Clear and Present Danger

Which photo is the real Howler Monkey???

I hope and pray that on the first day of his second term, Biden will:

• Enlarge the Court
• Fire Garland
• Fire Wray
• Fire DeJoy

When special counsel Robert Hur announced his decision last month not to prosecute Joe Biden for his possession of classified documents, he made a startling claim: The president suffered from significant memory loss, Hur wrote, botching dates, names, and details—including the year of his son Beau’s death. This narrative had a chokehold on Biden’s reelection campaign until Tuesday, when newly released transcripts of the two-day interview revealed that Hur exaggerated and misrepresented multiple statements in an obvious effort to depict the president as a senile geezer unfit for office. Democrats hammered this point during a congressional hearing shortly after the transcripts came out, venting their fury at Hur for manipulating the record to smear Biden’s mental capacities. But in a sense, their rage was misplaced. It would be more appropriately directed toward the one person on the planet who apparently believed that Hur would serve as a fair arbiter of this controversy: Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It was Garland, after all, who appointed Hur—a former U.S. attorney appointed by former President Donald Trump—to investigate the allegation that Biden held on to classified materials after leaving the vice presidency. No one forced Garland to do so. There were plenty of former U.S. attorneys under Democratic presidents who served with integrity and could have stepped into the Biden probe. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has noted, there appears to be an unwritten rule that only Republicans may be appointed as special counsel when a president or presidential candidate is accused of misconduct. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Trump, and now Biden all faced down GOP prosecutors. Garland made the conscious decision to continue that tradition, with results that are as disastrous as they are predictable: His choice to scrutinize Biden transformed the job into an audition for an even more prominent role in Trump’s second administration.”

A handful of left-leaning Hur defenders have argued that the special counsel did, in fact, discharge his duties with commendable independence. They point to Hur’s acknowledgment that Trump’s misconduct was far more serious than Biden’s, justifying his decision not to charge the sitting president with any crime. Well, yes: The evidence suggests that Trump intentionally absconded with massive amounts of classified materials, lied about it to investigators, then engaged in a criminal conspiracy to conceal the materials from federal law enforcement. What, by contrast, did Biden do? Carelessly brought a small number of secret files (including his own handwritten notes) home to Delaware, then complied fully with law enforcement after they were discovered. No reasonable prosecutor would have brought charges because there was absolutely no chance of winning and sustaining a conviction. Zilch. Not in this lifetime or any other. Hur had to compare Trump’s and Biden’s alleged offenses to explain to Republicans that he had no choice but to walk away without seeking an indictment. He deserves no credit for bowing to reality.

Why did Garland appoint Hur? Because the attorney general has a fetish for bipartisanship and a deep, overwhelming desire to be admired by the American people. These dual fixations drive him to conflate the real world with The West Wing, presuming—wrongly and repeatedly—that he could win universal acclaim by appeasing Republicans. It won’t work.

Garland’s one genuinely smart move was appointing Jack Smith to investigate Trump (after waiting way too long to do so). And that decision turned the GOP against him forever. One might suppose that Garland, of all people, would realize that Democratic appeasement and unilateral disarmament does not work in the face of Republican hardball. Obama nominated him to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 specifically because the president assumed that Republicans would assent to an older, moderate white man. Obama, we all know now, was disastrously wrong. And somehow, Garland did not learn his lesson. All these years later, he still hasn’t. And it is Biden who’s paying the price.

As predicted, last week was an important one for the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday stayed in the news throughout the weekend. On Friday, independent journalist Jonathan Katz figured out that a key story in it was false. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) described a twelve-year-old child sex trafficked by Mexican cartel members, implying that the young girl was trafficked because of President Joe Biden’s border policies.

Katz tracked down the facts. Britt was describing the life of Karla Jacinto, who was indeed trafficked as a child, but not in the present and not in the U.S. and not by cartels. She was trafficked from 2004 to 2008—during the George W. Bush administration—in Mexico, at the hands of a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls. Jacinto has become an advocate for child victims and has told her story before Congress, and she met Britt at an event for government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.

Britt’s dramatic delivery of the rebuttal had already invited parody and concern about the religious themes she demonstrated. The news that a central image in it was a lie just made things worse. “Everyone’s f*cking losing it,” a Republican strategist told The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”

On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to replace former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who resigned effective Friday, with Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. They will co-chair the organization and have made it clear their primary goal is to put Trump back in the White House.

Friday night, on Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a video announcing that the old Republican Party “no longer exists outside of the D.C. beltway…. The move that happened today…that’s the final blow. People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”

Just what that means was crystal clear on Friday night, when Trump hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the Trump Organization’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. The darling of the radical right, Orbán has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and hosted former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and his policies inspired the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation Florida governor Ron DeSantis has championed.

The right wing’s fondness for Orbán springs from his having rejected democracy and replaced it in Hungary with what he calls an “illiberal state.” Orbán and other far-right leaders working against democracy maintain that the central principle of democracy, equality before the law, undermines society. It permits immigration, which, in their minds, dilutes the “purity” of a people, and it requires that LGBTQ+ individuals and women have the same rights as heterosexual men. Such a world challenges the heteronormative patriarchal world traditionalists crave.

Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

On Saturday, Republicans in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, censured Senator James Lankford (R-OK) over his work negotiating the border security measure. In January, state Republicans claimed they had passed a resolution “strongly” condemning Lankford; others said the vote for the resolution was “not legitimate and definitely does not represent the voice of all Oklahoma Republicans.”

Lankford is a far-right senator whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to represent the Republicans in the negotiations. House Republicans had demanded the border security measure before they would allow a vote on a national security supplemental bill that funds Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.

But the House Republicans’ demand for a border measure appears to have been an attempt to kill the national security supplemental bill altogether. As soon as it became clear that there would be a deal, Trump came out against it. He demanded that Congress kill the measure, and his loyalists agreed.

Lankford, who had helped to produce the strongest border measure in years at the request of the nominal head of the party, has now been censured because he crossed Trump.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Biden signed into law one of the consolidated appropriations bills that must be finished to fund the government. The other must be finished by March 22.

Biden has continued to ride the momentum built by Thursday’s State of the Union speech. His campaign has released a number of advertisements, and today he was in Georgia, where the largest political action committees representing communities of color—the AAPI Victory Fund, the Latino Victory Fund, and The Collective PAC—endorsed him and pledged $30 million to mobilize communities of color to vote in 2024.

Dear @SenKatieBritt this message is for you. Take her advice! pic.twitter.com/hNuMoSpUys

— ⚓️ 🇺🇸 Proud Navy Veteran (@naretevduorp) March 9, 2024

I wasn’t going to watch the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech. But then social media posts started popping up: “What am I seeing?” “This porn sucks.” “Who is this?”

It was irresistable. I only caught the last half, but Oh My Goodness. I’ve watched the whole thing since then.

What we were seeing were worlds in collision. The folks I follow on social media were aware of a separate culture of evangelical Christians, Southerners, MAGAs. We had read articles about their culture from those who had ventured forth anthropologically or escaped. Hmm interesting, but reading about and actually seeing are two different things. We had been in a bubble.

Conversely, a United States Senator who presents herself with a dipping blouse neckline showing a gleaming stone-encrusted cross, speaking in a breathy childlike voice from a darkened and apparently unused kitchen was in a bubble of her own, along with a Republican Party that thought this would be appealing.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson could smirk and shake his head and refuse to applaud through the State of the Union because he lives in that bubble too. But let’s talk about Senator Katie Britt’s highly gendered performance.

For those who know (numbers now increasing), that bizarre voice is called “fundy baby voice.” It is cultivated by women in what let’s call the fundy bubble, which includes both more and less than MAGA or the Republican Party. It is explicitly taught to them, and they use it deliberately to signal that they belong to that bubble and all it implies about women – submissive to men, stays in the home, and certainly no attempt to control the relationship of sex to pregnancy. We want more children, Britt breathed as she endorsed IVF.

Her emotional presentation was also bizarre, with much too much smiling as she spoke about rape and household finances. But women are supposed to smile – men thought Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren should smile more. We’ve all been told more than once to smile more. Here was a woman who is willing to smile more, before our very eyes. And also to choke up her voice as if she was about to cry, to show us how very sensitive she is to others’ plights.

Tia Levings explains this. Yes, there are large numbers of people for whom this is expected and normal behavion, even as they know it is artificial. They even have a reference book to tell them how to do it: Fascinating Womanhood, by Helen Andelin, a contemporaneous reaction to second-wave feminism. It was first published in 1963, shortly after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Fascinating Womanhood codified a set of behaviors that women had been exposed to as an expected norm. They were to be submissive to men and responsive to men’s desires. But they also were to understand that those behaviors could be used to mask their ambition, as long as that ambition was compatible with conning the men into compliance with it. There were limits to what was acceptable.

According to Levings, Fascinating Womanhood has never ceased to be popular within the fundy bubble. It is now in its sixth print run. I can’t recall if I bought it back in 1963. I do recall reading a bit of it, recognizing what it was, and not finishing it. Carly Simon recorded a song that referred to the ideas ironically in 1971 in “The Girl You Think You See.”

Simon’s emotional range, starting with that fundy breathiness, foreshadows Britt’s performance.  And yes, it’s about sex, but I’ll leave that for another post.

I hadn’t thought about Fascinating Womanhood for a very long time. That’s my bubble. That was the shock of hearing that childish voice and histrionic delivery. Reading about the fundy bubble was different from seeing it in action. Reactions cited The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid’s Tale.

During her response to President Biden’s State of the Union message, Senator Katie Britt (Liar, AL) told the story of a 12-yr-old girl who was raped.  Britt tied President Biden to this story.  SHE LIED.  The girl was forced TWENTY YEARS AGO to work in a Mexican brothel.  And here’s the rest of the story.

This is what Britt said.  “We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

And here are the facts.

If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.