A couple of days ago I went to take a shower, and there was a spider in the tub. A large one (this isn’t a photo of my spider, but it looked just like it):
I couldn’t decide what to do with it. It was too big to smash, but I just didn’t feel up to performing the old cup-and-cardboard routine. So I washed up in the sink with a washcloth, and then left the bathroom and tried to forget about it.
The next time I entered, I was delighted to find that the spider had disappeared. Maybe it had even climbed out of the tub – although I knew that was unlikely, and that the steep sides made it very difficult for spiders to get out that way once trapped inside. I tried not to think about the details of where the spider might be.
The next time I entered the bathroom I happened to glance at the bathtub drain. To my horror I saw two little dots at the edge of the chrome, near one of the little holes. Could that be – two little spider feet?
In other words, had the spider crawled into a drain hole, and was it hanging there upside down, like a little trapeze artist?
My drain is of this type, by the way:
As I watched in horror, those small black dots withdrew downward into the drain. It was now unmistakable that the spider had taken up residence there. I suppose at that point I could (and should?) have run a stream of hot water, but that horrified me as well.
Maybe the thing would just crawl down and out, somehow – out into the wild beyond. Meanwhile, I left the bathroom again.
Next time – you guessed it – the spider was back in the tub, staring at me, looking bright and chipper and not at all the worse for wear. Refreshed, even.
And so I called in the troops, in the person of a friend who bravely removed it. And I finally took a shower.
I wonder whether they will get a dispensation from the rules against large gatherings, too, because it’s a protest march:
Hundreds of members of the Borough Park Orthodox community took to the streets Tuesday night, defying orders to disperse and lighting a fire in protest of new state-mandated restrictions imposed on area synagogues, schools and non-essential businesses over a COVID-19 surge.
One large crowd huddled closely together at the corner of 50th Street and 15th Avenue at about 9 p.m. as community activist Heshy Tischler ripped Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio over the order that shuts down schools completely and limits houses of worship to 10 people in certain COVID-19 hot spots.
One complaint was that they had not even been consulted or informed prior to Governor Cuomo’s press conference. And the crowd also chanted “Jewish Lives Matter!”
Cuomo’s presentation was especially offensive to the demonstrators:
“His language was dangerous and divisive, and left the implication that Orthodox Jews alone are responsible for rising COVID cases in New York State,” the elected officials said.
Exactly.
There is a long and terrible history of scapegoating Jews for pestilence. I am going to assume that Cuomo is aware of it. If he isn’t, he should be.
[NOTE: By the way, those who read yesterday’s thread on Cuomo’s presentation probably have noticed that the exact community and sect involved isn’t named here, either.]
I went to the hospital today for an upper abdominal sonogram. They’re trying to decide whether my weary old gallbladder will be allowed to stay with me for the duration of the journey, or if it needs to disembark at a station soon.
Sonograms are easy tests. The most that was required of me for this one was to fast, and then to lie down, hold my breath now and then, and turn this way and that.
My task was made even easier by the fact that the hospital parking lot, ordinarily so full at that time of day, was largely empty. The hospital waiting room likewise, and they took me right away. I was in and out, start to finish including check-in, obligatory hand-sanitizing and answering COVID symptom questions, in twenty-five minutes flat.
That got me to thinking once again of the missed screening tests, diagnostic tests, and treatment that enhanced COVID-fear hath wrought. And, strangely enough, as deaths have dropped, the fear doesn’t seem to be abating.
Among other things, the Democrats have labeled it politically useful. And it is. Biden has fastened on it as the hallmark of his campaign. Trump has now come to symbolize the opposite approach, which the opposition calls reckless and foolhardy, tantamount to murder, and which we on the right call reasonable caution combined with courage and guarded optimism.
You pays your money and you takes your choice. The parties have decided on their respective approaches, and those approaches also happen to play to psychological characteristics of their respective bases. The MSM does the rest – which from the start has been to place a heavy heavy thumb on the scale of “This is Trump’s fault,” in hopes that Biden and company win as a result.
I read today that polls show that most people think Trump is to blame and that Biden would do better:
Democrats have planned to leverage the twin crises of COVID-19 and the economic shutdowns to win in November. Biden’s message, not surprisingly, is all over the place, at once condemning the president for not doing enough to stop the spread then condemning the president for the economic and societal consequences of the lockdown that was intended to stop the spread.
Polls consistently show low approval ratings for the president on his handling of the disease; most respondents believe Biden would do a better job even though his plans do not differ from the president’s. Biden continues to flip-flop on a national mask mandate but has publicly said he would authorize another economic lockdown.
It’s increasingly likely the election will be a referendum on Coronavirus and its after-effects, which means Trump’s new tack [of “Fear not!”] is a risky, but necessary, one.
It’s only risky because the public has been told over and over that COVID is a killer far out of proportion to its actual menace (which is bad enough, but not catastrophic) and that Trump’s approach has led to further death and destruction. I’ve noticed that, as the danger slowly recedes, the fear has not – at least, among most people I know. Their anger at Trump and contempt for him has only increased.
Propaganda works. It really really really does.
And this was the plan from the very start. It was back in March that the drumbeat began: this would be Trump’s Katrina. You can do a search yourself and find all the articles, but for now I’ll give a link to just one of them from mid-March.
The media and the left care nothing about what this tactic of theirs has done to people’s health, both physcial (in the sense of missed medical interventions for other problems) and mental (for example depression and anxiety). Doesn’t matter. It’s like the riots in blue cities – the damage is extraordinary, even to the left’s own constituents, but that doesn’t matter either because it’s all part of the drive to defeat Trump, sow chaos, and turn this country into a permanent leftist fiefdom and its people into docile and obedient citizens who do what they’re told.
[NOTE: And of course Biden is now saying no more debates if Trump has COVID.]
Also please see this article for a very full discussion of Cuomo’s press conference. During it, Cuomo used an old photo and said it was new (he used others that purportedly really are new, as well), but it’s the substance of his remarks that interests me more.
I am struck by something I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere – which is that Cuomo keeps referring to the accused communities as “Orthodox.” Although that it true, it is like referring to them as “Jews.” “Orthodox” describes a large group of Jews, but there are many many divisions within that group. The ones in question are not just Orthodox, they are ultra Orthodox. And actually, they are not just Orthodox, they are ultra-ultra-Orthodox. Calling them simply “Orthodox” has the effect of expanding the accusation in the eye of the general public to all Orthodox Jews.
I have written previously on related topics, in regard to ultra-Orthodox views and accusations and misconceptions that they are anti-vaccers. Please read. Please also read this post of mine about accusations similar to the present ones regarding the group’s COVID behavior. An excerpt:
The genesis of de Blasio’s admonition to “the Jewish community” – a pretty diverse group, and in NYC a fairly large one – was apparently a funeral for a rabbi held in Brooklyn by an ultra-Orthodox sect called the Satmar. Not only are they not “the Jewish community” at large, they’re not even “the Orthodox Jewish community.” The NY Satmar are based in Willliamsburg, and they are such an extreme sect that they could correctly be called not just ultra-Orthodox but ultra-ultra-Orthodox. They are so Orthodox they are radical, if that makes any sense (among other things, they don’t recognize the state of Israel). It’s hard to get a bead on their numbers in Brooklyn, but let’s just say that although it’s in the thousands, it’s a miniscule percectage of the Jews of New York City. They no more represent the Jewish community than the Branch Davidians represented the “Christian community.”
But that didn’t stop de Blasio from referring to them that way. It is no accident, either, although he tried to backtrack somewhat when howls of protest ensued regarding his addressing Jews in general. De Blasio may be mayor of New York, but he’s a leftist of the Corbynesque variety, and anti-Semitism is part of the genre.
Oh, and by the way, the Satmar said they had a police permit for the event and tried to make the crowd conform to social distancing rules:
“Neither de Blasio nor his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, addressed reports that the funeral procession had actually been coordinated with the New York Police Department and the knowledge of City Hall. Shea said that 12 summonses had been issued for refusal to disperse and for violating social distancing. ‘That event last night never should have happened,’ he said. ‘It will never happen again.’
“The mourning event in the Williamsburg neighborhood Tuesday night was organized by followers of the late Rabbi Chaim Mertz. Organizers said that they thought the procession would conform with social distancing guidelines because they asked everyone to stay six feet away from each other. The police department cooperated by barricading streets and putting up street lights, according to David Greenfield, the CEO of a Jewish anti-poverty organization and a former city councilman.
“Video of the event showed that funeral marchers were also guided by members of Shomrim, the Jewish community security organization. A Hasidic source who is familiar with the Shomrim’s preparations for the funeral, but not authorized to speak publicly, told the Forward that the Shomrim and NYPD had worked together in planning the funeral.
“‘The plan was to have a specific number of people who could go into one street, then close it down, and have the car go to the next street,’ the source explained. The source added that in addition to lights and barricades, the police had also approved having a sound system so that attendees could hear eulogies, but that at the last minute, officers ordered organizers not to use the speaker system.
“In their joint news conference, de Blasio and Shea did not respond to the claims of NYPD involvement.”
Here’s a video of a very interesting talk by Matt Taibbi on the way that money drives news decisions that help polarize America further. I think it’s worth listening to, although I think he leaves out a lot, as well.
Taibbi is an unusual journalist – sort of on the left but a maverick who’s not afraid to call out the left and do a lot of critiquing of the press, as well. But here he seems to be ignoring some non-financial causes of the changes in news coverage, such as: (1) the erasure of the difference between opinion and fact journalism that started with Vietnam and does not appear to have been money-driven (2) the effect Watergate had on reporters’ egos and goals (3) the imbalance between the number of news outlets on the left and on the right, which is enormously skewed towards the left (4) the fact that the news is not just partisan on each side in terms of what topics they cover and how, but that – particularly on the left – a significant amount of their coverage consists of lies and/or substantial distortions (often featuring truncated quotes).
Here it is:
There is an especially revealing exchange that starts around minute 57:05. Taibbi’s monologue is over, and there is an interviewer asking him questions about covering the news. She says [emphasis mine]:
First there is the notion of treating both sides as equal, when they’re not. So, for example, I think it’s fairly clear that. you know, Donald Trump is prone to xenophobia, white nationalism, these types of things, so – you know, how do you kind of put that in context? Or, you know, how do you think about that, you know, covering him when there’s this – you have a chicken/egg problem with how you present his views?
So, in the context of being objective, she accepts (and expects Taibbi and every other supposedly neutral observer) to accept, that Trump is “xenophobic” and a “white nationalist.” Basically, she is saying that since it’s obviously true that Trump is an evil racist white supremacist who’s afraid of foreigners, is it okay to be fair to him, and what would “objectivity” even mean when covering a person such as that?
My answer would be to point out that she’s already made assumptions and believes her assumptions to be true, and might need to really dive deep, read some discussions on the right about those issues regarding Trump, and challenge herself and her assumptions. For example, I’ve written here about the use of the word “xenophobia” to label the right as evil, and why it’s just a buzzword that sometimes describes very logical reasoning and not a phobia at all. In addition, of course someone who is against illegal immigration would appeal to people who really are white supremacists, but that does not mean that person supports white supremacy nor that he/she has chosen such a position in order to appeal to white supremacists. There are enormous independent reasons to oppose illegal immigration, and by labeling the person “racist” “xenophobe” “white supremacist” or by pointing out that the person’s point of view happens to be attractive to such people is to use propagandist labels to deflect a serious discussion that we should be having about the merits of the case for opposing illegal immigration.
Taibbi says something curious during his answer to this particular question. He points out that during the 2016 campaign it was considered okay for reporters such as him to talk about the fact that Trump wasn’t just appealing to racists, but was also appealing to the disaffected Americans who felt they’d been left behind by government. Taibbi says that, after the election, that was no longer allowed (by the people who run the media outlets, I suppose), and that suddenly all that was considered acceptable by management was to say that Trump won by appealing to racists. Taibbi makes it clear that he thinks this appeal of Trump’s to the disaffected was insincere on Trump’s part; that of course he didn’t and doesn’t care about those people, but that still it needed to be reported that he was marketing his campaign towards them. In other words, Taibbi believes that he can read Trump’s mind, and that one of Trump’s most consistent messages is completely cynical and manipulative.
The sad thing is that Taibbi is one of the more objective reporters in the MSM.
The question with the many, many people in media like Acosta is: Are they shamelessly lying because they know damn well Trump has said it before, or have they actually convinced themselves to forget he said it, because they’re so utterly invested in this narrative?
I’m genuinely curious about this. I could believe either explanation.
I have two answers, and I think that although the answers are somewhat contradictory they co-exist in most of the MSM.
…[There’s] a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-f***er,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
Of course, many people believe that Trump is a white supremacist, and one of the main reasons they believe that is that the left says it and the media insinuates it by bringing it up over and over, making the sonofabitch deny it, and then criticizing every aspect of his denial, as well as pretending later on that the denial never happened.
I said there were two answers, though, and the second is that some on the left and in the press do believe their own narrative: that Trump is indeed a secret white supremicist. This is an article of faith among some people (I have met and argued with such people). With those people, every time Trump denounces white supremacy they feel he is lying. So they keep asking, hoping he will refuse to do so, or do it “wrong” (not quite vigorously enough or giving them some other tonal or linguistic nit to pick). I cannot recall any other president being made to do this, particularly one who’s never been part of such a group and has never expressed support for such a group.
I guess I have a third answer, too, although I think it’s less of a driver for them. It’s just a bonus, really. It’s that they get to virtue-signal by asking the question in that earnest, searching tone they use. Anyone who asks the question is making it clear that he or she is most decidedly not a white supremacist.
But then again, the anti-racist trainers (Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, etc.) believe that our entire society and all white people in it are irredeemably white supremacist, and that even black people who are conservative are white supremacists, despite their race, because they are fostering the white supremacist system. So denial doesn’t matter to the anti-racist (critical race) theorists – and they are educating new generations to think that way, too.
Victor Davis Hanson has a new article (entitled “The Full Crowley”) that revisits the infamous debate in 2012 in which moderator Candy Crowley intervened on behalf of President Obama. It didn’t help her career at all, but it certainly helped Obama and hurt Romney, and that almost undoubtedly was the goal.
Hanson compares that to media bias today as exhibited – just to take two examples – by Chris Wallace and John Roberts. The entire article is well worth reading.
Those of you who’ve read this blog for many years may remember that I did some exhaustive analysis of what happened during that Crowley exchange. You may want to stroll down memory lane and revisit a few of those posts, this one and especially this one and this one (the latter has a video embedment that no longer works, but it’s a reference to the moments I highlighted in that second link, which contains a video of the debate cued up to start with the exchange in question).
Looking back on all of it – on the full Crowley treatment that was given Romney – I feel even more strongly now that the episode was at least somewhat pre-arranged between Obama and Crowley. When you study the details, it’s almost impossible to escape that conclusion.
Ever since the series of positive diagnoses of people on the political right, McEnany has been tested regularly and until now she was always negative. But now she has tested positive, although so far without symptoms.
She expects to quarantine and to work remotely. She’s 32 years old, and a lean mean fighting machine, and so although COVID can get really bad for anyone and no one runs zero risk, statistically speaking her prognosis is good.
I’m not a person given to conspiracy theories, although I know that the current rash of diagnoses on the right (and none on the left, as far as I know) have engendered a lot of speculation about a deliberate infection of this crew by political operatives on the left. I don’t think that’s what happened – although I think that it certainly would have been a clever move if the intent was to peg the right as ignoring common sense ways to protect themselves, and to have that tie into the narrative that they failed to protect the American people, as well as to drive home the left’s constant assertion that we need to have lots of mail-in voting because going to the polls in person is inherently dangerous.
Except I think that deliberate infection would be a difficult tactic to pull off. Difficult, but hardly impossible. And it would have the potential to backfire. If everyone in the current group manages to recover without serious complications – and I fervently hope that is the case – what message does that give? A more hopeful one.
At any rate, I doubt we’ll ever really know why so many people in government were suddenly infected at once. You can point to a certain occasion that may have qualified as a “superspreader event” (such as the Barrett celebration, or perhaps the debate), but we’ll probably never be able to identify it. Also, it’s impossible to distinguish any of those events from so many others that did not seem to lead to infections. The Barrett get-together was held outdoors, for example. And some people who got sick had worn masks there.
Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has written a post about the stirring of memory and emotion that Trump’s illness has caused. For Jacobson, the event has conjured up this:
John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was four years old. It was the first emotion I remember — Being that young I’m not sure if I remember the event, or remember what my mother told me about the emotion I felt. She wrote out and mailed a two-or-three sentence note I ‘dictated’ to the Kennedy children telling them I felt sorry that they lost their dad. She made a copy of the note and showed it to me repeatedly over the decades. I have the note somewhere, but it’s one of those things I find when I’m not looking for it, and can’t find when I am looking for it.
I was older than Professor Jacobson when Kennedy was killed. But that’s not the emotional memory Trump’s illness stirs up in me. The Kennedy assassination was, for me, a sudden and violent blow, an unthinkable act that immediately changed history and changed the country, ushering a different era: that of the Sixties.
Trump’s illness is a continuation of something that we’ve lived with since February: fear of COVID, particularly in those over 70. Most of us here and elsewhere have probably thought about the illness and its risks quite often, including the idea that President Trump might come down with it. We’ve all had discussions here and with friends and family about the best way to prevent it and the best way to treat it. And Trump himself has been very prominent in such discussions, especially in the early days when he was part of the daily news conferences on it.
When Boris Johnson came down with COVID in late March and came close to death, it certainly occurred to me that Trump was vulnerable. I would suspect it occurred to you, too.
Trump’s critics and enemies have accused him of being cavalier about COVID, reckless even. And of course now that he has gotten it, that hue and cry has only increased (as has their delight, for the most part, although some are displeased he is not sicker or even deceased at this point). But of course, it’s not as though people who wear masks all the time don’t get COVID. And it’s not as though people who don’t wear them always get it – although that sort of reasoning doesn’t enter into the political calculus of those who’d like to excoriate Trump for this and who do so regularly.
Nevertheless, it is indeed true that Trump has been somewhat cautious about COVID but has drawn the line at taking every single precaution possible. I don’t blame him for making that choice. We all make it every day about everything, don’t we? And not just about COVID, but about every step we take in life. It’s a tradeoff between liberty and risk, and people come down at different points on that line. Trump is not a timid or risk-averse person, and although he tries to use good judgment he decided long ago what risks to accept. I don’t think he was foolhardy. I just think he has been in so much contact with people in the course of doing his job and trying to project strength and optimism that it finally caught up with him. And I fervently hope he has a speedy and uneventful recovery.
I don’t go to sites that feature the bile and vicious wishes that have spilled out of many Democrats and the left. Who needs to be exposed to that? I’ve got enough stress in my life as it is.
The memory that Trump’s illness has stirred up for me is of my father. He died when I was in my twenties, and had been in heart failure for ten years prior to that. In those days there were some medications to treat it, but nowhere near what we have today, and surgery had also been ruled out for him. He was younger than I am now as his health sank to the point where merely walking across a room exhausted him, and climbing the stairs was clearly extremely taxing and required many minutes of recovery.
My mother wanted to get one of those seats that electrically transport you up the stairs as you sit in them. But my father refused to use one. And the night he died, he expired right after climbing the stairs to go to bed. His heart simply gave out.
At the time, I didn’t quite understand his choices. Why was he so stubborn? Why hadn’t he used an electric assist in the form of a chair like that? But then, when I thought about it, I realized that it was his decision and he was drawing the line there. I wasn’t sure of his reason, but I felt that he just didn’t want to give in to that particular sort of limitation even though he was clearly greatly limited in other ways. His refusal was symbolic, but it was very important to him.
There’s no real analogy here, except in a very general way. We all make such decisions, and we make them constantly. My father made his decisions. Trump made his decisions. JFK made his decisions – to be in an open car in a motorcade, something that no longer is allowed presidents, for obvious reasons.
I wrote the draft of this piece a couple of days ago, before I saw the video Trump made in the hospital. I featured it already in this post, but now I want to highlight one short segment of it:
Note, also, that one of the very first posts I ever wrote on COVID was subtitled “assuming the risk” (the same subtitle I’ve given to the present post). In it, I wrote:
Of course, I wasn’t around in 1918. I wasn’t around when smallpox and tuberculosis or the Black Death killed far far more of the people on earth than any of the plagues of my lifetime have come close to killing. I cannot even imagine how terrible those things were; I don’t even want to imagine. And I doubt that people took them in stride at all. And I think a good part of the dread and fear now is that in the back of our minds – or for some people, even the front of our minds – we know that such catastrophes are still possible. Human beings know they are intensely vulnerable.
But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.
And it’s not just medical events, either. Students demand that colleges protect them from ever feeling bad or bullied or offended by anything anyone says. Woman have become so reactive to the idea of sexual harassment that many have redefined it to include what used to be considered standard compliments on appearance. People start bitter twitter wars about things like cultural appropriation. There seems to be a hair-trigger over-reactivity, a new emotional fragility and vulnerability, that is akin to what can happen when a person fails to develop normal immunities of the physical type, to use a medical analogy.
People are speculating as to how this will play out over the next month and how it will affect the election. I have no idea. But I think that those who believe in trying to eliminate all risk are probably not the ones thinking of voting for Trump in the first place. They are the ones for whom the image of a masked, sequestered, and subdued Biden is reassuring.
[ADDENDUM: The current plan is for Trump to leave the hospital this evening. I am relatively sure that, once in the White House, he will be monitored very very closely.]
I think this sets a perfect tone. One of the things about the situation is that it tempers some of Trump’s harshness without reducing his optimistic fighting spirit:
Some of the usual suspects are, of course, saying it was pre-recorded or made through AI. To combat the first charge, he should have held up today’s NY Times.
Somehow I missed the fact that a while back Leonard Cohen’s son and some other musicians and technicians put out a recording of posthumous new songs by Cohen, who had recorded the bare bones of them when he was near death. All they had to do was add the arrangements.
They also put out some gorgeous and mysterious videos. Here’s one:
Here’s how the songs were transformed into finished products:
And here’s Cohen’s son Adam, who looks somewhat like him at the same age and sounds even more like him but different, with a different emotional tone:
And by the time-travel magic of YouTube, here’s his dad at around the same age, same song, performing live:
This is day three. It’s days 7 through 10 that usually tell the tale.
ADDENDUM:
At RedState, there’s an interesting article about where Trump might have caught the virus. The media – of course – is focusing on the Amy Coney Barrett event, and on blaming lack of masks. But some people who wore masks there also got it, and everyone there was tested before being allowed to attend. And it was held outside.
Another possible venue was the debate, where some pre-planning and set-up people seem to have been infected. But I very much doubt the MSM will be emphasizing that possibility.
