Left Jabs

  They like the fact that this is a young Black woman squaring off against an old white guy. They like that she's going to all just talk about abortion. And they like the fact that she was a prosecutor and he's a felon. They like that framing. —    JesseWatters , Fox News host   I couldn’t have said it better. Watters, the current occupant of Tucker Carlson’s old time slot, was trying to sound smarmy and insulting — his default setting — but when you see his words on the page, you realize he’s reading the situation with uncanny accuracy. Hell yes, we like that framing. More, please. The rollout of Brand Kamala was superb. A marketing coup of the first order, I was agog. Before we’d even absorbed that Biden was stepping aside, the websites were up, the lawn signs were printed, the merch was available for purchase, and there she was, ready for her closeup. A star is born. It was as smooth a launch as I’ve ever seen, and to think it was cobbled together in ...

  My father would not live any place where the New York Times couldn’t be delivered before 7:00 a.m. To him, the Times was “the newspaper of record,” the keeper of the first drafts of history. It had the reach and the resources to be anywhere history was being made, and the skills to report it accurately. He trusted it more than any other news source, including Walter Cronkite. Like my dad, I grew to associate the Times with serious journalism, the first place one goes for the straight story. Their news was always assumed to be objectively presented, with the facts front-and-center. Their op-ed writers were well-reasoned and erudite, even when I thought they were full of shit. But there was more. The Times became — for me, at least — a sort of guide to critical thinking. It helped teach me, at an impressionable age, to weigh the facts before forming an opinion. And many of my opinions — including deeply-held ones — were formed around facts I might have r...

There is now ample evidence that people with democratic systems of government actually like them, and would just as soon keep them, flaws and all. There seems to be a strong backlash occurring in several European countries, a trend toward shoring up democracies threatened by toxic authoritarian forces. In Poland last year, then in France and Britain last week, actual voters — as opposed to deeply compromised opinion polls — gave a big middle finger to the fascists in their midst. I don’t pretend to understand the electoral systems of these countries — let alone their political currents — but I’m struck by the apparent connections between different elections in different countries, and what they might be saying to us. I’ve spoken before of Poland , where ten years of vicious minority rule was overturned at the ballot box. A ban on abortion was the galvanizing issue — sound familiar? — and it brought an overwhelming number of voters to the polls, many for the fir...

  Michelle Obama famously said of Republicans, “When they go low, we go high.” While I applaud the sentiment, she may not have fully understood just how low Republicans might go, given enough time and money. I assume she and her husband have since adjusted that equation. Both are surely on Trump’s lengthy enemies list, and no amount of going high will count for much if he takes over. It's time for Democrats to rethink that approach. Being on the side of right and good doesn’t seem to be cutting it right now. I’m hearing a lot of hand-wringing about the fanatical low-ness of the fanatical right, but not much   about practical ways to deal with it. Our imagination has failed us. We never imagined people so vile. We knew such people existed, but felt surely they were only on “the fringes.” We ignored the warning signs. Now, the Supreme Court is finished with warning signs. If there were any questions remaining about the unacceptable direction they want to ...

  Anxiety comes easily to Democrats. We’re highly practiced at perceiving a crisis, wanting to fix it immediately, and being consistently frustrated when we can’t. Democrats understand consequences, which is why we always have plenty to worry about. Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about consequences — which is, let’s face it, their superpower. I wasn’t intending to write about last Thursday’s debate, mostly because I post on Tuesdays, and this could be old news by the time it gets to you. But then the New York Times weighed in with a wildly disingenuous editorial calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the race, and the rest of the mainstream media piled on. In the Times' not-so-humble opinion, Biden needs to consider “the good of the country,” something their own paper has repeatedly failed to do for almost a decade. And since this is now the crisis du jour for virtually every Democrat who watched that shitshow, I thought I might at l...