I think there was some discussion around here a few days back about Dana Milbank’s WaPo column on the media’s “both sides” problem. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today. Sure, Biden has had his troubles, with the delta variant, Afghanistan and inflation. But the economy is rebounding impressively, he has signed major legislation, and he has restored some measure of decency, calm and respect for democratic institutions.
We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.
Milbank’s column apparently struck a nerve. Some of his critics raised legit questions, such as if the methodology used to parse the tenor of the coverage makes sense. But some of the pushback from horserace Beltway outfits unintentionally proved Milbank’s point. Here’s a representative sample from a protracted slap-fight on Twitter between Milbank and Politico’s Ryan Lizza:
Biden is attempting to salvage democratic norms. The people opposing him are using fascist tools of deception and voter disenfranchisement. Neutrality in this struggle is not a virtue. https://t.co/EwmkbbxUlX
— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) December 5, 2021
I am not bragging about the Post’s coverage, Ryan. None of us has anything to be proud of. We are failing democracy. All of us.
— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) December 5, 2021
Speaking of partisans for democracy, here’s good (breaking) news, also from WaPo:
Justice Dept. sues Texas over state redistricting maps, citing discrimination against Latinos
The Justice Department on Monday sued Texas for the second time in a month over new voting laws, this time alleging that Republican state lawmakers discriminated against Latinos and other minorities when they approved new congressional and state legislature districts that increased the power of White voters.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement marked the department’s first major legal action on redistricting at a time when Democrats have warned that GOP-controlled state legislatures are seeking to improperly redraw voting precincts to aid Republican candidates ahead of the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election.
“This is not the first time Texas has acted to minimize the voting rights of its minority citizens. Decade after decade, Texas has enacted redistricting plans that violate the Voting Rights Act,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “In enacting its 2021 Congressional and House plans, the State has again diluted the voting strength of minority Texans.”
I needed to hear that today because a Bart Gellman piece in The Atlantic about the possibility of the Trump cult pulling off a coup in 2024 had me feeling pessimistic. It’s a long piece but worth a read.
We’ll need law enforcement pushback from the feds and action from lawmakers. The press has its role to play too. Milbank is a mixed bag, but we need more epiphanies like his because the danger is real.
Open thread.
geg6
Milbank is getting a pat on the back from me for that column. Something, I think, that may be a first. He is absolutely right and Lizza, as usual, is wrong in the worst possible ways. I wouldn’t hire him to take my newspapers to the trash, let alone write for them. Such an idiot. It’s good to see Milbank slapping him around.
Chris
“But we’re really a republic, not a democracy, so isn’t it un-American to be a partisan for democracy?”
Sarcasm aside, I’m just glad anybody in the media is writing columns like this. (Krugman’s been at it for years, but for that reason it seems like he’s just kind of faded into the background).
marcopolo
It seems to my cynical mind that it is entirely possible that partisanship (though I do agree with Josh Marshall @ TPM that the media–particularly the beltway media has a republican bias) in the media is only partially responsible for Biden’s negative coverage. Instead, is it just possible that news organizations have learned, like the algorithms used by social media, that the best way to get clicks and hold eyeballs is to always accentuate the worst of everything? Honestly, I no longer consume as much news as I used to because I always feel like they are yelling at me to feel a particular way instead of just presenting the information and allowing me to figure out how I feel about it.
germy
SpaceUnit
And of course it’s not just about Biden. Let some college freshman in Berkeley use the word “woke’ in an Instagram post and the media immediately makes them the face of the Democratic Party, despite the fact that 99 percent of Democratic voters and officeholders never use the word and couldn’t even tell you what it’s supposed to mean.
Meanwhile a solid majority of Republicans are perfectly fine with a violent mob assaulting the Capitol in order to overturn an election but the face of their party is David Fucking Brooks. Same as it ever was.
ETA: That really is his middle name. I’m pretty sure.
Leto
It’s good that DoJ is suing Texas over their maps, but considering how the Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering is all good, I don’t know if it will succeed. We need new voting rights passed into law, and then vigorously defend them against the conservative judicial hacks. Ofc with a 6-3 SC they’ll probably strike it down anyways, but still have to try.
Kay
They’re never going to admit it.
October 29, 2016:
If they never admitted this blatant garbage – and they never did- you can just forget any “tone” analysis informing their work.
If Biden is able to surmount this he deserves a medal. He can’t even have his press secretary mention (good) jobs numbers without accusations that they are somehow dissing the unemployed. It’s another new rule.
VOR
Gellman wrote an article along similar lines in the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/how-trump-could-attempt-coup/616954/
Betty Cracker
@geg6: I liked Milbank’s clarity here:
We are, and that’s a HUGE story! It’s THE political story of our time by a mile! But while individual components of it get covered, the context is rarely mentioned.
Kay
@marcopolo:
I don’t think they wanted Biden to do anything. They wanted him to “restore normalcy” and not make any waves of any kind, like a caretaker after a traumatic period- a Gerald Ford. He had other ideas.
Chris
@marcopolo:
Nah, it’s not that.
People keep coming up with relatively benign ways to explain media coverage:
“They’re just drawn to conflict and drama; if it bleeds, it leads!” No. There’s no universe in which email server management is more inherently eyeball-grabbing than sex, gangsters, and Russian spies, and yet that’s what they spent all of 2016 reporting on. It took a herculean effort by the news media to make Butter Emailz the story of that year.
“They just have neutrality and the idea that you can’t take sides drilled too deeply into them!” No. When the Afghanistan withdrawal happened, people who supported it literally couldn’t get on the air for two straight weeks: it was all Biden Debacle, all the time. They didn’t give a fuck about giving “the other side” a hearing in the name of Journalistic Integrity.
“The media is in the tank for Republicans, full stop” is really the only explanation that fits the facts.
Kay
This is genuinely funny:
It’s because they think Biden voters are less legitimate than Trump voters. It really comes down to their feelings about the base. You guys are not Real Americans.
cope
I am about 20 pages from the end of Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland. It covers the Carter administration and the rise of Ronald Reagan. One of the things it describes is how in the weeks leading up to the election, Carter was being dragged in the press for “meanness” for saying Reagan is war-like. All this while Reagan is continually lying out of his ass and denying reality with complete impunity as far as the press was concerned.
Everything in this book is directly connected to our present situation. The rise of a militant christian force, huge infusions of corporate cash, really dirty tricks, the first insatiable 24 hour news station, the aforementioned press sympathies, even a lot of the same fucking characters…Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and so on. It’s like reading the recipe for how we got where we are.
Matt McIrvin
The Atlantic column is saying things I’ve been yelling about for a while. Actually reading it was very “tell me something I don’t know” but I’m glad this is getting attention.
I did not expect someone like Milbank to get on the train. I’m pleased about that.
I think the media responses to Biden come from an idea that things ARE in some sense back to normal, so they can treat Biden like a normal president using pre-Trump media rules. Which is: knock him hard, hold him responsible, assume the truth is somewhere between the partisan positions, etc. Historically that is what the press perceived as doing their job.
They had a dawning realization when Trump was in that things were not normal and they had to change their ways. But with Trump out, there was an idea that normality was restored and they could go back to the way things were. It’s an illusion.
Kay
@Chris:
If there had been even the slightest fig leaf of interest in secure email or other communications after Trump won (or ever again) but they didn’t even bother to do that. It just ended, never to be mentioned again in any context.
It’s impossible to take at face value. I don’t know what it was about but it wasn’t emails.
germy
This is no way to run a government.
JMG
The elite press would like to be equally mean to Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans hit back and so they’re afraid of the GOP. Good lesson for Democrats. Biden should throw Fox News out of the White House and never go a day without calling it a den of traitorous propaganda. So the Beltway media would go crazy. Who cares? In the end, they suck up to what they perceive as power. Reagan and yes, FDR both treated White House press corps with contempt. Got great notices anyway.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
This is why I’m liking him for the first time ever. He makes it very clear what the stakes are.
Plus, anyone who drags Lizza is a-ok in my book. For the short term, anyway.
Arm The Homeless
I initiated a slap-fight on a WaPo story last week by simply asking what Germans in 1929 would have done if they knew what would happen by 1945
I was called hyperbolic and chastised for comparing Nazis to the GOP.
I am very afraid that the next coup will simply be partisan legislatures claiming electors for their own and daring anyone to do something about it.
I fear we’ll get about three days of Twitter snark and outrage before the corporate media starts telling folks, “thems the rules, nothing untoward here, better luck next time normies”
geg6
@Chris:
Totally agree. It’s not sensationalism or both sidesism. They are in the tank for the GOP. Josh Marshall explained this at least a dozen years ago.
SpaceUnit
@germy:
Mr. Hiatt has just joined the choir invisible.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: Things will never be normal as long as long as organizations like FoxNews are treated as legitimate. Trump was just the guy who understood the opportunity these organizations presented to grifter like himself. It may have been because he was already steeped in Keyfabe with things like WWE and the The Apprentice and understood that people actually get addicted to that shit, even if they know it’s fake. Having attended wrestling matches in a small city in the south in the 70’s, it didn’t surprise me at all that Trump could draw thousands to his rallies.
Chris
@Kay:
I suspect what it’s about (not just Emailz but in general) is a confluence of a bunch of factors, like,
The people who own the media are right-wing as hell, even if their employees aren’t necessarily.
Not all reporters are right-wing, but the big nationally recognized names are all in that shitty center-right quadrant of people who think a McCain/Lieberman ticket would have saved America.
Even the liberal reporters are disproportionately middle to upper middle class and white, with all the blinders that come with that.
The media is stuck in a vision of the past where it’s always 1985 and The Average Voters is far more white, rural, and Republican than in reality.
They’re pathologically obsessed with proving that they’re Hard Hitting Rational Reporters and not liberally biased like everyone says, and in the process, become conservatively biased as hell.
germy
@SpaceUnit:
The Great Beltway In The Sky
Leto
@germy: this reply nails it:
I mean, Hiatt at least blames the appropriate dipshits but the solution: Schumer needed to keep them all there during Thanksgiving. Yeah, that would’ve made them relent. Again, we have a non-functioning democracy because one of our two major political parties is a non-functioning entity, that doesn’t believe in governance, and more importantly, doesn’t believe in government being effective. The Senate needs to update it’s rules to reflect that.
Bill Arnold
@marcopolo:
We have a Republican Party that has deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of Americans for expected political gain, and hopes to kill hundreds of thousands more. [1]
Betcha that if some (non-R) media outlet started vigorously pushing some flavor of that true narrative, they would get lots of clicks and eyeballs.
[1] Currently they’re mostly killing Republicans of voting age. For any close elections in this next year lost by Republicans, this needs to be pointed out.
Citizen Alan
@Leto: That was a 5-4 opinion that would have gone the other way if Hillary had won. But don’t let me use SCOTUS seats to scare the children or anything.
Brachiator
@JMG:
I doubt that the media is afraid of the GOP. They may be afraid of losing viewers and readers who are conservative.
But I would love it if Biden tossed Fox.
FDR used radio to get around the press. He didn’t really get good notices until WW2.
Note that Trump used social media to get around the press. And his goofball rallies.
Reagan learned how to be more genial as he worked the press. When he was California governor, LA Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad would regularly, and adroitly attack Reagan. Reagan typically used surrogates to complain the loudest.
He used similar techniques as president.
germy
The elite press will never forgive Biden for taking Afghanistan away from them.
SpaceUnit
@germy:
He is opining on the fjords now.
Chris
@Brachiator:
IIRC, Obama similarly used social media to get around the press. Should have done more of that since, now that everything happens on Twitter and Facebook.
oatler
@Chris:
Sad but true. I long for the days when Cole cited the “K-Thug”.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I always like Potholder54 on Youtube’s take on the basic problem with the press; Photholder is a former conservative science reporter and he feels the problem is the press treats everything as a matter of opinion. Global Warming, well sure the scientific consensus is it’s happening, but some crackpot with a degree in phrenology says otherwise, who knows and so on. There is no objective reality for the press, so it makes it impossible to have a rational discussion on how to solve the problem. And Politico is a good example, they treat the 6th coup attempt as only a matter of opinion.
https://youtu.be/OgLtxWulMiM
Geminid
@Leto: Some portions of the Voting Rights Act still have teeth even after Shelby. A VRA lawsuit resulted in a redrawn Virginia 4th District, represented since 2016 by the excellent Don McEachin. And a VRA lawsuit in North Carolina resulted in two more Democratic Representatives for that state, elected last year. Texas is one of the 22(?) states from Delaware to Arizona covered by the VRA, so the Justice Department might be successful there.
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I think there’s a deeper underlying problem, which is that the media lacks real expertise. They listen to everyone because they don’t know enough to tell experts from charlatans.
West of the Rockies
@Bill Arnold:
Less than 800,000 Americans have died of Covid (of course the number may well be much higher). Perhaps in a very few sparsely populated areas those deaths could tip a seat into Democratic hands (er, buns, I guess). But I don’t think it’ll make a gigantic difference. Maybe if the people who loved the Covid Republican dead switch party loyalty to Dems, too, but who knows.
SiubhanDuinne
@SpaceUnit:
Judging by the date, I’m guessing that was his last WaPo editorial.
Betty Cracker
@Arm The Homeless: That’s exactly the outcome many of us are worried about.
rikyrah
The MSM are yelling like the hit dogs hollering they are.
Leto
@Geminid: fingers crossed and all. We still need to push new voting legislation through. Pretty much everything hinges on that.
Chetan Murthy
I don’t mean to pillory Milbank for this, but does anybody remember when he and Cilizza put out those misogynist anti-Hillary videos “back in the day”? It’s good he came to his senses finally, but gee, coulda done it when it really matters ah well.
SpaceUnit
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yeah. I didn’t read it but it sounds like a doozy.
Now this is mere speculation because I don’t know the actual cause of death, but perhaps he woke up in the middle of the night and experienced a moment of self-awareness.
trollhattan
Having been fired over the phone from a 10-year job, I feel for these poor folks.
Somebody needs to define “better” for me.
Kent
@Bill Arnold: They aren’t just killing them. Those who don’t die but only get hospitalized are also being bankrupted. Our social safety net is not universal, especially not in much of rural red America where a prolonged illness can still destroy a family financially. And a lot of these folks don’t have good insurance because Trump dropped the mandate and allowed for fraudulent “faith based” fake insurance policies to be sold.
So we don’t just have less potential Trump voters. We have less potential Trump donors as Covid has sucked the financial life out of a whole lot of MAGA families.
Fair Economist
Brian Tyler Cohen has a great tweet on this:
laura
Top Commenter Villago Delenda Est has some excellent views on what to do with ambulatory cocktail weinies like Cillizza.
On a semi-related note – the constant misogynoir heaped on the Vice President needs more acknowledgement and bullshit calling out. My personal Stanford Journalism School graduate is working the high school girl’s bathroom beat at sfgate.com. Eric Ting has multiple posts per week repeating Politico or WP hit pieces and when possible, an unflattering photo of VP Harris. At first I thought it may have been a one off filler but nope its constant. Today I emailed some thoughts to Eric Ting at sfgate.com the website for the San Francisco Chronicle. I’m now planning to do my part in calling out shit-baggery because this is absolutely intended to ensure that the press and it’s Republican owners puke out Hillary Hate style sullying of our likely next presidential candidate.
Betty
@marcopolo: Interesting comment because Milbank on Brian Stelter’s program on CNN actually said the media’s job is to be negative and adversarial. We have to fight that perception. The media’s job is to give an honest account, including criticism when it’s warranted.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore:
Many know enough. If you read the details in the articles, they are usually pretty factual. It’s the summaries and headlines that are most misleading. There’s direction from the top, both in the summarizing and the hiring.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
In what alternate universe? Hillary wouldn’t have ever had a Senate majority, so McConnell & Co. would have blocked her from appointing a single Justice for sure, and probably kept her from filling any lower-court vacancies as well. She’d have been lucky to have a confirmed Cabinet by the time she lost in 2020.
Nobody ever considers how terribly her Presidency would have gone, through no fault of her own: Mitch and friends would have sabotaged her Administration from Day 1. If anything, the timeline where Hillary gets those extra 80,000 votes in MI/PA/WI that she needed for the win, is an even worse disaster than the one we’re in.
Kent
@trollhattan: I looked them up. Better.com is some sort of online home mortgage broker that apparently grew fast by cutting lots of corners in the normal underwriting review process so they could offer folks online mortgages cheaper and faster than the competition. It seems that cutting corners in the underwriting process has come back to bite them in the ass. They must have a much higher than average default rate if the company is crashing and burning.
Cameron
Well, since it’s an open thread….
https://youtu.be/jC1rWb1ZM34
Kent
@lowtechcyclist: The reality of American politics is that the orcs are always at the door, except when they are in the castle running things. There is no alternative history you can ever come up with where if something went differently we end up like Denmark. We need a new constitution, electoral process, and legislative branch to make that happen. A 2016 Hillary presidency might well have led to a 2020 Trump victory and we would now be clawing our way through the first term of Trump’s Covid presidency in which he also held the House and Senate.
I’m not saying it is good that she lost. It wasn’t. It was a disaster. But it would have simply set us off on another alternative history path that might have brought us right back, to the same place.
raven
@Kent: fewer
lowtechcyclist
:golf clap:
trollhattan
@Kent:
wife.com is a mortgage broker and this is her reality: cut corners and you will get your ass bit off eleven times out of ten. She battles mightily with underwriters on behalf of her clients but never, ever does an end-around.
Hard to believe that bidnez model is flawed. :-0
JustRuss
Here’s WaPo reporter on the death of editor Fred Hiatt:
Funny how the dead are lionized as champions of all things good, but if you accused the living of those things they’d be guilty of liberal bias.
Betty
@Chetan Murthy: I was waiting for someone to bring that up. Milbank seems to understand the stakes now.
lowtechcyclist
@Kent:
I just get tired of the implication that things wouldn’t have gone nearly as badly if Hillary had won. Nobody seems to have given a moment’s thought to the handicaps she would have labored under, and how that would have likely played out.
I’ve kept my mouth shut about that for a long time now, but I had to say something to that particular comment, because there wouldn’t have been a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court anytime during her first term, had she won, because there never would have been nine Justices.
Chetan Murthy
@lowtechcyclist: In full cognizance of how hobbled her Presidency would have been:
When Fascists take power, the corrupt things, they corrupt everything they touch. Delaying that might have been a good thing, even with all the other shit. And surely, Hillary could have done a lot to make covid less-awful in the early days.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist:
Even with eight it was better than after Gorsuch was seated, plus Kennedy would not have made room for KKKavanaugh with Killery in office. RBG’s death would have made a 7-member court, which I’d rather not even ponder.
Kent
@lowtechcyclist: In the conservative circles of which I am adjacent due to geography (living in Texas) or having a shitload of MAGA relatives, I can confirm that Hillary hatred was honestly more rabid and unhinged than Obama hatred. Obama was disarming in many ways because he was so charismatic. Hillary was not. The amount of unhinged and vile Hillary hatred that would have emerged with a 2016 victory would have been frankly overwhelming. And honestly, I think a large portion of the left half of the country and political class would not really have had her back. Especially once the going got tough. The Bernie folks would have been shitting all over her for 4 years. I have no idea what a Hillary presidency would actually have looked like. But it wouldn’t have been an easy road. And I doubt we would have regained the House in 2018 or reached a 50/50 Senate in 2020
If we have learned anything in the past 5 years. It is that a very large portion of our fellow Americans are truly vile and deplorable. Hillary warned us. Now we know without a shadow of doubt. I don’t think any sort of lasting universal progressive ideals will ever be realized until we figure out how to deal with that fundamental truth. Probably we just need to see most of them die off. I see no other alternative.
Old School
@JustRuss:
Atrios made that point over the Dole obits. Dole was good because he voted for the Civil Rights Act/supported the ADA. But yet, liberal things are rarely good ideas when they are trying to be put into place.
Chris
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeah. The best thing I can say about the Hillary 2016 victory is that it at least would probably have killed off Trump’s presidential aspirations, and a ton of the baggage that’s come with them. After 1/6, I honestly think that might have been worth it all.
Chetan Murthy
@Betty: He’s 53, so in 2009 (when they were publishing that shit) he was 41. Maybe it’s just that he’s getting old enough that he no longer sees every woman as “hott or not”, and so can devote a few brain cells to the question of the salvation of the Republic.
I’m really convinced that men shouldn’t be allowed to wield power until they’re not so interested in sex: it completely destroys their mental faculties, the constant being-blinded-by-their-dicks. No brain cells left for anything else.
Chris
@Old School:
Liberals are only good when they’re safely dead. See also Lincoln, MLK, etc.
trollhattan
@Betty: If he’s had his Road to Damascus moment, then good. Maybe Jenn Ruben had a little chat with him.
Chris
@Chetan Murthy:
That… doesn’t seem to follow?
Look at how old many men, quite a few of whom are presumably at that “sex doesn’t matter so much anymore” point, have grotesquely awful politics. And now look at the number of horny teenagers and young adults who, however small their common sense, nevertheless manage to have far saner politics.
Kent
@Chetan Murthy: I’m 57. Trust me, men are never not blindsided by their dicks. You don’t ever age out of being a dick. Trump is exhibit 1.
lowtechcyclist
And would have been excoriated by the Fred Hiatts of the world for having misplayed her Administration’s Covid response so badly that Covid killed 30,000 Americans by Election Day 2020. No second term for her.
Chetan Murthy
@Chris: *grin* You’ve convinced me. Relegate men to the home, where they can’t destroy anything except tonight’s dinner.
But seriously, yeah, you’re right. Sigh. #YesAllMen
Old School
@Chris: It’s more that after conservatives die, their few liberal positions are pointed to as their good points.
WhatsMyNym
The firing by better dot com gets even worse…
TheStreet
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@trollhattan: It gets even better than that
Basically, this nitwit is hasn’t a clue what’s going on at his company and trying to run it by a spread sheet.
eddie blake
@trollhattan: they’re members of the tribe. they’re red-sea-pedestrians. they know the stakes if the fascists take power.
Chris
@Old School:
Or after conservatives retire, they suddenly start caring about things like “legacy” and taking a few performatively liberal positions… long after they’re past the point where their words will be put into policy.
Yes, George W. Bush made noises about democracy and how bad Donald Trump was… after he himself came to power through vote suppression, Supreme Court fiat, and a riot interrupting a vote count, and then spent his entire presidency gutting the civil rights division of DOJ.
Yes, Colin Powell endorsed Obama and supported gays in the military… after he was comfortably retired. As opposed to what he did when he was CJCS and his opinions actually carried weight, which was to lead a very public battle against his commander-in-chief to keep the gays out.
Yes, Barry Goldwater spoke out against the religious right… in the eighties, when he was a has-been hardly anyone remembered anymore. When he was actually the leading edge of the conservative movement, he pretty much ran against civil rights.
Yes, Dwight Eisenhower spoke out against the military-industrial complex… in his farewell address, after spending eight years growing the monster.
(Occasionally, this is actually useful: I firmly believe McCain would never have voted for the ACA if he hadn’t been on death’s doorstep and no longer needed to worry about getting reelected or keeping his party happy. But far more often, it’s simply performative bullshit).
Brachiator
@Kent:
Hell, a lot of Democrats didn’t have Obama’s back. And the racist backlash was overwhelming.
But Obama was a good, inspiring president. And shit got done.
Nobody knows or can say what a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been like. Except for one thing.
By any measure, it would have been 1 trillion trillion gazillion times better than what we got with the Orange Monster.
Had the pandemic still happened during Hillary’s presidency, I cannot imagine that her response would not have been anything but professional and competent.
And it should not matter, but some Americans still have to get over the psychological shock of having a woman president.
And hell, I am convinced that had Hillary been president, all three of the last Star Wars movies would have been better films. ;)
Danielx
It’s going to be a real shame when Tiger Beat on the Potomac is unable to provide horse race coverage because one of the horses is crippled before it gets to the gate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Go read about all the fun had with queens throughout history if you think this is a male only problem.
rikyrah
@laura:
I am glad that so many are recognizing it and calling it out for what it is.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Probably true, and also: McCain hated trump. Nobody better personified Nixon’s idea of “knowing how to hate” than McCain.
rikyrah
@Kent:
She was right….about everything.
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’m going to try to convince you that this CEO knows what’s happening at his company, and … (wait for it) that thus you should judge him and his company even-more-harshly.
Mortgage lenders these days originate loans (= “find the borrowers and get the contracts signed”) and then package and resell the mortgages in the secondary market. So their business is all about getting people to sign on the bottom line. Throughput, not quality: b/c they resell the loans regardless.
I have friend who once worked for AMEX Financial Services, and he told me about how the place was basically a machine for separating widows and orphans from their life savings. The key skills there were: placing calls from the “leads” (remember Glengarry Glenross?), “fishbowl seminars”[1], and “sit-downs” (remember the Nyborgs in Glengarry Glenross?) What weren’t key skills? Knowing anything about securities, or, really, anything that might actually help clients. B/c what mattered, was getting them in seats and signing, period. It was pure salesmanship.
[1] a “fishbowl seminar” is when you put your business card into one of those fishbowls in a restaurant. to “win” a free lunch. The secret is that everybody is a winner: b/c companies like AMEX have those fishbowls locked-up, and they use them for lead-generation, inviting groups of people to lunch and a seminar about AMEX’s offerings.
So I don’t despise people like Garg for firing their workers based on those metrics; I despise him for running a company that fleeces its customers.
Chris
@Brachiator:
There isn’t a single election from 1932 onwards where the Democrat either wasn’t a trillion times better than the Republican would have been, or would have been a trillion times better than the Republican was.
Although Clinton/Trump was, indeed, that basic principle on steroids.
Betty Cracker
@laura: I am pre-dreading 2023 because they are going to crank that shit up to 11 and rip off the knob.
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
The GOP would have made a ton of money from fundraising as would the press on Hilary hate.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: I disagree about the 5-4 thing. While it’s true that McConnell would have blocked her appointees, I also think they would have rushed through Merrick Garland rather than risk something happening that would allow her to appoint someone younger and farther left. And Merrick Garland would, among other things, have cast the deciding vote to strike down partisan gerrymandering as against Due Process.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Totally OT but your “rip off the knobs” comment reminded me of something funny from when i worked at the university.
I have no idea what the thing was or why we had it at the office for a day, but whatever it was, each and every male who walked into the office walked over to it, said “nice knobs”, and reached out with both hands to grab them.
I kid you not.
Women who walked in the office said not one word. Not a one. Whatever the thing was, it was boob-a-licious to all the males.
opiejeanne
@SpaceUnit: I just saw that he died today. I was puzzled by your post at first.
SpaceUnit
@opiejeanne:
It’s an old Monty Python reference.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: As always: Follow the money.
(I posted a comment with a similar, but more recent, set of numbers a few days ago, but of course I can’t find it…)
They’re crashing off their sugar high and trying to get that rush again. And figure attacking Democrats is the way to do it because that’s what worked for TFG….
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Too much Power for any one individual is dramatically more a problem but we, as human beings, have never figured out how to make government work with more than one personality actually in charge. Yes given the size of most countries there will be people below the very top, no matter one or more at the very top. But it’s the guidance and policies that they have to implement which are supposed to guide them and someone like SFB has zero clue other than wrong. But many of those just below the top want the top slot and think they can always do better – even if they have zero idea how.
I stated below that humans all have the same issues, we just have them in different quantities. Men and women in different societies may/are treated different but put them in power and if history is any tell, women, like men can go either way, good or horrible. Women just have not had as much chance to prove it. And our trick is finding out how bad any one of them will be if given power, with prior performance not being as good an indicator as one might imagine.
James E Powell
When any press/media get pressure from the D side, they ignore it, scorn it, or go on the counter-attack. When they get it from the R side, the apologize, bend over, and give another wingnut space on the Op-Ed page.
It has been this way for 40 years.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
News media makes money from either having a one sided slant or from at least trying to stay out of the limelight. So they are going to follow the money, as well as the owners are going to follow their own political directions. We as a country are rapidly going in opposite directions politically. Forwards and backwards. Guess which is which.
Soprano2
Y’all are making it too complicated – the D.C. press has hated the Clintons since he first ran for office, and they hate her more because she refused to be the traditional First Lady. She dared to challenge their idea of what she should be, and they hate her for it. They were dreading covering her presidency because they hate her and think she’s boring. That’s it. That’s why email server management was important until she lost, and was never talked about again. It was a weapon to use against her, period.
Villago Delenda Est
Villager scum like Ryan Lizza are why I have my nym, and why the Village needs to be nuked from orbit, the only way to be sure.
J R in WV
@James E Powell:
Fixed that up a little bit for you. Seems more like a lot longer than 40 years, but I’m old, and read history. Since the New Deal sounds closer, anyway.