"Do the American people deserve to be abused like that, Mr. Fauci, because you’re not ‘Dr.,’ you’re ‘Mr. Fauci’ in my few minutes...."

"... in my time, that man does not deserve to have a license. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked, and he belongs in jail."

Said Marjorie Taylor Greene, quoted in "GOP chair reprimands Greene for refusing to call Fauci 'doctor'" (The Hill).

Contemplate the power that flows from the embrace of negative attention. It has worked for Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene has apparently decided to excel in this mode.

The givers of negative attention might want to rethink what they are doing. I will, once again, quote my mother on this subject: You'll only encourage them.

Also, I'm reminded of Barbara Boxer in her "I worked so hard" mode:

"The Ronna McDaniel Debacle and the Test for Talking Heads."

"I made the move from political operative to media analyst. Here’s how it can actually work."

Writes Jeff Greenfield, at Politico. Greenfield is "a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst" who moved from political operative to media analyst way back in the 1970s.

"Mr. Hawley’s challenge is not unprecedented... Democrats in both the House and Senate challenged certification of the 2004 election results..."

"... and House Democrats tried on their own to challenge the 2016 and 2000 outcomes, though without Senate support. ... Senator Barbara Boxer of California... briefly delayed the certification of George W. Bush’s victory... cit[ing] claims that Ohio election officials had improperly purged voter rolls... which Mr. Bush carried by fewer than 120,000 votes. Nancy Pelosi, then the House Democratic leader, supported the challenge.... The House voted 267 to 31 against the challenge and the Senate rejected it 74 to 1...  After the 2016 election, several House Democrats tried again, rising during the joint session to register challenges against Mr. Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in various states. The Democrats cited reasons ranging from long lines at polling sites to the Kremlin’s election influence operation."

From "Hawley Answers Trump’s Call for Election Challenge/The Republican senator said he would object to certifying the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, a move that is unlikely to alter President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory" (NYT). 

So... in the last three decades, every time a Republican won, Congressional Democrats challenged the certification of the election, and every time a Democrat won, Congressional Republicans did not challenge the certification.

That certainly puts a different light on what Josh Hawley is doing!

Either challenging the certification is the norm or it is not. It can't be the norm for Democrats and abnormal when a Republican does the same thing. Either Congress has a role in looking into the workings of the state elections or it does not. It can't be that the role is to question Republican victories and rubber-stamp Democratic victories.

I can see — in the NYT write up — the basis for arguing that there actually should be a lopsided role. To fill out something I elided above: "In challenging those results Democrats cited claims that Ohio election officials had improperly purged voter rolls and otherwise disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters in the state...." 

The argument that's hinted at is that there should be heightened scrutiny where the challenge has to do with discrimination against a traditionally discriminated against group. 

Who's too scary now? Bernie Sanders.

That's the memo. From The Sacramento Bee:

A lot of Democrats don’t want to admit it, but Donald Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate playing with fire and recklessly courting an angry mob. For the latest round of curse-word hurling, chair throwing, social-media stalking and conspiracy-theory swapping, look no further than the supporters of Bernie Sanders. Over the weekend, dozens of Sanders devotees lost their minds after the Nevada Democratic Party, meeting for its convention in Las Vegas, awarded a majority of delegates to front-runner Hillary Clinton. Convinced that the establishment had rigged the rules and that Sanders delegates had been excluded for unfair reasons, they booed and traded barbs with people on stage, including Clinton surrogate and keynote speaker U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer....

Since Hillary Clinton is not exciting, it needs to be the case that the others are too exciting — they're lunatics.

"Is [Carly Fiorina] really, truly so filled with rage? Probably not."

"When she ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in 2010, she was a moderate, pro-business Republican. That erstwhile profile would get her nowhere in this year’s presidential race, however, when everyone is scrambling to get to the right of everyone else and 'moderate' is a dirty word. One has to wonder if the showy posture of ultraconservative anger isn’t the biggest lie of all."

Writes Eugene Robinson.

I wonder if Hillary Clinton is watching Fiorina's rise and trying to learn something about how a woman can present herself in an exciting, compelling way. Robinson, I suspect, would only like to say that it's those terrible Republicans who respond to anger, but Democrats are responding to Bernie Sanders and he always sounds and looks angry. (Take any video of him, pause it randomly and repeatedly, and marvel or giggle at how every freeze frame is another angry face.)

And on "Meet the Press" the other day, when asked whether Hillary Clinton is "in tune with the mood of the electorate," Andrea Mitchell said no, because "She's not angry enough." Mitchell seemed to think it would be too hard for Hillary to feed the hunger for rage: "[I]t's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, 'She's shrill,' which is a sexist word, let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders."

If Carly can do it, why not Hillary? Carly undermines that pro-Hillary sexism argument, that if Hillary displays emotion, she'll be judged according to standards that are only imposed on women. There are reasons for a candidate to eschew the anger mode, but Carly makes it harder for Hillary to claim she must be flat and bland lest people see her as a screeching harridan.

Through a YouTube interview with her grandson, Zach Rodham, Barbara Boxer announces that she won't run for reelection in 2016.

I'm not going to criticize the bad acting that fails to disguise the scriptedness of every word of this. I've only got one thing to say, and I think you know what it is.

Man in shorts! Why in the holy hell is this man — sitting across from his coiffed, bejeweled, and heavily made-up matriarch of a grandmother — wearing shorts? Why is this video framed to include his bulgy, hairy knees squarely in the middle of the long shot? It's winter, and there's a fire blazing in the fireplace.

Do me a favor? Could you put on some pants instead of shorts? It's just a thing. She worked so hard to become your grandmother, so I'd appreciate it. Yes, thank you.

3 Pinnochios to "Barbara Boxer’s claim that GOP budgets hampered Benghazi security."

"[I]t is almost as if Boxer is living in a time warp, repeating talking points from six months ago that barely acknowledge the fact that extensive investigations have found little evidence of her claim that 'there was not enough security because the budget was cut.' State Department officials repeatedly told Congress that a lack of funds was not an issue. Instead, security was hampered because of bureaucratic issues and management failures. In other words, given the internal failures, no amount of money for the State Department likely would have made a difference in this tragedy."

Writes WaPos Fact Checker Glenn Kessler.

Ted Cruz's office says "in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of 'critical legal studies'..."

"... a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans."

That's in response to a New Yorker article quoting something Cruz said in a speech 3 years ago. (What Cruz said back then, at an Americans for Prosperity conference, was that when he was at Harvard Law School "There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.")

The Cruz spokesperson called it "curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it 'news.'"

Curious... there's a noncommittal word. I don't see anything wrong with digging stuff out of old Cruz speeches. He's a new character on the national stage, so it's not like old territory is being reworked. It was an inflammatory statement, and he needs to stand by it (and back it up), defend it as hyperbole, or concede he was wrong.

Attacking the aggressive Ted Cruz when Liz Warren simultaneously hits the Senate in full aggression mode.

Big Media is hot to wreck Ted Cruz. Here's the NYT piece: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack and Raises Bipartisan Hackles." Oh? Bipartisan has hackles? Well, then I guess those bipartisan hackles are also raised by Elizabeth Warren. Here's HuffPo: "Elizabeth Warren's Aggressive Questioning Prompts Anger From Wall Street."

The NYT forefronts this quote from Barbara Boxer:

“It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,’ and, of course, nothing was in the pocket,” she said, a reference to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s pursuit of Communists in the 1950s. “It was reminiscent of some bad times.”

Boxer didn't name names, but the NYT wants us to know that referred to Cruz, but why not Warren too? Because the NYT wouldn't have structured its rhetoric that way if it had known that a new Senator from the Democratic Party was going to go into attack dog mode the day they published the piece?

In just two months, Mr. Cruz, 42, has made his presence felt in an institution where new arrivals are usually not heard from for months, if not years....

In a body known for comity, Mr. Cruz is taking confrontational... sensibilities to new heights...

Ha ha ha. Cruz, that clod, doesn't know the comity tradition. Meanwhile, here comes the brilliant Harvard lawprof, and she's not meekly conforming to the be-seen-and-not-heard routine. So how are those hackles doing now — those bipartisan hackles — raised... or lying flat and flobby?



Hackles? More like hacks.

For comparison purposes.

Are those comediennes funnier than these?

And let's try to think deeply about gender politics. There's something distinctive about the argument — coming from females — that we will withhold sex unless you give us something we want. The argument, even as joke, assumes the audience grasps the notion sex is not intrinsically valuable to women. It's currency to be used to purchase something else.

In contrast to the idea of women exercising power by withholding sex is the idea that men seek political power to get sex. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" is something famously said by a man who looked liked this:



That's Henry Kissinger in his younger days. Think he would have had much political success saying do what I want or I won't have sex with you? No. It was the other way around for him. By acquiring power he became seductive.

Perhaps men have had such success reaching high positions of political power because of their sexual drive. If sexual energy propels their climb to power, it's surprising women ever win elections. Why bother? I mean, really. Why bother? They must really want political power as an end in itself. And... well, there's this:

Rick Santorum on feminism and abortion.

From his book "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good":

It is obvious that for [women who feel regret], abortion was not a liberating choice. These women and many others say abortion was a last resort, or that they felt they had no other choice. It is a decision, often born out of loneliness and desperation, that can cause a lifetime of suffering.

Alice Paul, the feminist author of the Equal Rights Amendment, was right when she said, “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”

"Top stylists from New York to Hollywood told me their liberal clients are guiltily requesting the Bachmann Look."

Forget politics! They love her hair:

"A lot of clients have asked for Sarah Palin hair in the past four years, and now, it's Bachmann," says Andi Scarbrough of Byu-ty Hair Therapy in L.A. "Politicians are the new celebrities, because they're real. They didn't just spring up out of the red carpet."

However, she admits, "I have women who come in with photos with the face cut out sometimes."

"She has great coppery color that warms her up a little bit," said Angelo David at his E. 43rdSt. salon, who confirmed a spike in copycat requests for the candidate's look. "Not everybody wants to look like Kim Kardashian."

Bachmann's style "is safe, but not soccer mom. It's sexy," said Alma Qeraxhiu at her AlmaG Salon and Spa on E. 21st. St.

"I have found it a little bit amazing how many women have been coming in asking for her hair style, even though they don't agree with her politics."

Having the best hair is an important step. If  you're betting on who will win in politics, you'll come out ahead, I think, if you always pick the candidate with the best hair. Male or female. But with female candidates, the hair can be a distraction if it's not resolved into a predictably sensible yet pretty style.

(Remember when Carly Fiorina said Barbara Boxer's hair was "so yesterday"?)

"It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title."

David Zucker — direct of "Airplane!" — directs a little campaign ad called Call Me Senator":

Was Carly Fiorina, talking about Barbara Boxer's hair, guilty of what Robin Givhan calls "style bullying"?

Givhan writes:

[S]tyle encompasses far more than good looks. In fact, it trumps beauty because it's rooted in deep cultural knowledge and self-confidence. Style is an expression of choices -- a declaration of individuality. And thus, the lack of it is not a matter of poor genetic luck. It is, a particularly judgmental soul could argue, your fault....

[I]t can make others feel terribly old-fashioned and parochial by comparison.... Women -- and men -- use style as a tool of intimidation, self-promotion and belittlement all the time. U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina's off-topic remark about Sen. Barbara Boxer's hair caused quite the explosion when it was captured by a live microphone. Fiorina quipped that Boxer's hair was "so yesterday." Fiorina has said she was quoting a friend, but her tone oozed delight in the observation as she happily repeated it...

Fiorina's words weren't, by any means, vulgar or angry. Indeed, she had the cutting tone of a gossipy girlfriend who knows a thing or two about hair travails. But as she gently fingered her own chic pixie, while relaying an insulting description of Boxer's hair, the polite smile never faded from her face -- until she realized her microphone was on. She bore all the earmarks of a style bully.

Givhan concludes that Fiorina was making an indirect but effective political argument that Boxer is out of step with the times. But let's take a closer look at what was really going on. Rewatch the short clip and think about whether what we are really seeing is a woman "ooz[ing] delight" because she thought her hair was "chic" — a "chic pixie" — and the other woman's hair really was so much worse. Does Fiorina even agree with the friend she quotes? Watch carefully, and keep in mind that Carly Fiorina was only quite recently bald (as a consequence of cancer treatment):



It's a bit hard to tell unless you look for it, but I'm looking after hearing a friend, a cancer survivor who lost her own hair, insist that what we are seeing is a cancer survivor's humorous attitude about hair. I now think that Fiorina stopped in the middle of an anecdote when someone off camera signaled for her to shut up, but that if she had gone on, she would have made a self-effacing/sarcastic wisecrack about her own hair along the lines of: Oh, yes, because my hair is so today, if by "today," you mean not utterly bald.

The gesture she makes at her own hair, just before she clams up, is not, I think, a mean girl's I'm-so-gorgeous primp. It's comic business that would have fit amusingly with the wisecrack that was never cracked. My friend, a woman who, like Fiorina, has recently regrown hair, feels sure she has the ability to recognize a shared dark humor about hair that women who have not gone through the experience don't pick up on. Hair is a big deal to women, and our ears perk up when we hear talk about other women's hair. Givhan explores that with good sensibility, but I think she, like many others, is judging Fiorina without a full understanding of the context.

On the other hand, Fiorina's private psychodrama is a bit beside the point when she's running for the Senate. She's got to get these things right and not give her opponents material to use against her. In that light, it doesn't matter what the explanation is, because she's running for office, and she needs to do that competently.

And speaking of context, this is funny:

"Men who go there are branded pigs. Gals who do it are denounced as catty, bitchy perpetuators of a system that fixates, unjustly and insultingly, on..."

... on hairstyles and, generally, the way women look. Michelle Cottle is ruminating over what Carly Fiorina said about Barbara Boxer's hair and, more specifically, how Carly tried to save herself from opprobrium by playing the breast cancer card:

“My goodness, my hair has been talked about by a million people, you know. It sort of goes with the territory.... Especially when you don’t have any hair. As you remember, I started out with none.”

Fiorina also likes to say things like: “After chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer isn’t very scary anymore.”

While overcoming any serious disease can make for a compelling political narrative, beating breast cancer is a struggle that resonates with, and makes a candidate more relatable to, women in particular....

From a purely strategic perspective, the heroic cancer narrative is hard to counter. ...

Invoking a breast cancer battle as a kind of character testimony is one thing; brandishing it as a partisan weapon is more problematic....

This kind of naked exploitation is risky—as is Fiorina’s using her survivor status to deflect criticism when she makes a bush-league mistake like Hairgate. But if the candidate can avoid such heavy-handedness, her more subtle invocations of her cancer battle could prove devastating in her fight for California women in particular.

Should a candidate can talk about his or her diseases? I remember Paul Tsongas doing it well, many years ago. It made him look sympathetic and strong... at least until it turned out he was actually too ill:

If Mr. Tsongas had gone on to win, America would now [in 1992] have a President-elect stricken with a debilitating, conceivably life-threatening disease....

When Mr. Tsongas' health became an issue during the primaries, his doctors at first said he had been free of all traces of cancer ever since, suggesting that the radical procedure had cured him. Only after he dropped out of the campaign did they acknowledge that he had suffered a "localized relapse," suggesting that the cure may not have been complete.

Now a cancerous growth has been found in Mr. Tsongas' abdomen....

Tsongas died of his cancer in 1997.

Exploiting one's cancer is a self-limiting political enterprise.

"It almost feels as if all these women winning are kind of a blow to feminism."

"Because, each one of them, really, most of them, are, you know, very much, uh, uh, you know, against so many of things that women have fought for such a long time."

That's Tina Brown trying to babble her way to saying something that makes sense. Watch the video at the link. I think she realizes in the middle — at the "you know, very much, uh, uh, you know" — that after invoking the big idea "feminism," she doesn't know how to say the right thing about feminism. It's not right to say according to feminism, women aren't supposed to be Republicans, so she can't say that. What then can she say? She goes with the weak, mealy-mouthed "against so many of things that women have fought for such a long time." So many of the things, eh? What? And fought for such a long time — as if women are supposed to — what? — adhere to traditional values and not make waves?

And what about the idea that there is variety within feminism and vivid debate about what is good for women? George Stephanopoulos pushes Brown with "Well, you could argue they're different kinds of feminists...." And Brown settles in to the routine partisanship that is easy to spit out clearly: "Women, too, can be wing nuts, is the point." Yeah, that's cogent and clear. Funny too. Brown's attempt at a point about feminism was flabby blather because it was dishonest. "Women, too, can be wing nuts" — she's telling it straight now and shows it with the kicker that it's "the point." Thanks for abandoning your pretense of intellectual analysis for some plain politics. We get it, Tina. You're a liberal. You don't like when strong candidates emerge on the other side. And you have nothing interesting or insightful to say about feminism. Noted.

And speaking of the poverty of feminist analysis on "Good Morning America," the discussion turns immediately to Carly Fiorini's comment about Barbara Boxer's hair:

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...Carly Fiorina after the election, getting caught on tape....

CARLY FIORINI: Laura saw Barbara Boxer briefly on television this morning. And said what everyone says. God, what is that hair? So yesterday....

BROWN: You know what I love about it so much? It's like, as we were saying... it was great that it was gender-neutral. Then, all of a sudden, you've suddenly switched to absolute claws come out. And it's like — the women. What really killed? It was so yesterday. It wasn't just women. It was rich women. That's the point.

Oh! Brown is declaring something else to be "the point." I'm not sure what, though. Rich women. Stephanopoulos cuts her off and crashes headlong into what will be the next underdeveloped topic (that Fiorini and Meg Whitman were CEOs). Presumably, if given a little room, Brown would have spouted some class politics about hair. Think of all the middle aged women who heard the rich lady's catty remark and looked at themselves in the mirror and saw a overgrown, undercolored, Boxeresque mops of hair and wondered if they could squeeze enough dollars out of the family budget to make a trip to the salon. Boxer's floppy, grizzled tresses will get knotted up with the heartstrings of California working women.

But Brown didn't get to say that, because it was time — fast-moving "Good Morning America" time — to opine about whether America could admire a corporate CEO these days. As if Hewlett Packard and eBay were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

How to choose between 2 female candidates?

Who's got better hair?

"Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am? It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title."

It's just a thing! And another thing is that a sharper, abler... ma'am is eager to undo all the hard work:

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and GOP candidate Carly Fiorina have already started sharply attacking each other and offering a preview of what could become one of the most compelling Senate races in the country this fall.

"In her 28 years as a career politician, Barbara Boxer is a bitter partisan who has said much but done little," Fiorina said in speech full of barbs at Boxer as she accepted the GOP nomination Tuesday night here. "She gets an A in politics, but she gets an F in achievement."....

Boxer, meanwhile, is one of the more liberal members of the Senate and voted three years ago against a war funding bill that did not include a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. She is one of the key backers of the climate change legislation in Congress and has voted for almost every part of President Obama's agenda in Washington...

In 2007, in criticizing the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, she highlighted the fact that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice didn't have children, drawing ire from conservatives.

"Who pays the price?" Boxer asked Rice at a hearing while discussing families who might send their children to war. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

You may have a title, but you don't have an entitlement.

"It's not a good sign when their anointed choice for Senator, a well-known three-term incumbent..."

"... loses 20% of the vote in their own primary against a couple of complete unknowns--after two transcontinental trips by President Obama to support her."

Mickey Kaus, about Barbara Boxer, to whom he had to concede.

"We are going to do that"/"Yes, we can!"

Here's President Obama stumping for Barbara Boxer and interrupted by hecklers demanding the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Obama turns on some charm and says "We are going to do that," and the crowd starts chanting "Yes, we can."



Now, I interpret the "Yes, we can" chant as sarcastic. You say you "are going to" do something, but why haven't you done it? You ran for office telling us "yes, we can," and you got the power of the office, so you've had time to demonstrate your vaunted capacity to do things. To tell us now that you will do something in the future isn't good enough. Sarcastic, right? If not, it should be.