for me is not necessarily good for thee.  Dems definitely need to become better at aggressive pushback.

  101. 101.

    Brian

    @opiejeanne:  I was in the jazz band pretty much continuously from 1972 through 1977. The only time I wasn’t was when DeFoor did his jazz symposium thing.

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