It’s clear General Kelly got it wrong. That’s not in dispute. But doubling down on the inaccuracy is an awful look for the WH, and apologizing for their screw-ups (including getting the role of Rep. Wilson wrong) is beyond their ability, apparently.
WaPo:
The challenge is that the Miami Herald said Kelly's retelling of the 2015 event is inaccurate. And the Sun-Sentinel published a video showing that Kelly misrepresented Wilson's speech.
Wilson was appalled by Kelly's attack.
“I feel sorry for General Kelly,” she said on CNN. “He has my sympathy for the loss of his son, but he can't just go on TV and lie on me.
“I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured, so that's a lie. How dare he!”
David A Graham/Atlantic:
So that was Character Counts Week. First the president, and then his chief of staff, made a series of easily disprovable false claims. Trump, by needlessly calling attention to his condolences to soldiers, revealed himself to have been negligent. Meanwhile, his untruths about both calling the soldiers and, based on Kelly’s account, the content of his call have managed to somehow even further degrade his honesty.
Kelly, too, has besmirched himself. Like H.R. McMaster, he entered the Trump administration enjoying nearly universal respect. As with McMaster, after his flimsy spin for Trump disclosing classified information in May, Kelly is demonstrating how quickly the job of defending Trump can destroy a carefully earned reputation. Between his own inaccurate account of the Florida event and Sanders’s doubling down on his version, reporters will now know just how seriously to take Kelly when the White House next sends him out to try to clean things up.
WaPo:
What John Kelly got wrong about Rep. Frederica Wilson and the Johnson family
Perhaps Kelly, who also listened to the call, would be less stunned if he realized that Wilson's primary identity to the Johnson family isn't as a member of Congress. The Johnsons have known Wilson for decades — most of those years before the former educator moved to Washington to join Congress.
“When I saw the headline that a young man was killed in Niger from Carol City, I thought, ‘My God, please don’t let it be a role model,'" Wilson told Politico. “And it was.”
Kelly is very much part of this fiasco. He should have stuck to the issue of how notification happens (he’s a process expert and a Gold Star father himself). That part was powerful. When he strayed into the area of attacking Rep. Wilson (and, as it turns out, twice wrongly — why she was there for the call and what her role was in the 2105 reference) he •made it• political. The idea, then, that a 4 star general cannot be politcally criticized is both absurd and disingenuous, let alone dangerous.
Assuming it was an unintentional error and the tone simply failed, normal people apologize. There is nothing normal about this WH. The bottom line is Kelly said this stuff it was wrong, and he is responsible.
Rebecca Traister/The Cut:
The Conversation We Should Be Having
A few days after the stories about Harvey Weinstein broke, former Vice-President Joe Biden gave a blistering speech in which he lit into the film executive, noting correctly that “sexual assault is not about sex; it’s about power” and describing, in Biden’s words, “deeply embedded attitudes in our culture that for a thousand years have shamed the victims and have allowed the perpetrators to escape the consequences of their actions.” Biden also praised the “courageous women” who have spoken about their stories and argued that, “It’s long past time for the powerful men in Hollywood to speak up … Silence is complicity.”
Biden, the architect of the Violence Against Women Act and recently a strong voice in the movement to address campus sexual assault, was right about a lot of things in this speech. But what he did not reckon with was his own deeply embedded complicity, his own direct and serious role in protecting the powerful, in permitting the shaming of women, in directly silencing those willing to speak about their experiences of harassment.
In 1991, then-Senator Joe Biden led the all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee presiding over the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. When word got out that Anita Hill, a former colleague of Thomas, was willing to speak about how he’d sexually harassed her, Biden made no effort to seek her out or speak to her. He also initially resisted the calls of his female colleagues in the House to delay the vote to hear Anita Hill’s testimony.
Sarah Kliff/Vox:
Medicare X: the Democrats’ supercharged public option plan, explained
“I like giving people more choices, not less.”
The Sanders plan would equalize insurance for everyone in America — a seismic shift in how Americans are used to getting health care. The changes would be drastic to the system. The Bennet-Kaine plan would feel more familiar, leaving consumers with choices while giving everyone access to a government plan.
Medicare X would allow all Americans to buy a public health insurance plan. That plan would pay doctors the same prices that Medicare currently does, and it would allow patients to be seen at the offices and hospitals that Medicare has in network.
But it would have a different benefit package from the public program that covers Americans over age 65. The Medicare X plan would cover things that Medicare does not, such as pediatrics and maternity care.
Bennet and Kaine envision the Medicare X plan growing slowly. In 2020, it would become available only in counties with one or zero health plans selling on the Obamacare marketplace. In 2023, it would open to the entire country and, in 2024, allow small businesses to enroll too. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), one of the sponsors, says he could foresee a future where large employers are also allowed to buy into the plan. (That is not included in the current version of the plan.)
Eliana Johnson/Politico:
Trump keeps his focus on outrage
Unlike his predecessors, this president sees policy as a diversion from the larger cultural battle he believes he was elected to fight.
President Donald Trump was expected to spend the fall pushing his ambitious tax reform agenda and helping devastated regions in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico recover from hurricanes.
Instead, over a period of three weeks, Trump has hammered the NFL into submission over the national anthem protests, repeatedly attacked the “fake news” media and now reopened a fight over his — and his predecessor’s — handling of Gold Star families.
But these seeming distractions are the president’s substance — and the legislative agenda his predecessors have approached with a singular focus is, for him, largely a diversion.
Since his inauguration in January, Trump’s sideshows have dominated the news coverage of his presidency, with his fellow Republicans often left struggling to understand why he insists on stoking major cultural battles rather than working to advance a traditional legislative agenda. It’s perhaps the fundamental misunderstanding of the Trump presidency — and helps explain the yawning chasm between the president and official Washington.
It echoes something Bill Scher wrote last month:
The Culture War President
Trump has all but given up on governing. He’s a full-time cultural warrior now.
Who is winning this culture war presidency? Trump feeds a base that lives to thwart further liberal advancements, but starves everyone else. Democrats ponder endlessly how to win back the hundreds of seats they’ve lost across the country and regain the support of white working class voters, but are constantly drawn into cultural battles that fire up their base but can alienate those very voters. It’s a stalemate—we’re all losing this war.
When viewed from a crude, narrow, electoral perspective, the culture war makes no political sense for anyone. It dominates cable news, electrifies Twitter, revs up partisans on both sides and drives fundraising. But neither party’s presidential candidate cracked 50 percent last year, so neither can feel sanguine about the potency of their base. Our endless and escalating fights over race, abortion, guns, sexuality and now football make it hard for either party to assemble a governing coalition.
James Wolcott/Vanity Fair, read of the day:
The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin. Cue the exodus of his cronies from the Cabinet and commence the shunning. The Trump family itself should be as unwelcome in what passes for society as Bernie Madoff at a Bar Mitzvah. Pay no heed to those pious owls in politics, the op-ed pages and cable-news panels—pastoral Voices of Civility such as Jon Meacham and David Gergen—who will caution that “now is not the time” to be raking over the recent past, casting recriminations, and turning Schadenfreude into tasty casseroles; the nation must move forward and let the healing process begin. To such doily knitters and thumb twiddlers, it’s never the right time to sift through the debris, apportion responsibility, and name the guilty parties; this is why it took more than a year to establish a 9/11 commission, and its final report was analytical, rhetorical mush. The day after Trump is deposed will be the day to get cracking on addressing what got him to where he never should have been.
When Laura Ingraham seemingly snapped a Sieg heil! salute at Trump’s giant-screen image at the Republican convention, it was a signal that a rabid strain of Fascist flirtation had been reborn—and mainstreamed. Post-Trump, the country needs its own, domestic version of the de-Nazification program established in Germany after World War II, an inquiry into how so many alleged neo-Nazi, white-supremacist sympathizers had input into this presidency, and their connection with neo-Nazi and nativist movements overseas. Trump has legitimized the hate militias like no president ever before, one of his many blighting legacies and perhaps his most lasting. The domestic threat posed by white-supremacist militias and other violent extremists armed to the steel teeth has been minimized by Republicans, who, jerked around by their Fox News puppet masters, prefer fulminating against Black Lives Matter and antifa street fighters. But white people’s grievances are always given precedence, reflecting the racial makeup of newsrooms and corporate hierarchies.
This bias infiltrates political feature writing past the point of exasperation. How nice it would be if even before Trump humps out of view and into the elephants’ graveyard we were given a journalistic moratorium on earnest dispatches devoted to the Loyal Trump Voter in the battered industrial ruinscape who still supports the big guy despite the latest storm out of Washington. Nary a month goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post filing a story about Trump supporters who can’t quit him even though he’s plotting to cut off their health coverage or shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
We are not the only country with leadership issues:
USA Today:
Let's fix Electoral College. It'll be easy compared to gerrymandering: Lessig & Painter
But the truth is that proportionality is a fundamental principle of any representative democracy, including our own. Since the Supreme Court began enforcing the 14th Amendment in voting rights cases, it has demanded that democratic systems weigh votes equally. That principle of proportionality is at the heart of the “one person, one vote” rule, which the court has imposed on every representative system (save the United States Senate where the Constitution specifically requires two senators per state).
This point is critical when considering the Electoral College, another odd feature of our current political system and one that presents a more straightforward case for change. All but two states allocate their electors to the winner of the popular vote in that state. That rule of winner-take-all is a clear denial of proportionality. A million people in Massachusetts and a 1.3 million in Minnesota voted for Donald Trump. Their votes had zero weight in determining the presidency. The same with Democrats in Montana or Texas: The system counts their votes at zero, just because they are in the minority in their state.