Michael Goldfarb on Facebook:

(Trigger warning, racial epithets used ironically in this post)
So much to say about the US tax bill, so little time to say it and not sure whether the people who get to see this when it’s first posted here in London will understand.
What happened yesterday was the end of a forty year process of undoing the tax code that underwrote America’s meagre social democratic safety net. Starve the beast has been the mantra of the ideological, anti-progress GOP going back to Reagan.
The beast, the government, takes from you to give to the n-words and free-school meals & edcuation to the illegal spics and to Planned Parenthood and to the undeserving who did not save for their retirements. The beast takes from your betters – wealth is its own proof of superiority and God’s blessing – who want to pass down their accumulated riches in their entirety to their posterity.
Now, within half a decade, all the programs underwritten by taxes will be gutted. The tax code was the guarantor of funding and now it has been destroyed.
What was at stake was not framed like that by those who reported on the process for major institutions and it should have been. In the stories you read, buried many paras down, you may find that the Senate has removed the mandate to buy health insurance, the underpinning of Obamacare. They couldn’t repeal it so now they just gut it of funding.

To be fair, I’ve seen that mentioned fairly prominently. I don’t think it’s really been buried.

When historians write about this odd, but decisive month (assuming there are historians in the future and not just myth-makers) when this bill was working its way through the Senate, they will note that at the same time the “liberal” side of journalism was distracted tearing itself apart over the gross sexual misconduct of some of its most prominent on-air and administrative men.
One thing will probably not be known to these future historians: to rise to the top of broadcast journalism you had to be an ass-kissing corporate hack. Guys like Lauer and especially Rose were lauded by “liberals” Why? they were incurious guys who looked good on camera. Literally hundreds of people, men and women, who actually did the work, risked their lives, ruined their marriages never got a sniff of advancement because they lacked the essential courtier skills necessary to ingratiate themselves.
So while human excrement like Lauer and Rose were being immolated, not for stupidity or just generally being awful at the essential business of reporting and explaining events and interviewing leaders with sufficient sceptical rigour, but because they used their positions to get laid, this bill worked its way through the Senate in the dead of night without any scrutiny at all.

That – except for the “they used their positions to get laid” part. They used their positions to harass and assault women. Getting laid is consensual; that’s not what they were doing. But the part about the incurious guys who looked good on camera: yes. Cf Broadcast News.

If we had better news media we would probably have a better political environment, but we don’t so we don’t.