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A recent poll, for what it’s worth — 27 Comments

1. Anyone who approves in the slightest of the abysmal performance of the Harris/Biden administration (about which there exists, quite literally, not one single thing which is positive or admirable or beneficial to the nation) or who considers J6 an “attack on democracy” ( along with all the histrionics and the ludicrous political theater and the insanely stupid allusions to Pearl Harbor and 9/11) has forfeited the right to be taken seriously as a thoughtful and intelligent person by anyone of sound mind and rational thinking. Interestingly, various dissidents on the independent left (not only G Greenwald, but also Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi) have also, very recently, poured well-merited scorn on the recent antics of the MSM, of the deranged and delusional Democrats, and of the equally worthless GOPe/Never-Trumpers.

2. Your friend who said ‘he’s doing fine’ has no serious performance measures in mind.

   Mollie Z. Hemingway pointed out that Quinnipiac’s is a poll that tends to overstate respondents’ satisfaction with the Democratic Party and Democratic pols, as measured contra election returns.

   A majority of Americans, 58 – 37 percent, think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse. Republicans say 62 – 36 percent, independents say 57 – 39 percent, and Democrats say 56 – 37 percent.

   I suspect if you carefully question Democrats, you’d discover they’re subscribing to the nonsense talking points propagated by their own opinion leaders (see what Robert Reich has been pushing over Facebook), e.g. ‘voter suppression’ and ‘insurrection’. You question Republicans and the non-aligned, the problem is ballot security and the use of the tax collectors and the security state against the political opposition, both of which are demonstrably real problems. Keep in mind that Democrats also fancy that public offices and public institutions are their property. ‘Democracy’ is ‘threatened’ when electoral contests award control of them to others or when audible public protest inhibits Democratic officials from doing whatever they feel.

3. Well, if the question posed is, “do you approve of the storming of the Capitol?”; then I suppose the numbers are understandable. If the question were, “do you approve of an American’s right to protest what appeared to be a fatally flawed election?”; I would expect a different response. Then, perhaps a follow up would be in order along the lines of; “how confident are you that the descriptions of the events of 1/6/21 faithfully describe what took place?”.

   Back to your basic premise. Freedom as we have come to expect it in the United States, and around the western world in general, is teetering on an eroding slope. (I chose not to use the word democracy, because that was never intended to be our form of government. I have a friend whose email signature is “democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.” A grain of truth there, and our Founders recognized it.)

   Any Democrat with an ounce of awareness and honesty has to reflectin private moments, “What the hell have we done?”.

4. Biden’s remaining supporters are simply “circling the wagons”.

   It’s not his administration’s policies wherein those dissappointed with him lies but only in him having turned out to be the wrong person to get the job done. Same old tune; doing the same thing over and over will finally get different results… once the right people are in charge. A fundamental disconnect from reality allows that juvenile stupidity to persist.

   The Biden voter’s self-worth is tightly woven into their ‘wokeness’.

   They’d rather the country go to hell than admit their error.

   So much for the “greater good”.

5. j e:

   You write that people who approve of Biden in any way have “forfeited the right to be taken seriously as a thoughtful and intelligent person by anyone of sound mind and rational thinking.”

   Well, I’m of sound mind and rational thinking, and I see it differently. Most of the people I know are somewhat disappointed in him but basically think he’s okay. I have known many of these people my entire life (or their entire lives, whichever is shorter), and for the most part they are very thoughtful and intelligent. I have written on this issue – and this conundrum – many times.

   People can compartmentalize their thinking, and a person can be highly rational, thoughtful, and intelligent, and in terms of politics they can be thinking with a combination of emotions (including wishful thinking) and information gleaned from (or omitted from) their sources of information. Many are very very busy and only read the NY Times, for example. They also mostly only know people – intelligent ones – who agree with their assessment.

   This is not unusual at all. It’s quite usual.

6. Most of the people I know are somewhat disappointed in him but basically think he’s okay.

   They think he’s ‘okay’ because they’ve redefined what constitutes a problem and what constitutes evidence of a problem. That is unserious.

   In my own experience, ‘thoughtful’ and ‘intelligent’ people are so in realms which have satisfactory operational measures of competence or which partake of discrete skills the exercise of which does not carry much emotional freight. When you get in realms where they’re off script, they say inane things, and their mode of thought has certain signatures.

   There’s a distinction between someone like Harold Pollack or the late Mark Kleiman – serious and knowledgeable people both – and street level Democrats. Street-level Democrats who are sensible do not tend to be emphatically opinionated. Their voice is not heard except in private conversation.

7. “Many are very very busy and only read the NY Times, for example.”

   How old are these people? Because if they only read the NY Times after its horrific performance on both the Iraq War and Russian Collusion, they are neither thoughtful nor intelligent.

   Mike

8. (about which there exists, quite literally, not one single thing which is positive or admirable or beneficial to the nation)

   For the first time in my memory (and I’ve been an assiduous reader of magazines since 1975), I would code this statement as ‘true’. What’s appalling is that the base impulses of the administration are in tune with the default setting of the vast majority of professional-managerial people in this country.

   Take Peter Szilagyi as an example. He used to practice medicine in my home town; I’ve seen his name on people’s paperwork. I’ve likely been in the same room with the man, though I cannot recall ever being introduced to him. Perfectly ordinary resident of a handsome suburb in a 2d tier metropolis (now practicing in LA, I believe). One of the minor horrors of this pandemic was the issuance of a unanimous advisory from a blue ribbon committee chaired by him (appended to the CDC, as I recall) that priority in the distribution of vaccines should not follow a simple and straightforward ranking according to age (which is the principal correlate of risk), but had to be kludged to give priority to the favored mascots of the Anointed. They made a unanimous decision to eschew utilitarian criteria rooted in medical data in favor of social fashions among People Like Us.

   Now, imagine Peter Szilagyi were your kid’s doctor (he’s a pediatrician). I’d find another doctor. But I’d be hampered by a reality: the decision on his committee was unanimous, which suggests that finding another doctor I could trust would be a challenge.

9. I don’t think there are really that many people who are paying attention that actually believe that Biden is “fine”. I think that while they don’t want to admit it publicly, they are secretly relieved every time he makes an appearance and doesn’t make a complete fool of himself. Even if they support his administrations policies, I think most Democrats wish that someone else was president.

   Quinnipiac’s polls have tended to skew to Democrats in recent elections but not when measuring Biden’s approval. Quinnipiac is somewhat of an outlier in its low approval rating for Biden but I don’t think Biden has hit bottom yet. The strongly approve number in the Rasmussen poll has been hovering around 20 percent for some time, and I think this is Biden’s floor. It is quite possible that Biden’s approval numbers will be in the 20s this summer and we will see full-blown panic amongst Democrat office holders.

10. My brother, whom I love very much, gets his news from CNN and the LA Times. I have no doubt he’s among the 33% who approve. He’s not stupid or unthoughtful. He just thinks his news sources are telling him the truth. He doesn’t see reports to the contrary.

11. Because if they only read the NY Times after its horrific performance on both the Iraq War and Russian Collusion, they are neither thoughtful nor intelligent.

    I used to read The Times assiduously in the Rosenthal era. It seemed like the gold standard of newspapers, although their Op-Ed page in that era and every era was insipid and far inferior to the Greenfield era op-ed page at The Post. It occurred to me around about 2001 that a paper which runs over 30 ‘news’ stories about the membership policies of a golf club in Augusta, Georgia was a paper edited by people you should never trust. Another discrete example of how the paper’s editorial line dictated coverage was their effort in August of 2006 to defend the conduct of Michael Nifong; no person of sense would have done that at that date; you only do that if you’re an idiot or if your job is to protect narratives in which you’re invested.

12. Kate – same here. I love my brother but he gets his news exclusively from NPR in the morning. He refers to it simply as ‘the news’, and that’s it – he literally does not dive into anything any deeper, at all. I have no doubt that is many people.

13. Kate,
    I wonder what your brother would think of Senator Cruz’s questioning of the FBI about their involvement on Jan 6, and more specifically, the non answers?

14. I would guess that Kate’s brother has learned from NPR that Senator Cruz lies about everything, as in the famous Dorothy Parker quote about Lilian Hellman.

    Notional Propaganda Recital

15. I very much doubt that my brother has heard about Cruz’s J6 questions.

    One time, years ago, when my brother was visiting, my husband told him all about how he (husband) was working on acquisitions for his very large company (true), and that they were going to buy Archer Daniels Midland, one of my brother’s worst nightmares. It wasn’t true, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to see Brother rising from his chair in outrage.

16. Been said before, frequently by me, that a certain belief style is not external to the personality but is a part and a support of it and for it.

    To have to change, to be challenged, is a threat to the person and the person’s self-image.

    It’s not as if you’ve never had any interest in Shakespeare and found that somebody else wrote the stuff.

    It’s not even, “Gee I’ve been wrong.”

    The process, the part of the personality which chooses the information and the conclusions, is that which is at threat.

    You mean I screwed over so many people–with my votes and communication and political actvity and how I rejected proffered reality, and I’m a stupid, rotten person who thought I was so great?

    Yeah. Sell that one.

17. Om,
    I believe it was Mary McCarthy who said of Lillian Hellman; ‘Every word she writes is a lie. Including ‘and’ and ‘the’.’
    What a take down!

18. I also know progressives/Democrats who can fairly be described as intelligent and thoughtful. The problem is that when it comes to our national divisions, which are most intensely expressed as political but are much deeper than that, their minds are completely closed. I mean completely. You can say that disqualifies them from the i. and t. group, and you have a point. But outside of this locked-in religious adherence to progressivism, they really are. What makes it worse is that more and more of life keeps getting subsumed into that.

    And as far as news etc. is concerned, they are completely shut up in their bubble. A year or two ago a really bright guy I know posted pictures of six books on Trump’s alleged Russia scandal that he was about to read. Every single one of them was written from a uniform anti-Trump point of view. In his world, there simply was no rational other side to the question. I’d be surprised if he’d even recognize Andrew McCarthy’s name.

19. In any area or issue in which a mind is closed to factual, reasoned
    dispute, it is by definition incapable of being thoughtful.

    A closed mind lives within the preconceptions that make up the bars within its cage.

20. A year or two ago a really bright guy I know posted pictures of six books on Trump’s alleged Russia scandal that he was about to read. Every single one of them was written from a uniform anti-Trump point of view. In his world, there simply was no rational other side to the question. I’d be surprised if he’d even recognize Andrew McCarthy’s name.

    If he were a really bright guy he would not waste his time reading six books on a topic and not attempt some syntopical reading on the subject. Every political cycle produces garbage books written by journalists or quondam officials. Most of them do not have a proper architecture of references, most of them are largely bereft of references to primary sources other than the author’s own notebooks, and we do not live in an age where public figures of unquestioned integrity are thick on the ground so you’d trust what they said about conversations they’d had with others.

21. Art. True.
    But people who are bright in some areas are presumed to be bright in all areas. And part of bright means thinking about your areas of interest and modifying one’s understanding as facts come to mind, or new conclusions suggest themselves. This does not apply to the supporters of the left. They take what they are given and pump it up in accord with their own personalities.

22. Not only does Biden ‘sound’ bad, he looks like a dessicated mannequin. It actually hurts to watch him walk, he staggers unsteadily in a gait as if he has a large suppository inserted in his rectum & when he makes the laughably absurd attempt of jogging 10 feet or so it becomes parody.

23. @ om and Kate – this match goes to Kate
    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/18/every-word/

    Quote Investigator: In 1978 a journalist named Joan Dupont interviewed Mary McCarthy for a short-lived English-language periodical called “Paris Metro”. Dupont explored the topic of rivalry between women intellectuals and asked McCarthy’s opinion of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. McCarthy said she greatly admired Arendt and felt no competitiveness toward her. When Dupont asked McCarthy about the playwright Lillian Hellman the response given with a smile was savage and comically hyperbolic. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:[1]

    “I can’t stand her. I think every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.’” Her steady smile has grown into a full grin.

    This version of McCarthy’s comment is not well-known because “Paris Metro” did not circulate widely. But McCarthy decided to reuse her bon mot in October 1979 during her appearance on a public television talk show hosted by Dick Cavett. When Cavett asked her to name overrated authors she referred to Hellman, and she attempted to recall her previous quip. She produced an altered remark that achieved wide distribution:[2]

    FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE DICK CAVETT SHOW,
    OCTOBER 18, 1979, TAPING

    MCCARTHY: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past, to the Steinbeck past, not that she is a writer like Steinbeck

    CAVETT: What is dishonest about her?

    MCCARTHY: Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

    Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

    The taped interview with Cavett aired in January 1980, and when Hellman saw it she notified her lawyer and initiated a lawsuit for $2.25 million against Mary McCarthy, Dick Cavett, and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET-TV). Hellman believed that she had been defamed and deserved monetary compensation for pain and suffering. In February 1980 “The New York Times” reported on the case:[3]
    …
    To mount a defense against the lawsuit McCarthy and her allies searched for falsehoods in Hellman’s memoirs. For example, in “Pentimento” Hellman cast herself as an anti-Nazi heroine who smuggled money into prewar Berlin. The extraordinary tale was made into a Hollywood movie called “Julia” starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. But McCarthy’s team concluded that Hellman had constructed her tale based on the real-life activities of Muriel Gardiner Buttinger, a woman Hellman had never met. Hellman’s daring role, they believed, was fabricated.[4]

    The lawsuit moved through the court system for years. Finally, in 1984 Hellman died and her estate simply dropped the lawsuit.

    Hellmann and Parker were besties.
    https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-musings/lillian-hellman-and-dorothy-parker-the-friendship-of-two-difficult-women/

    Lillian Hellman, the legendary American playwright, met Dorothy Parker, known for her brittle poetry and acid wit, in 1931. Hellman, not yet famous, was with her longtime partner Dashiell Hammett at a New York party when Parker approached the couple, fell to her knees, and kissed Hammett’s hand.

    The scene made the couple uncomfortable, and Hellman never imagined she’d want to see Parker again, let alone befriend her. But when the two women met four years later, they clicked and became lifelong friends. Here, in Hellman’s own words from her 1969 memoir An Unfinished Woman, some observations about her friend Dorothy Parker:

    “It was strange that we did like each other and that never through the years did two such difficult women ever have a quarrel, or even a mild, unpleasant word. Much, certainly, was against our friendship: we were not the same generation, we were not the same kind of writer, we had led and were to lead very different lives, often we didn’t like the same people or even the same books, but more important, we never liked the same men.”

    This is behind a paywall, sadly.
    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/lillian-hellman-lied-her-way-through-life

24. The average American is pretty clueless. Using the least amount of energy to get newsless news. It seems many will believe any pre packaged news as accurate.

25. Molly+Brown:

    You are correct, it was Mary McCarthy.

    That intertube search thing found the quote almost before I finished missspelling it.

    Is the problem thumbs or eyesight?

26. Polls mean squat when elections are questionable.

27. As Joe Brandon said what matters is who counts, counts, counts the votes. Sort of like what happened in Atlanta (boxes of ballots under the table) and in many states when counting had to stop at 3 AM to get all the “whos” and the “votes” in order. But President Brandon was just stealing the quote from another Joe, Joe Stalin. Old news.)

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