A Contagion of Cruelty

Plus: How Musk might kill Twitter

Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Happy Friday! The mid-term campaign is almost over and you’ve made it (almost) to the weekend.

Quick programming note: The weekend Bulwark Podcast will feature the NYT’s Maggie Haberman, talking about her new book, “Confidence Man,” described by Axios as “The book Trump fears most.”

Really? I asked Maggie. (Stay tuned… we’ll post later today.)

A reminder: It’s really not this far from this…

To this… “Head of Republican Party mocks speaking abilities of Fetterman, Biden.”

Because cruelty is contagious.

Ronna Romney McDaniel made her comments on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, during a discussion of about President Biden’s plan campaign with Fetterman alongside VP Harris n Pennsylvania today.

Hewitt teed up McDaniel’s shot.

“No one wants them except a doomed campaign,” Hewitt said, suggesting that Democrats around the country have asked Biden and Harris to stay away.

“I do not underestimate what the triple toxicity politically of those three can do,” Hewitt, a Washington Post contributing columnist, continued. “I hope there are cameras and microphones, because you put those three together and they could say anything, Ronna.”

“Well,” McDaniel quipped, “maybe they can get a full sentence out.”

Lest the gibe at the candidate who is recovering from a stroke be missed, she used the same line twice.

Agreeing with Hewitt (who, needless to say, did not push back), she suggested that since nobody wanted to campaign with Biden, maybe Fetterman “drew the short straw.”

“So Biden said, ‘Between the two of us, we may be able to finish a full sentence.’ ”

Get it? The old guy and the guy with the stroke who misses words? Hilarious. Monkeysinbarrelslaughoutloudfunny, right?

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As you know, I’ve generally accepted the conventional wisdom that Tuesday’s debate was a debacle for the Democrats, but perhaps I was guilty of premixture punditry. On Thursday’s podcast, I spoke with the Wapo’s Karen Tumulty, who thinks that there might be an empathy backlash for Fetterman.

You can listen here.

In an earlier column, Tumulty also wondered whether the smirking Dr. Oz had really helped himself with his performative jerkitude.

Another unknown at this point is how his GOP opponent, Mehmet Oz, already facing a goodwill deficit with Pennsylvania voters, will be judged. Oz seemed unnecessarily nasty in pressing his advantage in the debate, saying at one point during innocuous questioning about vocational education: “John, obviously I wasn’t clear enough for you to understand it.”

Fetterman himself is clearly hoping for a boomerang effect. At a post-debate rally here’s what he said:

But let me tell you, you know, he is, Dr. Oz has never let me ever forget having a stroke. Yeah, and I guarantee you, there’s people, you know, at least one person here, wanting to film this and to get more words that I miss. It’s quite an inspiring campaign to run on that kind of idea.

And let me ask you, what kind of doctor that has somebody that was sick, wants to stay sick?

And let me, everywhere, all across Pennsylvania, I do, I ask this one question. It’s a very serious question. How many one of you, perhaps any one of you, had your own personal major health challenge? And please, and please keep your hands up.

Okay. What about maybe your parents? Okay. What about perhaps a grandparent and, God forbid, even, even a child?

There’s a lot more of us to be rooting against, like Dr. Oz. And I hope that when you had those challenges with your loved ones, I hope you didn’t have a doctor in your life making fun of it or ridiculing that.

But unfortunately I do. But if we don’t do what we need to do, we’re all going to have him for the next six years on that. Yeah. And it’s another, it’s another truth, too.

By January, I’m going to be feeling even better. But he will still be a fraud.

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But don’t miss this smart piece from the Daily Beast’s Matt K. Lewis, who argues that Fetterman’s progressive allies didn’t do him any favors by running interference for his state of denial.

Rather than being open and transparent, Fetterman’s campaign sought to stonewall the press, delay the inevitable, and criticize anyone who tried to question his fitness for office—or even expose the truth about his current condition.

Much of the left — along with Fetterman’s allies in the media — went along with the strategy. But what if they had not formed a protective bubble around him? Writes Lewis:

Imagine a scenario where Fetterman’s campaign is more proactive and does that NBC News interview in mid-August, instead of mid-October. This could have been an opportunity for Fetterman to demonstrate that, despite an impairment, he could function as a U.S. senator. He could have taken this situation and used it to become something of a heroic activist for people struggling to overcome disabilities.

This scenario might have also given Fetterman an excuse to say, “Debates have become nothing but a reality show. That’s why I want to do a series of interviews,” or something similar.

Instead, Fetterman’s team did the scummy thing. They stonewalled the press. They relied on a pliant media. They shamed skeptics. It worked until it didn’t…

Lewis also makes a larger point.

In today’s world, Democrats are often (ironically) cursed by having friendly press coverage. This lack of accountability creates a false sense of reality. Instead of believing they could effectively run out the clock, the Fetterman campaign would have been better served by a press who forced their candidate’s problems into the open.

You can read the whole thing here.

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Crossing the aisle

Via the Wapo: “Republican Cheney endorses Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan race.”

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) is for the first time publicly supporting a Democratic congressional candidate, with plans to campaign next week for Rep. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.).

Cheney, who at one point held the No. 3 leadership position in the House GOP caucus, acknowledged in a statement that she and Slotkin have policy differences but cited other reasons for her decision.

“I’m proud to endorse Elissa Slotkin,” Cheney wrote. “Serving together on the Armed Services Committee, I have come to know Elissa as a good and honorable public servant who works hard for the people she represents, wants what’s best for the country, and is in this for the right reasons.”

Cheney is scheduled to appear with Slotkin on Tuesday in Lansing, Mich., for what is being billed as an “Evening for Patriotism and Bipartisanship.”

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Lucianne Goldberg, 1935-2022

Make sure you read John Podhoretz’s beautiful tribute to Lucianne Goldberg (our friend Jonah’s mother) in Commentary Magazine.

Lucianne Goldberg was—she owned the term proudly—a broad. A grand broad—big, blowsy, sexy, and up for a good time from morning till night. She was the first and the last person I ever knew to spend her days inserting cigarettes into a cigarette holder and smoking them with relish like she was attending the blowout party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

She was my dear, dear friend for 40 years.

Read the whole thing here.

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How Elon Musk Could Actually Kill Twitter

Writing in the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel sketches out the nightmare scenario:

Sources described a few nightmare scenarios that could legitimately hobble Twitter, which is still used by more than 200 million people every day:

1. Outside hackers and/or hostile foreign governments focus their hacking efforts on Twitter. Because of the massive layoffs and org-chart chaos, Twitter is unable to adequately address the attacks, causing catastrophic breaches, loss of personal information, or extended outages.

2. A stripped-down trust-and-safety team is unable to deal with government subpoenas or complex law-enforcement requests. A bare-bones team might, for example, accidentally assist outside efforts to identify anonymous dissidents and activists in foreign countries.

3. The trust-and-safety team is unable to stop coordinated efforts from fraudsters orchestrating low-level scams. Similarly, a strapped trust-and-safety department is unable to combat or monitor child-sexual-abuse material, sex-trafficking efforts, nonconsensual pornography, and copyright violations.

4. An inexperienced engineer pushes some buggy code and part of the site’s functionality goes down, but the people with expertise in that area of site reliability are not there to help restore it.

5. Musk does indeed roll back Twitter’s content-moderation rules and reduces tools for monitoring and reporting abuse on the platform. As Kate Klonick, an associate professor at St. John’s University Law School who studies content moderation, argued recently, a lack of speech governance, or a dismantled trust-and-safety apparatus, will result in a bad product, less engagement, lower ad revenue for the company, and, ultimately, more radicalized communities.

Read the rest here.

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Quick Hits

1. What It Means to Be a Republican Today

Outstanding (!) piece by Will Saletan in this morning’s Bulwark about the insurgent candidacy of Evan McMullin in Utah.

The most interesting political race of 2022 isn’t between a Democrat and a Republican. It’s in Utah, where incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Lee faces independent challenger Evan McMullin. McMullin, a nearly lifelong Republican, is conservative on most issues, so Lee can’t beat him with the usual playbook—calling him woke or a tax-and-spender or a socialist. By neutralizing the GOP’s favorite lines of attack, McMullin has reduced the race to one crucial difference between the candidates: Lee’s complicity in Donald Trump’s schemes to undo the 2020 election.

The Lee-McMullin race poses a difficult question: What exactly does the GOP stand for? Why should voters support a Republican senator against an opponent who agrees with him on policy but not on subverting democracy? If economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism no longer define the party, what does? What does it mean to be a Republican in 2022, beyond conspiring—or defending others who have conspired—to overturn elections when your party doesn’t win?

McMullin is discovering that there are answers to that question. And they’re ugly.

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2. The Hottest TikTok Challenge? Not Sharing Data with China

Tim Miller’s latest ”Not My Party” is in the wild:

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Cheap Shots

“Conservative”?

Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum

This man is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, for the kidnap of children, for torture, rape, cultural destruction and millions of refugees, and he talks about "conservative" values? His only values are those of a criminal thug and serial liar

New York Times World @nytimesworld

President Putin on Thursday reeled off a familiar litany of criticisms of a “cosmopolitan” Western elite seeking to dominate the rest of the world, using an annual foreign policy speech to try to appeal to conservatives in the United States and Europe. https://t.co/9NOLI5nEFB

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With this career trajectory, she'll be a US Senator by 2025.

Mike Sington @MikeSington

Lara Logan was fired from CBS, then Fox News, then Newsmax, so now she goes on Mike Lindell TV to claim the Biden administration is trafficking children, so we can drink their blood to look younger.

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