Opinion

I'm as sensitive as anyone to the sufferings of Afghani's now, but I've had it with the sanctimony of journalists and pundits who haven't thought about Afghanistan for 20 years – many of whom urged we get out – but who are now filling the August news hole with overwrought stories about Biden's botched exit and Taliban atrocities.

Yes, the exit could have been better planned and executed. Yes, it's all horribly sad. But can we get a grip? The sudden all-consuming focus on Afghanistan is distracting us from hugely important stuff that's coming to a head at home:

We Americans are pretty good at identifying what's what in other countries. We're pretty bad at identifying what's what in our own.

"Many Republican governors are still prohibiting mask and vaccine mandates in schools and universities, even as hospital beds are filling to capacity with predominantly young and unvaccinated people," wrote Editorial Board member Claire Potter. "Almost 94,000 cases last week were minor children. In New Orleans, a baby is on a ventilator, and in Mobile, Alabama, six kids are intubated.

Yesterday, I told you about the real fault line within the GOP and how the Democrats are hammering it to its breaking point by speaking the truth. While the GOP's radicals don't mind you knowing about its informal network of paramilitaries waiting to spring into action, its leaders and old guard would rather you didn't know. Right-wing violence exposes covert efforts to make authoritarianism nice and legal.

Don't lose hope, I said. The GOP's authoritarian takeover depends on its ability to balance both camps and their irreconcilable desires. One wants open violence while the other condemns it knowing the party's attempts to nullify democracy by way of state laws rigging elections would be exposed for what they are. Meanwhile, the Democrats are knocking the GOP off-balance by speaking truthfully. Recently House Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told Roll Call: "Call it what it is. Use the word: nullification. It is voter nullification" (my stress).

The mainstream media has historically tried to balance left and right in its political coverage, and present what it views as a reasonable center.

That may sound good in theory. But the old politics no longer exists and the former labels "left" versus "right" are outdated.

Two recent events have shed an illuminating light on who is and who isn't moral in today's world.

First, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leader in the U.S. Catholic Church and a staunch anti-masker/vaxxer, was put on a ventilator as a result of his suffering from COVID-19. Second, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations released its latest data-rich report, warning that "unless there are rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius will be beyond reach."

Peter Baker is a reporter for the Times. He said this yesterday: "The Biden team's cold political calculation is that Americans won't care what happens in Afghanistan as long as Americans are safe. To their point, today there are no front-page stories on Afghanistan in cities like Boston, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Fresno or Miami."

This is in keeping what I've been saying in the Editorial Board. Most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics. This goes double for August, that time of the year when normal people are thinking about vacations or preparing for the reopening of school. The Washington press corps barely paid any attention at all to Afghanistan, because most people most of the time stopped paying attention to it a decade ago, after the US killed the man responsible for murdering nearly 3,000 Americans a decade prior.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) circulated a memo warning that Donald Trump and his allies were stoking the threat of domestic terrorism by hyping the Big Lie. Trump was holding rallies earlier in the summer to keep his followers riled up with false claims that he is the "real" winner of the 2020 election and President Joe Biden only won through "fraud." He also spent the summer hyping a fake "audit" of the votes in Arizona. Meanwhile, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has found a second career spending all of his money on being a fascist propagandist, was pushing the idea that he has his hands on some shocking evidence that would lead to Trump being "reinstated" as president on August 13. Both claims have gone up in smoke, but they nonetheless served their main purpose: feeding anger and frustration to the hardcore Trump base. That rage then has to go somewhere, which is why DHS was concerned.

This article was originally published at Salon

Judd Legum is the editor of Popular Information, a publication focused on accountability in politics and business. He and two others posted a piece today in which they quote an unnamed "veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible."

I've been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can't get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back … In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.

It may feel like 2003 again but it's not for obvious reasons. I do, however, think Legum's source underscores a point I have tried making this week about the press corps. It's not so much fact-gathering. We understand what happened during the fiasco at the Kabul airport during which desperate Afghans did desperate, deadly things. Instead, it's acting collectively like the spokesman for America's political elite.

The clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Tina Peters, appears to have engaged in direct, potentially illegal, activities that threatened election integrity in her jurisdiction. The irony of the case is infinite — she is a far-right adherent of the big-lie movement that claims former President Donald Trump won the November election and purports to be safeguarding election integrity.

This article was originally published at Colorado Newsline

I don't think most people fooled themselves into thinking that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was going to be a great moment of triumph for America. It would be an ignominious end no matter how the last chapter was written. And regardless of the execution, it was clear that the poor wartorn country was either in for years of civil war or a swift takeover by the oppressive Taliban. (The mere fact that the Trump administration had been negotiating directly with the Taliban gave credence to the notion that the latter outcome was likely.) Nonetheless, watching the chaotic scenes from Kabul that have been blanketing the airwaves for the past week has been heartbreaking. It's hard to imagine that it could have gone much worse.

This article was originally published at Salon

Fox News host Mark Levin's new book, "American Marxism," has reached the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. But there appears to be a problem. Levin, best known as a right-wing radio host able to fly into a rage at any moment, has made repeated substantial errors when speaking and writing about the supposed topic of his book.

"American Marxism" largely concerns the supposed influence of post-Marxist European intellectuals in shaping the American left. Levin isn't the first right-wing commentator to identify German émigrés like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse as the source of a nefarious tendency in American life they often call "cultural Marxism." Those figures are collectively described as belonging to the "Frankfurt School" (although the term is somewhat ambiguous).

Four weeks from now, a right-wing Republican could win the governor's office in California. Some polling indicates that Democrat Gavin Newsom is likely to lose his job via the recall election set for Sept. 14. When CBS News released a poll on Sunday, Gov. Newsom's razor-thin edge among likely voters was within the margin of error. How this could be happening in a state where Republicans are only 24 percent of registered voters is largely a tale of corporate-friendly elitism and tone-deaf egotism at the top of the California Democratic Party.

This article originally appeared at Salon.