Diarrhea Donald And The Cyclospora Outbreak
Fair game is fair game.
Before we get to all of the diarrhea, let’s talk about how Republicans did politics even before Donald Trump transformed bad faith from a right-wing method into a badge of honor.
The basic idea was to ridicule liberal priorities sight unseen, impede liberal governance irrespective of merit, lay every social and economic challenge at liberal feet, while asserting ownership of every source of national pride.
Bill Clinton’s economic boom was actually the fruit of Ronald Reagan’s policies; George W. Bush’s recessions were actually Clinton’s fault, or the fault of bleeding-heart federal policies to reduce racial housing inequality.
John McCain would mine spending bills for grants he could depict as frivolous, without devoting a moment’s effort to understanding the projects they funded. He’d tweet them out disdainfully or use them to fill “reports,” meant to fan public perception that government is hopelessly wasteful. "$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi." McCain wrote about one program. "How does one manage a beaver?"
(The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act hired people to dismantle beaver dams, which in turn cause significant flood damage to infrastructure and farmland.)
McCain spawned imitators. Louisiana’s then-governor, Bobby Jindal, stole from the McCain playbook. In his 2009 response to Barack Obama’s first joint address to Congress, Jindal complained that the stimulus bill contained “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’”
(One month later, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, creating enormous ash clouds that caused flight cancellations and airport closures in Anchorage, significantly disrupting local commerce.)
The GOP’s deceptive methods went beyond opportunistic know-nothingism. Republicans went to lengths to obscure ownership of governing outcomes—the essential ingredient in democratic accountability. How can the public punish leaders for failure, or reward them for success, if they aren’t certain where responsibility lies?
When Obama announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Republicans were at pains to spread credit as thin as possible, and even claim some for their own party, denying Obama an unalloyed achievement.
At a Capitol press conference the next day, then-House Speaker John Boehner concluded his remarks, “I…want to thank President Obama and President Bush for all their efforts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.” (Emphasis added, but only kinda.) As if to underscore that this was a talking point they wrote with intention, and were determined to drive home, then House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy celebrated “the work that President Bush did and that President Obama did,” precipitating the covert raid.
(Bush famously undermanned the mission to capture Bin Laden, and when Bin Laden escaped, Bush turned his efforts to an unrelated war of choice in Iraq.)
Of course, when things went wrong, failure had a single father. When the U.S. economy didn’t return immediately to trend, Republicans blamed “Obama’s failed stimulus.” When the Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010, threatening the habitat and economy of the entire Gulf region, they called it “Obama’s Katrina.”
If anything that was an artifact of right-wing policy. As Obama later wrote in his post-presidency memoir, the industry was ripe for crisis, because the Minerals Management Service “wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters [to] do whatever the hell they wanted to do.”
So there’s the template: Claim credit; assign blame, mock mercilessly.
As an epistemic matter, this is well beneath the standards of journalism or any kind of reasoned discourse. I’d argue it pushed boundaries enough to strain the functioning of democracy. Years before Trump took over the GOP, it was clear to many of us that if something didn’t change (if the “fever” didn’t “break,” as Obama put it) the democratic aspects of our system would seize up and politics would become rooted more deeply in propaganda than in ground truth.
So the idea here is not that Democrats should adopt Republican methods wholesale. It is, rather, that these methods are fair game when facts support them.
Now to the diarrhea.