Michael Avenatti, champion of the #MeToo movement, arrested for domestic abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

And the liberal media has been strangely reluctant to cover this much.

Here’s the story:

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels and one of President Donald Trump’s chief antagonists, has been arrested on suspicion of felony domestic abuse, multiple senior law enforcement officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

Officers in West Los Angeles responded to an incident involving Avenatti, and he was detained in the process of taking an incident report, the sources said. He was booked into jail but released on $50,000 bond Wednesday evening.

The charges are, as they say, “credible.” But you know what? Unlike CNN and the others, I’m consistent. I have no idea whether Avenatti is guilty, and he deserves the same protections that all others accused deserve and yet often do not get—and that includes those who have been his clients’ targets in the past.

Maybe someday Florida will learn how to run an election—but I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till it does

The New Neo Posted on by

Then again, maybe the Florida powers-that-be are running it exactly the way they want to.

You may have noticed I’ve not run many posts about this, even though it’s a big story. Here’s what I’ve written so far. And for a sampler of recent articles by others, please see this, this,and this.

Last night I watched a little cable TV for a few minutes, something I rarely do these days. I saw an interview with Marco Rubio (on Hannity? I can’t recall) about Florida. Rubio’s been on this since the moment it happened, tweeting up a storm and raising the alarm before most people were paying attention.

Last night in the few minutes of his interview he was completely articulate and even quite eloquent about it, which reminded me that Rubio is very good a great deal of the time, although every now and then he’s really not. It seems like a long time ago that we were evaluating candidates in the lead-up to election 2016, and I remember thinking that Rubio would have good crossover appeal.

I still think that’s true, although there is no doubt in my mind that had he been elected, he would have made more compromises about conservatism than Trump has so far. There’s also no doubt in my mind that the MSM would have attacked Rubio (or any other Republican who might have won) vigorously on all fronts. But would the attacks have stuck to him as much as they do to Trump, in the minds of more moderate voters such as the ones who handed Democrats their victories earlier this month?

Yes, I know that Rubio’s much softer on immigration than Trump. And yes, I know that some on the right detest him for that. I’m not arguing otherwise; I’m saying something different, something that’s not primarily meant to be about Rubio. During 2016 I happen to have thought—and I still think—that many of the GOP candidates had a chance to beat Hillary handily, and that Rubio might have scored a bigger victory over her than Trump did. Many, if not most of you, probably disagree.

But my next point is that although the MSM would go after any of those people—including Rubio—mercilessly, I don’t think the charges would have gotten the same sort of traction among a certain type of in-between voter as the charges against Trump have. Trump has a core of very intense supporters, but like it or not, fairly or not, his style turns a lot of people off and makes them susceptible to MSM propaganda about him and about Republicans who support him. Staunch conservatives may be able to hold their noses and vote for him, or overlook his personal style to vote for him, but people with a shakier interest in what he has to offer politically (such as the appointment of very conservative judges, or putting up a good hard fight) are far more likely to hold their noses and vote for someone else.

I don’t have any polls that prove it. I don’t even know if what I say is factually true. But it’s something that occurred to me last night (and at other times as well), as I watched a politician explain a problem in a simple yet forceful and clear way.

It didn’t have to be Rubio doing this. This post isn’t really meant to be about Rubio at all, it’s about styles of communication and how they affect people. Reagan, for example, was a good blend of conservatism and the ability to talk about it clearly and agreeably and yet forcefully, without being too pugnacious. Reagan hit the sweet spot of pugnaciousness; he was just pugnacious enough and plenty charming enough. And people vote for candidates because of personalities as much as anything else.

None of this kept Reagan from vicious attacks from the press and others, including the repeated charge that he was a dunce. But he also was called the “teflon president” because his personality and style were such that the charges couldn’t gain much traction.

What will happen in Florida next? I’m not totally reassured by those who say not to worry. I’ve been plenty worried, because I’ve seen votes dwindle down before, and I’ve seen election results suddenly switch, nearly always to the Democratic side. I have zero trust in the integrity of the Broward County officials who are in charge of this, but I do have faith in their political creativity.

A change for the kilogram

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re planning to redefine the prototype kilogram:

During ceremonial weigh-ins that take place every few decades, when reference copies of the International Prototype Kilogram are flown in from around the world and compared to their distinguished forebear, the IPK has been found to have lost around 50 micrograms in mass, roughly equal to a single eyelash. Of course, because the IPK is the definition of the kilogram, it can’t technically lose or gain weight. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that the rest of the world has been getting slightly heavier.

Ah, that explains my inexplicable weight gain over the years.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t. But I’d love to be able to blame the kilogram. I never much cared for the metric system.

To metrologists these fluctuations are no more than an embarrassing gaffe. They don’t seriously undermine the legitimacy of the international metric order, but they do spoil the ambience of infallible metrical precision. With the redefinition on Friday, the age of physical artifacts — and its attendant imperfections — will be left for good. “We will transcend this messiness,” says Schlamminger. “We will be basing units on the fabric of the universe: on the heavens, so to speak.”

The article goes on to explain how this will be accomplished.

The fast-warming ocean—oh, wait a minute

The New Neo Posted on by

The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.’

Recently there was a big climate change article published in the prestigious journal Nature that got a lot of publicity, because it found that, alarmingly, the ocean temperatures have grown hotter more quickly than was previously thought to be occurring.

Now we learn that mistakes—some of them rather obvious, apparently—were made in the researchers’ calculations [emphasis mine]:

The findings of the Resplandy et al paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media. Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.

That was published in a piece by Nic Lewis at Judith Curry’s blog, a site I’ve recommended several times before as being one of the best, and fairest and most well-balanced, on the entire issue of climate change.

The author of that quote says the errors were “surely inadvertent.” No doubt some of you may disagree, but I don’t. If someone was going to fudge results, the errors wouldn’t be so blatant that someone could find them so easily, on a quick perusal of the first page. My guess is that that wouldn’t be the way to go about a purposeful deception.

So, what happened? I think that set and expectations probably did play some role, but an unconscious one, in the researchers’ initial error. It’s not really all that surprising, although it’s something researchers must assiduously guard against. But to me the more interesting question is: what about the peer-reviewers who approved the article? They are the ones you might think ought to be more clear-sighted, more eager to spot errors, more objective about they were reading.

But they were not. And that was probably because they did not want to see them and therefore they got sloppy, a function of confirmation bias. People are less likely to question something that accords with their already-existing worldview. I don’t think they knowingly passed on an article full of obvious errors, because they would have known that opponents of their point of view would be combing the article for mistakes and would almost undoubtedly find them if it had been poorly done.

And perhaps they also knew that the state of human-caused climate-change science is such that all findings of its opponents are labeled unscientific hogwash put out by propagandist “skeptics.” However, at least the authors of the study have admitted their error, which just shows you how egregious it must have been.

The split tickets and the votes for governor

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Mike K asks:

I am still interested in why Ducey, in his race for governor got 1,241,028 votes and McSally got 1, 059, 124 votes. That’s almost 200,000 votes more for the GOP governor than for the GOP Senator. Some may well be crossover Democrat votes but I wonder how many Republicans voted for Ducey but not McSally ?

And Kyndyll G posits what is essentially the same question, although it’s phrased as a statement:

Sinema is a known far left nutjob who ran on “pre-existing conditions” and “look, some normal people don’t hate me so now I must be a moderate.”

Why anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat straight tickets voted for her is a mystery.

It’s a mystery I’d love to clear up, but I don’t have the definitive answer. However, I’ve long noticed the phenomenon, and not just in Arizona.

For example, in the state of New Hampshire in this past election, the Democrats won in Congress but the Republican governor was re-elected handily, about 53 to 46. For the 1st district in the US House, the Democrat won by about the same margin, and in the 2nd district the Democrat’s margin was even greater. Why the split? And again, this is something you see in many states, not just Arizona and New Hampshire. Even Massachusetts, the bluest of the blue, sometimes has a Republican governor (it does at the moment, and he was re-elected, although—or probably because—he’s no conservative, and in fact has many liberal aspects).

Charlie Baker, the current governor of Massachusetts, is very popular in the state: “As of October 10, 2018, Baker had a job approval rating of 70%, the highest approval rating of any governor in the United States.” Described as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, even the ultra-liberal Boston Globe endorsed him in 2014, saying this:

One needn’t agree with every last one of Baker’s views to conclude that, at this time, the Republican nominee would provide the best counterpoint to the instincts of an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature

Some polls have his approval rating so high that he’s the most popular governor in the United States. I don’t have the answer as to why, although I do know that Massachusetts periodically elects Republican governors to rein in the fiscal spending when things seem to get out of hand (Romney, for example, was elected mostly to take on that task). But Baker is more wildly popular than most of them have been.

Perhaps people generally want their governors to be somewhat fiscally conservative and yet want the feds to give them lots of perks and “free” stuff. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. But I also think that a great many elections—more than we realize—turn on personalities. If someone is just the kind of person people like, and his or her opponent is more off-putting on the personal level, people will vote for the former over the latter.

Plus, promises go a long way. Leftists promise to be moderate, for example, and certain electorates seem to fall for it every time, a la Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football.

Are white people becoming a minority?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it depends how you define “white”:

In 2015, more than 17 percent of marriages in America were across “racial” lines. It is the reality of ethnic intermarriage that will add critical weight to the conservative argument for cultural assimilation, just as intermarriage in America between immigrants of various European ethnicities propelled cultural assimilation ala the “melting pot” in previous centuries.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post published a fascinating article headlined, “The Demise of the White Majority is a Myth,” by USC public policy professor Dowell Myers and his political scientist colleague Morris Levy. “Under a more expansive definition that counts as white anyone who so identifies (even if they also identify with another race or ethnicity),” Myers and Levy write, “the white population is not declining; it’s flourishing. The Census Bureau’s inclusive projections show a white population in excess of 70 percent of the total for the foreseeable future.”…

Watch out, professional race hustlers. Your entire livelihood is “rooted in outmoded notions of racial exclusivity.”

Based on demographic data that Myers and Levy cite, when one uses the inclusive definition of white, America is destined to remain around 75 percent white for decades to come. Using any other definition renders unsustainable the Leftist strategy of identity politics. How can they continue to carve out preferential treatment for “people of color,” if nearly everyone is mostly “White,” yet qualifies?

That’s exactly what the recent Elizabeth Warren DNA brouhaha suggests: if someone with only a tiny bit of genetics from a certain group can claim to be a member of that group, then nearly all of us can, and what happens to preferential treatment then? It goes out the window because there are too many candidates for perks.

Personally, I have long detested identity politics and I would prefer that every single person be treated as an individual. But our educational system, MSM, arts, entertainment business, and legal system (and I’ve probably left something out) all seem increasingly dedicated to the opposite goal.

[NOTE: I focused on a single aspect of the article that gave me the idea for this post. But it’s not the main theme of that article, which began with a discussion of the fact that posters going up at various colleges reading “It’s Okay to be White” have been condemned and removed as hate speech, because they are sometimes supported by white supremacists.]

Why McSally lost and Sinema won in Arizona

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to boil down to the fact that McSally wasn’t a good candidate and ran a pretty poor campaign.

[NOTE: The linked article assumes that Sinema’s victory wasn’t the result of fraud. It’s always possible that it was, although on the whole I don’t think that was the case for Arizona. In Florida, however, so far I think there is a definite attempt by Democrat to win by fraudulent means, and that attempt may even be successful despite current legal challenges to it mounted by Republicans.]

Through the fire: a town called Paradise

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You may be surprised to learn that there are a lot of towns in America called “Paradise.” Twenty-six, to be exact.

Or maybe it’s twenty-five now, because one was destroyed in a single day by an inferno that swept through it, leaving almost nothing.

Maybe it will be rebuilt. Some residents sound determined to do so. But whether or not it manages to rise from its own ashes, the town in California called Paradise is now famous for the day it ceased to be.

This particular Paradise was in certain ways a rather ordinary town of rather ordinary size, population 27,000. It boasted the usual churches, schools, fast food places, and the like. But its setting on a ridge between deep canyons was spectacular, and the drive called Skyway from Paradise to nearby Chico was impressively beautiful.

But a town is a community, too, and the community of Paradise—although dispersed at the moment—lives on.

Like me, you may have watched videos made by residents of Paradise and surrounding towns as they fled the fire in their cars, driving through scenery that was anything but paradisiacal: walls of flame on either side, sky black with smoke and red/orange with flame, wind-whipped embers coming at the car with seeming malevolence, heat that threatened to melt tires and metal and everyone inside. Even viewing the videos from afar on a little computer screen, and knowing that those people who took these particular videos survived, the scenes are intensely terrifying.

And of course it’s hard not to think of those who didn’t survive, and what they went through before they died and in their deaths.

What do the people in these videos do? Some pray. Many curse and yell repeatedly in intense frustration at the drivers ahead of them to move, move, MOVE. Men try to calm wives and children and hide their own fears. And they drive—drive through a landscape out of Dante, where they can barely see the road ahead of them, and where downed power lines and falling trees just add to the seeming impossibility of the journey.

I don’t know how they did it. I am glad I didn’t have to do it. I don’t know if I’d have been up to the task. These people were, though.

Here’s a video of a father driving away with his two sons. There are many other videos, but this one made an especially deep impression on me, perhaps because of the family dynamics. The sons, whose ages remain unspecified, demonstrate two different personalities. One seems to manage for the most part to stay relatively calm and optimistic, the other is more doubtful and fearful. Their father is a hero, and somehow remains wonderfully reassuring as he drives through a nightmare landscape in flames (this was taken in the middle of the day). Stick with it till the end for the final question the more fearful boy asks:

The father writes at YouTube:

I was born in Paradise 47 years ago and always told my 4 kids that Paradise is safe from flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes, the only thing we had to worry about was a fire. But that would never happen. Well it happened. Paradise is now hell. We had 15 minutes to get out and lucky enough my entire family is safe including our two dogs Coco and jet and our bearded dragon. We lost everything else. Please keep us and everyone from Paradise in your prayers.

There is a GoFundMe page for him. If you go to this webiste, you’ll find information on how to make more general contributions for the fire victims. In addition, blogger Gerard Vanderleun, who was displaced by the Paradise fire and is currently living with his near-104-year-old mother, can be helped by hitting his tip jar.

This is the song that’s been coming to mind for me when I think of what happened to Paradise. The visuals in this video are about a somewhat slower process of dislocation from a town, but the sentiment of nostalgia and loss is there:

Beauteous interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Philip” brought up the composer Dvorak in the comments of a previous thread today, and I replied by adding video of a well-known Dvorak string quartet known as the “American Quartet,” which has long been one of my favorites.

I loved it so much, listening to it again, that I thought I’d highlight it in a post of its own. What is it about this music that conveys such wordless emotion?

And why “American”? Dvorak was Czech, but he wrote the piece in 1893 during a stay in America as director of the National Conservatory in New York:

[Dvorak] spent his [summer] vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. Dvorák had come to Spillville through Josef Jan Kovarík who had finished violin studies at the Prague Conservatory…He told Dvorák about Spillville, where his father Jan Josef was a schoolmaster, which led to Dvorák deciding to spend the summer of 1893 there.

In that environment, and surrounded by beautiful nature, Dvorák felt very much at ease…

Dvorák sketched the quartet in three days and completed it in thirteen more days, finishing the score with the comment “Thank God! I am content. It was fast.”…The American Quartet proved a turning point in Dvorák’s chamber music output: for decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. In the American Quartet it finally came together. Dvorák defended the apparent simplicity of the piece: “When I wrote this quartet in the Czech community of Spillville in 1893, I wanted to write something for once that was very melodious and straightforward, and dear Papa Haydn kept appearing before my eyes, and that is why it all turned out so simply. And it’s good that it did.”

I think what I respond to in the piece is indeed its many gorgeous melodic themes, and yet I don’t think it stints rhythm, either.

And so, without further ado, I bring you:

Camille Paglia, women, and #MeToo

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interview of Camille Paglia appearing in Quilette. The entire thing is worth reading, but here’s one of her most interesting statements [emphasis mine]:

As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.

But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils , godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.

Paglia then goes on to discuss #MeToo and Kavanaugh:

The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed.

During the Kavanaugh hearing, I discussed the parallels to the Furies, as well. And the hearings were worse than “dismaying,” and I guess the whole thing was startling, but it was not really surprising. This is the way things have been going for a long time, and decades of talking to friends of mine has convinced me that a vast number react to politics and sexual offense accusations in a very emotional manner. Therefore I agree that this entire phenomenon has “has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality,” but what it really has done is even more extreme. It hasn’t just resurrected those stereotypes; to a certain extent it has actually tended to validate them.

I say that with great sorrow and a sense of horror. And I certainly do not think that women should not be allowed to vote. But not only have I been observing this phenomenon of all-too-common irrationality in women for a long time, I’ve also observed that a small but vocal number of women say this makes women superior to men, because rationality and due process are the inventions of privileged white guys and therefore bad.

I will add that the last couple of decades have brought home to me the irrationality not just of so many women, but of so many men as well. And that seems to be increasing, too. I have no way to measure the relative rationality of each sex as a group, or the numbers of those who display it. But I have noticed a great deal of emotionalism and a great lack of rationality in both sexes. And I find it highly disturbing and troublesome, although I’m not suggesting we all should become like Star Trek’s Spock (that would create other problems).

There is a great deal of overlap between the sexes on the emotional/logical axes. But it is my observation—anecdotal and fragmented though it may be—that the dominance of emotionalism over rationality is indeed at least somewhat more common than women than in men. But as I said, it’s pretty prevalent all around.

That same issue of Quillette contained another article on #MeToo that is well worth reading. It demonstrates how the movement has helped false accusers create “credible” scenarios. The example used by the author occurred in Canada, but it certainly is not limited to Canada:

The #MeToo movement, along with other previous movements and hashtags, has opened up vast resources online that help victims of sexual assault seek justice, network with allies and other survivors, and recover emotionally from their trauma. This is all to the good. But as Chloe’s case helps demonstrate, these same resources can also be used as tools to create a realistic backstory out of whole cloth.In 2016, a young British woman admitted, after just a few minutes of cross-examination at trial, that she had manufactured a sexual-assault complaint against her father, using the lurid plot of Fifty Shades of Grey as her source material. The father might well have been convicted if he hadn’t mentioned to his lawyer in passing, just a day before trial, that his daughter’s favorite book was, by his recollection, “about a millionaire who takes a young woman under his wing and ‘teaches her about art.’”

Likewise, if Chloe hadn’t promoted her interest in sexual-assault prevention on social media and recorded videos about her activism, how would the evidence in her case have come to light? The prosecutor and police reportedly didn’t research any of this in detail before the case went to trial; and when issues were raised by the defense, the Crown made no effort to examine or provide exculpatory evidence. Indeed, the court transcripts indicate that the prosecutor’s behavior was so outrageous that the judge warned about possible contempt charges. Yet this episode produced no social-media outrage, despite the fact that a likely innocent man might easily have gone to jail.

One of the reasons the Kavanaugh hearing energized so many women (and others) on the right to support Senate Republicans in the 2018 election is that it was a graphic example of how easy it is to “credibly” accuse an innocent man, and how even someone with a sterling previous reputation such as Kavanaugh is highly vulnerable to a woman who tells a good story in a believable manner, even without corroborative evidence, without important details such as time and place, and even though the events the woman alleges to have occurred supposedly took place many decades ago. It was a chilling prospect for anyone who believe in due process, the rule of law, and rationality over emotion when making a judgment about an issue so important.

Did John McCain kill the House in November of 2018?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why would anyone say that? After all, McCain was already dead when the election occurred. And he’d been in the Senate anyway.

But I have had the same thought as that expressed in this WSJ piece (at least, the first few sentences of the piece and the headline; I can’t get behind the paywall to read the article).

Here’s how it went:

The Republican Party lost its House majority on July 28, 2017, when Sen. John McCain ended the party’s seven-year quest to repeal ObamaCare. House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats. On the second try, we passed the American Health Care Act in May. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the “skinny repeal” killed the reform effort.

I already have written on the matter, and I reproduce it here [bold indicates quotes from links; the rest of the indented and italicized paragraphs are my own commentary]:

…[O]ne of the final reasons that many on the right feel a great deal of anger at McCain, his July 2017 vote against so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare:

…[McCain] stunned his party when the final vote was at hand early Friday when he voted “no” and killed the legislation.

In the process, the maverick dealt what looks like the death blow to the Republican Party’s seven-year quest to get rid of President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law.

Along with McCain, GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Democrats in the dramatic 51-49 vote rejecting the bill despite intense pressure from the White House…

Before voting, McCain would not say how he would vote, but told reporters to “wait for the show” as he arrived in the Senate chamber.

Note that last paragraph. It was not just the vote itself that rankled—although that was bad enough, considering how long and hard the GOP had campaigned for the repeal (whether you think they were serious or not), and the fact that McCain himself had campaigned in 2016 on a promise to repeal Obamacare [written in September of 2017):

McCain did run [in 2016], as Trump is drumming, on a strong repeal-and-replace platform. In fact, it was the principal distinction he drew with his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick. He would vote to repeal Obamacare. She would not.

McCain did not say that he would vote to repeal Obamacare, provided Democrats agreed. If he had, his Republican primary with Kelli Ward might have turned out differently.

McCain now says that Democrats made a mistake in passing Obamacare on a partisan basis, and that Republicans shouldn’t undo it on a similarly partisan basis. But that’s the equivalent of a Brezhnev doctrine on domestic policy. Democrats can enact legislation on a partisan basis. But Republicans can undo it only if Democrats agree.

McCain is undoubtedly correct that bipartisan policy changes are more enduring. But when one side acts unilaterally, it shouldn’t get a veto when the other side attempts to undo it.

More importantly, there is no bipartisan agreement possible to repeal and replace Obamacare, as McCain vowed to do. That’s because there is no Democrat willing to agree to the first step, repeal.

It was not just the complete impracticability of McCain’s stand, its divorce from political reality, that rankled, although that was the major thing (I wrote about it here). It was also the seeming hypocrisy of his campaign promises vs. his later actions, as well as the theatricality of failing to reveal his vote in advance and telling reporters to “wait for the show.”

These things did seem characteristic of McCain, at least some part of McCain, although somewhat exaggerated. But I have one caveat to offer when thinking about this episode, and that’s the fact that McCain had already been diagnosed with a glioblastoma and had undergone a three to four hour brain surgery about two weeks prior to the vote. Though widely reported to not be suffering from any cognitive decline, this is part of what led to his diagnosis:

He also told his doctor he had, at times, felt foggy and not as sharp as he typically is. In addition, he reported having intermittent double vision. These symptoms and doctor intuition prompted a CT scan.

A brain tumor can affect a person in global and obvious ways or in subtle ones. Perhaps McCain’s tendency towards what, for want of a better word, we’ll call maverickyness was accentuated by brain changes accompanying both his illness and his surgery. So personally, I think that all the decisions he made post-brain-tumor should have an asterisk next to them.

Note also that McCain wasn’t alone among Republicans in voting against the measure. Collins and Murkowski joined him. However, it was McCain’s vote that counted and was purposely dramatic. Had he voted “yes,” the tally would have been 50/50 and Pence could have broken the tie.

Did McCain’s “no” cause the GOP to lose the House? Maybe. If so, however, it was certainly misplaced anger on the part of any GOP voters who stayed home because of it. The fault was the Senate’s and McCain’s, not the House members’ at all.

I’m actually not at all sure it mattered in terms of the outcome in the House in the 2018 election, however. First of all, the Democrats had history on their side; there is almost always a big gain for the opposition party in the midterms. Secondly, I think voters were already very negative in polls on all the GOP’s proposed bills. Every single one (and there were many) had generally gotten terrible press from the MSM, and even many Republicans were against them.

Would the passage of this particular bill have mattered? At the time of McCain’s “no,” I wrote this about the bill and its flaws as well as its opportunities:

Here is [McCain’s] statement [on why he voted “no”]; you can read it and judge it for yourself. On the surface, this sort of thing makes sense:

The so-called ”˜skinny repeal’ amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker’s statement that the House would be ”˜willing’ to go to conference does not ease my concern that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time.

The idea that the details of a “replace” bill should be ready to go when “repeal” is passed, and that we shouldn’t trust promises that it will be taken up in a timely fashion, seems sensible. The problem is that this was originally tried, and it couldn’t pass, either.

The “skinny repeal” bill was a compromise arrived at in order to get the negotiations to continue, including probably some changes in the House. “Skinny repeal” was a Sancho Panza bill, as it were. McCain is the Don Quixote here (that is, if you think he’s sincere—and many people would say he’s not).

Here’s an example of what he’d like to see happen, taken from his statement on the reasons for his “no” vote [emphasis mine]:

I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict-party line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people. We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve.

Everything except that highlighted bit is possible, but bipartisanship has gone the way of the dodo and “reach-across-the-aisle” McCain fails to realize it (although if you think he’s insincere, you’d amend that to say he realizes it and doesn’t care because this is all a pose on his part). The problem is that McCain’s own voting “no” on the skinny repeal is probably the best way to ensure that none of the things on his list will be happening.

So McCain’s “no” was very effective in blocking further action on Obamacare repeal, and although I’m not sure the GOP wouldn’t have lost the House anyway had the Senate passed “skinny repeal” (for example, could they have actually passed an effective and popular “replace” bill in time?), I am sure that the failure of the GOP in Congress to do anything about Obamacare when they controlled the legislature, after all the promises they had made, did in fact hurt them in November of 2018. Whether it struck the fatal blow for the GOP-dominated House—or rather that blow would have landed anyway—I do not know.