Thinking About Things: While You Were Out

John DeQ. Briggs

Like many, I have been away for a few weeks, away on summer holiday just when society began to appear to be opening up.  It was a glorious few weeks, unplugged as I chose to be from television, newspapers, and most of social media.  Well, children and grandchildren have departed, and I have been scrolling around the internet to take a peek at the recent past to find out what has been going on and what sort of interesting things may have happened while I was happily unaware of them.  It turns out, things have gotten much worse while I was out.

But first, and on the local Talbot County front, I want to give a big shout out to Dan Watson and the fact that he has pretty much single-handedly brought to our attention the shenanigans that have been going on for a long time with respect to the development known as Lakeside in Trappe.  As of this writing, the most recent installment of his writing is here. But you can follow the breadcrumbs from the link and get the whole remarkable story. When, motivated by the work of Matt Pluta of ShoreRiver, he began identifying what was under the rock that had been lifted and exposed the maggots and other Lakeside insects below, they scurried to find their lawyers and defend their actions.  The County Council and the Planning Commission came to understand that  they were grossly misled, but the Council claims it is powerless to do anything because the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) has approved the project.  The whole thing looks a bit like a circular firing squad, but with fingers instead of guns being pointed.  

The story is by no means over, but this is something that should concern the entire County.  Adding thousands of people to the community of Trappe would create not only unmanageable wastewater/sewage problems but would add more than 6000 souls to a county with a population of less than 40,000.  By almost any measure, to permit the project to go forward on the scale contemplated would amount to governance malpractice, especially given the absence of focus upon the need for new schools, millions of dollars of necessary infrastructure, and maybe billions of dollars for a new bridge.  I doubt that the voters and taxpayers of Talbot County want to turn our County into another version of Queen Anne’s County, but that is where things seem to be headed absent responsible government.

Recent Catastrophes owned by the Biden Administration.  

Any one of the circumstances mentioned below might not be enough to bring down some administrations.  It is hard for me to imagine that these four disasters, taken together, will not bring about a major midterm defeat for the Democratic Party and very likely a presidential defeat in 2024, subject to the at present unknowable Trump factor.

1. Afghanistan Fiasco.  One hardly knows where to begin on this depressing topic, and the facts are changing by the minute.  Overnight, Kabul, a city of more than 4.5 million, fell to the Taliban; the entire country is now under Taliban control; the president has fled the country; US citizens and their facilitators are stuck there; troops and helicopters are frantically trying to evacuate diplomats, journalists, and others; we seem to be on the verge of abandoning Afghan citizens who have had some connection with in-country Americans (cooks, drivers, translators, military personnel and others) as we have made a habit of doing to our allies for a long time. Meanwhile, our President is hiding at Camp David and apparently has no plans to return to the White House for several days. Not a Profile in Courage at all. It is a far greater catastrophe than April 1975 and the chaotic evacuations from Saigon.  Yet as Matt Taibbi put it yesterday, As the Taliban waltzes into Kabul, the look of surprise on the faces of top officials should frighten us most of all. And further: 

Down to their own stunningly (perfectly?) inaccurate mis-predictions of what would take place once our military forces left the country, Biden administration officials could not have scripted a worse ending to the twenty-year disaster that has been our occupation of Afghanistan. 

Every image coming out of Afghanistan this past weekend was an advertisement for the incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing nature of American foreign policy leaders. Scenes of military dogs being evacuated while our troops fire weapons in the air to disperse humans desperate for a seat out of the country will force every theoretical future ally to think twice about partnering with us.

It is too early to make snap judgments, but it appears that the media, just a few days ago fawning over Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan, may now be finally turning on him not for the departure but for the incompetence associated with its execution. The implications of this are wholly unclear for now, and the Republicans must take care since their fingerprints are all over the decision to leave Afghanistan.  While Biden ended up looking like a fool, and perhaps he is, the situation would likely be no different if Trump had won the election and carried on with his stated policy, which was applauded by an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the nation.

Nonetheless, the events of the last few days to bring home the observation from former defense secretary (under President Obama, among others) Robert Gates, as set forth in his 2019 memoir: Biden had been wrong on virtually every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.  This dismal record of incompetence in foreign policy affairs continues apace with catastrophic consequences for America’s standing in the world and even more catastrophic consequences for the citizens of Afghanistan who are not affiliated with the Taliban. 

A 44-minute  Commentary Podcast from Last Friday lays out the many layers of disaster brilliantly.  It is too much to try to repeat here except to say that it was only a couple of months ago when Biden so precipitously and unexpectedly announced the near immediate departure of American troops (all 3000 of them) by a certain date.  The government of Afghanistan was not informed, and the military leaders of Afghanistan were also not informed.  This was a pure political act.  In making this announcement, the administration assured the American population that it would take at least a year for the Taliban to take over the entire country.  This is independently quite astonishing.  So, after fighting the Taliban for 20 years, the administration intended to hand the keys of the country to the Taliban, but after a 12-month decent interval.

Biden also gave great assurances that this would be nothing like the fall of Saigon and there would be no helicopters taking out Embassy personnel from the roof of the embassy.  These photos tell a different story.

So, the troops were pulled out, chaos has ensued, and just yesterday the administration said it was sending 3000 troops back to Afghanistan, later adding another 3000 for a total of 6000.  But these troops are not being sent back because of any change of policy.  They are being sent back to permit embassy personnel and staff to bug out quickly, and out of the sight of any cameras, so that there will be no images similar to those of April 1975, when the final days of departure from Vietnam were so painfully and powerfully recorded, causing a decade of psychic pain for the entire nation.  Like so much that happens with this administration, it is performance art – political theater – behind which might be hiding a smidgen of incoherent policy.  Even in the face of the ongoing catastrophe, Biden seems to believe that his precipitous and unexpectedly immediate departure from Afghanistan will “Bring America back to the leadership of the free world.”  Fat chance. It would be hard to imagine a more delusional thought in the current circumstances. See here for the early propaganda fallout and the Chinese crowing. 

Beneath at all, it is not clear that the Afghanistan adventure was a complete failure.  Many people even think it successful in a limited way, especially in the past few years, including the Obama years.  With a minuscule footprint of 3000 troops, sophisticated drone defensive actions, and on a shoestring budget, the Taliban were kept at bay for years protecting a nascent form of democracy and the liberation of women and girls, especially with regard to education and the professions. Outside the cities, though, there was never success. But the timing and the rationale behind the timing was egregious. The Taliban fighting season is dictated by the weather.  The fighting season is the spring, summer, and early fall, not late fall, or winter, when the Taliban retreat to the mountains.  So, for the American bugout to occur at the height of the fighting season amounted to strategic and tactical malpractice or insanity.  And it was dictated by the delusional notion that our country would loudly celebrate the 20^th anniversary of 9/11/2001 by being out of Afghanistan before 9/11/2021.  

Instead, we will see the domination of Afghanistan by the Taliban and the resurrection of terrorist cells capable of operating outside of Afghanistan, all in place by 9/21. Not the celebration Biden had in mind.  

The words “catastrophe” and “fiasco” are not strong enough to articulate the magnitude of the negative impact of Biden’s decision, made on purely political optics grounds.  In just months, this will be revealed as a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions (see the comment of wokeness below).  It will be defended no doubt on the grounds that it was the implementation of a policy first articulated by President Trump.  But for a Democratic President and the Democratic Party to invoke the despised Donald Trump is a most pathetic defense of incompetence (although it does protect against the most devastating Republican criticism, so there is that).  Almost equally pathetic is the United States efforts to beg the Taliban and to spare the American Embassy, offering a bribe to the new Taliban government.  President Biden and his administration will own this fiasco, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent people, and the virtual re-enslavement of Afghan women that was not inevitable under any administration.

2. The CDC’s Extension of the Eviction Moratorium.  Background: a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court found that the eviction moratorium was illegal, but because it was about to expire on July 31 shortly after their decision, it was allowed to stand and expire by its own terms, but also to give the legislature a chance to take such action to extend the eviction as might be necessary, appropriate or politically palatable.  The legislature did not act, doubtless because of the inevitable failure of any effort to legislate a further extension of the prohibition on evictions. President Biden candidly confessed that he had sought advice from constitutional scholars all over the place and that it was pretty much unanimous that the eviction moratorium could not be extended by executive fiat, but rather required congressional legislation in order to be constitutional.  

The reaction from the Progressives was instantaneous.  There was howling; there were demonstrations; there were all manner of speeches given in condemnation of President Biden’s claim that he was constitutionally limited.  A senior official advised President Biden that he should seek another opinion from a once respected constitutional scholar, the constitutional whore from Harvard, Laurence Tribe.  Tribe provided a convoluted explanation for the possible constitutionality of executive action and so the President instructed or allowed the CDC to extend indefinitely the eviction ban.  A particularly trenchant comment on all this by Jonathan Turley is right here.  Our elected officials, while declining to address the matter legislatively as the Supreme Court had invited them to do, urged the President to take executive action and thereby supplant the legislature itself.  This abandonment of legislative responsibility is independently weird and is the subject of a separate comment below on legislators abandoning legislation in favor of activism. There are approximately 8 million landlord victims of the ban (many homeowners who rent a basement) and perhaps 1 million tenant beneficiaries, although data on these things are hard to come by. 

When the eviction ban was first announced more than a year ago, the country was in lockdown and people were urged or even required to stay at home indoors.  Under such circumstances, the ban at least made sense.  It was not a political stunt.  Now, there is no mandate or suggestion that we should all locked up inside our homes under house arrest, as we were for so many months of 2020.  And the pressure to extend the eviction ban from the Progressives had nothing whatsoever to do with public health or safety.  The Progressive point of view is quite literally a Bolshevik point of view to the effect that private property rights are illegitimate and contract rights no less so.  And so, we now have a ban in place (soon to be reversed by the courts no doubt) that is based on a denial of property rights and a denial of contract rights. Properly understood, this is a huge issue and, standing alone, should cause political upheaval even within the Democratic Party and material segments of its constituency. Even the uber liberal Washington Post sems to have awakened to the dangers of what the Biden administration is doing, publishing an excellent piece by David Von Drehle entitled:  The Eviction Moratorium Mess Exposes the Decay in American Politics. 

3. A Multi-Trillion Dollar Game of Three Card Monte.  The capture of the President and the administration by three or four Progressive/Bolshevik members of Congress (“the Squad”) has created a weird legislative situation.  With considerable Republican support, the Senate has passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which involves only $250 billion of “new spending.”  But now, in the House, the Squad has vowed not to vote for this bill unless it also includes $3.5 trillion worth of new spending on the Progressive wish list.  So, the Squad seems to be on a path to blow up the Biden presidency.  All of this is because Biden has deferred a few too many times to the Progressives in his party.  Recall that the last time anything of vaguely comparable magnitude was passed, it was 1964-65 when, under Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society legislation was passed, which included among many other things the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  At that time the Democrats held a 120-seat advantage in the house and a filibuster proof 18-vote majority in the Senate.  The Great Society programs, therefore, enjoyed a political mandate unprecedented in the United States, even greater than the mandate that brought about Social Security and other reforms during the Roosevelt era.  Now we have a 50/50 Senate and a [likley fleeting] 3-vote Democratic majority in the House. 

As of this writing, it is unclear how this will play out, but Biden’s hoped-for signature “unity legislation” could well go down the drain.  This is due to a complete lack of leadership on the part of the President, amplified by his lack of influence on the Progressive left.  

Nobody really knows as yet what is in the $3.5 trillion spending bill because it is too long to read in a week.  But we do know that it throws money around is if we had it, and it would raise taxes on “the wealthy,” defined as anybody making more than $250,000 per annum, it will get rid of most estate tax exclusions and thereby vastly increase the so-called “death tax,” and by some accounts it will increase the capital gains tax to an even higher rate than the ordinary income tax, which would be astonishing.  It would bring about a century-long desire on the part of Bolsheviks to value labor more than capital. 

The outcome of this multitrillion dollar adventure will either be a catastrophe for the Biden administration, or a catastrophe for the country.  One suspects that the country could survive the former, but perhaps not the latter.  We will just have to wait and see. In either case, my crystal ball says that the Republicans, whatever they may stand for, will control the House and Senate after the 2022 election. 

4. Covid, Masks and Vaccination. The governors and administrators of many large Blue states have ordered a return to 2020 insofar as mask mandates are concerned, much to the displeasure of their vaccinated constituents.  Many are also demanding proof of vaccination (vaccination passports) as a ticket to entry to indoor public spaces, such as restaurants, buses, subways, concerts, sporting events, and so forth.  These governmental apparatchiks give no credit to those who have become infected with Covid-19 and therefore seem to have generally the same immune capabilities as vaccinated individuals.  But they are nonetheless treated as in all respects “unvaccinated.”  

All of this is due to the emergence of the “highly contagious Delta variant” (it is now compulsory to say it that way, without mentioning that it is in nearly all cases harmless).  The current circumstances have provided the CDC with the opportunity to take its umpteenth position on the importance of masking indoors, outdoors, at home, in front of unvaccinated children, etc.  And then there is the fact that roughly half of the citizens of the United States are unvaccinated.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the choice to remain unvaccinated is not based on ignorance, stupidity, the desire to infect others, libertarianism or any other single explanation.  The range of explanations is huge.  And so, we have a new and significant divide in this country between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.  Few generalizations are possible or accurate except that the masking policies of the largely blue states seem bent on punishing the vaccinated for the existence of the unvaccinated.  And there is no medical consensus about the benefits of immunity received as a result of having been infected., Such people are many, but they do not get the “passports” of the vaccinated. 

There also has been exposed a complete lack of medical consensus on the risk or danger of so-called “breakthrough” infection.  The data do seem to point to the proposition that the Delta variant, while very transmissive, causes mild symptoms and very few fatalities. I predict that the era of Dr. Fauci is close to over as he seems to be more responsive to political policy than to “science” and his secret role in funding the Wuhan lab is coming to light. 

Among the many curiosities of all this is the lack of attention given by the media to huge demonstrations in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe instigated by the unvaccinated protesting the spread of vaccination passports as essential tickets to indoor public spaces.  We seem inevitably headed towards compulsory vaccination as a condition of employment. One might have thought that people could unite against a potentially deadly virus, but the fact that such unity requires faith in government proclamations and adherence to government policy creates its own serious issues, given the inconsistent and contradictory “facts” presented by government in general over the last 18 months.  And then there is the obvious collaboration between governments and big Pharma, whose profits have soared and will continue to do so as long as vaccines are more or less mandatory. Moderna has seen its market capitalization grow from about $6 Billion in January 2020 to about $180 Billion today. Following the money may not always be the complete answer but it sure is informative.  

Biden’s kowtowing to the forces demanding constant masking is making him very unpopular. 

Then there is Andrew Cuomo, whose resignation was most unexpected given his Clintonesque defiance.   Not long ago he was the toast of the left for his “heroic handling of Covid 19” while governor of New York.  The fact that his policies and their accompanying prevarications killed thousands of elderly people in nursing homes was conveniently overlooked by a hospitable and compliant media.  But just as Al Capone was brought down by income tax evasion instead of a lifetime of bootlegging and murder, so was Andrew Cuomo brought down by his narcissistic view of his own powerfulness and his fully developed belief that he could lie at will to anybody about anything or everything. His bullying and intimidation of associates was apparently legendary.  The media, nonetheless, professed itself “shocked, shocked” that Cuomo was a devoted sexual predator and power-hungry, bullying, autocrat.  

Mind you, his downfall was engineered by the New York Attorney General Letitia James, a woman who doubtless lusts after his job, and so there is much in the lengthy report that one might consider trivial and not really of a sexual nature at all. Indeed, his conduct seems more about power than sex, although they are quite commingled.  Yet mixed in with all this there was enough that was of a sexual nature to taint everything else.  And so, his personal assistant of many years has now become another female enabler like Ghislaine Maxwell, Hilary Clinton, and the women who facilitated Harvey Weinstein’s escapades, among others. Maureen Dowd’s column last weekend, The Quislings of Albany,  focused on the enablers. The Times also ran an OpEd piece on How Cuomo Got Away with it for so Long.  Old story, new players. Cuomo turns out to be a sort of doppelgänger of Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and even Prince Andrew. It will not end well for the Governor.

Wokeness has not died, but it seems to have moved below the fold if not into the back pages for the moment.  This is no doubt because of so much of it is somewhere in the neighborhood of silly or ridiculous.  The University of Wisconsin at Madison determined in its woke wisdom to remove, and I’m not making this up, a 50,000 pound “racist rock,” the removal and relocation of this particular rock cost $50,000.  News reports say that privately donated funds were used for this purpose.  How very peculiar that someone would direct a contribution of that amount to a public university for that purpose. Racist Rock Removal.

Then there is the rebranding of vocabulary. The words “men” and “women” are verboten. Women do not get pregnant, people do. There are no “mothers” anymore in this country, just “birthing people.” Christine Rosen wrote about this a few days ago and it is another step down the slippery slope of vocabulary control, an early form of mind control. It is time for us all to re-read George Orwell, and not just 1984. In the current milieu his books will resonate much more than your vague memory of them.  

In the end, perhaps the most disheartening aspect of national wokeness is the existence of persistent sustained outrage over the trivial. This inability to distinguish between the important and the unimportant, the serious and the silly, and indeed good and evil, has produced a populous that is unwilling or unable to recognize real evil in the world.  For those who pay attention, and that will be only a few, we will soon see and hear real evil in Afghanistan on a par with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  Young girls and women who have embraced Western ways will be stoned to death, hanged, beheaded, shot, and otherwise executed in public stadia; attendance will be compulsory for the subjects of the Taliban.  One wonders whether our woke media will have the stomach or the courage even to report on this activity much less pass judgment on the current administration for bringing it about.  More likely, this true evil will be treated as less important than micro aggressions in the classroom; persistent whining about centuries of white privilege; improper use of chosen genders; and other trivialities that have come now to so dominate our country thanks to our social justice warriors, led by social media, elected officials, and even our most successful corporations.  

A curious sidelight of all this is the accelerating departure of wealthy people from the United States. The geese are leaving. No more golden eggs to feed people and no geese to tax.   

Legislators have Abandoned Legislating in Favor of Activism and Political Performance Art.  A Commentary Magazine podcast last week on the subject of the evictions was interesting on account of a short discussion of how federal legislators have in many ways given up on legislation and devoted themselves to becoming activists.  And as activists and performance politicians engaged in a sort of Kabuki theater, they ask the executive branch to approve rules and regulations by executive order or fiat. The fascinating discussion begins at minute 5 of the August 5 Commentary Podcast.  The activists’ performance politics aspect of this is even more striking when one considers that the entire brouhaha over evictions was too much of a political hot potato for the legislative branch, and so it was left to the executive branch to take action which it knew with near certainty would be ruled unconstitutional by the judicial branch (because the Supreme Court had already so held).  So, two branches of government can blame the judicial branch for the failure of the Progressives’ aspirational Bolshevism.  This is a seemingly new phenomenon, and it is deeply unsettling to anyone who values or has a sense of Constitutional order.  One can also imagine this sort of thing being called into play as an excuse to defang the judiciary in a variety of ways.

Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orban, and Hungary.  Tucker Carlson has long been the bête noire of the liberal elite, but he has been getting a certain amount of interesting press recently— first because the Inspector General of the NSA has opened an investigation into whether the agency “improperly targeted the communications of a member of the U.S. news media” following Carlson’s claims that the NSA tried to shut down his show.  While it seems unlikely that the NSA was interested in “shutting down” his slot on Fox News, it will be interesting to find out how it came to be that the NSA first ended up monitoring Tucker Carlson’s emails or telephone calls, and second, how the administration (unclear which administration) came to “unmask” those intercepts. 

Probably more substantively, Tucker Carlson spent a week in Hungary praising Hungary and its leader Viktor Orban, while at each step comparing Hungarian orderliness, cleanliness, absence of illegal immigrants, and general lack of visible political dysfunction to the lack of those qualities in the United States.  Hungary quite famously closed its borders to immigrants, mostly from North Africa, at about the same time that Germany was pressuring countries to take such immigrants.  The press around Carlson’s week in Hungary has been fascinating. A Washington Post OpEd view was that the interview and surrounding reporting provided:

… a deeply unsettling glimpse into the true nature of the authoritarian nationalist future that Carlson and his fellow travelers envision for our country.  

Carlson fawns over the “free” nature of Hungarian society — contrasting it favorably with the supposed repression of widespread anti-liberal yearnings in American society — while saying little to nothing about the autocratic nature of Orbanism.

In this lurks a sort of dream combination: ethno-nationalism secured via autocracy.

See Carlson Fawning over Orban.  

This reaction was to be expected and was 100% predictable. But far less expected was the publication by the New York Times of a highly nuanced and thoughtful piece by Ross Douthat, which contains the following thought, among many others. 

I was struck by an observation from The Atlantic’s David Frum, a fierce critic of the right’s Orban infatuation. As part of a Twitter thread documenting corruption in Orban’s inner circle, Frum wrote: “I visited Hungary in 2016. Again & again, I witnessed a gesture I thought had vanished from Europe forever: people turning their heads to check who was listening before they lent forward to whisper what they had to say. They feared for their jobs, not their lives — but still …”

On the one hand, there’s the fear that Trumpian populism will someday gain enough power to make its critics fear for their livelihoods. On the other, there’s the fear that progressivism already exerts this power in the United States, and that what Frum describes in dire terms, the cautious sotto voce conversation, is an important part of American life right now.

You can document this fear of sharing strong opinions, especially ones that conflict with progressive orthodoxy, by looking at opinion polls. For example, a 2020 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that 62 percent of Americans felt uncomfortable sharing their views because of the political climate, and “strong liberals” were the only ideological group where the majority felt free to speak their minds. To the question, “Are you worried about losing your job or missing out on job opportunities if your political opinions became known?” highly educated Americans were the most anxious, with 44 percent of respondents with a postgraduate degree and 60 percent of Republicans with a post-grad degree saying yes.

Why Hungary Inspires so Much Fear and Fascination. 

Douthat is not a strong fan of Viktor Orban, but he does wonder aloud how one can fight the social or cultural totalitarian forces of today. Where can you go to vote for a different ruling ideology given the interlocking American establishment, all its schools and professional guilds, its consolidated media and tech powers?  The old liberal idea that we could fight these social and technical forces through debate is implausible when debate is no longer actually allowed on campuses, in schools, by employers, and so forth.  Douthat describes this as a naïve form of cultural surrender, like telling a purged screenwriter during the Hollywood Blacklist, “Hey, just go start your own movie studio.”

Douthat explains his sense that it is this real feature of the United States today that makes the Carlsonian view of Orban appealing to American conservatives. 

It’s not just his anti-immigration stance or his moral traditionalism. It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers and the spending on conservative ideological projects are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.

At a somewhat higher level, the idea that our democracy has failed and needs to be replaced by a benevolent but nonprogressive authoritarian leader seems at least understandable if not a permanent solution.  

Short Takes 

1. The Death of Meritocracy and the Abandonment of Standards (Oregon). A new Oregon law suspends a requirement for a basic-skills test in math, reading and writing to graduate high school. This law is praised by advocates as a way to rethink education standards. This of course will create a permanent underclass of uneducated people, many of them people of color, and thereby perpetuate inequality and even the notion of white supremacy.  It will create a whole generation of illiterate students without job skills who will be dependent on the state from cradle-to-grave.  A perfect way to implement Bolshevism.  This is a policy, one might note, not all that different in a strange way from the policies that the Taliban will bring to the “education” of Afghanistan women in the months to come.

2. Mass Psychosis and Societal insanity Might Now Be Real.   This link, put out by something called the Academy of Ideas, presents the hypothesis that America is in the midst of a mass psychosis (societal insanity) not altogether unlike the mass psychosis that overwhelmed the nation and led to led to witch burnings in Salem and elsewhere. It is a 22-minute artistic cartoon presentation that starts off sounding very simplistic but develops by the end into something more complex and quite troubling. But beginning at about minute 18 there is a short discussion of how to escape or resist society’s madness. 

3. On the international front, the Olympics came and went.  But since everything happened on the other side of the world, and since no spectators were allowed actually to witness the events in the physical presence of the athletes, it was hard for most people to become particularly engaged.  Now that professionals have taken over the Olympics, they have an element of pointlessness to them (said the curmudgeon). But the fact that France beat the US team in basketball (although not for the gold) was amazing, and it was interesting to learn that so many French players came from the NBA. 

4. Back to the Future with Masking Mandates.  This is overtly discriminatory and anti-science.  The governors of two of the for large estates, Texas and Florida, are in open revolt against federal mandates.  This has resulted in the Biden administration declaring war on Florida and its governor based on statistics showing that Florida has more of the Delta variant infections than other states, despite having either no deaths at all as a result, or a minuscule number of deaths.  The only thing that is newsworthy about this is its revelation that Biden administration is terrified of Governor DeSantis in his capacity as a possible 2024 presidential candidate, assuming away for now the unknown Trump factor.  There is a separate panic going on in the Biden administration: namely, the suddenly obvious incompetence and unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris.

5. The Anti-Trumps Cannot Stop Seething and Writing About their Hatred.  A fascinating insight from the European publication Le Monde diplomatique by Thomas Frank shows more insight into the American Psyche than is found in American publications.  The article, entitled US Liberals Hysteria Outlives Trump, seeks to address the question: why did President Trump induce such fear and loathing among the nation’s highly educated elite?  Mr. Frank details some notable successes of the Trump administration, while being deeply critical of Mr. Trump himself.  Yet the hysteria led leading publications, radio outlets and TV channels to describe Trump as authoritarian, a tyrant, a nuke-crazy warmonger, a fascist, a Nazi, and the worst leader of any nation since Hitler. The hysteria was universal, hegemonic. To be on the left and hold some other interpretation of events was not only impermissible; it was a career-limiting gesture. To refuse hysteria was to silence yourself.  This phenomenon parallels the mass psychosis diagnosis introduced in ¶ 2 above. Mr. Frank points out that there were so many conspiracies, Russian conspiracy, and other conspiracy speculations that Matt Taibbi suggested that the high-speed succession of ‘bombshell’ Trump-outrage news stories — each of them accelerating the audience’s Trump-hysteria, each of them turning out to be misleading in some way, and each of them instantly forgotten when the next bombshell appeared — became the business model for the news industry.

The article does not lend itself to ready summation and should be read.  It is replete with extraordinary insights into the recent past. Its concluding paragraph is this:

Longing for the dictatorship of the expertariat is just a slightly more vivid expression of the authoritarian tendencies that now, post-Trump, make up more and more of the liberal faith. Look around at American politics today and you will see prominent lawyers expressing their disgust with free speech. You will find banks and defence contractors declaring their allyship with the oppressed, liberal legislators pushing for censorship on social media, and everywhere a belief in the essential villainy of the white, working-class population. These are the views of an elite that now regards as intolerable many of the millions over whom it presides. The only norms that matter, it now seems, are the ones that keep the right people on top.

6. Obama’s Fast Fall from Grace.  The occasion of the 60^th birthday of former President Obama, taking place at his $14 million-dollar mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, led to criticism from Massachusetts authorities that it was too large for an unmasked event.  So, the former President uninvited all of his close personal aids and hundreds of almost A-listers and limited the guests to the truly rich and famous, largely from the entertainment community.  Uninvited were people who once had influence such as Stephen Colbert and Larry David.  All of this led to a couple of extraordinary articles by people who had been strong supporters of President Obama in the early days.

The first of these articles by Matt Taibbi is biting and trenchant.  It is entitled The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama and is subtitled:  On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday partying Barrick Obama sold us all out.  It gets way more biting from there.    

Maureen Dowd wrote Behold Barack Antoinette in yesterday’s New York Times. While covering some of the same ground from different angles, her take is different from Taibbi’s but a clear sign that Obama can and will now be viewed even by the left through an altogether new and more critical lens, not all that different in fact from the lens through which he is seen by many conservatives.