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TPM Reader RS responds to PT and myself on the single point of failure …

What both you, Josh, and reader PT failed to point out explicitly was that every Democratic leader – President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi – said repeatedly and publicly, that these two bills, BIF and BBB, were linked. That both would pass Congress or neither would reach the President’s desk. Biden even said that he would only sign BIF if BBB also passed both houses of Congress.

They ALL LIED, and unlike GOP voters, there are electoral consequences for blatantly lying to Democratic voters.

From TPM Reader PT …

You and numerous other observers have commented on the peculiar passivity of the Democrats going into what was always going to be a challenging midterm election, which will of course be even more challenging if they don’t really make much of an effort to contest it. What could be responsible for this malaise in the party?

tl;dr: Joe Manchin.

One of the abiding features of early 21st century American politics is that a lot of change on the right happens in the subterranean world of what we used to call “the Crazy.” In the pre-Trump years it’s not that any of this was really hidden. It wasn’t subterranean in that sense. But it was off the radar of most of conventional journalism and the mainstream political discourse because it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t real. It was just crazy antics on the margins. But as we’ve tried to chronicle for decades now, that was never the case. That was the real GOP politics. It controlled and drove the presentable mainstream leaders — the Boehners, Ryans, McConnells and more. The ascension of Donald Trump was in many ways a simple inversion of this dynamic, putting “the Crazy” in formal and open leadership of the party.

Something has happened as recently as the last four to six weeks that follows this pattern, is important and dangerous and is still mostly coasting under the radar of “proper” U.S. political discourse and reporting.

A new AP poll says that 54% of Americans think President Biden has been “not tough enough” on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. These kinds of public perceptions can be shaped by perceptions of a leader as much as they drive them. So you think Biden is weak as your starting point and therefore you think he’s not being tough enough on Russia rather than the other way around. Also notable, Americans’ hawkishness over Ukraine has dipped a bit from a month ago. But the first, second and third most important thing about this poll is that this is what you get when you’re not reminding Americans every day — and I mean every god-damned day — that the GOP has spent the last 7 years boosting, allying with and even conspiring with Russia.

As you can see here, pre-Jan 6th text from Oath Keepers paramilitaries show they were actually afraid a massive Antifa army of feral Portlanders descending on Washington, D.C. It’s a fascinating prism into the Trump/alt-right/fascist paramilitary world. But we should remember that this is par for the course with coups, fascist takeovers, genocidal violence. It’s how incitement works. You can seldom get large numbers of people to do really bad things without getting them to believe that those people are getting ready to do something similar to them.

Getting a lot of questions like this one from TPM Reader NL …

Help me out here. Why on earth are Democrats/Biden beating this drum? It seems like the right and politically convenient thing to do. We are in a fight to save our democracy and many others around the world. Why are people not calling this shit out and putting MBS and Jared in the spotlight?

A few days ago, investigative journalist Vicky Ward published an account which claimed to explain just why Jared Kushner was able secure that $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund for his freshly hatched investment fund, Affinity Partners. Her explanation also claims to explain why Kushner was successfully prevented from receiving a top level security clearance while he was in government.