Marjorie Taylor Greene's 'gazpacho police' sums up this moment
"I know nothing." That was the response members of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner were supposed to give when asked about their secret society, which was founded in 1849.
The
fiercely anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic group evolved into the American
Party, but it will be forever remembered by another name. The "Know
Nothings" became a powerful political force, commanding the allegiance
of more than 100 members of Congress in the 1850s, as Lorraine
Boissoneault wrote in Smithsonian Magazine.
Last
week, a Republican member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, lashed
out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi, falsely accusing her of having "gazpacho
police spying on members of Congress," apparently mistaking a cold
vegetable soup from Spain for the Gestapo, the Nazi regime's secret
police. The botched reference was widely mocked on social media, and
Greene later made fun of herself, tweeting: "No soup for those who
illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the
goulash."
It
wasn't the first time Greene had reached for wildly inappropriate Nazi
comparisons. Even if she had gotten the term Gestapo right, there would
have been no excuse for comparing the Capitol Police with the murderous
agents of Hitler's Germany.
Greene's
blunder came at a head-spinning moment, when hyperpartisan politics and
the long-running pandemic have combined to produce a cavalcade of
misinformation, disinformation, ignorance, conspiracy theories and
self-defeating protests -- as if knowing nothing has become a feature,
not a bug of 2022.
"One
aspect of the pandemic experience that can't simply be explained by the
existence of an exceedingly transmissible, deadly virus spreading
between us is the sheer absurdity that it brought with it," wrote Abdul El-Sayed.
"Whether boarding an airplane with underwear on your face to protest
mask requirements, injecting yourself with horse dewormer instead of a
safe and effective vaccine or swallowing household disinfectants because
the President of the United States unironically suggested that it might
help, the pandemic has amplified the frequency and tenor of ridiculous
and sometimes alarming behavior."
Take
the Canadian trucker protests. "Now, they're impeding the Ambassador
Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, one of the most active
arteries for transnational commerce," El-Sayed pointed out. "Here's
what's so absurd about it: The protest over Covid restrictions is now
disrupting peoples' everyday lives -- which is what the protest was
supposedly aimed at stopping. They've lost the plot."
Reality of Rogan
Misinformation
has flourished on Joe Rogan's controversial podcast, which has caused
headaches for Spotify, the platform that reportedly invested
more than $100 million in the show. "Rogan's everyman persona is
attractive to millions who view themselves as fed up with perceived
liberal and conservative media biases," Peniel E. Joseph noted.
"Yet
Rogan, in many instances, amplifies partisan divides by offering an
unvarnished platform for some of the worst impulses in American culture.
From Proud Boys to anti-vaxxers, Rogan has helped spread
misinformation, furthered the coarsening of popular culture and
trafficked in a kind of racial bigotry soft-pedaled in some corners of
social media as merely the byproduct of speaking one's mind...
"Enter at your risk or pleasure (or both), but don't pretend that you don't know what you're listening to."
Trump mystery solved?
"An enduring mystery might finally have been solved," Eugene Robinson
wrote in the Washington Post. "Remember when Donald Trump ranted about
how 'people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to
once,' and nobody knew what on earth he was talking about? Maybe he was
referring to personal difficulties in trying to flush away official
White House documents."
Robinson
was referring to a report from Maggie Haberman's forthcoming book that
White House staff ran across toilets that were clogged with "wads of
clumped up wet printed paper." Trump denied disposing of records that
way and brushed off reports that his administration failed to safeguard
legally protected documents.
"Most presidents have violated the Presidential Records Act," wrote historian Julian Zelizer. "But former President Donald Trump's actions go further than previous presidents,
amounting to egregious violations of a law that came about in the
aftermath of President Richard Nixon's traumatic Watergate scandal... In
recent days, the nation has learned that Trump made a habit of tearing
up documents while he was in office. There have also been several news
reports of Trump administration staffers putting documents in burn bags
to be destroyed."
'Legitimate political discourse'
Richard N. Bond
served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1992
to 1993. So he has an informed vantage point on the world of trouble the
RNC brought upon itself with three little words. The committee passed a
censure resolution against Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger earlier
this month that described the House select committee on which they serve
as a politically-motivated effort to target citizens who engaged in
"legitimate political discourse" on January 6, 2021.
In
an open letter to current RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, Bond wrote, "At a
time when our focus as a party should be on the Biden administration and
Democrats at every level of power, you made former President Donald
Trump's unquenchable thirst for revenge against Republicans who disagree with him the political story of the week."
Recalling
the events of January 6, Bond noted, "More than 725 rioters from nearly
all 50 states have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the
storming of the US Capitol. Five deaths are directly attributable to
events of that day; approximately 140 law enforcement officers were
treated for injuries. It could take millions of dollars to repair the
damage caused by the rioters, according to congressional testimony by
the architect of the US Capitol."
As historian Nicole Hemmer
wrote, "legitimate political discourse" is "an odd way to describe the
actions of a mob that chanted 'Hang Mike Pence' as it clashed with
police before breaking through the doors and windows of the Capitol in
an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
And while, after widespread ridicule, the RNC insisted that it was
referring only to the nonviolent protesters supporting Trump's lie that
the election was stolen from him, its attempt to whitewash right-wing
violence is part of an ongoing pattern on the right... The end result of
these efforts to minimize, excuse, and erase right-wing violence is an environment that invites even more of it."
Inflation is no fun
Inflation
is not President Joe Biden's favorite topic. That's a fair conclusion
from his encounters with the media on the topic.
Last
month, he was caught on a hot mic calling a Fox News reporter a "stupid
son of a bitch" after the President was asked about the potential
impact of inflation on this year's midterm elections. In an interview
Thursday with NBC, Biden called Lester Holt a "wise guy" after the
anchor pointed out that it had been more than six months since the
President said the rise in prices was only temporary. Increasingly,
Democrats fear that inflation is hurting Biden's approval ratings and
the party's chances in the midterms.
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The
consumer price index jumped 7.5% in the 12 months ending in January, a
40-year high. Inflation is diluting the earnings of US consumers, and
the Federal Reserve Bank has signaled that it will embark on a series of
interest-rate increases which could slow the economy's growth. "The
public tends to think of inflation as an indicator of a cycle of greed
and inhumanity, as a conspiracy to rob them of their buying power,"
economist Robert J. Shiller wrote in the New York Times. "In reality, the cause is more technical, like an increase in the money supply or disruptions in the supply chain."
But
he added, "When people start to think that inflation is a measure of
collateral damage in the battle between big business and aggressive
labor -- when they blame, in effect, the wage-price spiral -- they feed
into the rhetoric of both the extreme left and the extreme right.
America doesn't need another angry political narrative that may further
erode our trust in one another, trust that we need for economic growth."
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