This is How You Become a Card-Carrying Member of the Republican Party
PLUS: A review of "Happier Than Ever" by Billie Eilish
New York Representative and Chair of the House Republican Conference Elise Stefanik bestowed this Twittergem upon us last week:
Today’s Anniversary of Medicare & Medicaid reminds us to reflect on the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families. To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes.
You’re darn right, Stefanik! Once socialized medicine takes root in the United States under the guise of a “humanitarian project,” the government’s going to come in and take over everything else and then before you know it our kids won’t be able to decide where to go to school or what they want to be when they grow up and we’ll all “spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” No less of a conservative than Ronald Reagan said that way back in 1961 when he was opposing a socialist healthcare scheme that would go on to be called—well, this is awkward—Medicare.
Republicans have been using “socialism” as a “scare word” at least since Harry Truman called them on it way back in 1952 so we might read Stefanik’s tweet as nothing more than some run-of-the-mill political nonsense. It’s the other nonsense she’s been spewing recently that’s got me thinking she shouldn’t be entrusted with political power in Washington DC. At a news conference prior to the House’s first hearing on the Capitol riot, Stefanik—whom House Republicans made chair of their conference last spring after they cancelled Liz Cheney for insisting that Donald Trump incited the Capitol riot—declared, “Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as Speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6.” According to Stefanik, Pelosi should have taken it upon herself to boost security on Capitol Hill that day. Never mind that the Capitol Police Board—not the Speaker—is responsible for assessing and arranging security for Congress and that the Speaker’s control of the Capitol campus is shared with the Senate Majority Leader, who at the time was Republican Mitch McConnell, whom Stefanik did not blame.
It also begs the question, “What exactly should Pelosi have secured the Capitol from?” If Stefanik means the angry mob stoked by Trump and egged on by Republican members of Congress for weeks with lies about the validity of the election, I’d say the responsibility for that mess clearly falls on Stefanik’s side of the aisle, unless Stefanik is arguing Democrats can’t be trusted with political power because they don’t do a good enough job cleaning up the messes Republicans make, which, if she is…anyway, just imagine how outraged Republicans would still be if Pelosi had ordered the National Guard to pre-emptively secure the Capitol that day. Nancy Pelosi’s unconstitutional suppression of these peaceful patriots’ rights would have sent Jim Jordan into the conniption to end all conniptions.
Granted, Stefanik did call 1/6 a tragedy, but it’s worth remembering some GOP members of Congress still maintain Capitol security overreacted that day; for instance, Andrew Clyde of Georgia [seen screaming at the far left in the photo below as insurrectionists come close to breaching the floor of the House on 1/6] thought the rioters behaved as though they were on a “normal tourist visit” with “people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos and pictures.”
Now I can tell you as a “normal tourist” who has visited the Capitol complex on multiple occasions that I’ve never entered the building through a window or by deploying a battering ram against a cordon of police officers. It’s always involved unlocked doors, metal detectors, and an orderly security screening process. Also, the only time I’ve ever been on the floor of the Senate was during a lovely tour of the Capitol conducted by the wife of Senator Chuck Grassley and I can say my presence there did not require any senator to take shelter in a secure location. So, yeah, it is kind of hard to know when exactly some of these Republicans would have wanted Nancy Pelosi to call in the Guard. I can only guess.
While Republicans can seem pretty ambiguous when it comes to their position on rioters taking over the Capitol building, we do know one thing they absolutely hate to see in the halls of Congress: Facemasks. With the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant leading to a massive surge in cases in the United States, the House physician re-imposed a mask mandate in the People’s Chamber last Wednesday. Now it should be noted this surge is concentrated almost entirely among the unvaccinated, and that while there have been a few mostly mild breakthrough cases among the vaccinated, vaccines do an excellent job staving off serious illness, hospitalization, and death. There was also concern last week at the CDC that vaccinated people could catch and transmit this variant of the virus, but many have questioned the validity of the data that led to that conclusion. Still, out of an abundance of caution, the CDC is recommending all people wear masks indoors in areas with high infection rates.
The new guidance, however, was too much for Republican congressman Chip Roy of Texas, who went on FOX News Friday to call “Pelosi’s mask mandate” a “line in the sand.” Interestingly enough, Roy had drawn a line in the sand just a few months earlier when he had refused to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That upset Trump’s base, so he, like Stefanik (also an early critic of the former president) has been looking for ways to reingratiate himself with the MAGA crowd. He found a way to do just that after the House physician re-imposed the mask mandate. “Shut this place down,” Roy proclaimed during a passionate floor speech on Wednesday, adding, “We can’t come to the floor, I can't execute my constitutional duty, unless I wear a mask. Which is it, vaccines or masks? Do the vaccines work or they don’t work? Do the masks work or they don’t work? I'd like to know which it is.” (The House physician probably has a brochure on that.) Roy—who will not disclose whether or not he has been vaccinated—then led a march to the Senate, which had yet to impose a mask mandate. There he and his Freedom Caucus colleagues inhaled—and exhaled—air unfiltered by cloth. It was the sort of bold exercise of personal liberty we haven’t seen in this nation since Ren McCormack taught the children of Bomont to dance. “We’re a free country and I am going to act like it and will defend the freedom of Americans and my staff to do what is in their interest,” Roy told FOX News. Wait until he learns the Capitol cafeteria has a “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” rule.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reacted to the mask mandate by saying, “The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” which is weird because a.) I don’t understand what is so “threatening” about masks; and b.) I would think the last thing Biden and his “liberal government officials” would want to do is “live in a perpetual pandemic state” since they want the political credit for ending the pandemic. Eventually it's going to dawn on Republicans they can hurt Biden politically by screaming the pandemic isn’t over while wearing a face mask, but that logic’s got to circle the drain a few more times before it goes down. By the way, when Nancy Pelosi got wind of McCarthy’s comments, she called him a “moron,” which is a good example of a Kinsley Gaffe.
In a statement last week, Donald Trump—who nearly died of COVID himself after attending a maskless indoor event last fall—listed five specific “terrible socialist programs” Democrats would enact if Republicans helped them pass the infrastructure bill; of those five, the only one that got the all-caps treatment from the former president was “MASKS.” Now it is fair to debate the science—both biological and behavioral—behind mask-wearing during this stage of the pandemic, but for many Republicans, the debate over masks just seems like a way for them to rehash the politics of 2020. Unfortunately, many Republicans live in areas where the pandemic is worse than it ever was last year.
The current surge in cases is on track to be the second-most severe spike of the pandemic (although deaths are remaining relatively low so far) with some states experiencing their most severe spike yet. In Louisiana, for example, the state’s largest hospital is so full (due to COVID patients) and under-staffed (due to COVID-positive medical care workers) that they can no longer adequately serve non-COVID patients who show up in their ER. (Here’s what that hospital’s chief medical officer had to say about that.) In Florida, where cases and hospitalization rates are nearly as bad as they were this winter, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is charging forward with re-opening plans and has forbidden mask mandates in schools once classes resume in a few weeks. (Maybe kids won’t have to raise their hands to talk anymore either; teachers are fascists.) Meanwhile, Florida Man and suspected pedophile/sex trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz told a crowd in the Sunshine State this past weekend
You’ve had all the experts say look out for the delta variant or the lambda variant, well next it’ll be the Chi Omega variant or the Pi Kappa Psi variant. I got the Florida variant. I got the freedom variant. It affects the brain. It gets you to think for yourself where you don’t just surrender to the truth that they’re trying to create in corrupt big media.
Florida, home to 6.4% of the United States’ population, accounts for 20% of the nation’s new COVID cases. As for the idea that “corrupt big media” is feeding the citizenry a line of bull when it comes to the pandemic, consider the case of Nashville conservative radio host Phil Valentine, who told his listeners only those with underlying health issues should get the vaccine. (“If you're not at high risk of dying from COVID then you're probably safer not getting it.”) He’s currently hospitalized with COVID, with a machine doing the work of his lungs and heart. His family says he regrets downplaying the severity of the virus.
About a month ago, a Missouri state representative from the Kansas City suburbs told his followers on Facebook he had contracted COVID. He finished his post by writing, “And no, we didn’t get the vaccine. We’re Republicans 😆” One of the more perverse consequences of Republicans’ dismissing vaccine and masking recommendations is that more of their own voters will get sick and potentially die from the virus. Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer recently investigated this idea in an article titled “Why the GOP Wants to Kill Its Voters.” He came up with four reasons: To sow distrust in government, and specifically Democratic government; to hurt Joe Biden’s political standing; to squeeze as many supporters as they can out of fringe social groups like anti-vaxxers; and to drive up engagement on Facebook, where vaccine conspiracies run wild and are major attention-grabbers. “It’s not a good or moral strategy,” Pfeiffer wrote, “but it is a strategy.”
Pfeiffer added, “It is a massive indictment of our politics and media environment that such a cynical and dangerous approach is not the death knell for those who adopt it.” You would think all this would doom Republicans’ chances in the next elections, but many think Republicans are on track to regain control of Congress in 2023, since the party opposite the president almost always makes gains in midterm elections. John Stoehr isn’t so sure though:
History seems to be on the side of [presidential] backlash. It happened in 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2014. If you’re a betting person, backlash is a sound bet. But history does not repeat itself. None of these midterm backlashes happened in the wake of an incumbent having his ass handed to him, nor in the wake of an attempted coup d’etat, nor in the wake of a once-in-a-century pandemic that will kill a million before it’s over because the losing president’s supporters keep sabotaging the recovery. The Republicans, in going all-in with a losing president, seem to be hoping the electorate has a very short memory. Matter of fact, the Republicans seem to be banking on the idea that history is as stuck in time as the Republicans are stuck with a losing president.
We’ll see. A lot is going to hang on the redistricting process, which Republicans control in states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Andrew Sullivan wrote this week that when it comes to managing the pandemic today, “the obviously correct public policy is to let mounting sickness and rising deaths concentrate the minds of the recalcitrant. Let reality persuade the delusional and deranged. It has a pretty solid record of doing just that.” It’s a cold, demand-driven calculus, but I’ll admit he may be right; vaccination rates are ticking up again across the country. All it took was a lot of needless and predictable suffering. I’m kind of getting tired, though, of one party having to learn lessons the hard way before finally doing what should have been done weeks or months or even years ago.
Yet if recent events have taught us anything, Sullivan’s “delusional and deranged” are numerous and not easily persuaded by that thing called “reality.” Reality may not even matter to them. Alexandra Petri, the humor columnist for the Washington Post, got serious in an article she published last week after Elise Stefanik pointed the finger at Nancy Pelosi for 1/6:
The point is that the specifics don’t matter; what matters is that we are being told, blatantly, repeatedly and without shame, that we simply did not see what we saw, and we are expected to go along with it. This is an exercise in power, to see how malleable our reality really is.
This craziness isn’t just about trolling the libs. Embracing all this absurdity—even when entrusted with the responsibilities of public office—is also a way to openly pledge your allegiance to the tribe. If you insist Nancy Pelosi is responsible for the Capitol riot or that masks are pointless and vaccines don’t work and the virus isn’t that bad despite everything you’ve witnessed and your own awareness of the very clear personal risk this sort of willful ignorance entails, that makes you a member of the club. It demonstrates your loyalty to the group. It makes you a Republican 😆.
Photo credit: Kevin McShane; Bryan Smith
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Top 5 Records Music Review: Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish
A major trend in pop music for the past decade or so has been interiority. This development can be attributed to the propagation of the iPod, cellphones, and earbuds, which have made the listening experience predominantly private rather than public. Music isn’t meant to be blasted out of windows or cars anymore; it’s meant to be projected directly at the ear drum and at the exclusion of others. The result is intimate, high-definition music that draws attention to its subtly detailed and often sparse production. Even club music like trap, with its crisp, rapid-fire beats, rewards close listening.
You can hear this trend in the work of artists like Drake, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Frank Ocean, or the xx (whose music is whisper thin) but no mainstream artist has pushed it further than nineteen-year-old Billie Eilish, whose sophomore album Happier Than Ever was released last Friday. Eilish’s 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, snuck up on listeners who may have assumed its #1 hit “Bad Guy” would just become the latest one-hit wonder generated by the music industry’s assembly line of enfants terribles. But When We All Fall Asleep… was surprisingly good, a sonically cohesive album whose whispered threats to burn everything down from the inside reflected either her devilish nature, her sense that this world deserved the torch, or her awareness of her own immaturity and fragile mental state . The work would lead her to a deserving sweep of the four major categories at the Grammys. As for the bouncy but sedated “Bad Guy,” it was just the best song of the year. (Duh.) Its thumping menace—complete with growl—burrowed into your ear canal and began living rent-free in your cranium. It kind of fit the times.
If When We All Fall Asleep… was designed to infiltrate the mental space of listeners, Happier Than Ever is an invitation into Eilish’s inner world. The mood isn’t one necessarily of intimacy but of discretion: She sings about illicit love affairs, unrequited crushes, and secret relationships founded on non-disclosure agreements. These are secrets she isn’t quite sharing, but she keeps luring us in.
Midway through the album, though, she flips the script on her listeners. Eilish had spent an album and a half explaining to the world that she was a young girl with body issues still figuring out her sexuality. The public scrutiny that came with that was too much and shook her to her core. With the interlude “Not My Responsibility” and the song “OverHeated,” however, Eilish uses her trademark microscopic sonic detail to trap listeners inside her mental space and make it uncomfortable for them to look this close at her. Suddenly, her subdued sound is too much; we’re at her mercy, bearing witness and learning the lessons we ought to know. Near the end of the album on “Therefore I Am” and the title track (see below), she starts pushes people away as the song grows louder, finally belting “just f—ing leave me alone.” It’s chastening, a reminder she wants her fans to listen to what she has to say but to remain at arm’s length. She’s an artist looking to connect authentically with others, not the fantasy you think you know.
Happier Than Ever is meticulously produced by Eilish’s brother Finneas. You can hear consonants crack and click against the roof of Eilish’s mouth; at other times, words slip out as exhalations or disappear into her lungs. Many of her lyrics are mumbled. Eilish’s vocals aren’t flashy—they’re more gray scale—but on songs like “Billie Bossa Nova” and “My Future,” she reveals a debt to slow-burning jazz singers.
Even “Oxytocin,” a surefire hit that sounds like a leftover from U2’s Zooropa, has a muted quality to it.
In other words, Happier Than Ever sounds like a synth-pop bedroom album made in quarantine, which it is. It’s meant to be listened to in the privacy of a bedroom, too, where someone can simply stare at the ceiling and soak up its vibes or dance to it without the presence of any judgmental eyes. Yet as we slowly move beyond the pandemic, I suspect listeners will begin to crave music that is more exuberant and outgoing. Perhaps the age of interiority is due to expire. It will be interesting to see how Billie Eilish—one of this era’s most unlikely pop phenoms—will respond to that challenge. But even if she continues to follow the beat of her own drum machine, she’ll likely remain a compelling artist for years to come.
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Exit music: “Happier Than Ever” by Billie Eilish