The social fallout of political disagreements—umpteenth version

The New Neo Posted on by

As you might expect, when I saw the headline “Don’t get divorced because of Trump. The tough work of settling America’s political differences,” I immediately clicked on it, because it sounded as though it would deal with one of my major interests.

That’s not because I’m trying not to get divorced; I’m already long-divorced. And I didn’t get divorced because my husband (now my ex-husband) and I disagree on politics or ever disagreed on politics; strangely enough, we’ve been on the same page pretty much right along. But I know that political differences can be a big problem in marriages, and I’ve certainly experienced the problem in other relationships with friends and family.

But the article doesn’t deal with marriages at all. And it deals with the general topic in a rather surface way, and seems to be trying to balance things out with a “both sides are qually hateful and angry” point of view interspersed with a subtle skew towards blaming Trump.

In my experience—and I have a lot of experience—there is indeed hatred on both sides, but the hatred is far more virulent and widespread left to right. And although it has exacerbated during Trump’s presidency—and although Trump himself is anything but a conciliatory figure—I most definitely do not see this phenomenon as his fault. I see the press as having had an enormous role to play in the escalating hatred, as well as social media—predominantly Twitter, which the nearly-worthless article doesn’t mention at all.

I say “nearly worthless” because the article does have one potentially helpful part in which the author mentions groups such as Better Angels and the Listen First Project, which try to promote more meaningful and less abusive discourse between the two sides. I’m not all that sure how much such movements actually help, however, because they appeal mostly to people who are interested in such civil discourse in the first place, as the article states. My guess is that most of the people doing all the flaming of others don’t really want to give up the excitement and the venting of bile.

At the moment I’m not very hopeful about all of this. As the 2020 election approaches, I see the prospects getting worse. And I don’t see the problem as a mere lack of civility, although there certainly is a dearth of civility. I see it as a huge divide involving very basic political assumptions that are quite fundamental, and I see the lack of civility as a byproduct of that, exacerbated by the hypocritical bias of the press, the general coarsening of our culture, and the amplification caused by social media,

Bruce Ohr’s role in Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

Russiagate has so many elements and such complexity that it’s easy to lose track of the details. One detail I haven’t covered all that much is the role of Bruce Ohr, who was an Associate Deputy Attorney General during the Obama administration.

Eric Felton certainly has, however. Please read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was perfectly positioned to advance the Russia collusion narrative. He had a rare set of relationships — ties to opposition researchers and the FBI — and would use his links to both in 2016 to connect federal law enforcement to those advancing Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

A mystery remains: To some in his narrow circle, Ohr was upfront about the compromising nature of his connections, yet he hid that fact from officials charged with overseeing ethics at the Justice Department. Why, then, did Bruce Ohr admit to the FBI that his wife worked for opposition researchers Fusion GPS while failing to disclose it to the DoJ? The answer speaks volumes not just about how the Trump-Russia affair gained traction but about the way Washington works…

Fusion GPS didn’t just get Bruce Ohr’s valuable attention, the firm used it to make an ask. Nellie Ohr acknowledged in her own congressional interview what Fusion GPS had in mind when Steele invited her and her husband to breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel on July 30, 2016. “Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce would put in a word with the FBI to follow up on the information in some way.” He did just that.

As I said, please read the whole thing.

Isn’t it curious how the national media takes zero interest in Ilhan Omar’s tax irregularities?

The New Neo Posted on by

Can you imagine what the headlines would look like if a Republican had claimed on his/her tax returns that Person A was his/her spouse while still married to Person B?

But when Ms. Intersectionality does it, crickets.

At least, according to that article, the local affiliate in Minneapolis is taking some interest. But Omar isn’t answering.

I can’t even imagine what answer would suffice to exonerate her, so she’s probably best off keeping mum and hoping the national media will continue to ignore the issue. Actually, I can imagine her excuse, but someone like Nancy Pelosi would have to make it for her again, because it would be a difficult one for Omar to pull off by herself: that Omar “didn’t understand the full weight” of what she was doing.

As Iowahawk has said:

California proposal to expand illegal immigrant health coverage

The New Neo Posted on by

California is poised on the brink of expanding Medi-Cal (the state Medicaid program) to cover illegal immigrants 19-26. When I read that, my first thought was aren’t they already covered in California?

It turns out that previously they only had been covered to the age of 19, and this new move would place Medi-Cal coverage in compliance with the ages of Obamacare coverage, which goes to 26.

When Goveror Newsom was inaugurated back in January, he proposed the change:

California already covers undocumented children until they turn 19, with Newsom’s plan increasing the age cut-off to mirror that of the Affordable Care Act, which allows young adults to stay on a parent’s health insurance plan until turning 26.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Newsom said in a Facebook Live feed announcing the proposal. “It’s the fiscally conservative thing to do. It’s the moral thing to do … When we talk about universal healthcare, it means everybody. When everybody pulls together, it means lower costs to each and every one of you.”

If you’re somewhat puzzled by the “fiscally conservative” statement of Newsom’s, you wouldn’t be alone. The idea is to pay for this through the following:

A legislative proposal last year pegged the cost of extending Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants under 26 at $250 million a year. That cost would fall solely to California, despite the mix of federal and state money that typically comprises Medi-Cal funding because the Affordable Care Act prohibits the use of federal dollars for covering immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.

So although Medi-Cal in general is partly federally-funded, this proposal would not be.

More:

Newsom’s proposal would also create an individual mandate in California to thwart predicted drops in the state’s health insurance market after the federal government removed financial penalties for uninsured consumers beginning this year. The requirement that consumers have health insurance or face financial penalties propped up the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and its elimination is expected to drive up premiums.

Without the individual mandate, all consumers will experience rate increases this year, said officials for Covered California, the state’s official health insurance marketplace. Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee said Newsom’s proposal would bring stability to the market and is a critical step toward reaching universal healthcare.

Newsom’s plan to create a individual mandate for Californians could be a heavy lift, even in the Democrat-dominated state Legislature, where such a requirement could require a two-thirds vote.

That was back in January, but now the proposal is before the legislature, tasked with approving a budget by June 15:

Republicans on the legislative committee negotiating the budget voted against the proposal, arguing it was not fair to give health benefits to people who are in the country illegally while taxing people who are here legally for not purchasing health insurance.

Republicans in California are essentially powerless, however.

There are plenty of Democrats in California who won’t stop at having Medi-Cal cover illegal immigrants up to the age of 26, however, and are eager to cover all of them throughout life. I will add that Medi-Cal only covers very low-income people, so (assuming that illegal immigrants would be disproportionately represented in the low-income Medi-Cal eligible group), this could and probably will stick in the craws of legal residents and citizens who are above the poverty level, are struggling to make ends meet, must provide their own health insurance or remain uncovered, and also be taxed and/or penalized to support illegal immigrants who are poorer than they.

The reality, however, is that California can do what California wants to do. There is nothing to stop it. And there is nothing to stop plenty more illegal immigrants from flocking there for the free ride on health care. There is also nothing to stop more middle-income (or higher) people from fleeing the state, although California still has its natural beauty and climate to attract others.

Another reality is that in California and across the nation, taxpayers are already paying for the health care of illegal immigrants through requirements that they be treated in emergency rooms. I believe that may be the origins of Newsom’s otherwise puzzling “It’s the fiscally conservative thing to do” statement. The argument goes something like this: because it is mandated that we cover people who go to the emergency room and cannot pay, illegal immigrants are using that service both for emergencies and for health care that would ordinary take place in a doctor’s office. They also lack preventive care. The “fiscally conservative” argument is that providing regular health coverage for them would actually reduce costs because it would prevent illness through making preventive care more available, and it would also reduce emergency room visits which tend to be far more expensive than regular doctor visits.

I have no idea whether the above argument would pan out in California if this measure were to pass, but my guess is that it wouldn’t reduce emergency room visits as much as thought, or prevent illness as much as hoped, and that it would be more expensive than projected—as well as drawing more and more illegal immigrants to the state.

[NOTE: I’ve previously written here about Medi-Cal policy in covering illegal immigrants, and emergency room coverage in general.]

“Chernobyl” and the press; the real Chernobyl and the public

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent article in The New Yorker about the very popular HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” the author writes:

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Sound familiar? In the US, however, the left hasn’t yet achieved a monopoly—although not for lack of trying in recent years.

I previously wrote a long post on the subject of the Chernobyl disaster itself; please see this. One thing of which I’m pretty sure is that the series “Chernobyl” will probably replace the history of the actual event in most people’s eyes, because all most people know about it these days (if they knew about it at all, that is, prior to watching the series) is that it was a big nuclear disaster. And the conclusion they have drawn, for the most part, is that nuclear power is bad.

The HBO series—which I haven’t seen, and I welcome comments from anyone who has—seems to blame the Soviet system (true) as well as individuals who worked at the plant:

So far Breus [an engineer working at the plant at the time of the disaster] has watched only three episodes of the HBO series. “All details of people’s clothes, furniture, dishes, equipment look real, but none of the characters,” he told The Daily Beast. “The series portrays Anatoly Dyatlov, the supervising engineer of that tragic night shift, as an evil and even stupid person—that is not true. He was sometimes tough, but never demonic; it was not his fault the reactor was bad.”

Breus continued to list the issues: “Two out of the three ‘scuba-divers’ who die in the movie, Bespalov and Ananenko, are still alive; also, the engineers working with Dyatlov that night were not cowards terrified by the threat of punishment like they are portrayed in the movie, but brave and responsible professionals… My concern is that many of the survivors, families of the personnel, will feel hurt watching this series.”

The Soviets blamed the engineer Dyatlov, and he served four years in prison. But he said, “If they [the Soviet regime] built the reactor according to the rules, the disaster would not have happened.”

Let’s just say that evidence points to problems with the execution of the test itself and problems in the design of the reactor. You can find a lot of information about it at this Wiki page, as well as here. A summary from the latter source [emphasis mine]:

The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyla Anchor nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture…

The Chernobyl disaster was a unique event and the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation-related fatalities occurred. The design of the reactor is unique and in that respect the accident is thus of little relevance to the rest of the nuclear industry outside the then Eastern Bloc. However, it led to major changes in safety culture and in industry cooperation, particularly between East and West before the end of the Soviet Union.

More details from that article [emphasis mine]:

A series of operator actions, including the disabling of automatic shutdown mechanisms, preceded the attempted test early on 26 April. By the time that the operator moved to shut down the reactor, the reactor was in an extremely unstable condition. A peculiarity of the design of the control rods caused a dramatic power surge as they were inserted into the reactor…

The interaction of very hot fuel with the cooling water led to fuel fragmentation along with rapid steam production and an increase in pressure. The design characteristics of the reactor were such that substantial damage to even three or four fuel assemblies would – and did – result in the destruction of the reactor.…

The 1991 report by the State Committee on the Supervision of Safety in Industry and Nuclear Power on the root cause of the accident looked past the operator actions. It said that while it was certainly true the operators placed their reactor in a dangerously unstable condition (in fact in a condition which virtually guaranteed an accident) it was also true that in doing so they had not in fact violated a number of vital operating policies and principles, since no such policies and principles had been articulated. Additionally, the operating organisation had not been made aware either of the specific vital safety significance of maintaining a minimum operating reactivity margin, or the general reactivity characteristics of the RBMK which made low power operation extremely hazardous.

The accident not only weakened the Soviets, it also had the effect of putting the kibosh on nuclear power plant construction worldwide because of widespread fear of a similar accident, although—as those quotes indicate—the situation wasn’t especially relevant to Western-designed and operated power plants, nor (as my previous post indicates) did the Chernobyl disaster itself cause anything like the loss of life most people think it caused.

I’m a proponent of nuclear energy. But I understand the unease about it. Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”) is a bitch, and the fear that Murphy’s Law will come into play in the future in a nuclear power plant—with even more disastrous consequences than before—isn’t going to go away.

Bars without alcohol: it’s a trend

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to be a growing trend among young people:

Getaway is a sober bar, a new kind of dry nightlife option that is cropping up in New York City. The idea is to provide outlets for people who want to socialize in a bar-like location, but without having to drink alcohol.

So they serve funny drinks like the “shrub,” described in the article as “an acidic beverage made from vinegar, fruit, sugar, club soda and zero alcohol.” Since two of these and some bread cost the author $15, I’d say that’s pretty pricey for what is essentially a flavored club soda.

I’m also a bit puzzled by the entire phenomenon. As a non-drinker myself (or rather, as an alcohol sipper—a thimblefull is about my limit) and a lover of plain club soda or seltzer, I’ve never had any problem ordering my preferred beverage, festively adorned with a wedge of lime for the occasion, in any bar.

What is meant by having to drink alcohol? No bar forces people to imbibe it.

I think it means two things. The first is without having the temptation of ordering alcohol, which helps those who like alcohol (I don’t) to refrain from ordering it if they’re on the wagon. The second is without being subjected to other people’s drinking and drunkenness. And that latter phenomenon in turn reduces one of the problems that sometimes goes with drinking too much, which is the phenomenon of sexual encounters without consent or with consent that’s not remembered properly, and the consequent accusations that can ruin a life.

The article focuses on the wellness aspect of not-drinking (although, isn’t some wine still supposed to be good for you? or have I missed an update on that?), but it also touches on the sexual concerns when it notes, “one of the most common factors among the harassment complaints made today at Google is that the perpetrator had been drinking (~20% of cases).”

And it’s not just Silicon Valley types who are involved. I find this quite fascinating:

Last month, Liquid Death made waves when it launched. The startup applies the bold marketing of energy drinks to a water-in-a-can beverage. Its tagline is “Murder Your Thirst.” Like an alcohol brand, it has an age gate on its website that says, “This water may give nightmares to persons under 18 years of age.”

The idea is to make consumers look cool while they keep hydrated, and to the unsuspecting eye, one may never know they’re downing simple H2O.

The original impetus, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Cessario, was to cater to heavy metal and punk rock fans. But the ability to drink water out of a can (which is more ecofriendly than plastic) and look like you’re drinking a beer or an energy drink, has broader appeal.

Boy, am I ever out of it. I’ve been drinking water or club soda for many many decades, and I’ve never considered trying to hide that fact, or that there might be money to be made in developing a product that helps consumers hide that fact.

I guess that’s why I’m not a rich person, in addition to not being the life of the party.

The NeverTrumper Max Boot—and NeverTrumpers in general

The New Neo Posted on by

I find NeverTrumpers interesting. Are they political changers, or political fail-to-changers? Are they virulent anti-Trumpers because of class and style objections, elitism, being part of the DC circle, desire to curry favor with liberal friends, or (as most of them claim) bedrock conservative principles?

No, this isn’t going to be an essay that goes into all that in depth. For now I’ll just say that I think it’s different for different NeverTrumpers.

For Max Boot, the subject of this piece, it appears to be connected with a deeper change from being on the right to being on what passes for the center these days. I never did read Boot too often even in his pre-Trump days, and I seldom read him now, but if that article I just linked gives a fair picture of him, it seems that he’s an example of that rarest of aves: a right-to-left changer (or rather, a conservative-to-middle changer).

I get the impression that the reasons for Boot’s change can be summed up as this: he never had a foundational conservatism rooted in one of the most basic conservative tenets of all, which is that humans are fallible and flawed. Boot appears to have been profoundly naive about that and remains so today. That is the constant within his personality that determines much of the rest.

For example [emphasis mine]:

Boot is ashamed not just of what conservatism has become under Trump, but of what he now realizes it has always been. Yes, Trump’s emergence on the political stage was the precipitating event that awakened Boot to his “naïve faith [his words, not mine] in the conservative movement and the American political system”; but the deeper truth is that the corrosion of conservativism has always been there. Max Boot, in reassessing his whole political outlook, is seeing his “consciousness raised.” He has just discovered that “modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism.”

Let me pause for a moment to note that if any group is permeated by racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, and know-nothingism (not isolationism, however)—as well as the desire to restrict liberty and a love of big government statism—it is the left. I will add that although I don’t think the right is “permeated” by those charactistics Boot lists, they certainly exist there. But nearly all political movements and groups (and certainly all groups which contain more than two or three adherants)—have elements of all those things.

It’s human nature. As Katherine Hepburn’s character said in “The African Queen”: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” But that Max Boot might have at one time thought that an entire group—conservatives—had succeeded in rising above human nature is rather puzzling. However, if someone was once that naive and misguided about a group, the fall from that sort of idealism can be quite hard. Boot appears to have taken it hard, anyway, and to have—as often happens—as a consequence swallowed much of the leftist line on what convervatives actually are: now he sees them as irredeemably racist and sexist.

If they’re not perfect, I guess they’re awful.

As I indicated, it’s not really Boot himself who interests me all that much. It’s Boot as an example of the much larger group of NeverTrumpers on the right, who in turn illustrate some even larger trends about how some people make up their minds about politics.

I also think that, for the people (and I count Boot among them) who previously were fairly prominent pundits on the right, there is an element of having gotten too deeply into Trump-hatred prior to the election, and finding it impossible to turn the ship around at this point. They made a choice and they’re sticking with it, and if they continue to do all they can to put Trump down than maybe they’ll contribute to his downfall and be able to say “I told you so.”

A commenter at that article has stated this premise quite well. I’ve long thought that something like this is operating for a great many prominent NeverTrumpers on the right, because it’s really difficult for most people to publicly admit having been wrong and to change their minds:

I think Boot’s biggest gripe…is that his candidate did not win the Republican nomination for the 2016 election . He despised Trump and, acting on the widely held belief that Hillary would win, staked out such a hateful position on Trump that with Hillary’s election, Boot could claim that he was prescient and entitled to a preferred place at the Conservative table. When Trump won, Boot had already boxed himself.

The more extreme the stance previously, the more boxed-in the pundit can become.

I say this as someone with a bit of experience on that score. I was very much against Trump the primary candidate, and wasn’t the least bit shy about saying so. But I always maintained that I was going on his previous record and his behavior while in the heat of the primary battle, and that as president he might act differently and he might pleasantly surprise me—and that if he did become president (something I did not think would happen) than I very much hoped I’d get that pleasant surprise. If so, I’d be happy to admit I’d been wrong.

And that’s the way it’s panned out.

But for most of the pundits who did not understand that Trump might turn out much better than they thought (and did not hope that he would), but who instead put all their eggs (and then some) in a “Trump is evil incarnate” basket, there is probably no turning back.

If your computer suddenly stops recognizing that there are new photos on your cellphone

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m writing this as a public service. I hope to spare at least one person from the same sort of 5-hour effort I recently went through when my computer suddenly and mysteriously refused to load any new photos from my cell phone.

In fact, it wouldn’t even recognize that they existed. “No new photos found” was the message, despite well over a hundred of them, ready and waiting. A search for things such as “why can’t my computer find new photos on my android?” and many variations on that theme yielded an infuriating list of site after site explaining how to load photos onto a computer, interspersed with sites with complicated instructions that didn’t work to fix my problem.

Many hours and tons of frustration later, I tried the only thing left: I changed the charging cord that connected my phone to my computer. And voila! Cured.

This makes no sense to me. Why would a cord that’s functioning perfectly fine to charge the phone, and doing perfectly well at connecting the phone (the computer recognized the phone and was checking for photos in the usual manner) fail to actually locate those photos? What does a cord have to do with it?

But folks, if you ever have a problem like the one I had, do yourself a favor, save yourself hours of hair-pulling exasperation, and just change that cord.

Training horses for the film “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”: the horse has to want to jump

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those extraordinary diving horses we talked about a while back? If not, refresh your memory here.

In that thread and in other online discussions, one of the big questions is: how are the horses trained to do that? There are plenty of animal rights activists who are against the practice and assume it represents (or represented; I don’t think there are any venues left where it’s done for entertainment) cruelty to the animals. Even if a person doesn’t assume it’s cruel, the wonder is how it’s done at all.

Here’s an explanation of how the horses were trained for the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” a film based on the life of one of the women who rode these horses [emphasis mine]:

There are three horse diving scenes in the picture. In this picture as in all other pictures, there were doubles trained for the picture. Six horses in all were in “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” Four were trained to dive. While the real Sonora’s horses dove forty feet, the horses that made the picture never dove over ten feet, which is the maximum that American Humane Association’s Guildelines will allow.

American Humane was on the compound for the full training period. Corky Randall, one of the most cautious horse wranglers in Hollywood, was hired by Pegusus Productions to train the horses. The horses were chosen very carefully and only horses that liked the water were used. Training was done very slowly by first seeing if the horses liked to swim. They were allowed initially to swim in the tank made for the picture.

As training progressed, they were allowed to step off one foot into water, then two feet and so on until they had reached the ten foot maximum. The horses always jumped on their own. In order to achieve the forty foot height, a lot of Hollywood magic was used. The ten foot ramp was made to expand to thirty feet. A cage was designed to place at the top of the ramp so when the horses climbed thirty feet, they just walked into the cage. Footage of the assent was run back to back to make the assent appear long. Then a mechanical person on a mechanical horse, with the footage of the real audience all set against drawings of buildings in the background, made the jump appear to be forty feet. The jump is shown in cuts with only leaving the board and entering the water being the real horse jumps. The lead horse playing Lightning always made beautiful dives. However, the horse playing Redlips always twisted to the side when he jumped making it easy to fake a bad dive in the story.

But my very favorite part of the description of the training of the horses for the movie is this:

The tank at the compound had to be blocked off when not in use because the horses and dogs on the ranch would run up and jump off on their own when there was no training being done.

They apparently enjoyed it.

All this was for the movie, of course. We don’t know if the horses for the earlier dives at amusement parks were chosen and trained in the same manner (progressing to greater heights, however). But it makes sense that they were. As one of the riders said (quoted in my previous post on the subject):

Some people say they must have forced the horses to do what they did. Sonora told me many times the last thing anyone would want was to be up on a tower with a horse that did not want to be there.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a play on the old joke: Q—How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A—One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.]

Oberlin’s insurer is unlikely to cover the Gibson lawsuit award

The New Neo Posted on by

Oberlin’s insurer is highly unlikely to cover Oberlin’s liabilities against Gibson’s Bakery.

It makes sense; why should an insurer be liable for the willful and knowing wrongdoing of the insured? Here’s a more technical statement of the situation, written by the insurance company’s lawyers prior to the verdict:

While the Lexington policy potentially provides coverage in relation to “personal and advertising injury,” defined to include defamation and/or disparagement in certain circumstances, the Lexington policy excludes any such coverage if “personal and advertising injury” is caused “with the knowledge that the act would violate the rights of another … ,” or if the insured published material it knew to be false. Further, the Lexington policy provides coverage for punitive damages insurable by law, but only where the corresponding award of compensatory damages is also covered by the Lexington policy. In this action, plaintiffs Gibson Bros., Inc., Allyn Gibson, and David Gibson allege that defendants Oberlin and Ms. Raimondo published material that falsely characterized the bakery owned by plaintiffs (“Gibson’s”) as being a racist establishment. While such allegations potentially implicate “personal and advertising injury,” plaintiffs also alleged that the statements were published with malice, were intended to injure plaintiffs’ business reputation, and were part of a purported campaign to harm plaintiffs. If it is established that the defendants knew the alleged statements were false, or if the defendants knew their alleged acts would violate plaintiffs’ rights, the Lexington policy would exclude coverage for any resultant damage.

Of course, to many universities 11 million dollars is just chump change. Even if the award climbs to 33 million when punitive damages are included, a lot of elite universities would find this relatively easy to pay. My sense, though, is that Oberlin has had some financial difficulties even before this, and that it therefore could be a significant hit for the school.

[ADDENDUM: One possible or even probable consequence is that Oberlin sues the insurer and tries to force it to cough up the money.]

Biden: just doing what he thinks he has to do

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a great deal of discussion about Biden and his reversal on the Hyde Amendment. But I haven’t gone into it much, because I already find Biden such a loathsome character.

Maybe “loathsome” isn’t the right word. But I have long found him to be an opportunistic mediocrity who seems well-suited to politics (that’s not a compliment) and who doesn’t appear to have a deeply-held set of values. Of course, that doesn’t distinguish him from most politicians, but I didn’t say he was distinguished, although he’s got staying power and has held many many offices, including having been VP. That’s why the Democrats are pushing him; he’s their only elder statesman at the moment, or at least their most “likeable” one.

That word “likeable” often puzzles me when applied to politicians, and it’s applied often. I find Biden sort of sleazy, and he seems rather doddering lately. But apparently he has a lot of likeability to which I’m blind (as did Obama). At any rate, “likeability” isn’t one of my top criteria for voting. It’s Biden’s political stances I’m against.

But I think his political stances actually involve doing and saying whatever he thinks will get him where he wants to go, politically. Right now he wants the Democratic nomination. If he gets it, he will be a few weeks shy of his 78th birthday. That doesn’t seem to be a selling point, does it? But I see his reversal on the Hyde Amendment as his effort to keep up with the youngsters in the Democratic Party rather than anything to do with principle.

If you want to get up to speed on Biden and the Hyde Amendment, see this. It’s not just a change of mind or even a supposed change of mind (such as Obama’s on gay marriage, for example), it’s a change and a change and a change:

For starters, “abortion rights in crisis” doesn’t explain why Biden has flipped three times on this issue in the span of a month, including twice in the span of 24 hours. If he’s worried about Brett Kavanaugh and fetal-heartbeat laws, he should have switched to a no on Hyde months ago and stuck to it. I’d add that if Biden’s view of Hyde is dependent on the threat level to Roe, he should have flipped to no on Hyde decades ago, after Clarence Thomas was confirmed. The Supreme Court at the time had *eight* Republican appointees, five of whom had been appointed by Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush…

Why was the threat in the early 1990s insufficient to get him to reconsider his view of Hyde? Why is the threat now, when the Democratic Party is far more militantly pro-choice than it was then, sufficient to make him do so?

The “best” argument available to Team Biden that doesn’t admit the plain truth, which is that he’s afraid he can’t get nominated in 2019 by remaining pro-Hyde, is that he … just hasn’t thought very deeply about this issue. He remained blithely pro-Hyde for the better part of 50 flippin’ years only to have his new campaign staffers convince him literally overnight that poorer areas of the country deserve some federal sugar to keep the abortion mills running. It was the first time he devoted more than eight seconds of thought to the subject, his aides might say, and a lightbulb went off over his head.

That’s not a very good campaign pitch either, though, for obvious reasons. And it would cut the heart out of Biden’s longstanding defense of his pro-Hyde position, that this is supposedly “deeply personal” for him and a matter of considered moral deliberation.

I agree. I think it reveals Biden as what he’s been all the time. Now, maybe that’s what people want. But I don’t think it plays well with either side.