'The intellectual bankruptcy Draper chronicles pivots around McCarthy, whose blind ambition to become the next speaker leads to a series of despicable choices. First, he decides he must push Liz Cheney out of Republican leadership, because she refuses to pretend Trump lost the election because of fraud. Then he goes out of his way to mend his friendship with Trump and turn a blind eye to Greene’s outrages, because he is convinced he cannot win a House majority without Trump’s craziest supporters..."
.jpg)
✓
Weapons of Mass Delusion review: Robert Draper dissects the Trumpian nightmare
.jpg)
'Not so long ago, fake news stories were routinely smothered, simply by being ignored by the biggest newspapers and the major TV networks, their storylines safely confined to the National Enquirer and its tabloid competitors.
Rogue legislators with histories of racism or addiction to conspiracy theories usually suffered the same fate for the same reason – nobody gave them ink or air time. Their leaders in the House and Senate could complete their marginalization.
These gatekeepers did not have perfect judgement, but in our time it has become obvious that they provided essential protections for democracy. The internet and its infernal algorithms are the main reasons no institution or congressional leader retains the power to protect the public from outright insanity.
Robert Draper’s new book about Washington in the 18 months after January 6 is all about the fatal consequences of the brave new world the internet created, in which Republican outliers like the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded for “outrageous, fact-free behavior” than to be penalized for it.
The author, a New York Times magazine contributor, begins with a confession: all his previous books and articles about the Republican party “tended to bear the telltale influence of my father, a lifelong Republican”.
Since his focus is “the tension between the party’s reality-based wing and the lost-its mind wing”, this confession reinforces the idea that all the book’s harsh judgements are coming from a dispassionate observer.
✓ But later on in the book this feels less like a confession and more like a mea culpa, when Draper describes three common notions about Donald Trump’s successful putsch: the idea it was accomplished through “force and surprise”; the notion “that the party was fully functioning and purposeful” before Trump took it over; and the contention “that the GOP bore no responsibility for the crime committed against it”.
As Draper writes, “Each of these notions is false.” . .Unlike Mark Leibovich’s recent book, Thank You for Your Servitude, which covers much of the same territory but does not manage to tell us anything new, Draper provides pungent new anecdotes about and original analysis of the most outrageous actors, like Gosar and Greene, and their main enabler, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy.
READ MORE ...
VIDEO
Posted: 8 hours ago
Posted: 8 hours ago
Posted: Oct 19, 2022
Posted: Oct 20, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment