William Saletan/Slate:
Hunter Walker/New York:
NY Times:
Molly Jong-Fast/Vanity Fair:
NY Times:
NBC News:
Rachel Tecott/Foreign Affairs:
Jonathan Chait/New York:
The GOP’s Phony Complaints About Afghanistan
Nearly everything Republicans are decrying happened under Trump.
To cover their hypocrisy, the Republicans are rewriting history. [Rep. Mo] Brooks says the Taliban’s triumph “would never have happened under President Donald J. Trump.” In reality, Trump guaranteed it by removing as many troops as he could. McCarthy says he knows “for a fact” that Trump wouldn’t have let the Taliban advance from “city to city,” though Trump allowed just that. Scalise says Trump “made it very clear with conditions he put in place that he was not going to let the Taliban take control of the country,” but Trump continued to withdraw troops regardless of conditions, making clear that the Taliban would take control.
An honest question: Has a single pundit anywhere over this last week outlined a concrete and realistic plan for a better path forward in Afghanistan? For all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, I haven't seen anyone knowledgable offer a better solution.
— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 27, 2021
Hunter Walker/New York:
‘A Total F*cking Disaster’: Inside Seth Moulton’s Secret Trip to Kabul
Amid clearly dangerous conditions at the airport, many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill saw his clandestine trip as blatant attention-seeking that only added to the risky atmosphere on the ground. However, Moulton insisted the mission brought him valuable insights, including about dire conditions at an airfield in Qatar, where refugees are being held and where the congressmen stopped en route back to the States.
“Refugees are going to start dying today if we don’t get them help in places like Qatar. Thousands will get slaughtered by the Taliban if we don’t somehow devise a plan to get them out before we leave,” Moulton said. “These are all things that the administration has failed to do, and I know that because the people on the ground are telling me.”
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Perfect example of media hysteria. The "giving names" to the Taliban is false. How many retweeted, wrote column on evidence of our supposedly bungling. It did not happen. Gen. Taylor: https://t.co/NJqPLhjzub
— Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) August 28, 2021
NY Times:
Calls Grow to Discipline Doctors Spreading Virus Misinformation
A tiny number of doctors have had an outsize influence in spreading false information about Covid-19 and vaccines.
Standing before a local school board in central Indiana this month, Dr. Daniel Stock, a physician in the state, issued a litany of false claims about the coronavirus. He proclaimed that the recent surge in cases showed that the vaccines were ineffective, that people were better off with a cocktail of drugs and supplements to prevent hospitalization from the virus, and that masks didn’t help prevent the spread of infection.
His appearance has since become one of the most-viewed videos of coronavirus misinformation. The videos — several versions are available online — have amassed nearly 100 million likes and shares on Facebook, 6.2 million views on Twitter, at least 2.8 million views on YouTube and over 940,000 video views on Instagram.
His talk’s popularity points to one of the more striking paradoxes of the pandemic. Even as many doctors fight to save the lives of people sick with Covid-19, a tiny number of their medical peers have had an outsize influence at propelling false and misleading information about the virus and vaccines.
Amid the Delta surge, this looks like the inescapable endpoint for red states that have placed the highest priority on defending the "rights" and "choices" of the unvax'd: citizens w/other health needs denied needed care as a result of those "choices" https://t.co/3rT1h7v7wr
— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) August 27, 2021
Molly Jong-Fast/Vanity Fair:
What Our New Age of Pandemic Anxiety Looks Like—And How to Deal With It
Right after 9/11, I looked around and had a realization: The rest of the world was as scared to fly as I was. Yes, I am a person who has suffered for decades with a crippling fear of flying. It’s a delicious irony to some—my mother is most famous for writing Fear of Flying—but to me, it’s mostly annoying.
But after 9/11, there was something oddly comforting about knowing the rest of the world was as neurotic as me. Granted, I had a leg up on them: For most of my 20s I was haunted by dreams in which I would need to get somewhere but I wouldn’t be able to, because getting to that place required getting on a plane. I was just incredibly, profoundly stuck. But eventually the world got flying again, and years later so did I.
Now, after 18 months of the pandemic, I can’t help but notice that the rest of the world seems to be struggling with the kind of anxiety that I was born with. After a brief respite, after a few months of cockeyed optimism, COVID anxiety is back. According to a recent Associated Press and NORC institution poll, 41 percent of respondents said they were “extremely or very worried that they or a member of their family would become infected.” As someone who has struggled for much of my life with health anxiety, I say, “Welcome.”
Before this is memory-holed --> https://t.co/XPEkCpgo9C
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) August 27, 2021
NY Times:
Justice Breyer on Retirement and the Role of Politics at the Supreme Court
In an interview prompted by his new book, the 83-year-old leader of the court’s liberal wing said he is working on a decision about when to step down.
He was in a characteristically expansive mood, but he was not eager to discuss retirement. Indeed, his publisher had circulated ground rules for the interview, saying he would not respond to questions about his plans. But he seemed at pains to make one thing clear: He is a realist.
“I’ve said that there are a lot of considerations,” Justice Breyer said. “I don’t think any member of the court is living in Pluto or something.”
Again, if you’re making claims about what the Bible says about masks and diseases, please turn to Leviticus 13: pic.twitter.com/oGsCWgRGdN
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 27, 2021
NBC News:
Clamoring for ivermectin, some turn to a pro-Trump telemedicine website
Much as the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine became an unproven remedy for Covid deniers, ivermectin has emerged in recent weeks as a new false cure.
Ivermectin has been called a “wonder drug” because of its use in treating parasitic diseases, but it has not shown the same results in studies against viruses.
The drug was the subject of research into possible use as a Covid-19 treatment — including a promising non-peer-reviewed study that was later determined to be “flawed” and taken down by the website Research Square, which hosts preprints of research papers that have not yet been published in academic journals.
The groups highlight the challenge public health officials and tech companies face in cracking down on Covid-19 misinformation — and the lengths some people will go to embrace fringe and misleading Covid advice. NBC News obtained access to several groups that are dedicated to ivermectin or have recently embraced the drug. Some groups have tens of thousands of members and can easily be found through Facebook’s search feature.
Ivermectin: My husband is a board certified medical toxicologist. There are reports that it inhibits replication of RNA viruses in vitro, it takes ~150 TIMES the recommended dose to achieve that. Most people become comatose at 10 times the recommended dose, incl many this year.
— Emily Porter, M.D. (@dremilyportermd) August 26, 2021
Rachel Tecott/Foreign Affairs:
Why America Can’t Build Allied Armies
Afghanistan Is Just the Latest Failure
The swift collapse of the Afghan security forces is not an outlier. In fact, it is closer to the norm for local security forces built up with U.S. military assistance. The United States’ three largest efforts to build partner militaries—in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan—have all failed spectacularly. There is good reason the images coming out of Kabul conjure up Saigon in 1975 and Mosul in 2014.
What the military calls “security force assistance,” “building partner capacity,” or “train-and-equip operations” remains a pillar of U.S. defense strategy. Setting Afghanistan and Iraq entirely aside, the United States spends billions of dollars every year and deploys thousands of personnel to train and assist foreign militaries from countries all over the world. Although the purpose of such assistance varies, its main goal is to increase the capacity of partner militaries to shoulder local security burdens so that the United States can shift its own resources to higher priorities.
Expansions to the child tax credit provided a bigger boost to incomes than spending in July. Much of the extra funds were used to feed children. Measures of hunger dropped in July and fell to their lowest level of the pandemic, esp among households with children in August.
— Diane Swonk (@DianeSwonk) August 27, 2021
Jonathan Chait/New York:
How Vaccine Mandates Can Promote Police Reform
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has mandated vaccination for all city employees, and Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara is not taking it well. “This has literally lit a bomb underneath the membership,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in America, goddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi fucking Germany.”
Making vaccination a condition of municipal employment was not in fact one of the tenets of National Socialism. (Nor, for that matter, is it “literally” a bomb.) What is at least slightly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, however, is detaining people at an off-the-books warehouse and denying them legal counsel, which was both a real practice of Chicago police and one of the first steps taken by the Nazis after Adolf Hitler took power.
.@ThePlumLineGS on the increasingly explicit fascist politics linking immigration to disease. He nails it. Linking immigrants to disease is core to the fascist politics of purity. https://t.co/KPTjZwyDyo
— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) August 27, 2021