Eugene Robinson: The GOP death cult attitude toward coronavirus vaccines isn’t just lethal. It’s stupid

What used to be the conservative movement in this country is becoming a death cult. The measure of its power is less in ballots cast than in how many people die needlessly in service of this twisted worldview.

This reality was on view over the weekend in Dallas at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where attendees cheered when Alex Berenson, who has made himself a Fox News folk hero for spreading misinformation about covid-19 vaccines, crowed about the fact that fewer Americans were getting their shots than public health officials had hoped.

“It’s horrifying,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “I mean, they are cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives. … Everybody starts screaming and clapping. I just don’t get that. I mean, and I don’t think that anybody who is thinking clearly can get that. What is that all about?”

I’ll tell you, even if the good doctor won’t. The cheers are all about “owning” Fauci, President Biden, liberals in general, scientists in particular, mask-wearers, fancy-pants “elites” and everyone else urging people to get vaccinated. The inevitable result will be that we end up mourning people who didn’t need to die. And the worst-case possibility is that covid-19 roars back — along with the restrictions and isolations Americans thought we’d left behind. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/12/gop-death-cult-attitude-toward-coronavirus-vaccines-isnt-just-lethal-its-stupid/

Amanda Carpenter: The Real Point of the Arizona Audit

It’s all a big show.

If you’re waiting to read the Cyber Ninjas’ report about Maricopa County’s election counts to find out what happens next in Donald Trump’s rigged election narrative, don’t bother.

The sham audit itself is the endgame. The audit, which began on April 23, was supposed to end by May 14. Now, nearly two months after blowing past that deadline, a spokesman says people shouldn’t expect anything until August. But, really, who knows when, or if, it all will ever end.

It’s not like anyone in MAGA land is in any hurry to call curtains on the big show. That’s because the performance, as incompetent as it is, is the point. It’s what’s keeping Trump’s election delusions alive and well; not what will prove or disprove whether the fantasy has merit. The play’s the thing.

Besides, haven’t they already won, on some level? It’s not every day a couple of partisans are able to seize millions of ballots and a bunch of expensive election equipment to put on a big, months-long show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Everybody came, too. Politicos, reporters, elected officials. MAGA propagandists are still capitalizing on all the free content. And donations keep pouring into the coffers of Trump-adjacent grifters all around. Why end it now? https://thebulwark.com/the-real-point-of-the-arizona-audit/

Jackie Kucinich: Trump Pick in Ohio Slammed as ‘Swampiest Swamp Creature’

He’s the Trump-annointed candidate running to make the Columbus suburbs MAGA again. But while former energy lobbyist Mike Carey is happy to tout the former president’s endorsement in the GOP primary, he’s not quite as eager to talk about his proximity to one of Ohio’s most expensive corruption scandals.

Carey’s campaign website touts him as an “outsider” who “spent his career holding politicians accountable and fighting for working class families.” But it only vaguely mentions his “20+ year career as an executive in the American energy industry.”

For eight years, Carey worked as the vice president of government affairs at Murray Energy Corporation, once one of the largest coal companies and most notorious violators of environmental laws.

From his perch as an “outsider” at Murray Energy, Carey joined his boss, Bob Murray, and Andrew Wheeler, then a lobbyist for Murray who later became the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to push their company’s agenda in a meeting with then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry. His presence in three meetings with Trump officials are detailed in documents from Wheeler’s confirmation hearing.

It was at that meeting where Murray, who donated $300,000 to the Trump inaugural, delivered a wish list of environmental regulatory rollbacks that eventually, according to the New York Times, became a “to-do” list for the Trump administration.

“I’m so sick of these corrupt, jack-booted thug assholes, who think they are above the law and think they can get away with threats,” Mike Harley, a longtime Ohio Republican political operative, said. “Somebody like Mike Carey is absolutely the last person that should be a member of Congress—literally he’s the swampiest swamp creature around.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-pick-mike-carey-in-ohio-slammed-as-swampiest-swamp-creature

Bess Levin: Trump’s Criminally Charged CFO Steps Down As Director Of Trump Organization Golf Club

One week after being hit with more than a dozen criminal charges, and the prospect of more than a decade in prison, Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime CFO, has stepped down as a director of Donald Trump’s Scottish golf club. In a Thursday filing, the company said that Weisselberg was no longer “a person with significant control” of the Trump International Golf Club Scotland, which Bloomberg notes is “the first sign of Trump’s longtime finance chief relinquishing duties after he was charged alongside the Trump Organization,” both of which pleaded not guilty to the 15-count indictment from the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., which detailed how Weisselberg and his employer allegedly avoided taxes on $1.76 million worth of perks, including an apartment, cars, and private school tuition.

At this time, it’s not clear what Weisselberg’s stepping down means with regard to Trump’s chances of staying out of prison. Is the company trying to distance itself from Weisselberg, and laying the groundwork to claim he acted alone? Given Trump’s long history of pretending not to know people who could get him in serious trouble, it’s entirely possible! Is Weisselberg preparing to step aside from the company, and inform on his old boss? That obviously could also be the case. The news could also have nothing whatsoever to do with the recent charges against Weisselberg and the company, though that seems somewhat unlikely.

Regardless, if Trump isn’t generally concerned at the moment, he definitely should be. Prosecutors have for months been working to get Weisselberg to flip, and while he has reportedly thus far remained to the ex-president, there’s nothing like the chance of numerous years in prison to get a person to rethink their situation. As former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne told MSNBC earlier week, “The jury will hate [Weisselberg]. He’s not going to have a jury of people who go to MAGA rallies, he’s going to have a cross section of people who live in Manhattan, who do pay Manhattan taxes, who don’t get free Mercedes, who don’t have somebody else paying for their children’s education and not have tax ramifications for that. So I think he will be a very hated defendant, Mr. Weisselberg, and I’m sure his defense attorneys have told him so.” Also weighing in on the CFO’s situation was former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who tweeted, “I am optimistic he’ll be convicted. The law is fairly clear on what is income & what is taxable. He’s a sophisticated executive; mistake is implausible. The company booked much of it as income. And juries hate rich tax cheats.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/allen-weisselberg-trump-organization-golf-club

Jonathan Chait: The Chilling Message of Trump’s Embrace of Ashli Babbitt Martyrdom January 6 is now a heroic uprising for the movement.

Last Thursday, Donald Trump announced a new theme, with all his customary blunt-force subtlety. “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?,” he wrote on his official pseudo-presidential stationery. Those four words were the entirety of the message.

Two days later, at his rally in Florida, he said more. “Who shot Ashli Babbitt? We all saw the hand. We saw the gun … You know, if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Okay? Now, they don’t want to give the name … It’s a terrible thing, right? Shot. Boom. And it’s a terrible thing.”

And then, speaking Wednesday about his lawsuit challenging his social-media ban, Trump returned to the subject again. Asked about the insurrection, he changed the subject to the terrible people on the other side who were not being charged, and brought up Babbitt once again: “The person that shot Ashli Babbitt. Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied?”

Martyrs are the most potent symbols for a radical movement. The John Birch Society commemorated an American missionary killed by Chinese communists in 1945 (the first death of the Cold War, the society’s followers believed). Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, inspired an eponymous song that became a Nazi anthem.

The anti-anti-Trump right has dismissed the insurrection as overblown, a protest march gone bad, perhaps ill-considered but never posing any serious threat to the republic. The far right’s highlighting of Babbitt’s death sends a different message: The insurrection was good. Babbitt’s effort to penetrate the defensive barrier was brave, and the stopping of her charge a crime.

By throwing himself behind this message, Trump is endorsing the most radical interpretation of his presidency. January 6 was not a minor misstep after a successful era, as fans like Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham now say. It was the heroic culmination of a righteous uprising. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/trump-who-shot-ashli-babbitt-january-6-insurrection-riot.html

Rick Hasen: The Supreme Court’s Latest Voting Rights Opinion Is Even Worse Than It Seems

It’s been almost a week since the Supreme Court issued its most significant ruling on voting rights in nearly a decade, and each time I read Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committe, the angrier I become. I’m angry not only about what the court did but also about how much of the public does not realize what a hit American democracy has taken.

In an opinion thick with irony, Justice Alito turned back the clock on voting rights to 1982. His decision for a six-justice conservative court majority reopens the door to a United States in which states can put up roadblocks to minority voting and engage in voter suppression with few legal consequences once a state has raised tenuous and unsupported concerns about the risk of voter fraud. It’s exactly the opposite of what Congress intended when it strengthened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, and it turns on its head the “non-retrogression” principle that Congress wrote in Section 5 of the act and that the court essentially killed off eight years ago in Shelby County v. Holder.

Justice Alito and the other conservative justices are leading the United States back to a time when racial discrimination in voting was easy, voting lawsuits hard, and political activity conducted behind a veil of secrecy. That probably fills Justice Alito, who has long shown hostility to voting rights, with nostalgia. Those may have been the good old days for him, but they were days of continued discrimination against minority voters for much of the country. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/supreme-court-sam-alito-brnovich-angry.html

Dana Milbank: Mitch McConnell, naked and afraid

On rare occasions, Mitch McConnell can summon the ability to mimic human emotions.

Ten days ago, for example, the Senate Republican leader was asked, at a Chamber of Commerce event, to imagine: “You’re stranded on a desert island and you can only have one companion. Your choices are Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Who do you choose?

McConnell had little hesitation. “Biden and I did four bipartisan deals during the Obama administration. I consider him a personal friend,” he said. “I was the only Republican who went to his son Beau’s funeral. So that would be an easy choice. I think Biden is a first-rate person.”

McConnell takes every opportunity to undermine this “first-rate person” and “personal friend” — both politically and personally.

McConnell waited more than five weeks before acknowledging Biden’s victory, allowing Donald Trump and his allies to delegitimize Biden — and the election — in the eyes of tens of millions of Trump supporters. McConnell didn’t speak up because he wanted Republicans to win Senate runoffs in Georgia. “Look, we need the president in Georgia and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now,” McConnell told the attorney general, according to Jonathan Karl of ABC News.

McConnell withheld support for the new Senate’s organizing resolution for weeks, delaying consideration of his friend Biden’s nominees.

Asked about Trump’s election lies, McConnell instead attacked his friend. “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” he said, also tagging friend Biden with the “socialist” moniker.

McConnell vowed to fight the relief legislation “in every way that we can.” He filibustered bipartisan legislation to create a commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection. He filibustered equal-pay legislation requiring employers to show that they don’t discriminate against women. He filibustered voting rights legislation and upended bipartisan talks on legislation to address police brutality.

He has so far failed to endorse bipartisan infrastructure legislation, while saying he would wage a “hell of a fight” if Democrats go it alone.

And he stands by as his staff portrays Biden as senile. McConnell aides “have taken to describing the White House chief of staff as ‘Prime Minister Klain,’” the Hill reported, attempting “to undercut public perception of Biden as a leader who is totally with it.”

With friends like these …

McConnell is not a man you’d want in your foxhole — or on your desert island. But his treachery would make for good television. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/09/mcconnell-biden-desert-island/

Greg Sargent: Tom Cotton’s slimy attack on a ‘critical race theory’ professor is full of holes

Sen. Tom Cotton is calling for the firing of a U.S. Air Force Academy professor after she admitted to discussing critical race theory with cadets. But even a cursory look at the Arkansas Republican’s slimy argument shows how full of holes it really is.

Cotton and other Republicans are unloading over this op-ed piece in The Post by Lynne Chandler García, an associate professor of political science at the Air Force Academy.

In it, García says she teaches critical race theory as an “academic framework” to analyze the fact that the founding and its documents harbored a “duality” between ideals of equality and realities of inequality and slavery. She also uses it to better understand “structural racism” that “has been endemic in American society,” and employs it for “deconstructing oppressive beliefs.”

Yet Cotton sees it as a firing offense, saying this:

We should not be teaching and indoctrinating our cadets to believe that our military is a fundamentally racist institution. Who exactly is going to want to raise their hand and take an oath to defend our Constitution if you believe what Professor Garcia is teaching about it?

García in no way says the military is a fundamentally racist institution. She cites the original segregation of the armed forces and the fact that George Washington may have initially opposed recruiting Black soldiers, and says:

Racism was ingrained in the system from the beginning, and the military still struggles with these issues. As a recent inspector general’s report on disparities in the Air Force and Space Force pointed out, Black service members lag behind their White peers in promotion rates but are overrepresented in disciplinary actions. Further, a recent Defense Department report documented the threat of white supremacy within the ranks.

Indeed, García herself notes that the ultimate desegregation of the armed forces was something to celebrate — again, pointing to a dramatic historical moment of institutional improvement. Talking about this will make people less inclined to serve in that institution?

But come on, this latest controversy is an utter joke. Cotton can’t possibly believe our cadets are such snowflakes that this op-ed will cause them and their morale to melt into puddles of shame. Can he? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/08/tom-cotton-critical-race-theory-professor-attack-holes/

Steve Schmidt: Stop Appeasing Autocrats

40% of the population has $400 cash in savings. Huge swaths of the country lack broadband, and our national infrastructure is decrepit. Billionaires who fund their own space programs pay no es, while the country's senior political leaders, who incited an insurrection, remain protected by their own coverup.

The concept of truth has been obliterated by a toxic combination of algorithms, misinformation and greed. There is an autocratic movement that is large, rich, powerful and on the march. It is maneuvering, yet somehow it remains invisible to the people who are nearest to it and have the power to do something about it.

The Senate is a small club, and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to look at someone and comprehend their bad faith. We are in for a long season of fighting over some really big and important things in this country. Orienting toward the ugly truth of what it is we are fighting is profoundly important.

We are fighting an autocratic movement that includes an eclectic multitude of extremist groups, among them fascists, theocrats, white supremacists and conspiracy loons. They are dangerous and they want political power again. This movement teems with menace and violence.

It has killed and it will kill again. The pro-democracy coalition must win the 2024, 2028 and 2032 elections to break this. It will not be easy. https://www.maxnewstoday.com/post/stop-appeasing-autocrats

Bess Levin: Trump All But Dares His Supporters To Attack The U.S.

In a reasonable society, the insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021, would have (1) resulted in Donald Trump being convicted at his second impeachment trial and barred from ever holding public office again, and (2) been a dark stain on the Republican Party that no one would dare play down or even mention for fear of being associated with a violent, failed coup. Instead, thanks to the GOP’s embrace of fascism, lies, and an aspiring dictator who continues to perpetuate the delusion that he won a second term, it’s become de rigueur for conservatives to whitewash the attack on democracy. Senator Ron Johnson claimed in March that he never feared for his life because the mob was comprised of “people that loved this country.” Rep. Andrew Clyde declared out loud, in public, that the scene that unfolded that day looked like “a normal tourist visit.” And on Sunday, Trump took the gaslighting and bullshit to the next level, rebranding an attempt to overturn the election, which left five people dead and more than 100 officers injured, as a peaceful gathering of “patriots” who were justified in their actions.

[Trump] has slowly turned January 6 from a black mark that threatened to expunge him from Republican politics, to a regrettable episode that his allies preferred to leave behind, to a glorious uprising behind which he could rally his adherents.

The anti-anti-Trump right has dismissed the insurrection as overblown, a protest march gone bad, perhaps ill-considered but never posing any serious threat to the republic. The far right’s highlighting of Babbitt’s death sends a different message: The insurrection was good. Babbitt’s effort to penetrate the defensive barrier was brave, and the stopping of her charge a crime.

By throwing himself behind this message, Trump is endorsing the most radical interpretation of his presidency. January 6 was not a minor misstep after a successful era, as fans like Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham now say. It was the heroic culmination of a righteous uprising. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/donald-trump-capitol-attack-patriots