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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Excellent Read: ‘A Timeline of Wolf-Crying’

Excellent Read: ‘A Timeline of Wolf-Crying’

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In the Washington Post, the dogged and fact-armored Philip Bump on “The year of Republicans throwing accusations against Biden at the wall”:

In the interregnum between Democrats losing control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections and Republicans taking control in January, senior members of the chamber’s Republican conference began discussing their wide-ranging attack on President Biden.

Speaking to The Washington Post a year ago, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), then the top Republican of House Oversight, pledged to use the power he would gain when assuming control of that committee to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.” He would begin with “probes,” he said, and, if necessary, move on to “investigations.” The desired outcome wasn’t political, Comer suggested, but aimed at developing “a legislative fix” to address influence-peddling.

This is not how Comer’s first year running Oversight worked out. Instead of using his majority to methodically flesh out the existing allegations against the president, Comer and his allies — including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — found themselves offering up baseless or debunked allegations to a conservative media ravenous for them. Throughout 2023, Comer, Jordan and their allies made little progress toward Comer’s stated target — but did manage to significantly erode their credibility.

This is most easily demonstrated by considering the slew of allegations and insinuations that Comer in particular offered as 2023 unfolded…

Read — and save for future reference — the whole month-by-month timeline!

<em>'A Timeline of Wolf-Crying'</em> - STOCKPILE

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    Brachiator

    He would begin with “probes,” he said, and, if necessary, move on to “investigations.”

    And after “investigations” would come lies, innuendo and conspiracies.

    And their secret weapon and key witness would be, no, not the Spanish Inquisition (which no one expects) but Hunter Biden’s laptop, a treasure trove of nothing which could be spun into evidence of anything, from Bigfoot to “proof” that the moon landing had been faked by Stanley Kubrick.

    The desired outcome wasn’t political, Comer suggested, but aimed at developing “a legislative fix” to address influence-peddling.

    Also to deflect attention from the righteous prosecutions of Donald Trump and to keep the GOP rabble roused.

  3. 3.

    HumboldtBlue

    OK, I’ll come clean, I did it, I did it all, laundered the money, made the connections with all the bad countries, left the toilet seat up, ate all the muffin tops and left the rest of the muffins, all of it is on me, it was me the whole time.

    Now come and try and catch me ya bastids!​

  8. 8.

    JWR

    Dude’s weird. (From Politico)

    Voters surveyed by the Daily Mail described former President Donald Trump’s political goals as “corruption,” “revenge” and “dictatorship.”

    On Tuesday, Trump appeared to voice his agreement with their assessments.

    In a cryptic post on Truth Social, Trump shared a word cloud with the results of a Daily Mail survey released Tuesday that prominently displayed the words “corruption,” “revenge,” “dictatorship” and “power,” indicating that those answers were provided by a large number of participants asked about Trump’s plans for a second term in office.

    There was no caption or comment attached to the post. The Trump campaign also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Here’s a link to the actual post.

  10. 10.

    waspuppet

    Throughout 2023, Comer, Jordan and their allies made little progress toward Comer’s stated target — but did manage to significantly erode their credibility.

    It’s up to Bump’s wealthy colleagues at the Post, The New York Times, CNN and the rest to determine whether their credibility has been eroded.

    If their every accusation gets two days of respectful, credulous consideration and the factual refutation of those allegations gets barely a mention and no analysis at all — if there’s no realization that maybe they should evaluate the track record of Republican “investigators” just like every other reporter at every news organization evaluates every source every day — then their credibility is not eroded.

  11. 11.

    Turgidson

    @Betty Cracker: 

    I keep expecting Bump to start BothSidesing these investigations and searching desperately for false equivalences, but he’s done a mostly great job calling it how it is without that shit.

  13. 13.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Jordan and Comer should both be expelled from the House for abuse of process. It won’t happen, but it should.

  14. 14.

    RevRick

    The whole purpose of these probes and investigations is to smear President Biden with a cloud of suspicion. Evidence is completely beside the point. Hunter Biden made a pile of money from questionable sources. President Biden still loves him. He is guilty of caring for him.
    The GOP views this as weakness to be exploited. They are the COVID of our political system.

  18. 18.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Betty Cracker: ​ 

    There’s some bad news for your Rays, Betty, Wander Franco is now a fugitive.

    DEVELOPING: The Santo Domingo Prosecutor’s Office for Children and Adolescents searched two homes in the Dominican Republic looking for Rays shortstop Wander Franco on Tuesday, according to a Dominican Republic newspaper.

    Listin Diario reported that Dominican authorities are looking for Franco on allegations of having a relationship with a minor from Puerto Plata.

    The 22-year-old Franco had returned to his native Dominican Republic earlier this month, the Tampa Bay Times previously reported. Franco was not located by authorities on Tuesday, according to Listin Diario.

  25. 25.

    Jackie

    @Betty Cracker: Speaking of rising up to the occasion moment! Guess who the author is before clicking the gift link below.

    The end of the year is a time to reflect on one’s mistakes, including, for a columnist, the arguments you got wrong. I am ruminating on my utter misreading of the politics of a post-Roe world.

    “The left is counting on an abortion backlash that may never come,” I wrote in May 2022, after Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft decision overturning Roe leaked to Politico. Polling suggested that most people were in what I once dubbed “the Muddle” — favoring neither total bans nor unfettered abortion access, and often conflicted about what should happen between the two poles.
    Of course, hardcore minorities at either end of the spectrum had clear, strong preferences, but those people were already active voters, I pointed out, already strongly committed to one party or the other. The rest of the public cared, but not necessarily strongly enough to affect their voting behavior. As abortion law in every state settled down to something close to the median of public opinion, I thought the issue would probably cease to exert much political force.
    I won’t say this is the wrongest I have ever been; that would be ridiculous, given that I supported the Iraq War, and thought the collapse of Lehman Brothers would instill a bracing sense of moral responsibility in the financial sector. But I have not been this wrong since I decided in 2016 to go on holiday after the election, because I thought there would be little worth covering in Hillary Clinton’s presidential transition.

    Pro-lifers have been losing abortion referendums even in deep-red states, and abortion seems to have resulted in Republicans losing other elections, too. If you are a local Democratic official in a state that allows initiatives or referendums and you are not doing your best to put abortion somewhere on the 2024 ballot, then you are committing political malpractice.

    So how did I get this one so wrong? Introspection suggests four reasons:

    First, I was right that voter intensity on this issue mattered — but wrong about the distribution of intensity. A lot of people for whom this was a low priority as long as Roe was the law of the land apparently became a lot more intense once Roe fell — almost all of them on the pro-choice side.

    Relatedly, I suspect I underestimated how many people were giving pollsters symbolic answers, safe in the knowledge that Roe v. Wade made them moot. In abstract, many people were against abortion in all but the most sympathetic cases. But though they might not have admitted it to themselves, I’d bet that many of them also liked knowing women had the option — if not for themselves, than for their wives, daughters, sisters or girlfriends. When politicians threatened to take that option away, they voted pragmatically.

    Third, I failed to understand just how badly legislators had drafted many of the “trigger laws” that banned abortion as soon as Roe fell.

    Operating under the shelter of Roe, politicians had also been thinking symbolically, giving pro-life groups ultra-strict laws that couldn’t command support among even a majority of Republicans, with little concern for the practical details of carrying out those laws. The result has been a parade of horrifying stories as doctors refused to provide abortions to a 10-year-old rape victim, and to adult women whose very-much-wanted pregnancies had gone horribly wrong.
    Which brings me to the fourth reason my prognostication failed: I underestimated how tactically inflexible the pro-life movement would be.

    As a member of the Muddle, I’m sympathetic to those who feel that every life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. But this feeling has made pro-lifers obsessed with ensuring that no doctor ever performs a single unnecessary abortion. Unfortunately, the law is too blunt an instrument for such surgical precision. If you really want to make sure that no unwarranted abortion is performed, you will be forced to bar a lot of needed medical care.

    Tell doctors they face severe sanction for any abortion deemed less than perfectly necessary, and they will respond by refusing to do abortions in all but the clearest cases — which means forcing a lot of grieving women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, possibly impairing their future fertility. Even if you can justify this policy morally, it cannot be justified politically; the personal tragedies will only turn the public against your cause.

    This has surprised me more than anything, because pro-life activists used to be good at picking strategic battles, at focusing on popular issues where they could win, such as parental consent or bans on particularly gruesome procedures. If they truly want to reduce the numbers of abortions, they’ll need to return to those strategic roots. Otherwise — if I dare make another prediction — they will end up where I am now: watching pro-choice initiatives win in state after state, and wondering how they got it so wrong.

    Gift link: https://wapo.st/4ayioZk

  26. 26.

    JWR

    NBC TV news at noon spent the first 7 minutes(!) on, drum roll please, CARAVANZ!1!! Scared the bejeebus outa me, I tells ya.

  29. 29.

    Splitting Image

    @Jackie:

    Speaking of rising up to the occasion moment! Guess who the author is before clicking the gift link below.

    Well, fuck me. I haven’t been this shocked since the first time I agreed with Bill Kristol.

  31. 31.

    Another Scott

    @Jackie: Thanks for the pointer.

    Before knowing who wrote it, I have to say that the piece annoyed and almost angered me.  The detached tone.  The oh, I’ve been wrong, but other politicians who should know better are wronger tone.  The all politics is just a game and doesn’t really matter to people’s lives, what matters is beating the other team attitude.

    It’s another illustration of why sensible people brush her off as being wrong about everything.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    NoOneOfConsequence

    @Jackie: RE:

    Third, I failed to understand just how badly legislators had drafted many of the “trigger laws” that banned abortion as soon as Roe fell.

    (deleted)
    Which brings me to the fourth reason my prognostication failed: I underestimated how tactically inflexible the pro-life movement would be.

    That could all be summarized by the author’s statement, “thirdly (yes, I correct grammar), I didn’t even bother to *read* trigger laws, I just assumed they were written in good faith and based on sound science, EVEN THOUGH THE SUPPORTERS SHOWED ONLY BAD FAITH AND LIES ABOUT SCIENCE. Thankfully, the NYT Pitchbot has a suggestion for me: “although I have been wrong about everything on abortion, you can now trust me to be as appropriately humble, and accurate, as all other right wing members of the NYT editorial page'”

  35. 35.

    Sure Lurkalot

    OT, this year’s best blog posts of the year have some familiar names:

    Michael Bersin, Paul Wartenberg, Mustang Bobby, whose comments here at BJ I bet many of us have read, as well as Driftglass and Blue Gal, who have produced the Professional Left Podcast for many years (and their new “No Fair Remembering Stuff” is excellent too).

    Worth reading their and others’ award winning posts!

    https://vagabondscholar.blogspot.com/2023/12/jon-swift-roundup-2023.html

  36. 36.

    brantl

    @Jackie: I thought it was BoBo Brooks, not Meghan McSuckle. She certainly is part of the Muddle, though, on every issue that I have ever read her writing about.

  37. 37.

    rikyrah

    @Jackie:

    This has surprised me more than anything, because pro-life activists used to be good at picking strategic battles, at focusing on popular issues where they could win, such as parental consent or bans on particularly gruesome procedures. If they truly want to reduce the numbers of abortions, they’ll need to return to those strategic roots. Otherwise — if I dare make another prediction — they will end up where I am now: watching pro-choice initiatives win in state after state, and wondering how they got it so wrong

     

    Phuck outta here.

    They’ve been lying for years.

  38. 38.

    trollhattan

    @rikyrah: ​
    Yeah, listening without hearing, our McMuddle.
    They are who they always have been, one Schlafly at a time. Moderate schmoderate.

  40. 40.

    Miss Bianca

    @Jackie: Well, it’s nice that Megan McArglebargle has admitted that she was wrong. But she still refuses to acknowledge the one salient point about ant-abortion folks: they were NEVER going to stop with “parental consent” and “partial-birth abortion” bans (which are BS in and of themselves, but whatever). They have ALWAYS been fixated on getting rid of abortion entirely, because their goal is not reducing the number of abortions, per se – it’s controlling women and sending them packing out of public life entirely. I think Suzanne is right on with this observation. 

    Kinder, Kirche, Kuche – it’s straight out of the Nazi playbook!

    So, Megan – glad you’ve woken up a little, but you can still get stuffed.

  43. 43.

    Miss Bianca

    @Steeplejack: The simple truth of the matter is that any abortion procedure involves the extraction – or expulsion – of fetal tissue and body parts. What the antis are calling “particularly gruesome methods” are late-term abortions, and yeah – they are icky, because yeah, the fetus is going to look like a baby, and is going to come out in parts.

    No, it’s not pretty. But necessary, sometimes? Yes.

  45. 45.

    Bill Arnold

    @Miss Bianca:

    So, Megan – glad you’ve woken up a little, but you can still get stuffed.

    If Megan McArdle writes a “no really, this is the best economy in my adult lifetime” piece in the next several months, I will happily eat a chocolate hat.

  47. 47.

    Ruckus

    @Miss Bianca:

    As I belong to the half the population that can not give birth, only participate in it’s starting function, I have, for the last like 60 yrs tried to understand why something that is not even close to foolproof and sometimes is started without the express desire/decision of the participants can not be undone at the request of the human being that has to do all the work and often has all the responsibility thrust upon them in a process that can be life threatening to them. If men had a greater, actual, continuous, possibly life threatening participation in the ENTIRE process, including the outcome, I wonder if the concept of abortion would be looked upon by more people as absolutely, positively necessary and available.

    We know the starting procedure is not going to be suspended by the participants, and that one of the results of that is always possibly life altering, yes often in a very good way, but also can be in a way that may be undesirable and/or negatively life altering to either of the participants but often far more life altering to the one of them that has to go through the entire process.

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