Back when she was posting as “Jane Galt” on a Blogspot blog Megan McArdle proposed something she called “Jane’s law”: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant; the devotees of the party out of power are insane.” That’s what I thought of when I read Matt Taibbi’s Substack post, “House Democrats Have Lost Their Minds”:
Wow. When I think this iteration of the Democratic Party can’t sink any lower, it does.
I learned yesterday Virgin Islands Delegate and Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government Stacey Plaskett is threatening me with prison, over her own error.
Robby Soave chimes in at Reason.com:
There’s a profound irony here. Plaskett’s likely agenda was to undermine the work of the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, and the manner in which she chose to do this was to threaten a journalist with jail time. Weaponization, indeed.
I think they’re painting with too broad a brush. Concluding that an entire caucus has become insane based on the threats of a single relatively unimportant member is a bit much.
Still I think they have a point. I think the party needs to step away from such firebrands.
Sadly, I think the days of “Jane’s Law” are long past. Both parties have some pretty insane members saying outrageous things to get attention. And we wonder why the Congress accomplishes so little.
I think the brush is not broad enough. While people still hover on what an awful person Trump was, little reasonable comparison and contrast is done analyzing the successes, failures and public policies of the current administration and the former one. Instead it’s always about the former president’s personality and presidential conduct that takes the top billing, while Biden’s forays into both foreign and domestic policy have stranded us into almost unsustainable debt, war, open border chaos, perhaps losing our status as the reserve currency, creating new enemy coalitions, and impoverished hope that things will get better. Where we are today is fundamentally because of the political insanity practiced in that little corner of our country called DC, much of it instigated by the intolerant left.
And, for every action there is usually an equal reaction, hence the coming of age of firebrands on the right to counteract the ones on the left who seemingly want absolute power over everyone and everything.
It’s the firebrands that get the press and hence the money. I bet if we check in a month, we’ll see a spike in fundraising for Ms. Plaskett.
Speaking of insane, a subcommittee called the “House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government” sounds like something out of an Orwell novel or as part of the Red Scare.
Meh. Taibbi did “make an error” or lie. Take your pick. He made a couple of other “errors”. All of the errors lined up in one direction. Was he lying, biased or just making sure the story lined up in a way to maximize attention/sales? Unfortunately this is common in journalism now so singling him out isn’t going to do anything.
It does raise the issue which people largely avoid and to which I have seen no decent answer. How should we deal with so much of the misinformation that people like Taibbi and other writers put out? It usually gets corrected but by then the damage is done. Most possible solutions have big downsides.
Steve
I’m currently in a hotel, a stop-over going to N CA. I packed Orwell’s book to do a refresher-read while out of town. The “weaponization of government†does sound rather Orwellian. But, when such an investigation into governmental practices is a worthy description of what has been going on in the Garland DOJ, then such a title might be a sound antidote to what is creeping up on the populace in this country – not a “red scare†but rather a “heads up†and “wake up†people action!
I consider the benefits of immigration and growing diversity to be extremely dangerous disinformation.
What do we do about that?
Steve seems to slander a messenger when they relay something rebuking his ideological stance or a leader of his democrat party. In the case of Matt Taibbi Steve labels his commentaries as “misinformation,†trivializing the Michael Morell story like the legacy press has done. Taibbi, however sees this lack of interest, in what otherwise is very relevant to the veracity of our government, as a media black-out suggestive of a real “Sovietization†of the news.
In Taibbi’s Racket News sub stack he goes on to explain his reasons of dismay over such a black-out:
By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.
We definitely seem to be living in an era of political double standards, which explains why so many people have simply given up on bringing the bad guys to justice, or participating in elections to vote in the good guys.