Lincoln Would be Pissed

It finally broke nationally that the aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is in dire straits, and not just that of Hormuz. Conditions aboard the Lincoln have deteriorated to the point where several sailors have tried to jump overboard. They’ve been deployed for over nine months, without shore leave or apparently any supply shipments.

We’ve known for years that TFG gives less than a flying F about our servicemen (and even less of an F about servicewomen). Back during his first term, he was quoted by one of his generals as saying those serving in our military were “suckers and losers,” apparently for putting their lives on the line in exchange for relatively little monetary reward. He doesn’t understand service, nor honor, nor sacrifice, so volunteering for such duty doesn’t compute to him.

Also, please recall that in 2019, he diverted funds away from our rank-and-file servicemen. I wrote about it thusly:

“Did you see where he wants to pull the money from?  Among other uses, he’s targeting funds earmarked to upgrade soldiers’ housing. Apparently, there are significant numbers of servicemen and their families living in moldy, rat-infested houses. Sure, everybody gets all weepy and patriotic about military men and women, but let’s divert the money meant to keep them from living in squalor.

I’m certainly no military expert, but I don’t understand, even if a longer-than-usual deployment is necessary, how they are not flying in supplies to restock the ship. Why can’t they send some plumbers to get the busted pipes back under control? Maybe start helicoptering some of the crew to shore and back, just to keep them going. Nobody functions well in a never-ending grind of both mental and physical faculties, not even our best and brightest.

At least Sen. Ossoff is bringing the heat.

Today, we’re faced with the fact that our military members are being treated more harshly than those who were on the USS Indianapolis.

 “Ya got city hands, Mr. President. Been countin’ money all yer life.”

At least with the sharks, you know what’s coming. I’m sure there are a lot of sailors on the Lincoln who enlisted after believing all the hype about becoming macho he-man weapons of war, only to be left to sleep in their own filth for three seasons. They must feel completely abandoned by their country and their leaders, who had to be pressured into taking the most meager of actions.

Which brings me to all the military sycophants I’ve seen on social media over the years, adorning themselves in yellow ribbons, flag lapel-pins, and sappy patriotic memes, who are now dead silent on what’s happening under their guys’ watch. I know one of my best friends served on an aircraft carrier in the 80s, who would completely understand what his modern peers are going through. Yet there has not been a word from him or any of the others in their social media feeds.

I guaran-damn-tee you that if this exact situation happened under Biden or any other Democratic administration, they’d be screaming bloody murder and there would be non-stop news coverage of the outrage. Instead, all these “Seal Team Six” war movie fans are now more like “The Silence of the Lambs.” It makes you wonder if there is anything really there under the charade. Is there anything they really stand for? Under all the bumper stickers, ribbons, and dewy-eyed reverence for our soldiers, is there any substance when you dig down deep for our soldiers and country?

No, just like their patriotism, it’s a mile wide and only skin deep.

Sunsetting

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been collecting more examples of the tricks used by a biased media outlet to taint what should be the “straight news” into partisan messaging. I have a prime example, right in my backyard: the daily newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. Last year, The Sun was purchased by the owner of the conservative media group Sinclair Broadcasting, and ever since, it has been coloring news stories with an anti-Democratic slant.

Granted, they have plenty of opportunities, given that the city and state are run by Democrats, so any and all “bad news” is immediately linked to a Democrat in power, especially Governor Wes Moore.

Rather than publicize a report stating that the Governor had kept many of his campaign promises, The Sun ran a front-page story arguing that he hadn’t kept them properly, claiming they were too vague or that fixes were already in process.

Gee, a candidate makes insufficiently specific promises… welcome to politics. Funny how they never run stories about Republican politicians taking credit for major projects at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, after having voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill that authorized the project. But then, it’s OK if you’re Republican.

But the point here is that they never cover a story that contains good news for Democrats without adding a big BUT. In fact, the “BUT” is usually the story. Like here:

And here:

They have to include reasons why it’s not really such good news, usually from hand-picked analysts, conservative think tanks, or one of the few Republican politicians in the state.

Take this article about a Fourth of July speech the governor made:

What did he say in the speech? No idea; they just question his motives and go on about what was wrong with it, as per their reliably negative “analysts.” They’re trying to torpedo, ahead of time, any chance a handsome, charismatic, young, Black, Democratic governor has to run for president in 2028. If you look at the first page of The Sun regularly, you’d conclude that their reason for existing is to provide a never-ending litany of smears of the Governor.

I understand and support that the media is supposed to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government, but we’ve never seen any such malicious coverage of the last two Republican governors, and that was before Republicans ran the paper. Digging up a black lining for every silver cloud is not balanced journalism; it’s putting your thumb on the scale. And even still, there’s a place for that, which is called the Op-Ed page, not the front page.

You can always count on The Sun to follow the traditional Republican talking points, like with this story:

Yep, whenever their own words are released and make Republicans look bad, they don’t apologize or look inward on what they can do better; they look to expose the leaker and prosecute. So rather than excoriate the Administration for using the “War Room” to devise plans to bury the Epstein Files information, The Sun/Sinclair National Desk attacks the efforts to expose such an atrocity. And if they can identify and punish this “transgressor,” all the better to dissuade future leaks. Yay! Democracy in action!

Note that this “columnist calling for a criminal probe” is one who works for the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or in other words, Fox “News.” As per the modern conservative media playbook, they have one of their own people start talking about something, then have their other outlets report that “people are talking about something.”

Here’s another beauty from The Bubble:

What they completely omit from this story is the most obvious explanation: Republican talking points are far, FAR, more likely to be false or at least less true. So any objective reading of a situation will come down to a fair reading of the facts, which usually support the Democratic talking points rather than the Republican. We know it, and they know it… a great many Republican assertions are straight out of Fantasyland. It doesn’t even take AI to see that, just a rational look at the facts and data. So this article isn’t so much a stark, raving falsehood; by ignoring a major factor, it’s more like an aggressive misdirection. It nonetheless leaves the reader with the impression they want from the start, that the media has a liberal bias, all the better to claim victimhood, ignoring the fact that media ownership today is overwhelmingly Republican. And it’s getting worse:

Trump’s FCC just cleared the way for large media conglomerates, who own dozens of TV stations, to get even larger, to further provide a single perspective (a conservative one) for the nation’s viewers. With the Paramount/Warner’s merger about to go into effect, even more media outlets are about to be compacted into even fewer hands, and those hands will be overwhelmingly Republican.

Ultimately, that’s the most efficient way to garner good headlines… make sure your own people are the ones providing them.

Here’s one more story, this one from today’s paper:

It’s another traditional “Democrats in disarray” story, this time, about how the moderates are supposedly worried about the Progressives gaining favor. Why is The Sun writing about it? Because the last thing they want to do is run against progressives. They’ve been beating the Moderates for years. They just label them as extreme and go from there. Progressives promise the same things Republicans do: to make their constituents’ lives better. But Progressives actually plan for and try to do it. And when it works, like it’s doing in New York City, it scares the Republicans shitless, because they have absolutely nothing tangible to offer their voters, other than the millionaires among them, who make out like bandits.

So they call the Progressives “Communists,” which is funny because it’s the Republicans who are actually forcing private companies to go into business with the government.

Personally, whether it’s Socialism, Communism, or Capitalism, I tend to ignore the labels. The Democrats should be one message on blast: that they seek to spend money to make people’s lives better, not to provide more tax breaks and loopholes for those with the most. Costs down, wages up, tax the rich to pay for it.

Make food safe, address climate change, and install an immigration system that actually allows immigration. When in doubt, look to make things better for people as opposed to corporations.

If it wasn’t for the insatiable greed of the 1%, it would already be that way.

Just Say Thanks, Then STFU

House Republicans needed a distraction last week, probably from the fact that they haven’t done diddly-squat to better the lives of American citizens, so they decided to re-litigate the COVID pandemic by demanding testimony from Dr. Fauci.

As far as I’m concerned, Dr. Fauci is a national hero. He, alone, among the first Trump administration, spoke to what was in the national interest, as opposed to repeating whatever nonsense his boss was spouting. Congress should have been thanking the good doctor for pulling the country out of the COVID mess, despite constantly having to swim upstream against the torrent of snake oil and misinformation emanating from the administration.

I still hold great antipathy toward these anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-science idiots. I still blame them for the fact that my father’s last days were spent scared and alone in an ER hallway where he couldn’t have visitors, because all the rooms were filled up with COVID patients, in a Florida county where only about 35-40% of the people were vaccinated.

The Republicans’ aim was to compare Fauci’s public words and actions to passages taken from a personal diary, and to somehow get him to say something under oath that contradicts materials stated therein, to conjure up a perjury charge.

The first thing that came to mind upon learning all this was to wonder where they get off publishing a man’s private diary. I mean, WT actual F?

As someone who has journaled on and off throughout my life, I can attest that things found in my old journals should not be taken as raw facts. A journal was a place where I vented, or worked out my shit, on paper. I may have said, from time to time, that I’d like to see a particularly manipulative girlfriend’s head in a camera bag (quoting a Sam Kinison bit from the era), but that would hardly constitute a threat or even a committed position. I didn’t want actual harm to come to anyone; it was just me letting off steam, so I’d be able to function normally during periods of intense heartbreak.

Also, using a journal against its writer seems like nullifying his Fifth Amendment rights by disallowing his right to avoid self-incrimination via his own words and thoughts. It should be unconstitutional.

Note: I’m talking about figurative things like opinions and feelings, not a step-by-step written log of how the writer killed someone and where he buried the body. Or, details on running a massive child-trafficking and sexual abuse operation for rich guys.

So under the circumstances, I think Fauci was wise to plead the Fifth to every question.

There are no grounds too shaky for the current Republican justice system to create charges. Someone would definitely find an answer that didn’t exactly match something from the past, no matter how carefully he answered. As we know, these guys come up with charges first, before bothering with evidence. So as we learned from the movie “War Games,” back in the 80s, sometimes the only way to win is not to play the game.

Fortunately, he did get to read an opening statement, to get some shots in against ringmaster and head clown, Rand Paul. It was the most savage opening salvo since Roman Maroni in “Johnny Dangerously.”

It’s a pity that we live in a time when scientists are criticized by those who don’t understand even the basics of science. Rep. Paul pretends to have high-level medical credentials, but he really doesn’t.

But even he surely knows that at the onset of a novel virus, no one knows what it will do, how long it will last, or how to fight it. By definition, you need data that amasses over time. It’s not lying to say something that has to be corrected later in such a situation; it’s just someone being wrong. Being wrong is the basis of science. You learn as much from being wrong as from being right; you learn what not to do or what doesn’t work, and you adjust from there.

So it makes perfect sense to cast a wide net with basic precautions like masks, spacing, and avoiding large quantities of people in public places. What got Fauci into trouble is that some of that cost some big donors some money, a cardinal sin amongst Republican politicos.

See, that’s a defining difference between the parties. Democrats were trying to save people. Republicans were trying to save profits, and short-term profits at that. They were too amped up over the next quarter’s bottom line to realize that temporary pain would lead to solid recovery later, once the virus could be treated.

So, now that Republicans need a distraction from this month’s policy atrocities, Dr. Fauci made a good target at whom to point their fingers.

Always remember, Congressional Republicans need something to run on this fall, and they’ve literally done nothing to help their constituents. Well, other than for the racist ones who cheer the harassment and seizure of brown people to pen up and torture for a while before sending them out of the country, to someplace where they may or may not be from. But that’s all they’ve got. All the bridge openings and ribbon cuttings originated under the Biden Administration. Sure, they’ll show up to take credit for actions they voted against, but it’s hollow. There will always be someone around to point out who actually got the shit done.

I can only hope that the next national health crisis holds off until we can elect a new administration, one who works to restore faith by basing health initiatives on science rather than who can benefit from providing a “cure.” Because if some pathogen starts running wild in the next three years, we will be totally and completely screwed. There is no one left to do anything that will help. They were hawking malaria pills to cure COVID last time, because key people could make money from it. Maybe next time we’ll see them pushing Viagra to cure the next bird flu.

At least then the “side effects” can occupy people until they eventually drop dead.