Looking at the "Most Read" list at The Washington Post this morning, I think he might win that bet.
How many Maryland workers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Grandma wants a hug. Covid's still percolating in the dumbosphere. And a lady lost a footrace.
America curls up and gets cozy. That virus is going after Republicans who sorta deserve it. The birdies didn't deserve the murderous workers. Are we getting our snuggie-wuggles from the kiddies? Feeling better to know that the runner who didn't run in the Olympics probably wouldn't've won anyway?
It's comfy to tsk at the Gramma who loves too much, the unvaccinated dead man, the Mississippians buying their medicine at the feed store, the workers who killed birds.
It's manageable caring. Shed a tear for a bird and another bird! Keep it up, and Joe's bet is won.
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@Althouse, it’s the Washington Post, for Pete’s sake! Think about what kind of person reads the Washington Post.
I share what I perceive as your hope that we care enough to pay attention and not look away while the evidence of the scale and depth of the consequences of Biden's decision continues to roll in. How far will the the entity often defined as "the Cathedral" go to protect Biden, the people who put him in place and run him today, and thereby protect itself from responsibility for the ongoing disaster? Events are approaching a point where a binary decision will have to be made whether to allow dissent or double down on the efforts at repression and cancellation.
Your later post from the NYT regarding the horror of current events gives me hope that the transformation into Pravda is not yet complete. The best strategy for us mere mortals is to leave a record, and I hope that someday someone will peruse this comment thread to find out what we were thinking while history got made.
The sunrise over the St. Johns this morning is a wondrous thing to behold. God loves us and wants us to be happy, if only we can.
I would imagine the vast majority of WaPo are intentionally avoiding stories about the Afghanistan debacle. I used to do this when I was a kid; if my favorite sports team was winning, I would read multiple news stories about them. If they were losing, I had a personal media blackout - who wants to read about how pathetic the Packers played yesterday?
I think it's a safe bet that WaPo readers are strongly team Biden, and they don't want to have to think twice about that. It's not going to make them happy to see they may be supporting the wrong team, so it's Sandra Bullock in Bird Box the whole way.
Just my two pennies.
Biden’s public relations program is based on Stockholm syndrome. You know you can’t leave me fat, you better put some ice on that Afghanistan slaughter.
Althouse writes, "How many Maryland workers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Grandma wants a hug. Covid's still percolating in the dumbosphere. And a lady lost a footrace."
Fortunately, WaPo is deeply and deservedly distrusted. America is disgusted with Biden, and Bezos and Company are powerless to save him from political extinction.
The Resident of the United States will resign "for health reasons" before the next Congress is seated, leaving the feckless Kamala Harris to reap the whirlwind all by her lonesome.
or, the WaPo is intentionally skewing results
And once again -- and it gets tiring -- a comparison to Trump needs to be made: If DJT had been the sitting President with all this s**t hitting the fan, we all know exactly how the media would play it. Must be nice to be Joe...
I scan/read 2 metro daily papers, Baltimore Sun and Tampa Bay Times. Total of 2 stories in Sunday editions about this ongoing debacle and humanitarian crisis. THAT’S how the story goes away….like Hunter, just stop covering it, works every time.
@Althouse, had the editors of the Post checked, you and they might have discovered that the government of India has been using the drug Ivermectin to combat Coronavirus since mid-May, apparently with considerable success in reducing the death rate to near-zero levels. This has been verified by numerous peer-reviewed clinical studies — something on the order of sixty studies, last time I read.
There are only three plausible hypotheses: (1) Ivermectin works, though no one in the scientific community knows why; (2) COVID-19 Delta variant is not at all dangerous and the citizens of India would have survived no matter what drug they took; or (3) all those clinical dtufies are a hoax and the medical researchers who performed them don’t really exist. Of course if (1) or (2) turn out to be true, then what are we to make of the American medical establishment’s insistence on masks plus vaccination —even for people with natural immunity by having suffered COVID-19 and survived it?
Ospreys are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). The MBTA prohibits the purposeful take or attempting to purposefully take any migratory bird, nest, and eggs or parts thereof, unless permitted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service). To Take is defined as, to pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, possess, or collect any migratory bird species, their nests or their eggs. The Chesapeake Bay Field Office is responsible for evaluating impacts of projects or activities on migratory birds in Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Also, see April 11, 2018 Guidance of the recent M-Opinion affecting the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (PDF).
1. All nests are deemed inactive from September through February when ospreys are at their wintering grounds in Central and South America. Inactive nests do not need a migratory bird permit or permission to remove nests.
One place I worked had possession of a rehabbed Owl and Hawk. When I was told I had to sign the paperwork for MBTA, I read up on it. The feds take it VERY seriously.
You may well be right about the audience who reads the Washington Post, but I'd bet the opposite across most of the country.
No, no, no! It’s not just that the readers of the Washington Post are mostly hardcore Democrats, though they mostly are. It’s that the city of Washington, DC, and it’s suburbs are a “company town,” and that “company” is the federal bureaucracy. It’s close to what Baker wrote upthread, but the point is that federal bureaucrats are not all that interested in reading how they and other bureaucrats massively screwed up on an epic scale. The bureaucrats who did the screwing are friends, neighbors, parents of their kids’ BFFs, perhaps former colleagues who now work at DoD or State. Reading about that monumental bureaucratic failure, that hurts, man!
Richard Nixon came back - to some extent - from his resignation. Running Biden for reelection in 2024 would be ridiculous but it was ridiculous before the Afgan withdrawal. People may be able to ignore or forget Biden's mistakes, but few people are going to willingly tie their futures to vocally supporting him.
Politico is on board with WaPoo's strategery. Their top headline was about Al Sharpton and the Delaware court system.
That was four or five days ago!
The official motto of the Democrats has become, "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?"
My husband has been doing this exercise ever since Kabul feel: checking headlines on Fox vs CNN. You have had to scroll a loooong way down on the CNN app before you got to anything about Afghanistan.
I don't have either app so I leave it to him. But it's awfully easy to win a bet like Biden's if the croupier is using your cards. (And if the house considers your win its win - which would be why the croupier is using your cards.)
His propagandists will keep it up, but how many more events are going to come hot and fast past him now that other actors have taken his measure? And what reckless action will Biden take to regain the initiative? I fear that Afghanistan will be just one thing in a long list of monumental failures.
WaPo readers aren't what they used to be. But then, neither are the WaPo reporters. Or editors.
Trump had tens of thousands show up in Alabama to listen to him talk for...what?...an hour and a half? More? I didn't watch, but skimming the net late last night saw he was still speaking. Amazing.
When you pair up images of the crowds at a Trump rally vs a Joe Biden speech- any JB speech from the last two years, it's not even close. And when you consider Joe is in hiding, told not to speak, told not to utter any words not written down, while Trump can speak off the cuff for hours, it makes you wonder how they managed to produce 83 million ballots for Joe.
But, while WaPo was investigating an unproven livestock dewormer in Mississippi as a covid carrier (and not large parties in Martha's Vineyard) Trump was getting ready for his next run. And not one mention of it on any national TV news source. No coverage, no talk of it.
They can try to censor this going forward for a couple of years, but it will not matter this time. Change is going to happen. WaPo can be a sideline observer.
Confirmation bias is my guess.
Stockholm Syndrome is a close second.
Reading about the birds demonstrates empathy that the Afghan people would ordinarily deserve.
m stone
Just imagine the difference if Trump were sitting in the White House right now.
The progressive propagandists figure if they don't report it, it didn't happen. And the gullible line up to fight anybody who questions why.
The old "If it bleeds, it leads" is true only if the blood is someone else's. No one wants to see their own foolishness and mistakes and disasters on page one. Or anywhere else.
Did either of these news giants treat their readers to the story that led both the UK Telegraph and the Times of London, namely, that former PM Tony Blair called Biden’s actions “imbecilic”?
This isn’t going to end soon, and it is going to get worse. I wonder how many of those stranded Americans are children of the elites working for NGOs?
And people don’t get news from NYT and WaPoo. They get confirmation of their beliefs. And I think any Dem will carry NY and DC.
I may have finally figured it out reason for lack of empathy in cultures
so called First World countries >>> callousness + luxury as excuse
Third World countries >>> callousness + misery as excuse
Well as noted elsewhere the Taliban have always paid close attention to western media and they may have their own opinion on how to shape the news. After all they are already staging propaganda photos using US military uniforms and gear as props. Although they outlaw jokes and tomfoolery it’s obvious they know how powerful mockery is as a geopolitical tool. They will have input on our news cycles and the Joe-fluffing USA Media won’t stop the signal.
Everyone is ultimately expendable to the regime. They just need to tell themselves the right story, then they can move on feeling ever so good about themselves. They will be watching the Afghanistan coverage closely until that story is provided. When it is, there will be a collective sigh of relief as their cognitive dissonance resolves and they will be on to the next grand scheme.
Two things:
1. The people getting their news from the WP aren’t the average American.
2. Wait until the horror stories… beheadings and other atrocities, start appearing in the foreign media. American media will suppress these stories, but there are still moral, ethical, honorable people who ply their trade elsewhere.
I'm skeptical that an item on Sha'Carri Richardson coming in last in a sprint was a "Most Read".
Nor is is it a "Must Read".
Do I wonder why they would push/plug that non-story? Nope.
WaPo readers predominantly voted for Biden*. They are averting their eyes from Afghanistan and hoping desperately that the Maladministration somehow pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Deep down, they know that this debacle is on them. I didn’t vote for him. My conscience is clear. My hands are clean. I can sleep at night.
Looking at the "Most Read" list at The Washington Post this morning, I think he might win that bet.[Image]
It is all over but for the crying.
Harris will not finish out the four years.
The question is how much of the elite's control infrastructure survives the coming catharsis.
I would not be too confident in any state funded retirement programs. Most of these are just subsidies for rich but not wealthy people everyone hates. Even the money in your personal accounts will be strongly eroded by what is to come.
And Biden isn't betting anything.
He is actually pleading for help.
You just have to actually watch him and read between the lines. People suffering from dementia are at times aware of their plight.
Particularly when pumped full of amphetamines.
We have access to foreign media and alternative information sources.
Sky news is telling the horror stories. The killings and be-headings have begun.
I am not even onto substack yet.
This will work for intellectual shut ins and gullible losers.
But most Americans are not willing to ignore the fact that the entire world has a pretty good grasp of what is going on or that what is going on right now reflects as pathetic and cowardly.
"They will have input on our news cycles and the Joe-fluffing USA Media won’t stop the signal."
Yep. The administration is as much a prisoner to the Taliban's intentions as anyone trapped in Afghanistan.
Well he has gotten away with the invasion of the United States from the southern borders. So he has a good track record to rely on from the democrat propaganda machine.
"Keep it up, and Joe's bet is won.""
After the fall of Saigon, it would be 16 years before another major US military intervention a foreign country. Yes, there was the debacle of Beirut in 1983. Yes, there was a much-hyped "rescue" operation in Grenada. But the stench of Vietnam hung long and strong until George H W Bush drew a bright red line in the sand between Iraq and Kuwait.
That's when the US got its "mojo" back.
Afghanistan never became quite the quagmire Vietnam was, but it was long and expensive and wearisome, and its end has been a far greater disaster than the fall of Saigon. I hope the stench lingers long after that grisly old grifter of a president is gone. He doesn't deserve to live long enough to see it lift.
Does anybody really think that 'most read' is really most read?
It is pretty obvious that 99% of the media is in the tank for the Dems.
Twitter has all sorts of trending garbage that is either manipulated by woke algorithms (same at Google) or flat-out placed there at the behest of the Twitter gods.
They only show us want they want us to see. To believe otherwise is to be extremely naive...
@RoseAnne: "Running Biden for reelection in 2024 would be ridiculous . . . "
It was ridiculous in 2020, but thank God for fortified elections.
Reality is different than you perceive it to be, Ann. 'Most read' at WaPo is not a reflection of society.
Well, ospreys are cuter than Afghanis, so who would you rather read about?
And they were only euthanized. It's not like they were beheaded, or trampled to death.
Resident Biden has been lucky there's a pandemic going on, to deflect attention from Kabul.
It was obvious leftie politicians and legacy media would be emboldened by what they've managed to pull off. I wasn't prepared for them to be so tested so strongly so soon in their reign. If Ann's on to you...
Consider that the NSA intercepts every electronic communication in Afghanistan, that the USA has had the power to interdict every shipment of material to the Taliban from Pakistan, and that Pakistan harbored OBL a few miles from their military school, and then ask yourself how to make sense of this.
Whatever else may be true, the Taliban offensive was not a surprise to the US. Some group high in the US defense establishment allowed this to happen, probably to mollify US ally and nuclear power Pakistan.
1: What makes you think that the WaPo does not monitor and edit their "most read" section to meet their political biases?
2: The swing voters who decide honest elections are not the same class of people as those who read WaPo online. So an honest "most read" section still wouldn't tell you anything about what the people who will decide any honest election care about
3: I am intensely furious about the Biden* Admin's utter fuckup in Afghanistan, and the stain they've placed on America's honor. I'm also not reading any articles at the WaPo online about it, or much of anywhere else.
The situation is utterly screwed. No one in the Biden* Admin is going to make it better. Reading about it just makes me sick to no purpose.
I will still remember in November.
And so will a lot of swing voters who have better things to do with their lives than to make their heads exploded with anger
Amadeus 48 said...
This isn’t going to end soon, and it is going to get worse. I wonder how many of those stranded Americans are children of the elites working for NGOs?
A lot of them. And their parents tend to be amoral familists, which is to say they care abotu themselves, their families, and nothing else.
It will be interesting to see how many ways those parents take it out on the Democrats, once their precious little children do NOT come back alive and in one piece
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