Dana Milbank notes that Ted Cruz played with fire and got his widdle fingers singed.
When you dance with the devil, the choreography can get awkward.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) last week made his latest appeal to the U.S. nativist fringe by naming Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) as a national co-chairman of his presidential campaign. King, called a “courageous conservative” and “incredible leader” by Cruz, is the anti-immigrant hard-liner who spoke of Mexican immigrants having “calves the size of cantaloupes” and who was a prominent birther.
King raised questions about President Obama’s birth certificate, voiced doubts that Obama had been born in the United States, floated the idea that Obama’s birth announcement in Hawaiian newspapers may have been placed “by telegram from Kenya,” and alleged that Obama “was not raised with an American experience.”
So we’re entitled to savor some schadenfreude now as Cruz himself gets caught in the birther web.
Milbank swears that he will not engage in birtherism, even when it’s aimed at Cruz. However, I’m not sure I can deny myself that pleasure. I mean, there’s irony here so profound you could probably melt it down and use it for railroad ties. It’s as rich as… hmm, pancakes smothered in good Canadian maple syrup.
More broadly: Do Democrats and liberals and all those who howled about the injustice and the outrage of Obama’s birtherism really want to join the cause of Cruz birtherism, simply because he’s a Republican, or a conservative?
Nope. I want to join because I have a moderate degree of pettiness and vindictiveness and because vengeance is a dish best served cold. I read that somewhere. I think it was in Klingon.
Chris Cillizza awarded Cruz his “worst week in Washington” for his case of Canadianitis.
Everything was going exactly according to plan for Ted Cruz and his presidential campaign. Until, suddenly, the question of whether he could actually serve as president — an issue that’s percolated around Cruz for years but had remained on the back burner during the campaign — boiled over.
… That is the question that Donald Trump — of course — raised this past week, first in an interview with The Washington Post and then in roughly 2 million follow-up interviews.
… That didn’t stop Sen. John McCain, long at daggers drawn with the senator from Texas, from twisting the knife during a radio interview. “I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into,” he said of Cruz’s eligibility.
I’m a long way from John McCain’s biggest fan, but in this case, I hope he keeps a good hold on that handle and keeps. on. twisting.
Ok, let’s see what’s going on south of the Canadian border this week. Come on in.
David Neiwert blames events in Oregon on the lax treatment giving to the first Bundy mini-uprising.
It has become a familiar scene: a cluster of armed “patriots” gathered at a rural locale in the West, protesting federal land-use policies and disputing the legitimacy of the government back in Washington, while nearby, law enforcement officers act stunned into submission.
… If the news from Oregon seemed like deja vu all over again, that’s because it was: At the head of the protest were Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. Back in April 2014, Cliven grabbed headlines by holding Bureau of Land Management officials at bay in an armed standoff on his ranch in which bloodshed was, by all accounts, only narrowly averted. …
If federal law enforcement authorities had taken their roles as stewards of the rule of law seriously, many of these players would be facing justice in federal courts right now, instead of opportunistically raising hell out in poverty-stricken rural areas.
I’m staggered not just by how law enforcement has treated these guys, but how “serious journalists” have acted as if they had something reasonable to say.
Frank Bruni on how being a jerkwad has become confused for being “strong.”
In a typical presidential campaign, the most successful candidates lay claim to leadership with their high-mindedness. They reach for poetry. They focus on lifting people up, not tearing them down. They beseech voters to be their biggest, best selves.
Not the two front-runners in this freaky Republican primary. They’re unreservedly smug. They’re unabashedly mean.
If you’re not with them, you’re a loser (Donald Trump’s declaration) or you’re godless (Ted Cruz’s decree, more or less). They market name-calling as truth-telling, pettiness as boldness, vanity as conviction. And their tandem success suggests a dynamic peculiar to the 2016 election, a special rule for this road:
Obnoxiousness is the new charisma.
I find this the most baffling point of the whole campaign. How can anyone, ANYONE, regardless of political position, watch Cruz or Trump for five minutes and think that either was suited to high office? It makes me wonder if their supporters are imbued with a sort of political masochism—one that makes them want to be ruled by bullies.
Ross Douthat searches the world for Muslims doing bad things.
On New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped.
I’ll note for you—because Douthat won’t—that the group in question contained men from Germany and at least one man from the United States. And, not to diminish at all what was apparently a horrid scene of harassment and abuse totaling up nearly 400 incidents, the “reported” rapes that Douthat mentions don’t feature in statements from the Cologne police.
The underlying controversy here is not a new one. For decades conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’ wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent.
The conservatives have made important points about the difficulty of assimilation, the threat of radicalization, and the likelihood of Paris-style and Cologne-style violence in European cities.
Jesus H. Christ on a hobby horse. Douthat’s weekly world-ending-because-not-enough-hair-shirts is one thing, but this week’s post is a mirror of every “they’re coming to get our white women” tirade ever made against “the Negro.” If Douthat can’t see the astounding level of prejudice, racism, and urge to violence inherent in these arguments, then surely his bosses at the Times should.
Here’s Douthat on the prospect of a peaceful future in which Europe continues to accept immigrants.
You’re also a fool…. The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.
This need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men.
Hey, I know. Maybe Germany can build a wall! After all, they have experience.
Those of you who have urged me to add Douthat to the “don’t bother reading” list? You’re about to get your wish.
Dan Carter on the Trump — Wallace connection
Donald J. Trump, reality television star and real estate mogul, is different in many ways from major political figures in our past. But there are striking similarities between Mr. Trump and George C. Wallace, the Deep South politician who ran for president each opportunity he got from 1964 through 1976. The connections between the two — their rhetoric and their ability to fire up crowds — give us a better sense of what Trumpism will mean once he is gone from the campaign stage. After all, political losers as well as winners can shape the future. ...
What both share is the demagogue’s instinctive ability to tap into the fear and anger that regularly erupts in American politics.
I’m old enough to have watched Wallace. Worse, I had a cousin who actually worked on his campaign. Listen to this description of his appearances.
On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent. But videotapes of those 1968 rallies captured a performance. A wild energy seemed to flow back and forth between Mr. Wallace and his audience as he called out their mutual enemies: bearded hippies, pornographers, sophisticated intellectuals who mocked God, traitorous anti-Vietnam War protesters, welfare bums, cowardly politicians and “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.”
If you draw a line from Trump through Wallace, the other end is at Nuremberg. I believe that sincerely.
Emily Thorson on Trump and the Trumptastic world of fake statistics
The same infographic kept appearing in my Twitter feed again and again around Thanksgiving. The graphic, originally shared by Donald Trump, showed a series of statistics about race and gun deaths in 2015, alongside an image of a dark-skinned man with a handgun.
Every single one of the statistics in the graphic was false.
But here’s the thing: The people I follow on Twitter weren’t endorsing the bogus statistics — quite the opposite. … Liberals shared the image along with their concerns that someone who would traffic in such fabrications could become president.
Even as they debunked and ridiculed the image, though, his critics continued to share it.
I get what Thorson is saying: in spreading the image, it’s likely that the fake statistics had more impact than the debunking that followed. But it’s awfully hard to debunk if you don’t cite the bunk.
Stephen Gardiner and the ethics of climate change
Climate change presents a severe ethical challenge, forcing us to confront difficult questions as individual moral agents, and even more so as members of larger political systems. It is genuinely global and seriously intergenerational, and crosses species boundaries. It also takes place in a setting where existing institutions and theories are weak, proving little ethical guidance. ...
It is technically feasible for us all to reduce our emissions by 50 to 80 percent tomorrow, or even eliminate them. We could, after all, just turn off our electricity, refuse to drive, and so on. The problem is not that this cannot be done; it is that the implications are bleak. Given our current infrastructure, a very rapid reduction would probably cause social and economic chaos, including humanitarian disaster and severe dislocation for the current generation. If this is correct, we are justified in dismissing such drastic measures. However, that justification is ethical: A policy that demanded those measures would be profoundly unjust, violate important rights and be deeply harmful to human welfare.
Still, the acknowledgement of those limits has its own implications. Even if any emissions cuts would be disruptive to some extent, presumably at some point the risks imposed on future generations are severe enough to outweigh them.
The problem with Gardiner’s arguments is the same one we have every time pollution controls are considered. They’re based on the assumption that 1) industry is correct when it says that reductions in pollution would be harmful to supply and 2) that this can’t change.
I still remember when the original restrictions on sulfur in the Clean Air Act were met with signs proclaiming that because of environmentalists, we would all “freeze in the dark.” I also remember industry warnings that no one would invest in new plants and the price of electricity would rise steeply. Rise so much, in fact, that many poor families would be left without power. Instead, targets were met, the electrical supply continued to grow, and electrical prices actually fell. In fact, often fell considerably. Certificates in the cap and trade market for sulfur turned out to be worth much less than expected because meeting the goals were much easier than industry predicted.
Which makes it hard to believe all the claims that reducing carbon emissions would be disastrously costly.
The New York Times looks at unions imperiled at the Supreme Court.
A case the Supreme Court will hear on Monday morning threatens to undermine a four-decade-old ruling that upheld a key source of funding for public-sector unions, the last major bastion of unionized workers in America.
In the 1977 decision Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the justices ruled that public unions may charge all employees — members and nonmembers alike — for the costs of collective bargaining related to their employment. For nonmembers, these are known as “fair-share fees.” But nonmembers may not be compelled to pay for the union’s political or ideological activities.
The Abood ruling was a sensible compromise between the state’s interest in labor peace and productivity and the individual worker’s interest in his or her freedom of speech and association.
But you know what happens to sensible compromise when it comes in front of the Robert’s court.
...leaders of the “right to work” movement — which is funded largely by corporate interests and has helped 25 states ban fair-share fees — have been gunning from the start to overturn the Abood decision. Today they have a good friend on the court in Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who has written two majority opinions since 2012 calling the ruling into serious doubt.
Jennie Yabroth worries about the lack of girls as main characters in children’s books
Every night, my daughter picks out bedtime stories from the picture books on her shelf. And every night, my husband gamely asks me the same question before starting to read: “The gorilla [or dog, or pigeon, or llama, or snowplow, or crayon, or bear, or monster, or dinosaur, or fly, or cat, or tank engine] is a girl, right?” “Right,” I say. In our house, she is. ...
A 2011 Florida State University study found that just 7.5 percent of nearly 6,000 picture books published between 1900 and 2000 depict female animal protagonists; male animals were the central characters in more than 23 percent each year.
I don’t have any numbers in front of me, but I’d venture that things are quire different in the YA realm. Not only have female characters featured in many classics, many of the more popular series these days are centered on young women. And while the the book I've just begun to serialize at DK features a male central character, all I can say is… wait for volume two.
Leonard Pitts is back from vacation. Thank goodness.
Inevitably, President Obama’s tears became the takeaway from last week’s White House speech on gun violence. They came as he recalled the 2012 massacre of six educators and 20 young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
“Every time I think about those kids,” said the president, tears shining on his cheek, “it gets me mad.”
… The president wept and it was a starkly human thing.
Or at least, that’s surely how most of us saw it. It is a sign of how angry and hateful our politics have become that some conservatives refused to accept the moment at face value.
“I would check that podium for a raw onion,” sneered Andrea Tantaros of Fox “News.”
“He’s putting something in his eyes to create the fascist tears,” wrote John Nolte of Breitbart.
Fascist tears. Fascist tears. Now there’s someone who has spooned out every last gram of empathy, understanding, and concern for this fellow human beings and replaced it with a cinder of cold hate. In a way, it’s impressive. And also sickening.